Ragini  Shah

Biography

Ragini Shah is a Clinical Professor of Law and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic. Professor Shah joined Suffolk in 2007, founding the Law School's first Immigration Clinic. Over the past years, the Immigration Clinic has represented a number of individuals including immigrants detained by ICE facing removal, undocumented youth seeking to remain in the U.S., and workers seeking to vindicate their rights in the workplace. The clinic has also worked on a number of projects including helping community groups propose legislation, creating and delivering Know Your Rights during the Trump administration and beyond, and preparing guides for community organizers on the rights of undocumented immigrants.

In the last several years, the clinic, now called the Immigrant Justice Clinic [can we link to the clinic page here?], has worked with community-based groups to help immigrant communities enforce rights that they have won through the power of their organizing. This includes technical assistance to community groups including trainings on emerging immigration law issues; help submitting immigration applications for community organization members; and guides to particular forms of immigration relief. It also includes researching possible legislative reforms and other kinds of advocacy with public officials to ensure that immigrants are able to access benefits fought for through grassroots organizing.

Professor Shah also teaches an Advanced Immigration Law seminar that examines the intersections between criminal and immigration law, also known as "crimmigration." The course draws on Professor's Shah's extensive experience supervising students on crimmigration cases including a case that led to the groundbreaking habeas decision in Compere v. Nielsen, 358 F.Supp 3rd 170 (2019) and another case in which students successfully showed that allegations of gang membership by Immigration Customs and Enforcement were not based on sufficient evidence to defeat a claim for permanent residence.

Professor Shah's scholarship examines immigration law from the perspective of those who experience its impacts. Her first articles examined the experiences of youth who were left without a mechanism for regularizing their status. She then moved to considering the perspective of the parents and other community members of these youth. In 2012, she was granted a Fulbright award to deepen her research into these experiences and from 2012-2013 conducted over 70 interviews with former migrants and their families in Mexico. For the next five years, Professor Shah continued to follow up on this research and to evolve her inquiry to include the experiences of community organizers in Mexico seeking to create alternatives to migration. The result of this research is her book, Constructed Movements, Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities which offers insights from Mexican migrant communities on how migration is an extractive process and offers examples of organizing in Mexico designed to create alternatives to the migration as extraction cycle. The book published by University of California Press, is available as open access and can be here.

Prior to joining Suffolk, Professor Shah was a Lecturer in Law and Clinical Staff Attorney in the Child Advocacy and Immigration Law Clinic at Columbia University School of Law from 2003-2007, and was a staff attorney in a number of legal services organizations in the New York area serving low income tenants, immigrant detainees and immigrant youth. Professor Shah received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and her Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law.

Publications

Books

• Constructed Movements, Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities (University of California Press, 2024)

Articles

• Laying the Legal Foundation for a Right to Stay, 50 Sw L Rev 319 (2020)
• No Matter What: The Inevitability of Mexico-U.S. Migration and Its Lessons for Border Control Strategies, 55 WAYNE L. REV. 1851 (2010)
• Sharing the American Dream: Towards Formalizing the Status of Long Term Resident Undocumented Children in the United States, 39 COLUM. HUM. RTS. L. REV. 637 (2008)

Bar Admittance

• MA