USF Law Review Symposium Speaker Bios
Lauren E. Bartlett
Professor and Director of Human Rights Clinic
Saint Louis University School of Law
Professor Lauren E. Bartlett is Director of the Human Rights at Home Litigation Clinic at Saint Louis University School of Law, which she launched in Spring 2020. Through the clinic, Professor Bartlett and her law students provide free civil legal services to and file international human rights complaints on behalf of community members in the St. Louis region. Their human rights work focuses on protecting the rights of incarcerated persons, immigrants, and communities facing environmental racism.
Previously, Professor Bartlett taught at Ohio Northern University College of Law, American University Washington College of Law, and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. At American University Washington College of Law, she provided trainings and technical assistance to legal aid attorneys and public defenders using human rights law in their everyday work and supported the work of the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez.
Professor Bartlett is a former legal aid attorney and co-founded the Louisiana Justice Institute, a nonprofit civil rights legal advocacy organization, where she focused on protecting the rights of persons affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Prior to obtaining her law degree, Professor Bartlett worked with nonprofit organizations in California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nepal, Ghana, Bangladesh and India, alongside advocates fighting for social and environmental justice. Professor Bartlett holds a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and a J.D. from American University Washington College of Law.
Jacqueline Brown
Director, Immigration and Deportation Defense Law Clinic, Associate Professor of Law
University of San Francisco School of Law
Jacqueline Brown is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic. Jacqueline began her career in immigration law in 2005 at the SF Immigration Court as an attorney advisor through the DOJ Honors Program. There, she wrote hundreds of orders and written decisions for the Immigration Judges. When working at her firm, she dedicated a significant part of her private practice to providing pro bono legal representation to children in removal proceedings. She has also worked with CLINIC’s National Pro Bono Project for Children and CLESPA.
With Founding Director Bill Ong Hing, Jacqueline started the Immigration & Deportation Defense Clinic in 2015. Through the Clinic, staff and law students provide pro bono legal representation to immigrants in immigration court. The clinic also assists children who are eligible for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS)with their state court findings in family and probate court all over California. Jacqueline is an expert in asylum law and SIJS. In addition to running the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic, she teaches U.S. Asylum Law and Family Law.
Stacy Caplow
Professor of Law
Brooklyn Law School
A leader in the field of clinical legal education, for more than ten years, Professor Caplow was Brooklyn Law School's first dean overseeing all aspects of clinical and experiential education. She teaches criminal law and several immigration courses, and co-directs the Safe Harbor Project. She assisted Hong Kong University in developing a clinical program, and spent a semester as a Fulbright Scholar at University College Cork, Ireland. In 2014, she taught at the Center for Law and Business in Tel Aviv, Israel.
She has been the president of the Clinical Legal Education Association and served on the board of editors of the Clinical Legal Review. She is a member of the Judge Robert A. Katzmann New York Immigrant Representation Study Group, has served as a Peer Reviewer for the U.S. Fulbright Commission, Law Discipline group, and is in the Board of the Refugee Reunification Project. As a member of a project to promote sustainable reforms in higher legal education, she spent time consulting at law schools in Armenia and Georgia.
She is the co-author of Multidefendant Criminal Cases: Federal Law and Procedure, and writes about criminal law, immigration law, and clinical education topics. Her most recent article about expanding pardons to immigrants was published in the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.
Professor Caplow served as Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Civil Division in the Eastern District of New York, and as Director of Training and Chief of the Criminal Court Bureau in the Kings County District Attorney's Office. She was also a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society.
Jennifer M. Chacón
Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law
Stanford Law School
Jennifer M. Chacón is the Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, and criminal law and
procedure. She is a co-author (with Susan Bibler Coutin and Stephen Lee) of the recently published Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and The Haunting Failures of Immigration Law (Stanford University Press 2024) which traces the impact of shifting immigration policies on immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California. She is also a co-author on the immigration law textbook Immigration Law and Social Justice, now in its second edition. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, and essays exploring how legal frameworks on immigration and law enforcement shape individual and collective understandings of racial and ethnic identity, citizenship, civic engagement, and social belonging. Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of California.
Professor Chacón is a past Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Immigration, and of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Committee. She is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF), and previously served on the ABF’s Board of Directors. She is on the National Immigration Law Center’s Board of Directors, the Advisory Group for the University of Oxford Border Criminologies network, and the Advisory Board of the Latina Lawyers Bar Association. Professor Chacόn was previously an associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell, and a law clerk for the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, she held appointments as a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, the UCLA School of Law, and the UC Davis King Hall School of Law, and as a Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Administration at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University.
Shaw Drake
Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in law
Stanford Law School
Shaw Drake is a Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law, and joined the team at the Mills Legal Clinic in January 2023. Since 2018, he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) where he defended border communities against unconstitutional and inhumane policies, worked to hold Border Patrol accountable for abuse and deaths, and developed border-related advocacy strategies.
Prior to joining the ACLU, Shaw served as a judicial law clerk in the Eastern District of New York and an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Human Rights First, where he authored the report “Crossing the Line – U.S. Border Agents Illegally Reject Asylum Seekers.” Shaw’s work during law school included travel, research, and writing on statelessness in the Dominican Republic, disappearances in Mexico, protests in Venezuela, surveillance and racial discrimination in Colombia, and military justice in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Before law school, Shaw worked for the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture in New York City and No More Deaths in Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico.
Shaw graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where he received a Juris Doctor, a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies, the Bettina Pruckmayr Award in Human Rights, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He holds a B.A. with highest honors in Latin American Studies and Romance Language from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He speaks fluent Spanish.
Lindsay M. Harris
Professor; Director of Human Rights Clinic; Director, International Programs
University of San Francisco School of Law
Lindsay M. Harris is a professor of law and director of the Frank C. Newman International Human Rights Clinic. Before joining USF Law, Professor Harris served as Associate Dean of Clinical and Experiential Programs at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law where she directed the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic. Professor Harris was the recipient of the AILA 2020 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Harris has visited as Acting Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at American University and previously taught at Georgetown Law and George Mason.
Previously, Professor Harris worked at the American Immigration Council focused on efforts to end family detention and at the Tahirih Justice Center leading the African Women’s Empowerment Project. She clerked on the Ninth Circuit for the Honorable Harry Pregerson.
She thinks and writes in the asylum law space, but also explores clinical pedagogy and has a particular focus on secondary trauma and burnout among law students and lawyers. Professor Harris has published widely in law reviews but has also authored Op Eds published with the Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg, The Hill, and Ms. Magazine, among other outlets.
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Bill Ong Hing
Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship; Professor; Founding Director of the Immigration and Deportation Clinic
University of San Francisco School of Law
Throughout his career, Professor Bill Ong Hing pursued social justice through a combination of community work, litigation, and scholarship. He is the author of numerous academic and practice-oriented publications on immigration policy and race relations, including Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System (Beacon Press 2023), American Presidents, Deportation and Human Rights Violations (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019); Ethical Borders—NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration (Temple University Press, 2010), Deporting Our Souls–Morality, Values, and Immigration Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Temple University Press, 2004), and Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy (Stanford University Press, 1993). His book To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation (NYU Press, 1997) received the award for Outstanding Academic Book by the librarians' journal Choice. He was also co-counsel in the precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court asylum case, INS v. Cardoza–Fonseca (1987), and represented the State Bar of California in In Re Sergio Garcia (2014), in granting a law license to an undocumented law graduate. Hing is the founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and continues to volunteer as general counsel for this organization.
Professor Hing is the Founding Director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic.
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer
Clinical Professor of Law
Cornell Law School
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer founded and directs Cornell’s first 1L clinic, the Immigration Law & Advocacy Clinic. She also teaches first-year Lawyering, advanced Immigration Clinic, and seminars relating to migration and the law. She is the Managing Attorney of Path2Papers, a pro bono project housed within Cornell Law School that helps DACA recipients pursue work visas and other pathways to legal permanent residency. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan School of Law and a B.A. in writing and Spanish from Ithaca College.
Professor Kelley-Widmer’s legal expertise is in immigration, especially asylum law and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Her practice experience also includes representing clients in cases for parole, naturalization, special immigrant juvenile status, and visas for survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. At Cornell, she leads students in providing legal services to immigrants in the Cornell community and nationally. She engages law students in advocacy for those held in immigration detention centers such as in New York, Louisiana, and Texas.
Professor Kelley-Widmer is a regular contributor to the scholarly and public conversation in immigration law. Her scholarship often focuses on themes of clinical pedagogy and immigration at the intersection of administrative or criminal law. Her pieces have appeared in journals including the Brooklyn Law Review, Clinical Law Review, Oregon Law Review, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. She has published shorter pieces on emerging immigration issues in the Washington Post and Immigration Law Advisor. Her work has been featured on NPR, in the Cornell Daily Sun, and in other media.
Previously, she was an Equal Justice Works fellow at La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco, where she focused on representing immigrant youth and their families in their applications for immigration relief. She also taught legal writing at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and clerked at the San Francisco Immigration Court through the Department of Justice Honors Program.
Professor Kelley-Widmer is a member of the California Bar, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the Finger Lakes Women’s Bar Association. She is an advisory board member for the local non-profit Ithaca Welcomes Refugees. She is fluent in Spanish.
Helen Kerwin
Clinical Supervising Attorney, Huma Rights Clinic
Berkeley Law
Helen Kerwin is a clinical supervising attorney in the International Human Rights Law Clinic at Berkeley Law. Prior to joining the clinic, Helen was a staff attorney at the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), where she specialized in strategic litigation before the Inter-American Human Rights System, particularly on the rights of Indigenous communities, migrants and asylum-seekers, and human rights defenders. Before that, she was a staff attorney at the Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI), an NGO in Mexico City, where she engaged in advocacy, research, education, and strategic litigation on U.S.-Mexico border policy, access to asylum, and access to identity documents for dual nationals. She began her legal career as a fellow at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), where she worked in the Rapporteurship on the Rights of Migrants, the U.S. human rights monitoring section, and the merits/Court litigation section.
She has also consulted for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the IACHR, and human and migrants’ rights organizations based in Mexico and Colombia. She has published articles on international and domestic refugee law, international human rights law, and strategic litigation.
Helen received her J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. She also holds a B.A. in international studies from the University of Oklahoma, and a M.A. in global studies from the same university.
Gaby Pacheco
President and CEO
TheDream.US
Maria Gabriela (“Gaby”) Pacheco, an influential immigrant rights and education leader from Miami, Florida, is the President and CEO of TheDream.US. As an immigrant with a mixed-status family, she intimately understands the complexities and challenges faced by immigrant families in the US. For two decades, Pacheco has played a pivotal role in advocating for immigration and immigrant rights. In 2010, alongside three undocumented students, she led the Trail of Dreams, a remarkable four-month walk from Miami to Washington, DC. Two years later, she spearheaded efforts to establish the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Pacheco made history as the first undocumented Latina to testify before Congress on April 22, 2013, addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee and highlighting the urgent need for immigration reform.
Pacheco’s exceptional contributions have garnered recognition and accolades. She was listed in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30: Education” and “40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics.” She received an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Humanities from The New School in 2015 and was featured in Elle magazine’s 30th-anniversary issue, “This is 30,” alongside the world’s 30 most notable women. She also appeared on the June 2012 TIME Magazine cover along with 30 other immigrant leaders.
Pacheco is a highly sought-after national political analyst, regularly sharing her expertise on networks such as Univision, Telemundo, MSNBC, CNN, and CNN en Español. She has also contributed opinion pieces to newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today.
Despite being undocumented, Pacheco fought for higher education and earned multiple degrees in education from Miami Dade College.
On June 21, 2023, Pacheco achieved one of her biggest dreams and became a naturalized US Citizen. Gaby resides in Miami with her husband and their five rescued dogs.
Sabrina Rivera
Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic
Western State College of Law
Sabrina Rivera is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic at Western State College of Law (WSCL). Through the clinic, Professor Rivera supervises students representing immigrants with cases before federal immigration agencies and state courts. Professor Rivera’s research focuses on immigration law, specifically, the ethics of layperson legal aid initiatives and access to justice in immigration proceedings.
Before joining the WSCL faculty, Professor Rivera held various roles within immigrant rights organizations, including serving as the inaugural executive director of Orange County Justice Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for persons defending against deportation, especially those without legal representation. She also served as the supervising attorney at Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) where she helped establish immigration legal services at eight California State University campuses throughout Southern California. Professor Rivera also previously served as an Adjunct Lecturer at UCI Law, Immigrant Rights Clinic, where she supervised law students on immigration cases and community legal empowerment projects in partnership with community organizations.
Professor Rivera speaks regularly at local and national trainings, workshops, and conferences. She is also the co-author of the report, The State of Immigration Enforcement and Legal Resources in Orange County, published in May 2023 and highlighted by various media outlets. She received her J.D. from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
FRANCISCO UGARTE
Managing Attorney
Immigration Defense Unit at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office
Francisco Ugarte is the Managing Attorney of the Immigration Defense Unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, California’s largest detained deportation defense provider. The unit was launched shortly after the 2016 election in response to threats of mass deportation. Francisco provides direct legal representation for immigrants facing deportation and advises criminal defenders on mitigating adverse immigration consequences in criminal cases.
Hired and mentored by the late Jeff Adachi, Francisco was named Co-Public Defender of the Year in 2018 for his pivotal role in defending Jose Ines Garcia Zarate against politically charged murder accusations. He also served as co-counsel in Zepeda-Rivas v. Jennings, a landmark pandemic-related lawsuit that secured the depopulation of two ICE detention centers and critical health and safety protections for detained individuals.
Before joining the Public Defender’s Office, Francisco worked at Dolores Street Community Services, where he helped establish San Francisco’s first legal program to respond to ICE raids. His advocacy has earned recognition from leading organizations, including Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in 2015 for defending survivors of domestic violence wrongfully targeted for deportation, and Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) in 2011 for his immigrant rights work.
Francisco frequently lectures on crimmigration law and deportation defense, and has been featured in various media outlets as an expert on immigrant rights.