Public Charge and Hot Topics in Consular Processing

Ariel Brown joined the ILRC in April 2017. After five years in private practice at a well-respected immigration firm in Sacramento, Schoenleber & Waltermire, PC, Ariel brings extensive practical experience to the ILRC. She has experience filing numerous immigration applications and regularly appearing before USCIS, ICE, and EOIR, with cases spanning the areas of removal defense, family-based adjustment of status and consular processing, DACA, naturalization, SIJS, U visas, and VAWA. She was also involved in establishing Sacramento's rapid response network to respond to immigration enforcement action, and served as an American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)-USCIS liaison.

Ariel contributes to the ILRC's Attorney of the Day legal technical assistance program, as well as writing and updating practice advisories and manuals and presenting on family-based topics for ILRC webinars.

Prior to joining the ILRC, Ariel also briefly volunteered with the International Institute of the Bay Area in Oakland, and Catholic Charities of the East Bay in Richmond. In law school, Ariel was a student advocate with the UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic, assisting with cancellation of removal cases for indigent noncitizens, and an editor for the Journal of International Law and Policy.

Ariel earned her law degree from the University of California at Davis, and her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she majored in anthropology. Ariel is admitted to the state bar in California.

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.