Rosemary Barkett served as the first woman on the Florida Supreme Court, a federal appellate judge and now a judge in The Hague — but before all that, she was an immigrant.

Barkett spent the first six years of her life in Mexico before she and her Syrian-born parents arrived in Miami. Immigration has always been close to her heart, but perhaps never more than it is now, she said in a fiery Florida Bar convention speech Friday that urged attorneys to uphold American values of accepting those oppressed and threatened in their home countries.

“As a Mexican and Syrian immigrant, the face of two of the [groups] that have been recently maligned and defamed, it is even more meaningful to me,” she said at the bar's annual convention in Boca Raton.