Marielena Hincapi\u00e9 is a nationally recognized immigrant justice leader, strategist, and democracy advocate. As Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center, she spent over two decades shaping some of the most pivotal legal and policy fights on behalf of low-income immigrants. She played a key role in supporting immigrant youth in creating and defending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as U.S. citizens and their undocumented spouses in achieving the recent Keeping Families Together policy. She co-founded the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition to expand access to safety net programs, as well as the #NoMuslimBan campaign, and #ImmigrantsAreEssential cultural campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a visiting legal scholar at Cornell Law School and was recently named by Northeastern Law\u2019s Judith Olans Brown Forum for Women in the Law as its practitioner-in-residence for 2025\u20132026.<\/p>
Hincapi\u00e9 is writing a narrative nonfiction book, Becoming<\/i> America: A Personal History Of A Nation\u2019s Immigration Wars<\/i>, on contract with Flatiron Press. In it, she tells the sweeping history of America\u2019s immigration through the story of a single family\u2014her own. Hincapi\u00e9\u2019s family includes descendants of Mayflower arrivals, Polish and Russian emigrants, and modern-day deportees in the Trump era. She is blending memoir, investigative history, and political analysis to ask whether working-class immigrants might ever again be at the heart of America. Hincapi\u00e9 is from Medell\u00edn, Colombia, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She is an avid birder and a constant student of migration as a natural process.<\/p>Selected Work<\/h2>