What if the thing an immigration lawyer did all month was lunch?

Once a month, on a Sunday, a group of AILA DC attorneys and paralegals sits down at a restaurant chosen to match the book they have all just read — a Salvadoran kitchen for Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Dominican food for Angie Cruz’s Dominicana. They call it the Belonging Book Club, and since late 2024 it has become the place where people in a hard profession get to be readers first.

Ariel Rawls of Grossman Young & Hammond runs it. She picks the restaurants, posts the polls, and drives a couple of hours from central Virginia to be the first one at the table. She joins host Lauren Clarke on the single question at a committee meeting that started the whole thing, why the food does more than feed people, the five-hundred-page first pick that nearly sank it, the afternoon a Palestinian milk drink sent one member straight back to her childhood, and what a novel can show a lawyer that a client never will.

Plus, Erickson Immigration Group partner Rob Taylor with the news: a federal judge blocks the duration-of-status rule for F-1 and J-1 visa holders, DHS moves to eliminate the 60-day grace period for workers who lose a job, and a new executive order tightens oversight of the H-1B program.

Resource Links:

AILA DC Chapter — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (Belonging) Committee

Bookclubs — where the Belonging Book Club runs its polls and meetings

GUEST: Ariel Rawls, Attorney, Grossman Young & Hammond; Chair, AILA DC Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee

HOST: Lauren Clarke

NEWS NERD: Rob Taylor

PRODUCER: Adam Belmar

Interview Date: 9/17/26