Today we’d like to introduce you to Mona Mansour
Hi Mona, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born right outside of Washington DC to immigrant parents. Both of my parents immigrated from Palestine in the early seventies. My father was mostly ill and passed away before I could reach college. Due to my father’s illnesses my mother had to work 7 days a week and two jobs to provide for my sister and I until we graduated high school. My mother had a fourth grade education but she was a worker and taught us to work hard and live within our means. She worked as a cleaning lady for a hotel located near our home for several years and then became a cleaning lady for the apartment complex where we were living. On the weekends she worked at Bowl America where she also worked as a cleaning lady.
We lived in the same apartment complex from my birth until I graduated college. The neighborhood consisted of underprivileged families and children who were primarily immigrants. Most of the boys in my neighborhood ended up working after high school and several girls got pregnant and dropped out of high school by the age of 15. Luckily my sister and I wanted out so we focused on our education and both of us obtained full scholarships and attended the George Washington University in Washington DC. I worked 40 hours a week while taking 17 credit hours a semester and managed to graduate Suma Cum Laude with a degree in Finance and Business Economics and a minor in Judaic Studies. After working in the business field for about a year it was clearer to me than ever that I needed to pursue my childhood dream of becoming an attorney so I eventually went to law school and graduated from the Cecil C Humphreys School of Law in May of 2023.
My passion for law stems directly from my background. As a Palestinian American I dreamed of becoming a human rights lawyer and advocating for the rights of Palestinians. As a child I remember my mother could not return to Palestine to visit her family because she was a green card holder and did not have a passport. There was no such thing as a Palestinian passport back in the 80s and when she left Palestine she had her identity taken from her. In 1995, two years following the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority was allowed to issue Palestinian Passports but for my mother it didnt matter then because she had already obtained US citizenship. In 1985 my mother decided to send my sister and I to Palestine to live with family and attend school. She was supposed to follow us after a few months thinking she would become a US citizen. That unfortunately did not happen and my sister and I ended up finishing out the school year overseas. At that time the first intifada had just begun and I witnessed Israeli soldiers coming to the school to harass the administration and students. I also witnessed the Israeli soldiers coming to my uncle’s home several nights and arresting my cousins because they were teenage boys. Schools were forced to shut down and the violence in the West Bank increased so my sister and I returned to the US. I came back to the US with a better understanding of what my fellow Palestinians had to endure; I began to understand what it meant to be occupied and to live in apartheid and so thereafter I became passionate about the rights of Palestinians to return to their homeland and their right to self-determination. And I of course understood even more now why my mother wasnt able to return to the west bank until she naturalized.
When I returned from overseas, my mother told us that she was sorry for our year long separation and that she was still unable to obtain US citizenship. In fact she told us that her attorney didn’t even show up to her immigration appointment which took place while I was overseas. As a result of her struggles, she couldn’t travel back to Palestine until 1993, 20 years after her initial arrival in the US. She couldn’t see her mother before she passed away and lost both of her sisters during the 20 year span. Her struggle to become a US citizen so that she could travel back home is one of the very reasons I decided to focus my practice on immigration law. At the age of 85 years old my mother still cries about not being able to see my grandmother before she died. In 2006 I decided to help the immigrant community in Memphis so that they wouldn’t go through the struggles my mom had experienced. Because of my ability to read, write, and speak Arabic fluently the Arabic speaking community naturally found me and my office has been thriving ever since. Throughout the years I have gone by the slogan, immigrants helping immigrants, because my staff and I are either first generation americans or immigrants and we are devoted to the immigrant cause.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Starting my practice was not easy. I had graduated law school and passed the bar back in 2003 but did not work immediately because I had small children. My circumstances changed and my mother moved to Memphis in 2006. That is when I finally started practicing immigration law. In March of 2007 a retired immigration attorney by the name of James Irion called me to tell me that he was giving me his entire practice. Three months later he passed away and I was left with hundreds of files and very little knowledge of the immigration law world. But I patiently worked through his files, assisted his clients pro bono as I learned the ropes and within one year my practice expanded from 14 new clients to over 200. During my first year of practice I took my book of business and joined Apperson Crump. I stayed there until 2011 and opened my own separate practice and have been practicing solo ever since.
Over the years I will say the immigration field has been challenging because of my gender. Most of the time we are dealing with men from the Middle East and Africa who think they know more than me because they are men. Another struggle over the years has been with meeting the female clients specifically from Yemen. When I was younger the men would retain me for their wives and I couldn’t sit with their wives until our hearing date. Fortunately, I have built a good reputation with several communities where they feel comfortable bringing their wives to the initial consultation.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Immigration Law – visas, consulate processing, green cards, naturalization, asylum, tps, and other forms of relief. Immigration is 80 percent of my practice. The remaining includes divorces and traffic tickets.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
I owe all of my success to my mother.
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