Eleanor Acer
Senior Director of Refugee Protection
Human Rights First
As the director of Human Rights First’s Refugee Protection program, Eleanor Acer oversees Human Rights First’s research and advocacy on issues relating to refugee protection, asylum, and migrants’ rights. Ms. Acer advocates, speaks, and writes regularly on issues relating to the human rights of refugees and migrants, including legal representation, detention, US asylum law and policy, US global refugee protection and resettlement policies, and protection from xenophobic and bias-motivated violence. She works closely with Human Rights First’s pro bono legal representation team, conducts field research, has authored numerous reports and articles, and has testified before the US Congress.
Ms. Acer was awarded the Louis J. Lefkowitz Award for Public Service by Fordham University School of Law in 2007. She was selected by the American Bar Association to serve on its Commission on Immigration, and serves on the advisory board of the International Detention Coalition. She was also vice chair of the Refugee Council USA from 2006 to 2008. She has taught classes on refugee protection and migrants rights as an adjunct professor at the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs.
Before coming to Human Rights First, Ms. Acer was an associate handling federal litigation at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP. She has coordinated mentoring programs and has served on the International Human Rights Committee and Immigration Committee of the Association of the Bar of New York, as well as the Board of Advisors to the Crowley Program in International Human Rights at Fordham University School of Law. Ms. Acer received her JD from Fordham University School of Law and her BA in history from Brown University.
Robert Carey
Leadership in Government Fellow
Open Society Foundation
Robert Carey served as the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the US Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. ORR was charged with the administration of the US national resettlement program, which provides a range of social, medical, and other services to refugees, asylees, victims of torture, and unaccompanied children through state governments and nonprofit organizations across the country.
Previously, Mr. Carey served as vice president for resettlement and migration policy at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), leading IRC’s efforts to advance systematic change in domestic and international refugee resettlement, refugee protection, immigration policy, and human trafficking. Mr. Carey is the former chair of the Refugee Council USA, a coalition of nonprofits focused on refugee protection. He earned a BA in history from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended the Barbieri Center in Rome, Italy.
Alyssa Currier
Legal Advisor
Human Trafficking Institute
Alyssa Currier is a legal advisor for the Human Trafficking Institute’s initiative within Uganda’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and she currently directs the Institute’s Federal Human Trafficking Report and fellowship program. Prior to joining the Institute, Ms. Currier was an attorney at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as part of the US protection and resettlement unit in Washington, DC. She has worked on human trafficking and migration issues at Tahirih Justice Center and Human Rights Watch, advocated on behalf of forcibly displaced women with International Justice Mission in Uganda, and represented victims of human rights abuses before the International Criminal Court. In law school, Ms. Currier provided direct legal services to asylum seekers fleeing sexual and gender-based violence. Ms. Currier speaks Spanish and holds a JD from the George Washington University Law School and a BA from Northwestern College. She lives in Washington, DC.
Rená Cutlip-Mason
Chief of Programs
Tahirih Justice Center
Rená Cutlip-Mason first joined Tahirih Justice Center in 2004 and rejoined again in 2017. As the chief of programs, Ms. Cutlip-Mason is accountable for the quality of Tahirih’s programs nationwide. She directly manages local office executive directors and legal and social service directors, supports legal staff nationwide, and supports the chief of policy in advocacy efforts. Prior to rejoining Tahirih, Ms. Cutlip-Mason served as counsel to the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and served as the chief of casework and a senior advisor at the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) Ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She has lived and studied in the Dominican Republic and Chile.
While serving in DHS, Ms. Cutlip-Mason was the recipient of the 2016 Secretary’s Award for Excellence for her contributions to the DHS Directive and Implementation of 8 USC Section 1367. She received her JD from the Northeastern University School of Law, and her BA from Bucknell University. Ms. Cutlip-Mason has also received a Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate from Georgetown University.
Jill E. Family
Commonwealth Professor of Law and Government Director of the Law and Government Institute
Widener University Commonwealth Law School
Jill E. Family is an internationally known expert in immigration law. Her scholarship focuses on the procedures used to adjudicate immigration issues. She brings her expertise into the classroom in courses on civil procedure, administrative law, and immigration law.
Prof. Family’s scholarship draws on administrative law and constitutional law, as well as comparative study of procedures in other countries. She has studied extensively the US immigration court system, immigration agency policymaking, the role of the federal courts in immigration law, and the relationships between the three branches of government in setting, implementing, and interpreting immigration law. She has published in British and Spanish law journals, in addition to many leading US law reviews. Her expertise played a prominent role in a hearing before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, when she testified about the administrative law implications of President Barack Obama’s immigration proposals.
As the director of the Law and Government Institute at Widener, Prof. Family works with students, government officials, legislators, judges, attorneys, and the public to explore legislation, the intersection of law and policy, and the work of administrative agencies.
During the spring of 2012, Prof. Family was a visiting scholar at Queen Mary School of Law in London. She received the 2011 Douglas E. Ray Excellence in Faculty Scholarship Award, and the National Administrative Law Judiciary Foundation selected Prof. Family as its 2010 Fellow. Her article, “Administrative Law through the Lens of Immigration Law,” was selected for reprinting in an anthology of immigration law scholarship. Prof. Family served as a member of the governing council of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section on Administrative Law, and she is a Fellow of the ABA’s American Bar Foundation.
Karen Grisez
Public Service Counsel
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP
Karen Grisez is full-time public service counsel in the Washington, DC office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. In that capacity, she supports the firm’s attorneys in a variety of subject matter areas, including social security disability, landlord/tenant, family law, veterans’ benefits, and other civil litigation. Since the mid-1990s, Ms. Grisez has increasingly concentrated her practice in immigration matters. She is former chair of and current special advisor to the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Commission on Immigration, is a member of the Advisory Board of the ABA’s Immigration Justice Project in San Diego, and is a former co-chair of the ABA Section of Litigation’s Immigration Litigation Committee. She is also a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), serves on its national Pro Bono Committee, and is a former trustee of the American Immigration Council. Ms. Grisez has been a volunteer case screener for the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) Pro Bono Project for over a decade. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and the Washington Council of Lawyers.
Ms. Grisez received her BA degree summa cum laude from the University of Maryland in 1987 and her JD from the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America in 1990. She has successfully represented numerous asylum applicants and other immigrants before US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the asylum offices, immigration judges, the BIA, and in federal court, and litigates a variety of other immigration matters. She also speaks frequently on asylum and other immigration-related topics.
Lucas Guttentag
Professor of the Practice of Law
Stanford Law School
Lecturer in Law (Fall Term), Ford Foundation Distinguished Senior Research Scholar in Law, and Robina Foundation Senior Visiting Human Rights Fellow
Yale Law School
Lucas Guttentag is Professor of the Practice of Law at Stanford Law School and Robina Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, where he teaches courses on immigration law, immigration administration, and constitutional litigation. He is the founder and former longtime national director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project, which he led from 1985 to 2010. From 2014 to 2016, he was an immigration policy adviser in the Obama administration, including serving as senior counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
For more than 30 years, Prof. Guttentag has engaged in complex civil rights, class action, and appellate litigation in federal courts throughout the United States, including successfully arguing a landmark case in the United States Supreme Court to ensure access to habeas corpus for noncitizens. Under his leadership, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project became the country’s premiere organization engaged in strategic litigation to protect and advance the rights of immigrants and refugees. Prof. Guttentag speaks and writes widely on immigration law, policy, and the constitutional and civil rights of noncitizens.
Prof. Guttentag was awarded an honorary degree from City University of New York (CUNY) Law School in 2013, named one of the 25 leading advocates of the last 25 years by the National Immigration Forum in 2007 and designated a “Human Rights Hero” by the American Bar Association Human Rights journal. He is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, listed among the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America for 2017 and 2018, named California Appellate Lawyer of the Year in 2002, and has received the top litigation award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association four times. He has served on a variety of nonprofit boards, is a distinguished fellow at the Emerson Collective, and advises the board of Unbound Philanthropy. Prof. Guttentag served as law clerk to federal judge William Wayne Justice in Texas. He received his undergraduate degree in history with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Benjamin Johnson
Executive Director
American Immigration Lawyers Association
Benjamin Johnson is the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) in Washington, DC. AILA is the national association of more than 15,000 immigration lawyers established to promote justice, advocate for fair and reasonable immigration law and policy, advance the quality of immigration and nationality law and practice, and enhance the professional development of its members.
Mr. Johnson has studied and worked in the immigration field for more than 20 years. A former immigration attorney, Mr. Johnson joined the American Immigration Council (AIC) in Washington, DC in 2003, eventually serving as its executive director. AIC is one of the nation’s leading nonprofit educational organizations in the field of immigration dedicated to increasing public understanding of immigration law and policy and the role of immigration in American society. Prior to that, Mr. Johnson served as the associate director of advocacy for AILA in Washington, DC from 1999 to 2003, working directly with members of Congress and the administration on legislation to reform immigration laws. He has written extensively on immigration law and policy and has been invited to present testimony on immigration issues before the US Senate and House of Representatives. He is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio, with appearances on programs including CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Fox News, BBC World News, National Public Radio, and C-SPAN. He has been quoted by print outlets such as New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Bloomberg.
A native of Arizona, Mr. Johnson was the co-founder and legal director of the Immigration Outreach Center in Phoenix. Prior to becoming involved in immigration issues, he was a public defender and civil litigation attorney in San Diego, CA. He earned a JD from the University of San Diego School of Law and studied International and Comparative Law at Kings College in London.
Donald Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies
Donald Kerwin is the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS). The organization is an educational institute/think tank devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. CMS is a member of the Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN), which consists of more than 270 organizations that serve, safeguard, and advocate for migrants throughout the world. Mr. Kerwin previously worked for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) between 1992 and 2008, serving as its executive director (ED) for 15 years and its interim ED for six months in late 2012 and early 2013. Upon his arrival in 1992, he coordinated CLINIC’s political asylum project for Haitians. Between 2008 and 2011, he served as vice president for programs at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), where he wrote on immigration, labor standards, and refugee policy issues. He has also served as: an associate fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center where he co-directed Woodstock’s Theology of Migration Project; a non-resident senior fellow at MPI; a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Immigration Task Force; a board member for Jesuit Refugee Services-USA, the Capital Area Immigrant Rights (CAIR) Coalition, and the Border Network for Human Rights; an advisor to the USCCB’s Committee on Migration; and a member of numerous advisory groups. Mr. Kerwin writes and speaks extensively on immigration policy, refugee protection, access to justice, national security, and other issues.
Tara Magner
Director of the Chicago Commitment
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Tara Magner was named the Director of the Chicago Commitment in January 2016. Prior to this assignment, she served as a program officer in US programs, focusing on migration, policy research, and other program areas.
Ms. Magner joined MacArthur in 2012 after two stints with Senator Patrick Leahy on the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary (2001-2006 and 2009-2012). Her issue responsibilities included immigration, refugee protection, human rights, national security matters, the Freedom of Information Act, and government secrecy.
After the 2008 election, Ms. Magner was a member of President Obama’s Transition Policy Working Group on Immigration. She has also served as a commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration; director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center; and deputy director of the Winston Foundation.
Ms. Magner has published articles with the Center for Migration Studies’ Journal on Migration and Human Security, the International Journal of Refugee Law, and the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. She received her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University and her law degree at Georgetown Law.
Alejandro Mayorkas
Partner
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP
As a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, Alejandro Mayorkas represents clients in civil litigation and internal investigations, and augments the firm’s formidable strengths in strategic counseling, crisis management, and national security, with a particular focus on cybersecurity.
Before joining WilmerHale, Mr. Mayorkas served as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. For his service as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Mayorkas received the Department’s Distinguished Service Award, its highest civilian honor; the US Coast Guard’s Distinguished Service Award; a special commendation from the National Security Agency for his achievements in national security and, specifically, cybersecurity; and numerous additional awards and commendations. Prior to becoming Deputy Secretary, Mr. Mayorkas served as Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that administers the largest legal immigration system in the world. There, he realigned the agency’s organizational structure, including the creation of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to more effectively prioritize the agency’s national security responsibilities. He also implemented a series of transformative initiatives, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA), the Citizenship Awareness Initiative, and the Entrepreneurs in Residence program. Prior to leading the agency, Mr. Mayorkas led the US Department of Justice Criminal Division’s Transition Team for then President-elect Barack Obama.
As Deputy Secretary, Mr. Mayorkas was the Obama administration’s highest ranking Cuban American and was named to Latino Leaders’ list of the nation’s most influential Latinos. In 2008, National Law Journal recognized him as one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.”
During the Clinton administration, Mr. Mayorkas served as the US Attorney for the Central District of California, and was the youngest US Attorney in the nation. From 1998 to 2001, Mr. Mayorkas served as the US Attorney for the Central District of California, prior to that, from 1989 to 1998, he served as an Assistant US Attorney specializing in the prosecution of white-collar crime.
Cecilia Muñoz
Vice President, Public Interest Technology and Local Initiatives
New America
Cecilia Muñoz is Vice President for Public Interest Technology and Local Initiatives at New America, a Washington-based organization focused on American renewal. Prior to joining New America in 2017, she served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Obama. Before working in government, Ms. Muñoz was senior vice president at the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US), the nation’s largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization, where she served for 20 years. She is also a senior fellow at Results for America, a nonprofit that advances the use of data and evidence in policymaking. Ms. Muñoz received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000 for her work on immigration and civil rights. She serves on the boards of the Kresge Foundation as well as the nonprofit Protect Democracy Project, and chairs the US Programs Board of the Open Society Foundations. Ms. Muñoz, a Detroit native and the daughter of immigrants from Bolivia, is also a wife and mother of two grown daughters. She lives with her husband in Maryland.
Lindsay Nash
Clinical Assistant Professor of Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law • Yeshiva University
Lindsay Nash is a clinical assistant professor of law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she teaches in the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic. Previously, Prof. Nash was a Skadden Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she focused on impact litigation related to immigration detention and border enforcement. She was also an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at the Cardozo Immigration Justice Clinic, where she worked on issues at the intersection of criminal and immigration law and helped establish the nation’s first system of institutionally provided counsel for detained noncitizens facing deportation. While at the ACLU, Prof. Nash taught an immigration law field clinic as an adjunct professor at Cardozo.
Prof. Nash graduated from Yale Law School, where she was a member of the Yale Law Journal and received awards for her work in her law school clinic and in academic scholarship. Following graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Robert A. Katzmann, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Honorable Ellen Segal Huvelle, District Judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Prof. Nash is a member of the Study Group on Immigrant Representation. Her scholarship explores access to justice issues, particularly those affecting immigrant communities.
Victoria Neilson
Senior Attorney
Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC)
Victoria Neilson is a senior attorney at Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) where she works in the Defending Vulnerable Populations Project. She is the former legal director of Immigrant Justice Corps and Immigration Equality, where her practice focused on the intersection of LGBT issues and immigration law. Ms. Neilson has also worked for the Office of Chief Counsel at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) at the New York Asylum Office and is the former legal director of the HIV Law Project. She has taught as an adjunct professor at City University of New York School of Law and at New York University School of Law. She is the current chair of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association; the former co-chair of the Ethics Committee of the New York Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA); and a member of AILA’s national Asylum Committee. Ms. Neilson received her JD from the City University of New York School of Law and her BA from Harvard University.
Esther Olavarria
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary
US Department of Homeland Security
Esther Olavarria is Vice President for Institutional Affairs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Prior to joining the Kennedy Center, she served as a senior counselor to Secretary Jeh Johnson at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2014 to 2016. During 2013, she worked for the White House Domestic Policy Council on immigration policy issues. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS. From 1998 to 2007, she was Senator Edward Kennedy’s chief
Immigration Counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ms. Olavarria has also served as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a senior advisor for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Ms. Olavarria began her career as an immigration attorney in Miami, Florida, working at several not-for-profit legal service organizations. She was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Florida.
Michele Pistone
Non-Resident Fellow and Associate Editor, Journal on Migration and Human Security
Center for Migration Studies
Professor of Law and Director of the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES)
Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Michele R. Pistone is a professor of law at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, where she has taught since 1999. At Villanova, she founded the school’s in-house clinical program, which she directed for nine years, as well as the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES). Through CARES, Prof. Pistone works with law students to provide free legal representation to asylum seekers and others fleeing persecution and violence. She has served on the University’s Partnership Committee with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) since its inception in 2004, and through the Partnership Committee has organized conferences on human trafficking, Iraqi refugees, and the migration of unaccompanied children in collaboration with CRS.
Prof. Pistone is currently developing a new online educational program at Villanova University to train non-lawyer accredited representatives to represent immigrants before immigration courts and the Department of Homeland Security. The new program, called Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA), will launch in 2020.
Prof. Pistone has written extensively on immigration and refugee protection, including on issues related to detention of asylum seekers, the one-year deadline for asylum applications, expedited removal, overseas refugee resettlement, as well as on the migration of skilled and educated migrants. Her book, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Thought in a New Era of Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), which she co-authored with JMHS associate co-editor, John J. Hoeffner, as well as other articles and book chapters, looks at migration through the lens of Catholic Social Thought.
Prof. Pistone has taught at American University Washington College of Law, Georgetown Law, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Malta. Before becoming a professor, she served as the acting legal director of Human Rights First, where she coordinated a Congressional campaign to defeat certain legislative initiatives that would have imposed stricter restrictions on asylum protection.
Andrew I. Schoenholtz
Professor from Practice, Director of the Human Rights Institute, and Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies
Georgetown Law
Andrew I. Schoenholtz is a Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law, where he directs the Human Rights Institute and the Center for Applied Legal Studies, an asylum clinic. He also directs the Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration. He has taught courses on refugee law and policy, refugees and humanitarian emergencies, and immigration law and policy, as well as a practicum on the rights of detained immigrants. Prior to teaching at Georgetown, Dr. Schoenholtz served as deputy director of the US Commission on Immigration Reform. He also practiced immigration, asylum, and international law with the Washington, DC law firm of Covington & Burling. He has conducted fact-finding missions in Haiti, Cuba, Ecuador, Germany, Croatia, Bosnia, Malawi, and Zambia to study root causes of forced migration, refugee protection, long-term solutions to mass migration emergencies, and humanitarian relief operations.
Dr. Schoenholtz researches and writes regularly on refugee law and policy. His publications include: The New Refugees and the Old Treaty: Persecutors and Persecuted in the Twenty-First Century; Lives in the Balance: Asylum Adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security (co-author); “Rejecting Refugees: Homeland Security’s Administration of the One-Year Bar to Asylum” (co-author); “Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication” (co-author); Refugee Protection in the United States Post-September 11th; The Uprooted: Improving Humanitarian Responses to Forced Migration (chapter on “Improving Legal Frameworks”); and “Aiding and Abetting Persecutors: The Seizure and Return of Haitian Refugees in Violation of the UN Refugee Convention and Protocol.”
Dr. Schoenholtz holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Brown University.
Stephen W. Yale-Loehr
Professor of Immigration Law Practice
Cornell Law School
Steve Yale-Loehr has practiced immigration law for over 35 years. He is co-author of Immigration Law and Procedure, the leading 21-volume treatise on US immigration law. He also teaches immigration and asylum law at Cornell Law School as Professor of Immigration Practice and is of counsel at Miller Mayer in Ithaca, New York. Prof. Yale-Loehr also founded and was the original executive director of Invest in the USA, a trade association of EB-5 immigrant investor regional centers.
From 1982 to 1986, Prof. Yale-Loehr practiced international trade and immigration law in Washington, DC, and from 1986 to 1994 was managing editor of Interpreter Releases and executive editor of Immigration Briefings, two leading immigration law publications. While there, he hired Juan Osuna who later became managing editor of Interpreter Releases before he joined the government.
Prof. Yale-Loehr is the co-author or editor of many books, including Green Card Stories; America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity After September 11; Balancing Interests: Rethinking the Selection of Skilled Immigrants; Global Business Immigration Practice Guide; J Visa Guidebook; Understanding the Immigration Act of 1990; Understanding the 1986 Immigration Law, and numerous law review articles.
Prof. Yale-Loehr is a member of the New York State Bar and the US Supreme Court. He is a member of the asylum and refugee committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). He is also a founding member of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers, a global consortium of top business immigration attorneys.
He is the 2001 recipient of AILA’s Elmer Fried Award for excellence in teaching and the 2004 recipient of AILA’s Edith Lowenstein Award for excellence in advancing the practice of immigration law. He is also a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Prof. Yale-Loehr received his BA degree from Cornell University in 1977 and his JD cum laude from Cornell Law School in 1981. He was editor-in-chief of the Cornell International Law Journal. After graduation, Prof. Yale-Loehr clerked for the chief judge of the Northern District of New York.
Wendy Young
President
Kids in Need of Defense
Wendy Young has led Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) since 2009. She brings extensive immigration policy experience to the organization. Prior to KIND, Ms. Young served as chief counsel on immigration policy in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees for Senator Edward M. Kennedy. She held prior immigration policy positions with organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Women’s Refugee Commission, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US). She has also written numerous articles, reports and cutting-edge op-eds on the plight of unaccompanied children.
Ms. Young has received a number of awards and honors for her work on immigration rights including: 2017 Williams College Bicentennial Medal Award; 2016 Keepers of the American Dream Honoree by the National Immigration Forum; Women Inspiring Change 2015 Honoree at Harvard Law School’s 2nd Annual International Women’s Day Celebration; Foreign Policy’s Leading Global Thinker of 2014; nominated as one of two NGO representatives to participate in Seminar XXI Program on US foreign policy by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National Defense University (2002); honored by Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center for work on behalf of women and children detainees (2002); Child Advocacy National Certification of Recognition, American Bar Association, in recognition of contributions advancing the welfare of children (2001); and Human Rights Award, American Immigration Lawyers Association, in recognition of the work of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children on behalf of women and child asylum seekers (1999).
Ms. Young earned a joint law degree and master’s degree in international relations from American University in Washington, DC, and a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in Massachusetts.
