Advocating for Prosecutorial Discretion for Clients in Removal Proceedings

Lena Graber is a national expert on the role of local police in immigration enforcement and the use of ICE detainers.  She has spent more than a decade supporting organizers and lawyers around the country to fight unfair and often illegal detention of immigrants, and to push for pro-immigrant local policies. Lena spearheads ILRC's national work combatting immigration enforcement and providing comprehensive advocacy resources and trainings to the immigrant rights movement. In the last several years, Lena has written and consulted on local and state-wide sanctuary policies in dozens of states and trained hundreds of organizers and policymakers to better understand and dismantle the machinery of detention and deportation. Lena joined the ILRC in 2013, and she has co-authored several ILRC publications including Motions to Suppress: Protecting the Constitutional Rights of Immigrants in Removal Proceedings; FOIA Requests and Other Background Checks; DACA: The Essential Legal Guide; and Parole in Immigration Law.

Prior to the ILRC, Lena was a Soros Justice Fellow at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, where she supported campaigns against local law enforcement involvement in deportations and litigated ICE detainer issues in federal courts. She also worked at the National Immigration Forum doing federal advocacy on immigrant rights and border policy.

Lena graduated with honors from the George Washington University Law School, where she served on the journal for International Law in Domestic Courts. She earned her B.A. in history from Wesleyan University. Lena is a member of the California bar and she speaks Spanish.

Anita Gupta is a senior staff attorney based in Austin, Texas, where she focuses on building the capacity of legal practitioners in Texas to represent immigrants in immigration and criminal proceedings. She conducts trainings on immigration law, provides legal expertise through the ILRC's Attorney of the Day program, and writes practice manuals and advisories for practitioners across the country. She also works with advocates and local officials throughout Texas to strategize, pass, and implement local policies that reduce the arrest-to-deportation pipeline. She focuses on issues related to removal defense, federal immigration enforcement, and the intersectionality of the immigration and criminal legal systems.  

Prior to joining the ILRC, Anita worked in private practice in Austin, specializing in removal defense and humanitarian-based immigration relief. She has also worked at American Gateways and the National Immigrant Justice Center, where she represented low-income immigrants in a variety of matters before the immigration courts, USCIS, and ICE.  

Anita obtained her Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she earned her law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. During law school, Anita participated in DePaul's Asylum and Refugee Law clinic, and she interned at the Legal Assistance Foundation and the National Immigrant Justice Center. Anita is admitted to the Illinois bar.