Jean is an ILD Founding Managing Attorney, where she specializes in Special Immigrant Juvenile Cases through ILD’s Legal-Education partnership with the Oakland Unified School District, a unique partnership that provides direct representation to K-12 students and families in removal proceedings. Jean has spent more than thirty years representing recently arrived asylum seekers and immigrant youth in their immigration cases.

EXPERIENCE Prior to ILD, she worked as Managing Attorney for the Immigrant Youth Project at Centro Legal de la Raza, where she directly led a team of attorneys and paralegals in representing hundreds of non-citizen youth before the immigration court, Asylum Office, USCIS, and state family and probate courts. She has worked closely with school districts and community stakeholders to establish partnerships for legal services tailored to meet the needs of students and their families. Jean has also practiced immigration law at East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, where she represented unaccompanied children seeking relief from deportation, as well as clients seeking affirmative asylum, U-Visas, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, naturalization, and family-based petitions, and as the supervising attorney for the Student-Initiated Legal Services Project (SLPS) East Bay Dreamer Clinic, Berkeley Law. Early in her career, Jean worked alongside a Franciscan nun and another attorney to combat police tactics that detained undocumented workers in remote detention facilities where they struggled to find representation. The collaborative visited local jails to equip detainees with representation and advocate for their transfer back to the Bay Area. As a national expert in Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, Jean has advised and participated in impact litigation aimed at protecting the rights of immigrant children to apply for SIJS, and has trained and mentored attorneys and paralegals in California on advanced SIJS related issues. Jean’s work has also included complex and emerging issues in DACA cases.

EDUCATION Jean holds a B.A from Beloit College in Classics and a J.D. from the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the California bar and is fluent in Spanish.