Cities and Immigration in the Age of Trump

Melissa Mark-Viverito currently serves as the Speaker of the New York City Council, the first Puerto Rican and Latina to hold a citywide elected position. She represents the 8th District, which includes El Barrio/East Harlem and the South Bronx.

Speaker Mark-Viverito was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She worked for over a decade in local activism, nonprofit organizations and labor before being elected to the City Council in 2005, as the first Puerto Rican woman and Latina to represent her district in the Council.

In 2009, she was elected to her second term in the City Council, during which she served as Chair of the Committee on Parks and Recreation, the founding Co-Chair of the Progressive Caucus and as a member of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. In 2011, she was one of four Council Members to pioneer the first-ever Participatory Budgeting process in New York City.

She is a graduate of Columbia College at Columbia University and Baruch College, City University of New York, where she studied Public Administration through the National Urban Fellows Program.

Dara Lind is a staff writer for Vox, covering immigration, criminal justice and politics. She's been recognized for her work by John Jay College's Center for Media, Crime and Justice and by the nonprofit immigration organization Define American. Before coming to Vox, she worked in immigration policy at the advocacy organization America's Voice in Washington, DC.
 

Alina Das ’05 is an Associate Professor of Clinical Law at NYU School of Law, where she co-teaches and co-directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic. She and her clinic students represent immigrants and community organizations in litigation and advocacy to advance immigrant rights locally and across the country. In addition to her teaching, Das engages in scholarship on deportation and detention issues, particularly at the intersection of immigration and criminal law. Das also serves as faculty director of the NYU Latino Rights Scholars Program. Prior to joining the Law School, Das was a Soros Justice Fellow and staff attorney with the Immigrant Defense Project, and clerked for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Das graduated magna cum laude with an AB in government from Harvard University, and graduated cum laude from NYU Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar with a joint MPA from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. Das is a recipient of the LexisNexis Matthew Bender Daniel Levy Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Immigration Law, the NYU Law Podell Distinguished Teaching Award, the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award, and the NYU Center for Multicultural Education & Programs Nia Faculty Award.

Kate Brick is the Director of State and Local Initiatives at New American Economy, a bipartisan coalition of business and political leaders working to create smart, sensible immigration policies in cities, states, and nationally. Kate has 10 years of experience working on immigration issues in the United States, Mexico/Central America, and Europe through her time at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, Unbound Philanthropy, the Migration Policy Institute, and the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Kate holds an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BA in Latin American Studies from The George Washington University.

Adam Cox, Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at NYU, is a leading expert on immigration law, voting rights, and constitutional law. His writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and many other scholarly publications, and has been covered by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others. He is currently writing a book about the President’s power to shape immigration law.

Aaron M. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a Contributing Editor at its quarterly magazine City Journal. He is on a mission to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse 21st century. This requires building a future that is both demographically and economically sustainable and equitable. It means creating an engine of opportunity and upward mobility, and a platform on which a broad majority of citizens can build towards achieving their aspirations.

Renn is also an economic development columnist for Governing Magazine, and has contributed to the Guardian, Forbes.com and other publications. His perspectives on urban issues are regularly cited in global media outlets which have included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the Economist, and the London Daily Telegraph.

His insights are rooted in a 15 year career in management and technology consulting, where he was a partner at Accenture. He’s held multiple technology strategy roles, and directed multi-million dollar global technology implementations. He also founded the urban data analytics web startup Telestrian.  He currently lives in New York.