Understanding FOIA with DHS
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.
Ann Block is a part-time Senior Staff Attorney with the ILRC based in Davis and San Francisco. She has been with the ILRC part-time since 2009 on a contract basis, and in 2019 transitioned to a staff position. She also maintains a part-time private practice in Davis, California. Ann has expertise in family immigration, naturalization and citizenship, VAWA and U visas, asylum, removal defense, as well as extensive experience with immigration consequences of criminal convictions. She provides technical assistance through the ILRC's Attorney of the Day program, mentoring and assisting nonprofit attorneys and staff, public defenders and private attorneys with a wide variety of immigration law questions and cases.
She has contributed to several ILRC manuals, including Defending Immigrants in the Ninth Circuit; Naturalization & U.S. Citizenship; Inadmissibility and Deportability; The VAWA Manual; The “U” Visa; Hardship in Immigration Law; Families and Immigration; Inadmissibility and Deportability; FOIA Requests and Other Background Checks; Removal Defense: Defending Immigrants in Immigration Court; and A Guide for Immigration Advocates/ Ann has authored articles, presented webinars, led the ILRC 40 hour basic immigration law training, and has served as a panelist on a number of immigration issues for the ILRC, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG).
Prior to the ILRC, Ann gained extensive private and nonprofit experience as a staff attorney with Park & Associates, Catholic Charities in San Mateo, the International Institute of San Francisco, and her own solo private practice. Ann has additional teaching experience as a former adjunct professor at McGeorge School of Law, supervising the Immigration Clinic and teaching the podium course on Immigration Law. She has also served on the California State Bar's Immigration and Nationality Law Commission (INLAC), the entity that certifies attorneys as immigration law specialists, including as both vice-chair and chair of INLAC.
Ann earned her law degree from the University of California at Davis where she represented clients through the prison law and immigration law clinics. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she double-majored in psychology and political science. Ann is admitted to the bar in California and is conversant in Spanish, with working knowledge of written French.
Elizabeth Taufa is a policy attorney and strategist based in Washington, D.C. Her work is focused on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration advocacy, particularly naturalization and policies related to equal access to immigration benefits.
Prior to joining ILRC, Elizabeth was a senior attorney with the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration managing their detention information line. She began her legal career representing children in removal proceedings at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston and previously worked as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Access Programs at the Executive Office for Immigration Review. She is a native of Winchester, Virginia and holds a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law where she completed internships with the ABA's Immigration Justice Project in San Diego, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Office of Immigration Litigation. She also volunteered with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).