Public Charge for Legal Practitioners in 2023

Erin Quinn is an attorney based in San Francisco. Her work focuses on building capacity of organizations and practitioners to assist immigrants. She conducts trainings on immigration law throughout the United States and provides legal expertise through the ILRC's Attorney of the Day program. Erin has contributed to numerous ILRC publications as author or editor, including Removal Defense: Defending Immigrants in Immigration Court; Essentials of Asylum and many others. In addition, Erin works on issues related to immigration status and healthcare as well as consumer protection. She has published articles with LexisNexis Emerging Issues and American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

Prior to coming to the ILRC, Erin represented immigrants in all aspects of their immigration matters, with an emphasis on removal defense and complex cases. She was owner and attorney at her own firm for 5 years after defending immigrants as an associate at the Law Office of Robert B. Jobe. Her experience in immigration law and policy includes working as a fellow for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, EU headquarters in Belgium; clerking for the Immigration Court of San Francisco; and teaching courses as a lecturer at California State University, East Bay. Erin is on the Advisory Council for the Northern California Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), in which she serves as Consumer Protection Coordinator.

Erin holds a joint degree in law and public policy (JD/MPP) from the University of Michigan, where she was co-editor of Michigan Journal of Gender & Law. She received her undergraduate degree from University of California, Los Angeles, where she majored in English and Anthropology. She is a member of the California Bar and proficient in Spanish.

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.