Barbara became the firm’s first Pro Bono Counsel in October 2016, after two years as Pro Bono Manager and three years as the Fragomen Fellow at the City Bar Justice Center. As Pro Bono Counsel, Barbara is responsible for managing the firm’s pro bono initiatives throughout the United States. In this connection, she has overall responsibility for coordinating and mentoring Fragomen attorneys in the United States in their pro bono representation of clients in removal proceedings, asylum, and applications for a variety of available immigration benefits. She is also responsible for developing and providing training to volunteer attorneys, supervising and litigating pro bono cases, and acting as the firm’s liaison to various non-profit legal service providers with which the firm partners. Barbara is a frequent panelist on a variety of immigration issues, including removal defense and children’s immigration issues before bar associations, community groups and child protective agency personnel.

In her former position as the Fragomen Fellow at the City Bar Justice Center, Barbara directed the Center’s Immigrant Outreach Project, which included the Varick Removal Defense Project. She worked to expand the Justice Center’s recruitment, training and mentoring of pro bono attorneys from leading law firms to address the crisis in lack of counsel for detained immigration cases in the New York metropolitan area. Barbara served as a mentor to pro bono attorneys in addition to providing direct representation to immigrant clients, both detained and non-detained. Expanding on the tremendous foundation laid by prior Fragomen Fellows, she also continued to develop, supervise and strengthen pro bono immigration outreach clinics and activities to benefit the community at large.

Prior to serving as the Fragomen Fellow, Barbara had six years of comprehensive immigration experience, including three years as a paralegal at Fragomen, followed by three years after law school as the Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) Fellow at the American Friends Service Committee in New Jersey, where she specialized in removal defense of children (both detained and non-detained) in the Immigration Court. She also has the distinction of having been selected as an immigration subject matter expert by the New Jersey Child Welfare Training Partnership, where she was charged with training the management, supervisors and staff members of New Jersey’s child protection agency on immigration relief options for children in its care. Previously, Barbara was a Law Clerk for the Presiding Judge of the Superior Court, Criminal Division in Morris County, New Jersey.

Barbara speaks English and Spanish.