Katrina Eiland, JD ’10, is the Managing Attorney of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project’s California Office. She has a decade of experience litigating complex immigrants’ rights and other civil and workers’ rights cases. She has been counsel in more than two dozen such suits in federal court. For the past three and a half years at IRP, she has litigated many high impact cases on behalf of immigrants, several of which have challenged immigration enforcement abuses by federal and local law enforcement agencies. For example, Eiland played a lead role in briefing the recent appeals and petitions for certiorari in Ortega Melendres v. Maricopa County, a successful lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Sheriff’s Office for racial profiling and harassment of Latino drivers in Arizona. She was also counsel in Amadei v. McAleenan, a suit challenging Customs and Border Protection’s unlawful search and seizure of passengers disembarking from a domestic flight, which resulted in the government agreeing to measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.

In addition, Eiland is lead counsel in the successful challenge to the government’s arbitrary termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival grants, in which she obtained an injunction requiring that the government provide notice and an opportunity to be heard before terminating any class member’s DACA. Eiland argued the case before the Ninth Circuit.  She is also lead counsel in U.T. v. Barr, which challenges the government’s “safe” third country removals of asylum seekers to dangerous neighboring countries. She has also played key roles in other asylum litigation, including Grace v. Sessions, a challenge to policies restricting asylum claims by survivors of domestic and gang violence, and East Bay v. Barr, a challenge to the government’s asylum bar based on an individual’s transit through a third country.

Eiland is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. Following a clerkship with the Honorable Keith P. Ellison of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Eiland was first a Civil Rights Fellow and then associate at Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, where she litigated complex wage and hour, employment discrimination, disability access, and voting rights cases. She received the ACLU of Southern California’s 2014 Voting Rights Award for her work representing Latino residents in the City of Anaheim under the California Voting Rights Act. Prior to joining the ACLU, Eiland was also an associate at Outten & Golden LLP where she represented employees in wage and hour and discrimination class actions, including cases on behalf of DACA recipients unfairly denied employment. In 2017, she was selected as a “Rising Star for Northern California” by Super Lawyers. She will participate in several events during the week of October 12.

A recording of Eiland’s keynote address is available here: “Resilience in Resistance: When Immigrants’ Rights Are Under Relentless Attack.”