Aly Panjwani

Aly Panjwani is an Ismaili Muslim advocate originally from Dallas, TX. His core work breaks down how media, culture, and technology are used to conceptualize narratives about targeted communities and how to use those tools to challenge violent narratives. Centering youth voices and writing curriculum to enhance political education, Aly leads programming across the country for high school and college students. Aly graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and wrote an honors thesis on the role of theatre as resistance to nationalist state narratives in the West Bank and India. As a playwright with the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, he developed a piece that critically examines how nationalism is performed in the U.S., incorporating immigrant histories of his own family. Working with the Bridge Initiative, Aly conducted research and advocacy on Countering Violent Extremism programs that co-opt the language of mental health to police Muslim communities and wrote factsheets on Islamophobia. He currently serves as the paralegal for the ACLU National Security Project in NYC where he supports litigation and advocacy on detention, torture, discrimination, surveillance, censorship, and secrecy.

AnaKaren Ortiz Varela 

AnaKaren Ortiz Varela is an art practitioner, data strategist, and poet dedicated to abolitionist practice and independent publishing. Ana is an organizing member of the San Anto Zine Fest, and a co-founder of the online and print publication La Liga Zine, a NALAC Fund for the Arts 2016 grantee publication. She has worked with migrant families detained in the for-profit Karnes Family Detention Center while supporting the Karnes Pro Bono Project and lending bilingual and bicultural support to the migrant women's shelter Casa de Maria y Marta. Currently, Ana is an Advocacy Coordinator with Innovation Law Lab and is humbled to sit with the board of directors of Detention Watch Network.

Archana Ahlawat 

Archana is a software engineer interested in studying the impacts of technology on society and using technology to imagine and build a just world. She graduated in 2019 from Duke University with majors in Computer Science and Political Science and spent time building technology for fact-checking and computational redistricting. After a year at Microsoft, she is now the third founding engineer at Color of Change, a racial justice nonprofit, working to build its technology team from scratch. On the side, she organizes with Seattle South Asians for Black Lives and keeps up to date on science and technology studies, especially research on surveillance and labor.

Caitlin Barry
Our team includes law students Rebecca Velez and Mackenzie Wilson.

The Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law is a community lawyering legal clinic that represents farmworkers and their families and provides legal support for organizations seeking racial and economic justice for immigrant workers.

Frances Kreimer & Tania N. Valdez

Frances Kreimer and Tania Valdez co-teach the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES) at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, specializing in trauma-informed asylum representation and advocacy. Professor Kreimer also serves on the board of Juntos, a community led, Latinx immigrant organization in South Philadelphia. Her work focuses on movement lawyering as trauma-informed lawyering, and on legal advocacy as a tool to mitigate bureaucratic violence. She previously co-directed the Deportation Defense and Legal Advocacy Program at Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco. She clerked for Justice Goodwin Liu of the Supreme Court of California and Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California. She holds a JD from New York University School of Law and a BA in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Professor Valdez is also a Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Immigration Law & Policy Clinic at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Professor Valdez’ scholarship centers on constitutional issues in immigration law, particularly for immigrants facing deportation. Her clinic students represent people in immigration court, agency appeals, and federal district and circuit courts. She previously litigated civil rights and employment discrimination cases at a boutique law firm and has also served as a staff attorney at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and as a law clerk for Magistrate Judge Kristen L. Mix at the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Professor Valdez studied Sociology, Spanish, Chicanx Studies, and Women’s Studies at Colorado State University and received her JD from Berkeley Law.

Hannah Lucal

Hannah Lucal is associate director of Open MIC, where she organizes investor support for corporate accountability campaigns in the media and tech industry. Hannah’s work targets major companies that sell surveillance technology, enable the spread of racism and misinformation online, or do business with government agencies that use technology in ways that threaten civil and human rights. She helped launch Racial Justice Investing, a network that builds investor solidarity with social justice movement groups and provides education about alternatives to racial capitalism. Hannah is also a trainer with the Center for Racial Justice in Education, where she facilitates anti-racism workshops for teachers. She lives in New York City.

Jennifer Koh
Our team includes law students Abby Jiang and Elicia Shotland.

The University of Washington School of Law Immigration Clinic trains upper level law students in lawyering skills, represents individuals in immigration matters, and partners with organizations working to advance social justice for immigrants in the State of Washington and across the country. The director of the UW Immigration Clinic for the 2020-21 academic year is Professor Jennifer Lee Koh, who brings years of experience in immigration advocacy and law teaching, and whose scholarly work on the immigration consequences of crime and the federal deportation system has been published in leading law journals and cited by federal courts (including the US Supreme Court).

Linus Chan
Our team includes law students Megan Stembridge, Emily Curran, Dorislynn Quinones, Jamie Scmid, and Adam Oliver.

Linus Chan is an associate professor of clinical law and the director of the Detainee Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is an immigration attorney that focuses removal defense for those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also teaches in the area of intersection of criminal and immigration law.

Nicole Hallett
Our team includes law students Jacob Hamburger and Kathleen Schmidt.

Nicole Hallett is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law and directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, which provides legal representation to immigrant communities in Chicago, including individual representation of immigrants in removal proceedings, complex federal litigation, and policy and community education projects on behalf of community-based organizations. Her scholarship focuses on immigration and labor/employment law, and in particular, how laws in these areas either promote or impede collective action and power-building in subordinated communities. In her practice, she specializes in creative lawyering through complex litigation and multi-pronged advocacy. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, The Nation, the Today Show, the Intercept, and the Associated Press. She was previously an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, where she founded and directed the Community Justice Clinic and the US-Mexico Border Clinic, and a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School, where she co-taught the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. Before her teaching career, she was a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the Community Development Project of Urban Justice Center in New York City, where she represented victims of human trafficking and labor exploitation.

Sara Osman

Sara Osman is a 2L pursuing her J.D. at Berkeley Law. Sara is from Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a product of the thriving Somali community in the city. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota where she studied African American/African Studies and Global Studies with a concentration on human rights in sub-Saharan Africa. Passionate about youth work and justice, after college Sara worked at a local high school implementing restorative justice practices for students and served as a local community organizer where she and her peers campaigned against harmful government programs such as the Countering Violent Extremism program in Minneapolis. In law school, she has been involved in several student organizations such as the Youth Advocacy Project and is currently serving as the managing editor of the Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy. Sara hopes to use her legal education to serve her community and is interested in topics relating to international human rights, government surveillance and immigration.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes 
Our team includes law students Daniela Hargus, Cristina Moreno, and Kennedy Barber-Fraser.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes is a Clinical Associate Professor and the associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program at Boston University School of Law, where she supervises students representing newly arrived unaccompanied children facing deportation, refugees fleeing human rights abuses, and other vulnerable immigrants in court and administrative proceedings. She also teaches Immigration Law and has spoken nationally on issues related to immigration, asylum, detention, gangs and mental competence in immigration proceedings. She has written for the Washington Post, Cognoscenti, USA Today and The Hill and her scholarship has appeared in the Hastings Law Journal, the Villanova Law Review, the Denver Law Review and, forthcoming, in the Indiana Law Review. She previously was an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project.