NORTHWESTERN MAGAZINE — Five floors up from the cacophony that is Chicago’s West Loop, inside a stone-still hearing room at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Chicago Immigration Court, where the ratcheted-up nerves and quickened breaths make for the sort of place you do not want to be, Uzoamaka Emeka Nzelibe ’96 is there to get the job done. An immigration lawyer, she is fighting to right a litany of wrongs, fighting for youth who’ve fled hellholes all across the globe, trekked thousands of miles and hurdled untold obstacles, running for their lives. The words Nzelibe chooses couldn’t be starker — nor the consequences more dire. She locks eyes with the immigration judge. Her words at once pierce and amplify the chill in the room. “What we’re deciding today is whether or not this kid is going to die,” begins the no-nonsense Nzelibe, a 43-year-old Nigerian-born clinical associate professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. As staff attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, she represents unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, cases deemed the toughest legal challenges by agencies that turn their clients over to her. (Several organizations refer clients to the Bluhm Legal Clinic, including the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago and children’s detention centers around the U.S.)