Albany lawyer Barbara Brenner reflects on career of immigrant advocacy

Albany lawyer Barbara Brenner reflects on career of immigrant advocacy

Barbara Brenner, as a young pupil studying English, sat in a cramped classroom listening intently as her classmates at the SUNY College at Geneseo hashed out debates prompted by their professor. It was a small, three-hour debate class that most students in the early 1980s avoided because it was held on Wednesday evenings. But the course excited Brenner, and each week she hustled onto a bus in Rochester for 40 minutes just to make it there. At th…