Advanced FOIA with DHS

Alison Kamhi is the Legal Program Director based in San Francisco. Alison is a dedicated immigrant advocate who brings significant experience in immigration law to the ILRC. Alison leads the ILRC's Immigrant Survivors Team and conducts frequent in-person and webinar trainings on naturalization and citizenship, family-based immigration, U visas, and FOIA requests. She also provides technical assistance through the ILRC's Attorney of the Day program on a wide range of immigration issues, including immigration options for youth, consequences of criminal convictions for immigration purposes, removal defense strategy, and eligibility for immigration relief, including family-based immigration, U visas, VAWA, DACA, cancellation of removal, asylum, and naturalization. 

She has co-authored a number of publications, including The U Visa: Obtaining Status for Immigrant Victims of Crimes (ILRC); FOIA Requests and Other Background Checks (ILRC); Naturalization and U.S. Citizenship (ILRC); Hardship in Immigration Law (ILRC); Parole in Immigration Law (ILRC); Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and Other Immigration Options for Children and Youth (ILRC); A Guide for Immigrant Advocates (ILRC); and Most In Need But Least Served: Legal and Practical Barriers to Special Immigrant Juvenile Status for Federally Detained Minors, 50 Fam. Ct. Rev. 4 (2012).

Alison facilitates the eight member Collaborative Resources for Immigrant Services on the Peninsula (CRISP) collaborative in San Mateo County to provide immigration services to low-income immigrants in Silicon Valley. 

Prior to the ILRC, Alison worked as a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic, where she supervised removal defense cases and immigrants' rights advocacy projects. Before Stanford, she represented abandoned and abused immigrant youth as a Skadden Fellow at Bay Area Legal Aid and at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York. While in law school, Alison worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, and Greater Boston Legal Services Immigration Unit. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Julia Gibbons in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Alison received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from Stanford University. Alison is admitted to the bar in California and New York. She speaks German and Spanish.

Peggy Gleason, who has dedicated her career to immigrant rights, joined ILRC in 2019 as a senior staff attorney in Washington, D.C.

She worked most recently in the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, dealing with civil rights complaints concerning U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Earlier, she worked on family and humanitarian immigration policy and legal issues for the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman and on legal access issues for the Department of Justice Executive Office of Immigration Review.

Before her time with the federal government, she was a senior attorney for Catholic Legal Immigration Network's training and technical support section for 23 years, providing technical assistance and training to CLINIC's affiliated programs and other nonprofits nationwide. She also represented immigrant clients of Catholic Charities Immigration Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Washington. She began fulltime practice of immigration law while working for the Colorado Rural Legal Services Farmworker Program.

She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A. in Ibero-American Studies and earned her J.D. at Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the Colorado Bar.

Peggy is a frequent speaker on immigration law topics and contributor to publications. She speaks Spanish.