Stacy Jones

During my senior year at Lehigh, I took a brand new international law course with Professor Gillroy that sparked my interest in international human rights law. After graduating from Lehigh in 2005 with a double major in Spanish and IR, I went on to law school at American University Washington College of Law in DC. I took several courses on international law, human rights law, and comparative law, and was a student attorney in the International Human Rights Law Clinic during my last year. I also participated in WCL's summer program in Chile and Argentina during my first summer, and after the program ended I stayed in Santiago for another month, working as an intern at Chile Transparente (the Chilean chapter of Transparency International). During law school, I had several other internships, including with the Due Process of Law Foundation and in the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. My courses and my work in the Clinic introduced me to immigration law, and I enjoyed the connections between immigration and international law and policy, so after graduating and passing the DC bar in 2008, I went into the field of immigration. I worked for a solo practitioner in Virginia and a new non-profit in DC called Mil Mujeres, which seeks to help low-income Spanish-speaking survivors of domestic violence with immigration and family law issues. Since September 2009, I have been working as an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow at the National Center for Refugee & Immigrant Children (a program of the U.S. Committee for Refugees & Immigrants). The National Center matches unaccompanied immigrant children with pro bono attorneys to help in their removal proceedings in immigration court, and I personally am working on a project to help immigrant children in foster care in DC obtain lawful immigration status in the US.