Immigrant Rights

Aseem Mehta is a Meselson-Liman Public Interest Fellow in the Immigrant Rights Program. His work focuses on supporting incarcerated immigrants and seeking repair for individuals harmed by the state’s violence. Aseem previously advocated alongside immigrant communities against detention and deportation in New York and South Texas as an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow. Before joining Advancing Justice – ALC, Aseem clerked for the Hon. Richard A. Paez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Hon. Edward M. Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Aseem received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. He was awarded the P.D. Soros Fellowship, Reinhardt Fellowship, and Stephen J. Massey Prize in recognition of his excellence in and commitment to lawyering in the public interest.

Avelina is Community Advocate with the Immigrants Rights Program. In her role, she works alongside attorneys to challenge the deportation and detention of immigrants and refugees. Avelina is committed to supporting families like her own in their journeys to heal from the trauma inflicted by separation.

Previously, Avelina served as Program Manager at Bonafide and developed re-entry services for people returning home from life sentences. She was a Resource Manager and Legal Assistant at UnCommon Law, and has also facilitated restorative justice centered groups inside of men and women's prisons throughout California. In 2019, Avelina received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and during her time there was Program Director of UC Berkeley’s Teach in Prison program, an intern at Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic, and a member of Berkeley Underground Scholars. In 2021, she was selected as a Young Professional of Color Fellow with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

In addition to her work at ALC, Avelina serves the community in various capacities. She is currently a member of the Inmate Family Council where she advocates for impacted families' visitation rights and works alongside California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation (CDCr) administration to make prison visitation accessible. Avelina's work is intentionally dedicated to making healing accessible for communities who have historically been underserved and disenfranchised.

Cyrina is a paralegal with the Immigrant Rights program. She collaborates with attorneys to provide legal representation to immigrants facing detention and deportation.

Before joining Advancing Justice-ALC, Cyrina worked as an immigration paralegal at a community law firm in Tucson, AZ supporting working class and poor families facing separation. Cyrina has been involved in grassroots organizing with undocumented communities along the US/Mexico border for over ten years, as a volunteer EMT and humanitarian aid worker with No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, as a bilingual hotline administrator with the Tucson Community Rapid Response Network, and as a member of Trans Queer Pueblo where she was an organizer and advocate with LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers facing detention and deportation.

Jenny Zhao is a senior staff attorney in the Immigrant Rights Program. She litigates cases challenging the detention and deportation of Southeast Asian refugees and other communities targeted for policing and immigration enforcement. Before joining Advancing Justice – ALC, Jenny was a Liman Public Interest Fellow at the ACLU of Northern California. She received her law degree from Yale Law School, where she was a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic.

So Young is a staff attorney in the Immigrant Rights program. She provides direct legal services to immigrants who are detained and facing deportation. So Young first joined Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus in 2013 to organize undocumented API youth and rejoined in 2019 as a Bridge Fellow. In law school, she interned with the Immigration Defense Unit of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and at a private public interest firm in its deportation defense practice. So Young received her law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law.