Hannah is a senior attorney with substantial experience bringing impact litigation, strategic individual representation, and non-legal advocacy at the intersection of immigrant rights, students’ rights, criminal and juvenile justice, and police practices.  At SJLF, Hannah supports and builds up litigation to dismantle unconstitutional government systems and demand justice and dignity for persons wronged by government actors.  She also supports SJLF’s fellows in investigating opportunities for advocacy, litigating SJLF’s active cases, and developing public interest lawyering skills.     

Before joining SJLF, Hannah was a Managing Attorney for Immigrant Defenders Law Center’s (“ImmDef”) Litigation and Advocacy team, where she specialized in trial and appellate impact litigation.  In that role, Hannah helped build up and litigate through trial ImmDef v. DHS, which challenged the Department of Homeland Security’s denial of statutory entitlements to unaccompanied noncitizen children.  She also represented countless asylum seekers in their removal proceedings on appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Through that work, Hannah successfully litigated Lopez-Marroquin v. Garland, where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that California’s commonly prosecuted joy riding offense cannot carry immigration consequences.  She also carried a substantial post-conviction relief (“PCR”) docket at ImmDef, vacating countless convictions based on legal or procedural error and restoring a person’s ability to remain in the United States.  Notably, her PCR docket included People v. Manzanilla, where a California Court of Appeal issued a published decision announcing several legal principles advancing the rights of noncitizens seeking relief from immigration-adverse convictions.   

Before ImmDef, Hannah was a legal fellow at the ACLU of Southern California’s Education Equity team.  There, Hannah investigated a school-based “diversion” program that unlawfully targeted students of color for onerous probation based on innocuous, child behavior.  That work culminated in Sigma Beta Xi v. Riverside County, a class action lawsuit that resulted in an unprecedented settlement benefiting more than 10,000 students.  Hannah also coordinated several non-legal advocacy efforts, including drafting a model school district board policy that was adopted by several of California’s largest school districts to ensure a safe and secure educational environment for all students in the wake of the 2016 election.   

When she’s not working, you can find Hannah going on evening walks with her Sheepadoodle, Bader (named after R.B.G.), picking up new hobbies (currently tennis and painting with watercolors), and attending concerts.