Dissertation

My dissertation is a multiyear ethnographic study of asylum lawyering in Los Angeles, a global hub of immigration adjudication. Based on over four and a half years of research—including participant observation at a nonprofit legal aid organization and in-depth interviews with nearly 100 immigration practitioners—I examine how legal advocates navigate the turbulence, incoherence, and hostility of contemporary migration control.

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The project asks: How do adverse institutional conditions shape professional practice? More foundationally, how do these conditions matter for lawyers' professional identities and their belief in the law as an instrument of justice?

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I show how legal institutions' heightened politicization destabilizes lawyers' legal consciousness, leading practitioners to simultaneously inhabit multiple, contradictory orientations towards the law. Attorneys' diverse social locations mediate these orientations: formal legal training and professional norms coexist alongside moral, experiential, and socially situated ways of knowing the law. Lawyers respond by reconfiguring legal practice, knowledge, and professional identity in ways that both sustain and unsettle their commitments to law. 

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By foregrounding the perspectives of immigration lawyers, I develop a broader account of how restrictive migration policies reverberate inward, transforming legal institutions and destabilizing their legitimacy. Ultimately, my findings illuminate how professionals sustain moral purpose amidst institutional erosion by developing multiple ways of seeing, knowing, and acting within the institutions they occupy.

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This research is generously supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, the Center for Institutional Courage, the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, and the UCLA Center for International Migration.