Sabrineh Ardalan

Sabrineh Ardalan is clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. Ardalan supervises law students working on deportation defense, strategic litigation, and policy advocacy with a focus on asylum and immigrants’ rights. She has authored briefs submitted to the Board of Immigration Appeals, as well as to the federal district courts, circuit courts of appeal, and U.S. Supreme Court on cutting edge issues in U.S. asylum law. She also oversees and collaborates closely with the clinic’s social work team. Her courses and research focus on immigration and refugee law and advocacy, trauma, refugees, and the law, and strategic immigration litigation and advocacy. She has also engaged in research on asylum in comparative contexts as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Morocco and Fulbright Specialist in Croatia. Prior to her work at HLS, Ardalan clerked for Hon. Michael A. Chagares of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and Hon. Raymond J. Dearie, district judge for the Eastern District of New York. She previously served as the Equal Justice America fellow at The Opportunity Agenda. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in history and international studies from Yale College.

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Arevik Avedian

Arevik Avedian is a Lecturer on Law and Director of Empirical Research Services at Harvard Law School. Professor Avedian's teaching and research interests center around empirical law. Before joining HLS, she taught at University of California, Riverside and California State University, Fullerton. Professor Avedian holds a Ph.D. in world politics and methods and a M.A. in economics from Claremont Graduate University, a dual B.A/M.A., summa cum laude, in international relations from David Anhaght University of Armenia. 

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Katherine Peeler

Katherine Peeler is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in the Division of Medical Critical Care at Boston Children’s Hospital. Additionally, she is a Medical Expert with the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), where she has volunteered for 20 years providing pro bono forensic evaluations to assist asylum-seekers with their immigration cases and researching and testifying about conditions inside U.S. immigration detention centers. In this capacity, she and her students in the Peeler Immigration Lab conducted the qualitative portion of the study “Endless Nightmare”: Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention, published in February 2024 by PHR. She holds a master’s degree in medical anthropology from Harvard University and completed a fellowship in bioethics at Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. She is presently a research fellow in the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

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Philip L. Torey

Phil Torrey is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since 2011. He is also the Director of the Crimmigration Clinic, which is part of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. The Crimmigration Clinic engages in cutting-edge litigation and policy advocacy concerning issues ranging from criminal bars to immigration relief and immigration detention conditions to sanctuary city policies and the crime-based grounds of removal. Torrey has litigated numerous cases in administrative tribunals, federal district courts, federal circuit courts of appeals, and authored briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. Torrey teaches courses on crimmigration law as well as strategic litigation and immigration advocacy. His research focuses on the federalism tension inherent in crimmigration law as well immigration detention, including the private prison industry and the immigration system’s mandatory detention regime.

Prior to joining HLS, Torrey was an attorney in the Immigration Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services where he specialized in removal defense and represented individuals seeking various forms of immigration relief. He was also a litigation associate at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. He received his B.A. from Colgate University and his J.D. with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law.

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Wes Boyd

J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD is a professor of psychiatry and medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. He is also a Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has taught extensively in the humanities, bioethics, human rights and psychiatry. His areas of interest include social justice, access to care, immigration, physician health, the pharmaceutical industry, mass incarceration, and substance use. He writes for both academic and lay audiences. 

Felicia Caten-Raines

Felicia is a second-year law student and member of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRCP). She came to law school to pursue immigration law and enjoys advocating for immigrants through HIRCP. Over the January Term, Felicia traveled to San Diego to work with detained immigrants at the border. This summer, she will be in Serbia advocating for immigrants' rights. 

Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher has worked for the federal government since 1995, originally as a trial attorney for the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City and in San Antonio, Texas, and later as Special Counsel in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office of the Chief Counsel (2003-2012). In 2007, she served as a Congressional Fellow for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where her assignments included helping draft Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation. From 2012-2013, Ms. Gallagher served as Senior Ombudsman within the DHS Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. She left that position to become a Policy Advisor in the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In the fall of 2014, Ms. Gallagher first began reporting whistleblower concerns regarding the widespread use of solitary confinement in immigration detention. In complaints filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Ms. Gallagher sought to bring attention to ongoing violations of law and policy that pose a danger of imminent harm, particularly to mentally ill and other vulnerable detainees. Her whistleblowing from 2014-2019 also involved repeated outreach to members of House and Senate oversight committees. In the absence of meaningful action to address these concerns, Ms. Gallagher agreed to go on the record with the press. In May 2019, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in conjunction with The Intercept, NBC News, and Univision, published the results of an extensive investigation on the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention, which featured her accounts. These articles have prompted additional scrutiny by Members of Congress, legislation to restrict the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention, and other calls for reform. With the assistance of the Government Accountability Project, Ms. Gallagher has further published articles in the Washington Post and Ms. Magazine.   

Ms. Gallagher works as a Senior Advisor in the DHS OIG. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where she teaches a course entitled, Immigration and the American Ideal. Before entering on duty for the federal government, Ellen received a Skadden Fellowship to work in New York City, where she represented children with disabilities in the public school system. Ellen earned her B.A. from Harvard College in 1984 and her J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law in 1991. 

Karim Golding

Karim Golding, a Jamaican immigrant, faced a life-altering experience in the US when wrongfully arrested in 2006 during the "War on Drugs" as a target of the “Hip-Hop Police.” After years of incarceration, Karim obtained a certificate in paralegal studies, which helped him to get some convictions vacated, and his 30-year conviction was changed to time served. However, he was transferred to a harsh ICE detention in 2016, where he remained for 5 years. Contracting COVID-19 twice in 2020 while housed in Etowah County jail in Alabama, enduring solitary confinement, Karim stepped up his advocacy for detained immigrants' rights, gaining national attention in several publications such as Rolling Stone, and The Intercept. With support from immigrant rights organizations and Tik-Tokers, Karim was able to help hundreds of families to reunite. He eventually secured his release in 2021. Karim also played a role in stopping ICE's contract with the Etowah detention center. Today, he continues his advocacy efforts through “The Law Library,” helping both migrants and US citizens with legal work, credit repair, and business credit building while passionately advocating for systemic criminal justice and immigration reform. 

Stuart Grassian

Dr. Stuart Grassian is a Board-certified psychiatrist who was on the teaching Harvard Medical School teaching staff for almost thirty years. He has had extensive experience in evaluating the psychiatric effects of stringent conditions of confinement and has served as an expert in both individual and class-action lawsuits addressing this issue. In his publications, Dr. Grassian described a particular psychiatric syndrome associated with solitary confinement and with other situations imposing conditions of restricted environmental stimulation.

Caroline Lee

Caroline Lee is a current Resident Physician at UC San Francisco in the Department of Emergency Medicine. She was a founding member of the Peeler Immigration Lab, where she helped coordinate two national studies published by PHR, covering public health conditions during the initial spread of COVID-19 and solitary confinement in U.S. immigration detention centers. Caroline is passionate about promoting health equity for immigrant populations including in medical education, palliative care, and public health policy. She also served as the prior Clinic Coordinator for the Harvard Asylum Clinic, which provides medical and psychological evaluations to support the cases of asylum-seekers in the Greater Boston area. She received her B.A. from Rice University and M.D. from Harvard Medical School. 

Elizabeth Matos

Elizabeth (Lizz) Matos is the Civil Rights Division Chief and Senior Advisor to the Attorney General at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. Between 2018 and summer 2023, Lizz was the Executive Director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts (PLS). Lizz has been involved in litigation about solitary confinement practices regarding prisoners with mental illness, discrimination against deaf and hard of hearing prisoners, draconian classification practices, guard-on-prisoner assaults, and eliminating exorbitant and monopolistic prison phone rates. Lizz also advocated for passage of the Criminal Justice Reform Act in 2018, which significantly changed the state’s laws governing solitary confinement practices and improved protections for those identifying as LGBTQ+ in the prison system. Before her ED appointment, Lizz worked as a Staff Attorney at PLS and previously worked as a Staff Attorney at South Coastal Counties Legal Services where she practiced housing, education, disability, and immigration law. Prior to law school, she served as the Immigrant Rights Coordinator for the MIRA Coalition and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mozambique, Africa. Lizz sits on the Council of the Boston Bar Association and served on the boards of the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee and Justice at Work. She is a graduate of Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center. 

Elizabeth Nguyen

Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen is the Migrant Justice Organizer with the National Bail Fund Network and previously did faith-based justice work and youth organizing. She is a Unitarian Universalist minister and part of the founding team of the Beyond Bond Fund in Boston. She is passionate about progressive organizing in the Vietnamese American community, and building power across prison walls.

Tessa Wilson

As Senior Program Officer with the Asylum Program, Tessa Wilson supports the Program’s research and advocacy initiatives with colleagues in the asylum medicine and human rights movements, academic partners, PHR’s Asylum Network of clinicians, and medical school asylum clinics around the country. 

Tessa comes to PHR with significant experience in asylum systems. Prior to joining PHR, Tessa was based in London, UK, where she served as Assistant Director and, prior to that, Senior Executive Officer at the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, an independent Government body. In these roles, Tessa led and supported inspections on border and immigration functions and served as a member of the senior leadership team. Tessa’s work included inspections into asylum casework and refugee resettlement, among other areas, with all reports laid before Parliament. 

Earlier in her career, Tessa was an Advocacy and Casework Coordinator at Refugee Women Connect, a not-for-profit organization focused on aiding women refugees and survivors of trafficking. Additionally, she served as an Outreach Worker, where she oversaw drop-ins that provided vital services to refugee women, including casework assistance and other community-based support.

Tessa has also volunteered as a caseworker for Refugee Action, where she helped newly arrived asylum seekers in Liverpool, UK, with asylum support applications. Tessa holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Liverpool. She is based in New York.