Lee Michaels was already helping families outside the Dallas ICE field office with hugs, diapers, and rent checks when she decided to reactivate her law license. After years away from practice, she began filing habeas petitions for detained immigrants, only to watch the law change four times in a single case.

In this conversation, she and George Mason talk about what she has witnessed at the weekly vigil and the respite tent, why immigration courts are failing to deliver due process, and how a video call between a detained father and his daughter felt like ministry. Lee also explains how the Holocaust museum’s call to be an upstander became her moral compass, and why she believes anyone can be one, including parents who want their children to learn it.

Lee Michaels is a retired Dallas corporate attorney and former board chair of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. She now handles immigration habeas cases and volunteers at the respite tent behind the Dallas ICE field office, supporting the work led by La Colectiva.

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Hadi Jawad's path into activism began with a phone call. In the late 1990s, his sister in Pakistan told him that relatives from Iraq had shown up at her door, having walked the distance to escape the suffering caused by US and UN sanctions. That call set him on a path that led him to the old Dallas Peace Center and eventually to co-founding Human Rights Dallas, an organization built around a simple conviction: dignity is the foundation everything else rests on.

In this conversation, Hadi and George Mason talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the long push to get Dallas designated a Human Rights City, and why Hadi believes denying people basic rights is ultimately a judgment on their humanity. The conversation turns to the death penalty in Texas, where Hadi lays out the statistics on executions and racial disparities on death row, and closes with a reminder that one person, like Rosa Parks, can shift the world.

Hadi Jawad is a Dallas-based human rights activist and community leader with decades of experience advancing peace and justice. He co-founded the Crawford Peace House during the Iraq War and helped establish the North Texas Civil Rights Project, now part of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is the co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas.

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