BY ALEXIS BAUM
When you first ask Giselle Rodriguez ’16 why she chose to become an immigration attorney, she talks about helping individuals and families. She talks about educating people about the complexity of the immigration process. She talks about majoring in criminal justice and political science at Regis, and how that opened her eyes to the possibilities as she had aspired to pursue law school from a young age.
But when you dig deeper, you can see in her eyes that there’s a more personal motivation—a story—behind her passion for helping people gain a legal path to United States citizenship.
For Rodriguez, the issue of immigration hits close to home.
“Pursuing immigration law was more than a career choice—it was a mission for me,” says Rodriguez. “My father escaped from Cuba when he was 19 years old, fleeing the country on a raft with his friend. Sadly, his friend didn’t make it. My father was rescued after nine days at sea in the Gulf of Mexico.” (Pictured here: Rodriguez with her father.)
Rodriguez tears up when she tells the story of her father’s perseverance and bravery, and you can hear the passion and determination in her voice when she talks about the impact that he had on the woman that she has become today.
That determination—along with her full-tuition Presidential Catholic Scholarship—led her to Regis, where she graduated in 2016 before pursuing law school and starting her own law firm in 2021. Born to Cuban and Puerto Rican parents and growing up in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez vividly remembers a visit from the Regis admissions team during her junior year at Academia del Perpetuo Socorro High School in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
“When I met [former Director of Admission] Wanda Suriel ’98, she was so graceful and welcoming and I immediately felt like Regis was a school where I would make personal, one-on-one connections with faculty and peers,” says Rodriguez. “In high school I was a member of many clubs, including topics like politics and theater, and I was able to continue that at Regis which was important to me.”
Rodriguez went way beyond a few clubs. She maximized every opportunity at Regis, including an internship as a legislative intern in the Massachusetts State Senate.
“Receiving the Presidential Catholic Scholarship was a breath of fresh air, taking away a real financial burden from me and my family,” says Rodriguez. “I was able to focus solely on academics, and I had the opportunity to complete an internship working for the first female Senate president [Sen. Therese Murray] in Massachusetts.”
Rodriguez says that the Senate experience was invaluable, and her main takeaway was that she wanted to be on the frontlines working with members of the community.
“During my internship I spent time working in the juvenile probation office, meeting with individuals to complete intake forms,” says Rodriguez. “I realized at that time I really valued being able to form relationships with the people I’m serving. These experiences helped me determine the direction I wanted to go in my career, and now I’m able to build that one-on-one connection with my clients every day in my practice.”
PERSONAL CONNECTIONS
After she graduated from Regis, Rodriguez was accepted first to Suffolk University Law School, and then transferred to the Massachusetts School of Law to complete her Juris Doctor. She also spent a year working for AmeriCorps for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA)—a mission that, once again—hit close to home. She worked there full-time during the day while taking law classes at night.
“It was the hardest year of my life,” says Rodriguez. “But I did it, and it fortified my decision to become an immigration attorney.”
Now as the principal attorney and owner of the Law Offices of Giselle M. Rodriquez, PLLC, Rodriguez has offices in the financial district of Boston, Massachusetts, and serves clients throughout the Greater Boston community and around the United States. Her passion for justice and her client-centered approach is clear.
“I learned again that the one-on-one connection is so critical,” says Rodriquez. “Most of my work is compassionately listening to people, bringing a positive energy, and making an effort to really understand what they are going through. I bring my experience at AmeriCorps into my law practice every day.”
FULL CIRCLE MOMENT
As a business owner, Rodriguez has become immersed in a less traditional, but fruitful, mode of recruiting clients—social media. In addition to using various social platforms for marketing, she has also parlayed that into an educational opportunity for the wider community.
“Social media is an incredible marketing tool, but I’m also utilizing it as an educational tool,” says Rodriguez. “My YouTube videos break down the complex immigration process and hopefully provide easy-to-access information for people who need it. I see this as a way I can serve the greater community even outside of my own clients.”
With three of her videos garnering more than one million views each, she is certainly reaching a vast population of individuals that, without social media, she would not have access to share important information. She has built her TikTok following to an impressive 40,000, and Instagram to 14,000.
And social media is not just a way for Rodriguez to reach millions—it also helps her stay in touch with several people she met while on a Regis service trip in Peru in 2016 (pictured here)—an experience she describes as her “most memorable” as a Regis student.
“A service trip makes you understand how little so many people have, yet they are so grateful for everything that they do have,” says Rodriguez. “I remember thinking to myself while I was in Peru, ‘someday, when I become an immigration attorney, I would love to reconnect with these people to help them relocate or visit the United States if they need assistance.’”
Seven years later, that fleeting thought has become a reality. Rodriguez stayed connected with many of the Peruvians she met on that service trip through Facebook, and she has provided immigration consultations for two of them for tourist visas and for exploring potential avenues for legal immigration into the United States.
“It has been amazing to be able to guide them in the right direction,” says Rodriguez. “It’s a really meaningful, full circle moment.”
When she thinks back to her education at Regis, she reminisces about several professors and mentors who had an impact on her. She recalls a former professor who “challenged us to know our purpose and our ‘why’”—which deeply resonated with Rodriguez, and she says she still thinks about that sentiment every day.
“Above all else, I feel like Regis made me a well-rounded person,” says Rodriguez. “It was important to me to excel academically, but I learned that it’s just as important to be a good person, understand the needs of the world, and that a passion for being successful can also come with a passion for helping the community and being a good human.”
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
At the core of Rodriguez’s work is a fundamental desire to help people and make the world a better place. But to achieve that, there's also an entrepreneurial component of running a law practice that is certainly no easy feat. And for Rodriguez, building a business was an “uphill climb” because she “started from scratch.”
In her Boston office hangs a frame that says “If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.” She certainly fits in the latter.
“I knew I wanted to have my own firm, but I really had no idea where to start from the business perspective,” says Rodriguez. “And in a field that is so male-dominated, I knew that as a Latina, I would need to work extra hard to figure it out.”
With no business background or experience, Rodriguez took it upon herself to research on her own—things like customer relationship management systems (CRM), search engine optimization (SEO), lead generation techniques, law firm management systems, and more—and she sought out people who could mentor and guide her. She admits it was scary at times, but in the same breath says she never once doubted that she could—and would—do it.
After opening the Law Offices of Giselle M. Rodriguez in 2021 with no staff and no clients, Rodriguez now has nine staff members, averages more than 12 college interns each semester, and consults with dozens of clients each month—most of whom become clients. Her team is focused on everything from marketing, website development, and social media, to the paralegal assistants who handle case management, assistance in document preparation, client intakes, client communication, and other duties. Rodriguez is currently the principal and only attorney, and as she looks toward the future, she hopes to expand to add an additional attorney who can focus on other aspects of immigration.
“As a business owner, I had to take risks to make an investment and get to where I am today,” says Rodriguez. “And it’s really a balance between being personally invested in my clients while also building an efficient system and team. Becoming an entrepreneur has been scary, but I have always liked a challenge and it’s within me to trust the process and take the necessary risks to be successful.”
FIERCE COMPASSION
Rodriguez exudes compassion and humbleness, yet still has that fierce, entrepreneurial fire inside her. Growing up, she says her parents and her grandfather were her role models. She describes her mother as “humble, kind, and compassionate” and her father as “stern and entrepreneurial.”
“Before my grandfather passed away, he would always talk to me more like an adult than a child,” recalls Rodriguez. “He talked to me openly about the communist regime in Cuba and what he experienced. And I think having that realistic view of the world at such a young age had a major influence on me. I have traits from all three of them—my mother, father, and grandfather—that made me who I am today.”
During law school when Rodriguez landed her dream internship at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC)—an experience that she describes as “illuminating” —she witnessed an asylum trial where she heard the judge say “I am granting your stay of asylum,” which was followed by the client’s tears of joy in the courtroom.
She was immediately reminded of her father.
On June 11, 1970, on his ninth day on the raft in the Gulf of Mexico, Rodriguez says her father recalls that he had thought to himself “today, I die.” Instead, it was the day that he was rescued by an American merchant ship.
“They say people can survive without water for about three or four days—and he was on day nine,” says Rodriguez. “On the day he was rescued, his raft was sinking and he was severely dehydrated on the verge of death. His rescue was a miracle.”
Rodriguez’s father not only survived unfathomable circumstances, he then went on to dedicate much of his life to helping minority groups before retiring.
“My father is my light, my rock, my hero. It breaks my heart that he had this experience—something that no person should ever have to endure. He has influenced my life in so many powerful ways, and I am honored that through my work, I can bring light to those who are in the same position of my father—those who have no choice but to flee their country and leave behind their family, their roots, and their lives.”
Learn more about Giselle Rodriguez on her website at www.gmrodriguezlaw.com and follow her on social media at:
Read her own personal reflection of her father’s story: https://hls.harvard.edu/clinic-stories/uncategorized-ocp/a-cuban-escape-a-daughters-admiration/