About the Center for Immigration Law and Policy
Learn more about the Center for Immigration Law and Policy and meet our faculty and staff.
Founded in 2020, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law expands the law school’s role as a national leader in immigration law and policy. CILP generates innovative ideas at the intersection of immigration scholarship and practice; serves as a hub for transforming those ideas into meaningful changes in immigration policy at the local, state, and national level; and empowers students with unique opportunities for experiential learning through work with academics, practitioners, policymakers, and activists. CILP pursues those goals by supporting faculty performing cutting-edge work in immigration law and policy; bolstering initiatives for student engagement including the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic and service-learning trips for UCLA Law students to border regions; engaging in strategic litigation; publishing briefings and reports on immigration policy; and hosting conferences and symposia featuring top national scholars.
For media inquiries, please contact cilppress@law.ucla.edu.
CILP Leadership
Ahilan T. Arulanantham
Faculty Co-Director
Ahilan T. Arulanantham is Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Ahilan teaches in the law school and also maintains an active litigation practice. He has successfully litigated a number of cases involving immigrants’ rights, including Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first case to establish a federal right to appointed counsel for any group of immigrants; Jennings v. Rodriguez, which secured the due process rights of immigrants jailed for years while litigating their deportation cases; and Ramos v. Nielsen, a challenge to the Trump Administration's plan to end the TPS program. Ahilan has argued three times before the United States Supreme Court, most recently in the fall of 2021 on behalf of Americans of the Muslim faith who were targeted by the federal government for surveillance because of their religion in FBI v. Fazaga.
Prior to joining UCLA, Ahilan was Senior Counsel at the ACLU in Los Angeles, where he worked for nearly twenty years. In 2016 Ahilan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Read Ahilan T. Arulanantham's faculty biography.
Director of Strategic Communications
Sandra Hernandez is Director of Strategic Communications at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. She has spent more than two decades in communications and media. Most recently, as vice president of communications and media at MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), she led communications efforts around the organization’s defense of DACA, voting rights, and challenges to the integrity of the 2020 Census. Sandra previously worked as director of communications at the ACLU of Southern California.
A veteran journalist, she wrote about immigration and criminal justice as an editorial writer at Los Angeles Times. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Daily Journal, she broke national stories about the U.S. immigration detention system, including a covert federal program to forcibly drug and deport detained immigrants. She has reported from Latin America on Colombia’s civil war, Venezuela’s political turmoil, and U.S. deportations to Haiti.
She served as an editor of Underground America and En las Sombras, a collection of oral histories of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The collection was published as part of The Voice of Witness Book Series that uses first person narratives to document human rights issues.
She was born in Colombia and raised in Southern California. She is a graduate of UCLA and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Talia Inlender
Deputy Director
Talia Inlender is Deputy Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Talia teaches the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic and plays a lead role in advancing CILP’s research, advocacy, and litigation. During her career, Talia has litigated cases on behalf of immigrants before Immigration Judges; the Board of Immigration Appeals; and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has been co-counsel in transformative immigrants’ rights litigation, including: Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first lawsuit to establish a right to government-appointed counsel for a class of immigrants with serious mental disabilities; F.L.B. (formerly J.E.F.M.) v. Lynch and C.J.L.G. v. Barr, lawsuits to vindicate children’s right to counsel in immigration proceedings; and International Refugee Assistance Project v. Kelly, a lawsuit challenging the detention of an Afghan family entering on Special Immigrant Visas during the so-called “Muslim Ban.” Talia has also played a pivotal role in advocacy to expand local and state funding for legal representation in removal proceedings.
Prior to joining CILP, Talia spent 13 years in the Immigrants’ Rights Project at Public Counsel, where she launched and led the agency’s detained deportation defense program.
Read Talia Inlender's faculty biography.
Hiroshi Motomura
Faculty Co-Director
Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), Americans in Waiting (Oxford 2006), and he is the co-author of Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (West 9th ed. 2021). He has received several university teaching awards and is one of 26 U.S. law professors profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his current book project, Borders and Belonging: Can Immigration Policy Be Ethical? (Oxford est. 2024). And perhaps most significantly, he is featured in the Try Guys video, The Try Guys Try Immigrating to America.
Read Hiroshi Motomura's faculty biography.
CILP Staff
Senior Communications Strategist
Hayley Burgess is the Communications Strategist at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Most recently she was Communications Manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC), where she led communications work for Health & Public Benefit campaigns in CA and partnered with statewide coalitions to advance inclusive policies for everyone who calls California home.
Before that, she worked at the National Immigration Law Center, where she partnered with state and local immigrants' rights organizations to help build communications power and capacity to further advance critical changes for immigrants in their communities throughout the country. Hayley also managed media coordination and helped guide communications strategy for NILC’s litigation, policy, and narrative priorities.
Hayley has also independently consulted with a range of immigrants’ rights organizations to support communications strategy for economic and racial justice campaigns. She believes in a people and community-centered approach to communications work, which is grounded in her conviction that everyone should have the freedom to live full lives with their family and community.
Senior Staff Attorney
Monika Y. Langarica is a senior staff attorney with the Center for the Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Monika has litigated cases and advanced advocacy challenging immigration confinement and exclusionary border policies, and in defense of humanitarian pathways.
The daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in San Diego, Monika was born and raised in the borderlands. Before joining CILP, Monika was the immigrants’ rights staff attorney at the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, where she pursued impact litigation, strategic direct representation, policy advocacy, and community education efforts in the border region. Prior to ACLU, Monika was a senior staff attorney with the ABA Immigration Justice Project of San Diego and served as an Equal Justice Works fellow at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland. Monika cofounded the Borderlands Get Free Fund, the first immigration bond fund established in the California border region, and has served on the board of directors of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers’ Association Scholarship Fund and Borderlands for Equity.
Monika is a graduate of the University of Southern California (B.A. 2011) and UC Berkeley School of Law (2014) and is licensed to practice law in California.
Program Coordinator
Chloe Lin is the Program Coordinator for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Prior to joining UCLA, she was the Public Programs Assistant for the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. She has also worked as Project Coordinator for the Chinese Historical Society of New England and Marketing and Communications Associate for the Old North Church & Historic Site. Chloe holds a BA in History from Smith College and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the Harvard Extension School.
Staff Attorney
Sofía López Franco (she/her/hers) is a staff attorney with the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. Sofía is originally from Mexico City, and her passion for immigrant justice work comes from her personal experience and the admiration she’s developed through her work with immigrant communities.
Prior to joining CILP, Sofía was an Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC) fellow at the Bronx Defenders, where she worked at the intersection of the immigration and criminal legal systems, providing direct representation in immigration proceedings and Padilla advisals to noncitizen clients. Before joining the Bronx Defenders, Sofía graduated cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she was a Latinx Rights Scholar and received the Christian Jarecki Memorial Prize for her outstanding work and commitment to a law clinic. During law school, Sofía was a part of the Immigrant Rights Clinic and worked on federal litigation challenging the conditions in and use of ICE detention, unlawful deportations, the misapplication of asylum law.
Sofía received her B.A. in Political Science and Legal Studies from Northwestern University and is fluent in Spanish. She is currently licensed to practice law in New York and California.
Staff Attorney
Stephany Martinez Tiffer is a Staff Attorney at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA School of Law. Stephany works on litigation, policy advocacy, and strategic communications.
Prior to joining CILP, Stephany was an associate at Keker, Van Nest & Peters where she worked on complex civil litigation matters and maintained a prominent pro bono practice. Stephany graduated from UCLA School of Law, where she obtained a specialization in public interest law and policy. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Before law school, Stephany worked on Immigrants’ Rights advocacy in her local Bay Area community.
CILP Student Staff
Dora Bustos
Communications Assistant
Dora Bustos is a Communications Assistant for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. She is a third year pursuing a B.A. in Political Science as well as a minor in History. Dora has experience working with low income youth and has also dedicated her time to working with children with autism as a respite worker in Orange County. This past summer she interned with The Law Firm of Daniel M. Miller, PLLC to gain experience in the legal field as she plans to attend law school upon graduating from UCLA.