The Migration and Human Rights Program is led by five faculty co-directors with deep expertise in the field.
Alexandra Dufresne is a lawyer who works at the intersection of law and public policy. She directs the State Policy Advocacy Clinic at the Brooks School of Public Policy and teaches international human rights, immigration law and policy, and children’s rights.
Professor Dufresne spent most of her career working as a lawyer for children and refugees at leading NGOs, including the Center for Children’s Advocacy, Connecticut Voices for Children, and CLINIC/Boston College Immigration and Asylum Project, where she led law students in the representation of detained refugees and immigrants. Working closely with community partners, including youth in foster care, she has led successful advocacy campaigns in Connecticut and before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Professor Dufresne founded a human rights clinic at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and taught children’s rights and refugee and immigration law at the University of Zurich Faculty of Law and Yale College, where she served as Dean of Morse College. She has served on several NGO and government boards and committees in Europe and the U.S. and on Connecticut’s Child Fatality Review Panel. She writes frequently about children’s rights, women’s rights, and refugee rights for various news outlets in Europe and the U.S. She is a 2022-2023 Global Public Voices Fellow from Cornell.
Professor Dufresne received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. She clerked for the Hon. Martha Craig Daughtrey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit from 2001-2002.
Jakki Kelley-Widmer has worked with hundreds of DACA and undocumented clients since 2013, including through the Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic she founded at Cornell Law School in 2020. Read more about Jakki and her legal team helping a DACA recipient reunite with her father as well as a DACA recipient study abroad.
In addition to work with undocumented communities, Jakki’s legal expertise and practice experience includes advocacy for detained individuals, asylum seekers, applicants for naturalization and special immigrant juvenile status, and survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. At Cornell, she teaches and supervises law students to provide legal services. She regularly publishes both public-facing and scholarly articles on immigration law issues.
Previously, Jakki was an Equal Justice Works fellow at La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco, where she focused on representing immigrant youth and their families. She also taught legal writing at the University of California–Berkeley School of Law and clerked at the San Francisco Immigration Court through the Department of Justice Honors Program.
Jakki received her law degree in 2013 from the University of Michigan Law School, cum laude. While in law school, she worked at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, California, and was a student attorney representing survivors of human trafficking. She received awards recognizing her work on behalf of women and the Latinx community.
Jakki is a member of the California Bar. She is fluent in Spanish.
Ian Matthew Kysel is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law. He founded and directs the Transnational Disputes Clinic and is a faculty director of the Migration and Human Rights Program. He is also a founder and director of the Migrant Rights Initiative and a founder of the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights, the Secretariat of which is jointly housed at Cornell and The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School, where Kysel is a Non-Resident Fellow. From 2019-2021 Kysel co-directed Cornell’s Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic. From 2020-2021 he was an inaugural Global Public Voices Fellow at the Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He is a past recipient of the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Award.
Kysel’s research interests primarily lie in international migration, refugee and human rights law and US immigration and civil rights law. Kysel has published in the New York University Journal of Law & Social Change, the Georgetown Journal of International Law, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review Discourse and Cornell International Law Journal Online as well as in the peer-reviewed International Migration Review, International Migration, Journal on Migration and Human Security, International Journal of Refugee Law, International Legal Materials and AJIL Unbound. He has authored book chapters and also contributed to interdisciplinary commentaries published in the New England Journal of Medicine and American Journal of Public Health. In addition to his scholarly writing, Kysel has written several human rights reports; his essays have appeared in Just Security and EJIL:Talk! as well as in The Hill, The New Humanitarian, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Kysel has argued or participated in litigation before immigration, federal and state courts in the United States as well as international tribunals. He has provided testimony to various legislative bodies and international commissions. Through the Migrant Rights Initiative, he supported the drafting and adoption by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the 2019 Inter-American Principles on the Human Rights of All Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Victims of Human Trafficking and the drafting and adoption by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights of the 2023 African Guiding Principles on the Human Rights of All Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers. In 2023, the Initiative launched the Migrant Rights Database, the first global data source benchmarking the extent to which states hosting the vast majority of the world’s migrant fulfill international obligations in national law and how they implement these protections (these data are published at www.migrantrights.info).
Kysel has previously held appointments at the University of Oxford, as an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of Law, a Plumer Visiting Research Fellow at Saint Anne’s College and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, and at the Georgetown University Law Center, as the first Dash/Muse Fellow and an Adjunct Professor of Law.
Before joining the faculty at the law school, Kysel was a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California. He also served as the Aryeh Neier Fellow at both the National ACLU and Human Rights Watch and practiced in the International Arbitration Group and Public International Law Practice of an international law firm.
Kysel currently serves as a Trustee of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) on the Board of Advisors of Ithaca City of Asylum (a U.S. affiliate of the International Cities of Refuge Network), and on the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division. From 2021-2023, he co-chaired the International Refugee Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.
Kysel holds an LLM in Advocacy, with distinction, a JD, Magna Cum Laude, Order of the Coif, and a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies from Georgetown University Law Center. While a law student at Georgetown, he was an articles editor for the Georgetown Journal of International Law and a Global Law Scholar. He holds a BA, with high honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Swarthmore College.
Beth Lyon is a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she founded the Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic, and co-founded the Low-Income Taxpayer Law and Accounting Practicum. She also serves as the Law School’s Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Clinical Program Director. Her areas of focus include domestic and international migrant and farmworker rights, language access to justice, and provision of legal services to rural minorities.
Professor Lyon received her B.A. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her M.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. While at Georgetown, she was the managing editor of Law and Policy in International Business (since renamed Georgetown Journal of International Law) and a Ford Foundation Fellow, working in Lima, Peru for the Comisión Andina de Juristas.
Chantal Thomas is Vice Dean and the Radice Family Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she also serves as the Director of the Cornell Center for Global Economic Justice, and as Faculty Director for the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa.
Professor Thomas researches and writes in international law focusing on international law and political economy, focusing on questions of global social justice. She has taught international law as a Visiting Professor at distinguished institutions nationally (including Columbia University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas), and globally (including the American University in Cairo, King’s College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Soochow University, and University of Paris I).
Professor Thomas holds a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge, a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, and a BA in Political Science from McGill University. She has consulted for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United States Agency for International Development, and the World Bank, and has advised the Trade Counsel’s office for the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives. She serves on the United States Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law, and has served as a Vice President, Counsellor, and Executive Council Member of the American Society of International Law. She serves on the boards of the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of International Economic Law. Professor Thomas also serves on the Roster of Experts for Binational Panel Dispute Settlement, United States – Canada – Mexico (USMCA) Agreement. She is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Professor Thomas has authored more than 50 articles and other publications on aspects of international economic law and development, ranging from human rights to economic law. She has two book volumes forthcoming: a monograph with Oxford University Press on international migration; and a monograph with Cambridge University Press on law and development. She is also Co-Organizer of the Law and Society Association’s International Research Collaborative on Gender and Political Economy.