Elora Mukherjee is the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She and her students help immigrant children and adults fight deportation and collaborate on projects involving regulatory and legislative reform, impact litigation, public education, and grassroots advocacy. Under her leadership, students have secured immigration relief for clients from countries including Burundi, El Salvador, and Syria. Their work has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Mukherjee is also an advisor to students working with Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to unaccompanied minors in immigration proceedings.

Mukherjee has been taking students to the southern border of the United States since the clinic’s inception. In January 2015, they were the first pro bono counsel on site in southern Texas representing individual asylum seekers. They continue to work with refugees on both sides of the U.S. border.

A former staff attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program, Mukherjee served as lead counsel in a class action lawsuit challenging racial profiling and civil asset forfeiture laws in Texas. She is founder and director of the Refugee Reunification Project, which provides grants to help refugee families relocate to the United States.