Mexicali Blues

People don’t change, Payne. They just get old and die. Sometimes, they don’t even get old.” So warns the judge who has just strip-searched at gunpoint Jimmy “Royal” Payne, the hapless anti-hero of Illegal (Bantam, 2009). In the newest thriller by trial-lawyer-turned-award-winning-novelist-and-television-writer Paul Levine, J.D. ’73, this admonition foreshadows Payne’s descent into the treacherous underworlds of sex slavery, human trafficking, and illegal immigration that engulf the U.S.-Mexico border in places like Mexicali and Hellhole Canyon. Inspired by real events, Illegal follows a family torn apart by a midnight border crossing and a Mexican boy’s attempt to find his missing mother.

Getting Inside Gitmo

One minute Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, J.D. ’07, was studying law at the University of Miami, questioning whether prisoners were receiving fair hearings and due process at Guantánamo Bay. Six months later, in 2006, the Michigan-born daughter of immigrant Pashtun parents was shuttling back and forth as a volunteer interpreter and later a supervised legal advisor for Afghan detainees. Fluent in Pashto and familiar with Afghan culture, she made more than 30 trips to the U.S. military prison and traveled to Afghanistan to collect evidence for prisoners she believed may have been “swept up by mistake.” The lawyer and journalist offers her insider’s perspective of the experience in My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (Public Affairs Books, 2008).