Our Team
Ellen Kemp, Co-Founder & Deputy Director
Ellen is deputy director and a co-founder of Just Futures Law, where she manages finance and administration. She has over 25 years of experience in the field of non-profit immigration law and advocacy, having performed direct service work locally; technical assistance, training, and advocacy work at the national level; and operations and finance as part of a non-profit leadership team. Ellen’s past experience includes being a legal worker and interpreter specializing in access to immigration status for refugees, people living with HIV, and survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She also designed and managed accredited continuing legal education programs for immigration law professionals. Before JFL, Ellen served for 3+ years as Director of Finance and Operations for the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.
Ellen holds a BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Tufts University and an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College. She lives with her son, partner, and pups outside of Boston, MA.
Julie Mao, Co-Founder & Deputy Director
Julie Mao has nearly a decade of experience in the immigrant rights, police accountability, and labor rights movement. She was a senior attorney at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and attorney at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. She has represented immigrants in civil rights litigation against law enforcement abuse and labor exploitation, and worked with hundreds of directly impacted community members to stop their deportations.
Recently, she has been engaged in legal strategies challenging migrant prosecutions, technology-based policing, and local police collusion with ICE. Julie is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and a student of the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic. She is a former Equal Justice Works fellow and named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Law and Policy.
Dinesh McCoy, Staff Attorney
Dinesh McCoy joined our team in 2021 as a staff attorney working at the intersection of technology, racial justice, and immigrant rights. At Just Futures Law, Dinesh has focused on supporting litigation that seeks accountability for government retaliation against organizers and has worked on litigation and policy advocacy aimed at ending law enforcement use of invasive surveillance tools. Dinesh also supports organizing campaigns on surveillance policy in Illinois, Washington, D.C. and New York City. Dinesh is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and a student of the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Citlaly Mora, Communications Director
Citlaly Mora joined the Just Futures Law team as the Director of Communications in 2022. Originally from Mexico and raised in North Carolina, she has worked in the immigrant rights’ movement for a decade. Citlaly holds a strong background in national coalitional organizing, building Latinx political power, and organizational communications. She has worked with social justice organizations that include AFSC, YWCA, ACLU, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Her work at JFL centers on messaging, narrative strategy, and storytelling to end criminalization and support immigrant justice.
Citlaly received her Master of Arts and her Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Duke University. She is an alum of Elon University.
Paromita Shah, Co-Founder & Executive Director
Paromita Shah is the founding Executive Director of Just Futures Law, our movement lawyering organization that provides cutting-edge legal support to the grassroots groups and organizers fighting for a future beyond deportation and criminalization. Paromita has worked at the intersection of racial justice and immigrant justice for over two decades. She is a racial and immigrant justice lawyer who works alongside community-based movements to end mass deportation, criminalization, and surveillance. Answering a call from grassroots immigrants rights organizers, she co-founded JFL in 2019. Paromita has served as the primary author on dozens of resources and reports for immigrant communities impacted by policing and immigration enforcement. She previously served as the Associate Director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, as the Detention Project Director at Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition in Washington DC, and as a staff attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. She is a graduate of Suffolk Law School and McGill University.
Amina Rahman, Finance and Operations Associate
Amina Rahman joined the Just Futures Law team in January 2024 as our Finance and Operations Associate. They have worked and organized at the intersection of worker and immigration rights issues for a decade -- from direct representation in immigration services; to organizing unions with janitors and fast food workers; to practicing collective decision making and management stewarding a community owned food co-op. She looks forward to providing organizational support that can resource and continue to make possible the important work being done in and through JFL to service frontline movements. Amina graduated with a degree in Anthropology from Reed College and is based in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys spending her time reading speculative fiction, playing tennis, and hanging out with their cat.
Laura Rivera, Senior Staff Attorney
Laura Rivera joined us as our Policy Counsel in September 2022. As JFL’s Policy Counsel, Laura will lend policy support to grassroot organizing happening against criminalization and surveillance. For the past decade, Laura has worked in partnership with immigrant and BIPOC communities in the Southeast to advance and defend their legal and human rights. Her contributions to the movement include litigating class action cases against government agencies and directing a program that provides direct representation to detained immigrants in removal proceedings, the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has also represented farmworkers in wage theft and trafficking cases as part of the Farmworker Division of the Georgia Legal Services Program. Laura graduated from Emory University, New York University, and Emory Law School, where she was a Woodruff Fellow.
Daniel Werner, Senior Staff Attorney
Daniel joined Just Futures Law in August of 2022. He grew up in San Francisco and began working with immigrant communities over a decade ago, including as a legal worker with immigration legal services providers in the Bay Area. Most recently, he was a senior immigration attorney with the Deportation Defense and Legal Advocacy Program at Dolores Street Community Services (DSCS), where he represented clients facing deportation before the San Francisco Immigration Court, Board of Immigration Appeals, and federal courts. During his time at DSCS, he also worked with community organizers on local immigrant rights advocacy and community empowerment efforts.
Daniel graduated with a BA in International Development Studies from UCLA and lived and worked in Mexico City for a year following his studies. He was awarded a Public Service Scholarship to attend UC Irvine School of Law, where he participated in the UCI Immigrant Rights Clinic and was immersed in the study and practice of movement lawyering.
Sejal Zota, Co-Founder & Legal Director
Sejal is the legal director and a co-founder of Just Futures Law. With almost twenty years of experience in the area of immigration, Sejal has litigated and argued several high-impact decisions on behalf of individuals and amicus curiae, including Saget v. Trump (challenging termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status), Catalan-Ramirez v. Wong (challenging Chicago Police Department’s gang database and ICE’s unlawful raid on Catalan-Ramirez), and Sessions v. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct 1204 (2018) (holding that immigration crime of violence definition is unconstitutionally vague). She has argued before the Second, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits and the North Carolina Supreme Court and Appeals Court, and is a frequent speaker on immigration issues. Most recently, Sejal was the Legal Director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, where she spearheaded creative legal strategies in the areas of immigration enforcement, crimmigration, removal defense, civil rights, and post-conviction. Prior to that, Sejal taught, researched, and advised on local and state immigration issues at the UNC School of Government, where she authored Immigration Consequences of a Criminal Conviction in North Carolina. Earlier in her career, she served as an instructor in the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, as a public defender with the Bronx Defenders, and as a Kirkland and Ellis fellow at the Immigrant Defense Project. She graduated from Duke University and the NYU School of Law.
Our Board
