Marielena Hincapie

Marielena is an immigrant from Medellin, Colombia. Growing up in Rhode Island as the youngest of ten kids, she became an interpreter for her parents at schools, hospitals, and government agencies where she learned a lot about the structural barriers and inequities facing poor people in this country, especially people of color and immigrants. As Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund, for more than twenty years, she has helped shape the national movement for immigrant justice. At Mesa Refuge, she wrote about our immigration system, weaving her personal story into a nonfiction book that makes the case for a paradigm shift in how we think about immigrants and immigration rights.