After helping thousands of the area’s most vulnerable people, Sister Maureen Kelleher is retiring. But the 80-year-old nun and attorney is not going to stop working. She just plans to do it without pay now.
“I love the people,” she says. “They are hardworking. They have family values. Many of them have very strong faith, and they are committed to making their children’s lives better than what they knew.”
Stephen Hayford
Sister Maureen Kelleher, 80, recently retired as staff attorney for Legal Aid Service of Collier County after serving in the role since 2004. However, she is still staying involved with the organization, helping clients with immigration law.
Sister Maureen came to Immokalee in 1984 and hasn’t stopped being a campaigner for the undocumented and needy. She’s helped children grow up with their fathers instead of seeing them deported. She’s helped victims of abuse find security here instead of returning to dangerous homes. She’s helped children stay safe instead of being sent to countries where they are forced to be in gangs.
Her path to this work took many twists and turns as various events sparked changes in her life plan. Sister Maureen grew up in Pelham, New York, with her mother and three sisters. Her father died when she was 4 years old. After high school she decided to become an English teacher and went to Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York.
“It never occurred to me to examine this,” she says about being a nun.
That changed her senior year of college.
“I was on a retreat, and I had a wow experience,” she describes. “I was standing in a snowy field with rocks, and I was feeling, ‘I am not sure where I am going,’ and I had a certainty that came over me.”
That feeling led her to become a nun. She went to grad school in Garden City, New York, while also teaching school. She later taught school in the Bronx.
Her life changed again when she heard a bishop talking about some nuns starting a group to lobby Congress. Soon she became one of the original members and the editor of the newsletter for Network, a Catholic social justice group that lobbies for the working poor in Washington, D.C.
“There were a lot of poverty issues,” she says.
This sparked her to realize there were better ways for her to help the poor.
“Working as a lobbyist, I saw what law could do,” she says.
She headed to The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., for law school. While there she heard about the farmworkers in Florida.
“I had been teaching about Cesar Chavez and Albert Schweitzer, and I thought I really should get up and do something,” she says.
That led her to a small legal aid office in Immokalee in 1984.
“That year the little store on main street became bankrupt, and farmworkers were saving their money in that store, and when they went bankrupt, the savings of the farmers was gone,” she says. “We ended up getting a lot of contributions from all over the county, and I thought this was a happening place.”
Since then, Sister Maureen has fought pro bono for impoverished farmworker families from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. Many came here to escape extreme poverty, an earthquake, organized crime, political uprising or sexual abuse. She helps them gain temporary protected status and aims to make them permanent legal residents.
She worked for Florida Rural Legal Services until 1996 when laws changed stipulating that one of its sources of funding, the Legal Services Corporation, could only fund work if clients were already legal residents or citizens.
“And I had hundreds that were in the process of getting political asylum claims,” Sister Maureen says. “When this came through, I had a huge number of Haitians that left Haiti because of the coup. Their stories were atrocious. They really had good claims.”
She and three other attorneys began Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. It wasn’t easy.
“We approached the Florida Bar, because we needed funding,” she says. “We were told they could fund groups in Miami, but not in the sticks in Immokalee. I felt like I was diving off the diving board and there is no water in the pool.”
She opened her Bible and prayed for help.
“By the time the bar association met again, there was water in the pool,” she says. “I found out I would get the funding.”
In 2005, Sister Maureen took a job as managing attorney with a new corporation, Legal Aid Service of Collier County. It almost didn’t happen. Right before starting her new job, she was in New York and felt sick. A visit to the hospital revealed that she had peritoneal cancer.
“The whole bottom cavity of my body was filled,” she says. “I was discovered with cancer, and I was going to die.
“The nuns prayed. When the surgeon opened me up to get me ready for surgery, there was nothing there. The surgeon had never seen anything like this. I used to walk in the convent and wonder if it was her prayer that did it or her prayer that did it.”
The healthy Sister Maureen returned to Immokalee and Legal Aid and hasn’t stopped working since.
She has helped with big trendsetting cases, such as helping farmworkers prove they worked enough days to fill a requirement to become eligible for temporary and then permanent residency. But she has also helped countless individuals keep their families together and stay in the U.S.
She prevented a young man with kidney problems from being deported.
“He took my heart, because he came here as a 14-year-old kid and never went to school and went right into farm work,” she says.
She helped a lady who was beaten by gang members in her home country get asylum.
“There was a gay young man facing deportation, and for him to return to El Salvador was a death sentence,” she says. “We got him out (of detention), and now he will have a work card.”
Although she works long hours, she stresses that it is not a one-person job.
“It’s not me,” she explains. “It’s a team. There is a team here.”
Sister Maureen has seen those she’s helped in the past get out of the migrant fields and open their own small businesses.
Even at 80, Sister Maureen keeps fighting for the people she loves to serve. She says she’s retiring so another attorney can be paid to help. In December, she packed up her office and moved file cabinets.
“I am not going to stop now,” Sister Maureen says. “I am just going to work for no pay. I love what I do. I have the health. I am retired as of January, but I still have clients for legal aid work.”