News & Commentary written by Jennifer Chang Newell

Jennifer Chang Newell is a managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she has practiced since 2004. Her work includes challenging state and local anti-immigrant ordinances, protecting the constitutional rights of immigrants to judicial review and due process, and combating discrimination and retaliation against immigrants. Newell is counsel in Arizona DREAM Act Coalition v. Brewer, a challenge to Arizona’s denial of driver’s licenses to young immigrant “DREAMers” granted federal permission to live and work in the U.S.; and in M.S.P.C. v. Johnson, a lawsuit enforcing the due process rights of Central American mothers and children detained at the Artesia federal detention facility in New Mexico. Her other cases have included Supremacy Clause challenges to immigration ordinances in Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and other states and localities across the country; litigation invalidating the Department of Homeland Security regulation concerning Social Security Administration “no-match” letters; and litigation upholding the validity of the San Francisco Municipal ID Ordinance.

Prior to joining the ACLU as a Skadden Fellow, Newell was a law clerk to Judge Marsha Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Newell was a member of the Order of the Coif and an article editor of the Stanford Law Review. She received her undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Yale College. Newell has published articles on immigrant workers’ rights and housing discrimination in the Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal, California Labor & Employment Law Review, and Stanford Law Review. Newell was named as one of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s Best Lawyers Under 40 in 2014, and is the 2013 recipient of Stanford Law School’s Miles Rubin Public Interest Award. In January 2017, she was selected to serve a 3-year term as a Ninth Circuit Appellate Lawyer Representative.