Clare Hanusz is one of Hawaii’s better known immigration attorneys and advocates, thanks partly to her involvement in a criminal case that ended in 2011 against the owners of a local farming company accused of illegally importing and abusing dozens of farm workers from Thailand.

That case "imploded," she said this week, because "basically the government said it felt it couldn’t prove the … case beyond a reasonable doubt."

The dropping of the charges, she added, "was a real shock to the victims, as well as to the advocates who had worked for them," though there are "still people looking into the possibility of a civil action."

Hanusz became interested in the plight of immigrants when she was living with her husband, Nevi Soguk, in Tempe, Ariz., where he was attending graduate school. While he studied, she worked with a sanctuary organization that helped political refugees from Central America.

"I met a handful of immigration attorneys who were doing really important work," she said. "And immigration law combined my interest in social justice, foreign policy, domestic policy (and) direct services to people, all in one package, better than any other field."

Hanusz moved to Hawaii in 1995 after her husband joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii. In 1999 she graduated from the UH law school, where she had focused on immigration law.

For more than 10 years afterward she had her own law firm, but this month she joined Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert, after about 18 months of living in Australia.

"I continued my practice here, but working remotely," she said. "And then we decided we were coming back, and Damon Key was looking for another immigration attorney. One of the partners was a friend of mine from law school and he contacted me. And it seems like a good fit."

Hanusz said living in Australia, where her husband had worked for a university in Melbourne, gave her additional insight into the reality of immigration.

"I got to be an immigrant myself," she said, "going through their visa process and living as a temporary resident. Granted it was a much easier road our family traveled than most of my clients, due to our circumstances and similar language and culture, but it did make me appreciate some of the challenges of living in another country as a resident and not a tourist."

A native of Ohio, Hanusz attended Central Catholic High School in Toledo, then earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Ohio University.

In 2010, she was among Save Our Schools members cited for petty misdemeanor trespass in Gov. Linda Lingle’s office where they had been protesting the furloughs of Hawaii public school teachers. She said she remains "passionate about public schools and the belief that an excellent public school education is the right of all children."

Hanusz resides with her husband and their two children, a son, 12, and a daughter, 10, in Manoa.

QUESTION: What is the range of legal work that being an immigration attorney might involve?

ANSWER: Well, immigration law is very, very broad. It goes from assisting people who have a lot of money who want to invest in the United States, and they can get status that way, … to working with asylum seekers, human trafficking victims, crime victims. …

Q: What would be a crime victim? What does that mean?

A: Well, for example, I had one case, a woman on Maui had been sexually assaulted by a family member. The family member was a U.S. citizen but she had no status. She reported the crime and cooperated with the investigations, but to allow her to kind of come out of the shadows and report this crime, the law allows someone to obtain a temporary legal status, called a U visa. The U visa is a way to encourage people who have been crime victims to report crime, because oftentimes, of course, people who don’t have legal status are terrified of going to the police because they’re afraid that they would be reported and that their family members would be reported.

Q: Does that happen very often?

A: I think it happens more often than you would think.

Q: Do you think this fear of coming out applies similarly to young people in Hawaii covered by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (which offers a reprieve from deportation to undocumented residents under age 31 as of June 15, 2012, who were brought to the U.S. before age 16)?

A: I think that definitely has kept people from coming forward. … Under DACA, applicants have been told by the government that their coming forward is not going to put their families at risk of deportation.

Q: But?

A: Well, I don’t know of any cases where action has been taken.

Q: So what is it — just a matter of education to reach those estimated several hundred other folks who haven’t come forward?

A: Exactly, there’s a lot of education that still needs to be done in the community about DACA. Applying to DACA is a bit confusing, and oftentimes people really do need help with it.

One of the problems in Hawaii is a lack of immigration legal services for people who can’t afford attorneys. Immigration law is a very complicated area of law, and immigration attorneys are generally fairly expensive. Community groups such as the Hawaii Coalition for Immigration Reform and the Hawaii chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, have done some very good work … to get the word out into the community about who is eligible and how to apply.

Q: Regarding farm workers brought to Hawaii under false pretenses, do you think that this goes on still? Is it a big problem?

A: I think if you would drive around and take a look at a lot of the really small farms that are operating on Oahu, that are very much off the beaten path, I can almost guarantee that there are abuses of workers going on.

Q: Is that because they are illegal immigrants or that they were brought under false pretenses with the right papers?

A: Possibly a combination of both. I know of cases where people came on tourist visas, but there were lies in the visa process. Those people came actually with the intention of working and have been kept on the farms very isolated from the public view. So I think that there’s quite a bit more going on than we realize.

Q: In essence, what’s wrong with today’s U.S. immigration system?

A: (Sigh)

Q: Is that too broad?

A: It’s very broad. There are a lot of broken pieces on the immigration system. The piece that I’m most concerned about and have really seen the effects in our community is the lack of options for people who’ve been here a long time, are very much members of our community, but lack immigration status. And the pieces that particularly tug at my heart are the ones involving children, and oftentimes children who were born in the United States, in Hawaii. For those kids, this is all they know. And then something happens — there’s a stop-sign violation or a neighbor is angry at someone and reports them to immigration, or there’s a raid at a workplace — and the lives of these families are thrown completely upside down.

Q: Do you think there’s a lot of people like that?

A: I do. And one of the things for me that’s been very frustrating is there’ve been overtures by the Obama administration in the form of these memos. … One famous one for immigration attorneys we call the Morton memo, which came out a couple of years ago from John Morton, who was the former head of ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it dealt with the issue of prosecutorial discretion, meaning that deportation is not the best remedy for everyone who gets caught, and especially if the person who gets caught up in the immigration web has a clean criminal record, has U.S. citizen children or a spouse or parents. …

Now, the problem is that locally it seems as though immigration enforcement has not taken those memos very seriously, so there are still, I’m sure many times a week, families — local families — who are being torn apart by a family member who is forced to leave the island and go back to the country that maybe they left 15 or 20 years ago.

Q: What are the leading areas that these folks typically are from?

A: They are from all over, but I think maybe the largest single group is people from Mexico, who are living here in the islands. … And, again, a lot of these people have been here a really long time, and their ties to the community are so very deep, but there’s been no way for them to get any legal status. And when people say, well, it’s not fair, they need to stand in line, the problem is there is no line for these people. No line exists.

Q: What do they mean, then, when people say, "Get in line"?

A: Well, people are thinking about people who had the opportunity for family members to emigrate legally. They say, "Well, my mom had to wait," or "My grandmother had to wait." They had a relative who could initially petition. But a lot of these people never had that person to file that initial petition for them. So there is no line.

And, you know, if you take the time and ask these people, "Well, why did you make the decision to leave your country in the first place?" the answers are all very, very sad. It’s because of poverty, because of war, because they needed to support their families, and they felt, even as teenagers, this weight on their shoulders that they couldn’t make it in the country where they were born, so they took this incredible, very dangerous risk to cross the border, and to try make a better life for themselves, and almost always sending most of their money back home to support their families.

Q: What kind of reform would you like to see happen?

A: I think what’s really important for the almost 12 million undocumented people who are in the U.S. today is what people are calling a pathway to citizenship, a way for those people to jump through a series of hoops and eventually, at the end of all of that — which is going to cost them a fair amount of money — get them legal status and stability for their families.

Right now I’m working with this family on Maui — a single mom, two U.S. citizen children, the daughter’s a senior in high school, at Lahainaluna; the son is 6 years old. Mom has a deportation order, and the family has lived with the stress of being in deportation proceedings for the last four years. So the daughter has spent her whole high school years — when she is supposed to be focusing on her school work and her future — she has lost so much because day after day after day, she didn’t know if her mom was going to be ordered deported from the U.S., or if her mom was going to be allowed to stay.

Q: Is that still going on?

A: It is. Immigration decided locally that they would let mom stay until the daughter graduates high school. And then they’ll give her two weeks after that, and then she has to be gone.

Q: The little kid’s got to go, too?

A: Well, the kids are both U.S. citizens, so the kids legally can stay, but who would take care of them? And the mom is from a very, very poor region of southern Mexico, where the life possibilities for these kids, who’ve never lived outside the islands, the prospects for them are pretty grim.

Q: Who pays to help this lady?

A: That’s a case I’m doing for free, because she can’t afford an attorney. …

Q: What about the need for importing more skilled laborers, and even more unskilled laborers?

A: Absolutely, there needs to be more H1Bs (high-skilled workers). Ideally U.S. schools would graduate more students who were qualified to take those jobs, but in the meantime, this is something that industries really need.

Q: And the low-skilled workers?

A: There’s absolutely a need for those workers, too. In agriculture, it’s a problem that Hawaii farmers have had. I mean, we need to think about who picks our fruits and vegetables. It’s one of the hardest jobs that exists in our economy and most U.S. citizens don’t want to do that.

Q: Do you think there will be some sort of national immigration reform approved soon, and how do you think that will affect Hawaii, if so?

A: The gridlock we see right now in Congress over the budget and debt ceiling I think is a clear indication of how polarized many are. And it is hard to see immigration reform coming out of this climate. I don’t see a resolution in the near future, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop working on it, organizing locally as well as nationally.

Locally some steps that can be taken are … you know, California has just allowed undocumented people to get driver’s licenses, also as a public safety issue. If you don’t have a driver’s license, you can’t get auto insurance, right? So there are a lot of good, hard-working people in our community who are forced to drive to work to support their families who would like to have auto insurance but they can’t get it because they don’t have driver’s licenses.

California has joined actually a dozen other states that allow driver’s licenses for these people. California, I think, is a state to look at as far as state initiatives to benefit the people in our community who are waiting for federal relief that might not come any time soon.

So we have work locally to be done, regardless of what happens on the federal level.