Nayna Gupta is currently the Associate Director of Policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). Nayna advocates on behalf of immigrant communities, refugees, and asylum seekers before members of Congress and other policy makers on Capitol Hill. Her expertise focuses on the entanglement between the criminal legal and immigration systems and on the use of detention to enforce civil immigration laws. In addition to authoring two reports related to the criminalization of immigration, she is currently spearheading “Chance to Come Home,” a national campaign based on her proposal to the Biden administration for a centralized process to give hundreds of unjustly deported people an avenue to return to the U.S. Through the campaign, Nayna has helped bring home six of eleven deported people featured in her proposal, secured legislative language that facilitates the return of deported people nationwide, and garnered national press in major media outlets on the fight to remedy unjust deportations. Prior to NIJC, Nayna worked as an immigration defense attorney for the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office where she litigated cases on behalf of individuals with criminal records in their immigration proceedings and in federal court, including setting precedent alongside her detained client regarding prolonged detention in the Northern District of California. She also worked as a racial justice fellow and staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. Nayna started her career as a federal law clerk to the Honorable Myron H. Thompson in Montgomery, Alabama and is a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.