By Jonathan Turner, Hola Iowa
Just five years into his career, Isaac Medina is in a high-demand field. He’s an immigration attorney based in Iowa City, whose path to law was shaped by something deeply personal, growing up in an immigrant household in central Iowa.
The son of Mexican immigrants, the University of Iowa alum has dedicated his legal career to serving communities that need bilingual representation. After four years of legal experience, Medina tapped into his family’s entrepreneurial spirit to establish Medina Law this past March. He provides guidance and representation in a broad range of immigration matters, including family-based petitions and DACA.
After working for a West Liberty firm specializing in immigration, he set up his own shop in Iowa City (mainly for the freedom in setting his own schedule). A 2021 graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, he’s now 30, married, with two children, ages 2 and five months (his wife, Gabriela, is a social worker for the Iowa City school district).
“I fully own my time as my own, as my own boss,” he said. “If a kid is sick and I need to take him to a doctor’s appointment, get him from daycare, etc. I have that flexibility within reason. A lot of small businesses and just businesses in general are not set up that way, which is unfortunate.”
“At a time when we’re talking about immigration enforcement and policy under an administration like this one, it makes it difficult,” he said, noting the need is great and immigrants’ incomes are limited. “Wages have not kept up with inflation and the cost of things. So there’s a fine balance.”
“Just my wife and her salary alone can’t cover the expenses that we have. And so I’m hopeful that little by little, my name will get out there,” Medina said. “My interest is to give you ethical, transparent, and honest legal advice as to your situation and then present you with options. Because unfortunately, during times where people are scared and fearful of a heightened immigration enforcement, and you combine that with the wonders of the Internet and interconnectedness of everything, individuals are preying on people’s fears and defrauding individuals of their money.”
“And if I can get somebody to calm them down, explain their situation to them and lower the temperature to at least they know their next steps, then I’ve done my job,” he said. “So obviously hopeful that it translates to business.”
In the past year and a half, there’s been much stricter immigration enforcement, which has increased work for Medina.
“What we’re seeing now is more people being detained, more people not having options,” he said. “The possibility of being deported is almost assured because of the lack of discretion, because of the way the immigration court has been dramatically changed in its members and immigration judges and because of just the apparatus of funding to ICE.”
“The hardest thing is that it will take congressional action to really change these things,” Medina said. “We’ve seen the economic situation worsen when it comes to resources that clients have or the lack thereof. So individuals right now, if I’m strapped right now, we all are. I know my clients are too.”
He sometimes partners with legal organizations in Iowa that offer free consultations.
“Even private attorneys are not set up to meet that demand. Even if clients had to pay, it’s a perfect storm,” Medina said. “And unfortunately, the immigrants are getting caught in the crosshairs.”
His practice does a lot of family petitions, where he helps an undocumented spouse of a U.S. citizen.
“Some people don’t want to start their immigration process because they think that something might happen to them, that they might be detained, in this administration,” Medina said. “It’s the frustrating part of how much longer is it going to take because there’s already excessive wait times to begin with.”
It is rewarding to help people to citizenship or permanent residency, but the “sad part, too, is that today’s immigration environment, immigration policy and enforcement environment, the number of people that you can help without a glitch is very narrow now,” he said.
From Mexico, across the U.S.
Medina’s father came from Jalisco, Mexico, as a teen to southern California, without authorization, to work in the fields, but benefited from a 1986 federal amnesty law signed by President Reagan.
“If they were people of good moral character or no criminal history, they were put on this path that wouldn’t have existed beforehand,” Medina said of citizenship. “So it gave millions of individuals like my father, if they stayed on the straight and narrow, it allowed them to completely change their family tree, a pathway to citizenship. They became citizens in 2000 as a Latino business owner and, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs. They even got the opportunity to meet George W. Bush when he was running for office.”
Medina’s parents were married in 1989, and had their first child in 1990, in Roanoke, Va. His father became owner of Mexican restaurants, including La Carreta, which still exists in Marshalltown and Boone, Iowa. Isaac was born in Davenport in 1995, where his family lived for two years (he has four siblings). They moved to Marshalltown in 1999 (where he went to high school), and his parents are semi-retired.
“My family’s immigrant story really drove me to practice law, specifically immigration law,” Medina said. “As I grew up, I figured out what type of barriers they faced. I did plenty of translation communicating as a child. We all did. But then also my extended family were all immigrants because with these businesses, back in the day, it afforded the ability to sponsor workers, to sponsor family members against the income and work through these restaurants. So a large portion of my extended family on both sides are now here in the U.S. with legal status.”
Since 1995, the number of unauthorized immigrants in America has more than doubled, from 5.7 million to estimates of 11 to 13.7 million in 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“Practicing somewhere like Iowa, there’s a need, there’s a community that needs that type of representation, in the language that they understand,” Medina said. “There’s not a lot of people that are able to do that. And little by little that’s changing because there’s a lot of young professionals that are bilingual that are staying or either getting equipped with the skills that they need in any type of field.”
“That’s what has kept me here in immigration and just seeing my parents’ story and the ability to help immigrants reach their full potential, reach their American dream,” he said. “I think that’s beyond rewarding, just because I know how difficult some of these clients, the difficult situations that these clients are facing or have come from, from their country of origin, their hopes, and really get to know what being here actually means to them and seeing how hard they’re willing to fight through the legal process to be able to just be given a shot and be given a fair shake by the immigration laws.”
At the University of Iowa, Medina earned a bachelor’s in political science and history, and graduated a semester early in December 2017. After law school, he wanted to work in Iowa because of his family roots.
“While the young bilingual professionals, their numbers are growing in the state, it’s certainly not enough in any profession,” Medina said. “It wasn’t even a question that I was going to go out somewhere else to another state. Iowa has always been home to me. I like the small-town feel.”
“I also knew there were communities throughout the state, some that I know very well, that needed someone like me,” he added. “That needed someone bilingual to explain the legal process in a language they understood. So it just made sense for me to come back.”
As a child of immigrants, Medina hates to see anti-immigrant stereotypes.
“It breaks my heart given my background. And I was just thinking back, imagine just how great our country can be if we gave everyone, regardless of immigration status a fair shake?” he said. “It’s their opportunity at their own American dream.”
“It breaks my heart that once again immigrants become the scapegoats when we’ve got more problems,” Medina said. “I also think there needs to be comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Like the one that my dad benefited from. Because everybody deserves dignity and when you live in the shadows and you’re subject to fear, it just doesn’t help our communities at large.”
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