By day, Kyle Sessions Vazquez protects parents’ rights as a deputy defender in the juvenile section of the Oregon Public Defense Commission’s appellate division.
But when he’s not reading transcripts from hearings and advocating for his clients, he coaches Willamette University’s debate team. The Bearcat alumnus started coaching in 2021 while he was in law school there.
The team, known as the Debate Union, closed out the 2024-25 season with a No. 2 ranking in the Yaatly Online Debate League, trailing only behind the U.S. Air Force Academy but beating universities that include Vanderbilt, Clemson, Texas Tech and Pepperdine.
Sessions Vazquez, who started working at OPDC in August 2022, discovered his passion for debate in high school in Spokane, Wash. It showed him why it’s important to be able to write critically and conduct research. It also took him around the country to tournaments in California, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Washington, D.C. Then one day, a coach from Carroll College saw him and recruited him.
So, in 2013, with a scholarship in hand, Sessions Vazquez moved to Montana. As an undergraduate, not only did he debate, but he also interned on a political campaign. After college, he worked for a public affairs and political consulting firm specializing in grassroots campaigns for political and business clients. Those experiences with campaigns made him realize that if he wanted to give advice that people would respect, he needed a law degree, he said.
So, it was on to Willamette University, where he later learned that the coaching position was open.
The type of debate Willamette competes in is called British Parliamentary Debate. Four teams of two debate a proposed motion, with two teams arguing for it and the other two opposing it. Topics have included medical ethics, personal autonomy, immigration, artificial intelligence and international relations.
Debaters have 15 minutes to each prepare a seven-minute response, and they can’t use the internet. Each person has a specific role, such as defining and interpreting the motion, providing new arguments, and summarizing the debate, with an emphasis on the superiority of their side. The more in-depth preparation comes in the weeks and months beforehand as the students stay up to date on current events.
From fall through spring, Willamette’s orators, who totaled about three dozen this past season, are generally on the road at least one weekend a month. In 2024-25, they competed in California, Colorado, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and Panama. On other weekends, they competed in online tournaments.
Seeing the students benefit is what keeps Sessions Vazquez coming back each year.
“I get a lot of students with no experience. I have to teach them to do debate,” he said. “One student had no experience, debated for two years, and was the overall top speaker at several tournaments this year. Seeing someone get that far in two years and seeing someone win trophies keeps me going.”
When he isn’t coaching debaters, Sessions Vazquez represents financially eligible parents appealing trial court decisions that adjudicate their children as abused or neglected and authorize the government to intervene in a family, remove the children and place them in foster care. This area of law piqued his interest during a class at Willamette.
“Parents have rights,” he said. “We need to make sure that parents’ rights are being robustly defended.”
He explained that parents have a constitutionally protected liberty interest in the care, companionship and control of their children that a state court may not breach without a sufficient showing of parental unfitness. Too often, he said, the system conflates poverty with unfitness, resulting in the unnecessary and unlawful separation of children from their families.
If a parent disagrees with a court’s decision to take dependency jurisdiction and put a child in stranger foster care, Sessions Vazquez will appeal on their behalf. Or if a parent thinks the court made a legal, factual or procedural mistake, he will review the transcripts and the law and write a brief challenging the court’s erroneous decision.
“I’m constantly arguing what’s best for my client,” he said. “It makes me feel good to help someone who has no one else and to advocate for what they need.”
