Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA): Process and Key Strategies Conference

Faculty:

The Honorable Bruce J. Einhorn served as a United States Immigration Judge in Los Angeles from July 29, 1990 through January 31, 2007.  In that capacity, he presided over prosecutions initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (”DHS”) against non-citizens in the United States whose lawful presence here has been placed into question by counsel for the government, including alleged terrorists.  Judge Einhorn presided over bench trials in which DHS seeks the removal or deportation of non-citizens based on the circumstances of their entry into the country and/or their conduct (including their alleged terrorist and criminal conduct) following their arrival in the United States.  Judge Einhorn also adjudicated the claims for relief of those non-citizens, including their applications for asylum and relief under the United Nations Convention against Torture.  As a young lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice in 1980, Judge Einhorn helped draft the final version of the Refugee Relief Act, which for the first time in U.S. history gave non-citizens the right to apply for asylum in the United States.  Judge Einhorn thus adjudicated claims under the very statute of which he was a principal draftsperson.  He has served as the Liaison Immigration Judge for Los Angeles and has also served as an instructor at the training academy for newly appointed Immigration Judges.  In November 2007, Judge Einhorn hosted a National Conference on Asylum at Pepperdine University.

Judge Einhorn is now a Professor of International, Immigration, Asylum and Refugee Law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, where he also serves as Founding Director of the Law School’s Asylum and Refugee Clinic.

Recently, the President-elect of the American Bar Association appointed Judge Einhorn to serve on the ABA’s National Commission on Immigration.  At the same time, the non-partisan, D.C.-based think tank, The Constitution Project, has appointed Einhorn as its first member of its new National Immigration Committee.  As an ABA member, Bruce Einhorn also serves as a member of the organization’s Judicial Division.

Bruce Einhorn has lectured on issues of international humanitarian law before the International Association of Refugee Law Judges, and has served with its Committee on Vulnerable Peoples.  He has also conducted continuing legal education seminars for the American Immigration Law Association and the Los Angeles County Bar Association.  Finally, he has conducted seminars on the interplay of federal immigration law and California criminal law before the Los Angeles County Superior Court Judges’ Conference, the State Public Defenders’ Conference, and several law school classes of several universities.  He has also appeared on ABC television, Fox News, and CNN to discuss and advocate immigration reform, and National Public Radio to discuss national security and civil liberties in the post-9/11 world.  Einhorn has also spoken to the Muslim Students Association of UCLA Law School on the dangers of ethnic and religious profiling post-9/11.  Judge Einhorn was the judge who dismissed deportation proceedings against the last of the “L.A. Eight,” Palestinians accused of engaging in terrorist activities.  Einhorn found the government’s failure to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence against the respondents to constitute a denial of the latter’s due process and statutory rights.  The Department of Homeland Security decided to drop its appeal of Judge Einhorn’s dismissal of the cases 

As an Immigration Judge, Bruce Einhorn issued major decisions on the granting of asylum to the following persecuted peoples:  religious minorities, including Muslims from Europe, Evangelical Christians from the Middle East, China, and Russia, and Jews and Bah’ai members from Iran; women facing “honor killings,” victims of female genital mutilation and of rape in Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Arab world; racial and ethnic minorities from Nigeria, the Sudan, and Indonesia; and political dissidents, gays, and lesbians from many countries.  Bruce Einhorn was also the first Immigration Judge to grant asylum to HIV-positive individuals and disabled children who faced socially-based persecution and the denial of available medical treatment in their native countries.  Einhorn is currently working on his professional autobiography, and on a book about the legal and political culture of citizenship in the West, and particularly the United States.

For his judicial work, Bruce Einhorn has received the Human Rights Award of the Bah’ai community in Southern California, a Plaque of Honor from the Mexican-American Bar Association, a Career of Merit Award from the Cuban-American Bar Association, and Certificates of Merit from the Arab-American and Iran-American Bar Associations of Southern California.  He has also received a Lifetime Professional Achievement Award from the California State Bar.

Since 1991, Judge Einhorn has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Immigration Law, International Human Rights Law and War Crimes Studies, and Legal Ethics at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California.  He also sits on the Law School’s Board of Visitors.  In 1997, Judge Einhorn received the Law School’s David McKibbin Excellence in Teaching Award.   Einhorn is now a Professor of Law at Pepperdine where he directs the law school’s Asylum and Refugee Law Clinic, whose students under his supervision represent indigent asylum applicants in federal administrative, trial, and appellate proceedings.

Since 1990, Bruce Einhorn has participated as a lay activist in the work of the Anti-Defamation League (“ADL”).  He has held various positions in ADL, including Life Membership on the League’s National Commission and membership on its International Affairs,  Legal Affairs, and Civil Rights Committees (the latter for which he helped approve submission of ADL friend-of-the-court briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases, including those involving the expansion of rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees), and the Chairmanships of the League’s Pacific Southwest Regional Board and its Los Angeles-based International Affairs Committee.  In the latter post, Bruce Einhorn has engaged in extensive liaison activities between ADL and the Los Angeles-based Consuls General of foreign countries.  As an ADL leader, Einhorn helped draft the Declaration of Los Angeles, which called for a carefully balanced national policy of protecting homeland security and immigrant rights, and which strongly criticized the activities of so-called “minute men” who attempt to become involved as vigilantes in border security and who in part have been linked to racist organizations.  The Declaration has been co-signed by a number of civil rights groups and was recently adopted by the Los Angeles City Council and California State Legislature.  Currently, Einhorn participates as a founding member and as Co-Chair of the ADL Latino-Jewish Roundtable of Los Angeles, and also works with the Consuls General of Mexico, Israel, Germany, Canada, and other countries on initiatives involving the international rights of women and ethnic and religious minorities. Also, as an ADL leader, Einhorn has spoken extensively on the separation of church and state, and has lectured to federal district court judges on sentencing guidelines for those convicted of federally defined hate crimes.

In 1999, Bruce Einhorn was honored for his ADL activities with the Daniel Ginsberg National Leadership Award in Civil Rights, presented to him in the presence of President Bill Clinton at a ceremony at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, the home church of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He has also been honored for his ADL activities by Representatives Howard Berman and Xavier Becerra of the U.S. House of Representatives, the California State Legislature, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the Los Angeles City Council.  As a Jewish communal leader, Einhorn has also received a Lifetime Professional Achievement Award from the State of Israel.

From October 1979 through June 1990, Bruce Einhorn served as a special prosecutor and later as Chief of Litigation for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (“OSI”) in Washington, D.C., which is charged with seeking the identification, denaturalization, deportation, and prosecution of Nazi war criminals who escaped justice after World War II and have resided illegally in the United States.  As an OSI prosecutor, Einhorn conducted investigations and trials of Nazi-era persecutors of Jews, Roma, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, prisoners of war, and political dissidents.  He conducted trial depositions of eyewitnesses to atrocities.  Many of those depositions were taken in the former Soviet Union, Poland, East and West Germany, and France.  Einhorn also participated in appellate arguments on behalf of OSI cases.  For his work at OSI, Einhorn received three Justice Department Special Achievement Awards, the Attorney General’s Special Commendation Award, and the Distinguished Graduate Award of New York University School of Law.  Bruce Einhorn was largely the basis for the character of the prosecutor in the motion picture, The Music Box.

Judge Einhorn has served as a senior advisor and interview instructor to Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has taken and preserved over 50,000 oral histories from Holocaust survivors.  Einhorn served as a consultant on the Spielberg-produced film, The Last Days, which won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Documentary.  Judge Einhorn is also a founding member of both the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Between November 2008 and January 2009, Bruce Einhorn served as an advisor on immigration law and policy to both the George Soros-financed “Apple Seed Project” on immigration court reform, and the Obama Transition Team through the law firm of Arnold and Porter.

Bruce J. Einhorn received his B.A. degree in history in 1975, magna cum laude, from Columbia College of Columbia University, and his J.D. degree in 1978 from New York University Law School.  He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the national honors fraternity.  In 1986, Judge Einhorn received NYU Law School’s Recent Graduate Award.  From September 1978 to September 1979, Einhorn served as a judicial law clerk with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.  In 1979, he was accepted into the U.S. Justice Department’s Honors Program for Distinguished Law Graduates and Clerks.  He is a member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court, and a member of the American Bar Association, the American Constitution Society, the American Academy of Political Science, the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society, the Organization of American Historians, the Abraham Lincoln Association, and the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

Bruce Einhorn has written op-ed pieces for The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Daily Journal, and other newspapers.  Judge Einhorn’s publications also include the following:  (1) Political Asylum in the Ninth Circuit and the Case of Elias-Zacarias, 92 San Diego Law Review 597 (1992); and (2) The Prosecution of War Criminals and Violators of Human Rights in the United States, 19 Whittier Law Review 281 (1997).   Judge Einhorn also recently served as a co-author o the book Refugee Roulette (published by NYU Press), which analyzes the disparity in asylum grant and denial rates by the U.S. Immigration Judge nation-wide and which proposes reforms in the asylum adjudication process.  He also wrote a piece on the same issues in the January 2010 issue of Albany Law School’s Government Law Review.  Einhorn has also authored thousands of judicial opinions.

On matters of immigration law, Bruce Einhorn has argued cases before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth, Sixth, and other Circuits, and before the U.S. Supreme Court.  He has given numerous lectures on federal appellate and trial advocacy for health care professionals and attorneys in matters of medical malpractice law.  He is engaged in discovery referee activities and arbitration and mediation work with Alternative Resolution Centers in Century City, California.  Einhorn has also been involved in bar conferences on the economic impact of immigration and on copyright and intellectual property law.            

Judge Einhorn serves on the Board of Directors of the Beverly Hills Bar Association, and on the Executive Committee of the Immigration Section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association.  In addition, he is a member of the Boards of the Americans for Democratic Action in Southern California, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the Jewish Labor Committee.  He is also a member of the Union of Reform Judaism and of the American Zionist Movement, the NAACP, and People for the American Way.  

Ms. Hill went into solo practice immediately after passing the bar exam and has been working exclusively in the area of immigration law since 1995. Personally appearing in up to ten cases per day in immigration court, Ms. Hill solicited the help of partner Alary Piibe in 1998, and formalized the partnership of Hill & Piibe in 2003. In 2005, the partnership again expanded to become Hill, Piibe & Villegas, where Ms. Hill currently oversees all research and writing. In addition to teaching immigration law at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California, she also supervises an asylum law clinic comprised of UCLA law students, helping them successfully represent asylum-seekers on a pro bono basis. Other community involvement has included: co-chairing the Domestic Violence Project through the Women Lawyers’ Association of Los Angeles, overseeing a volunteer-staffed legal clinic that advises women at Santa Monica’s Sojourn Services for Battered Women; working with the Los Angeles Parks and Recreations Department assisting disabled residents, where she was nominated for the J.C. Penney Golden Rule award; and contributing time for KPFK/Pacifica radio station.

Nikki Mehrpoo Jacobson is a founding partner of Jacobson & Han LLP.   She is an experienced attorney and immigration rights advocate.  Ms. Jacobson has been practicing law since 1997 and has successfully represented hundreds of clients before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS – formerly INS), the United States Federal Courts and the Superior Courts of California. Ms. Jacobson has extensive experience in immigration law; including, deportation and removal proceedings before the Immigration Court, Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  She has successfully represented clients in political asylum, withholding of deportation, cancellation of removal, and criminal and fraud waiver cases.  Additionally, she represents clients from all over the world before the USCIS, U.S. Embassies, and Consulates assisting them with consular processing, visas, adjustment of status, citizenship, naturalization hearings, various waivers, corporate immigration and employment matters, labor certifications, non-immigrant visas, and permanent residency options.

Ms. Jacobson was recently appointed Chair of Beverly Hills Bar Association Immigration Law Committee and is a member and very active in the American Immigration Lawyers Association (Southern California Chapter: Immigration Court-EOIR Liaison), the Los Angeles County Bar Association (Executive Member of the Immigration Law Section), Culver Marina Bar Association and several other legal associations. She is an active lecturer on various immigration topics and legal ethics.  Her most recent seminars were entitled Immigration: From No Status to Citizenship and The Bottom Line: Ethics, Hiring and Utilization for Paralegal Work under B&P Code 6450 (Panel discussion related to Business & Professions Code 6450-6456 and its impact on attorneys, paralegals and other legal professionals in California).  She is also a distinguished Associate Professor of Law at West Los Angeles College.  In addition, Ms. Jacobson continues her immigration legal education by attending numerous classes and seminars each year.

Ms. Jacobson obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science (cum laude) from California State University, Northridge in 1994.  She earned her Juris Doctor degree from Pepperdine University School of Law in 1997.  She was admitted to the California State Bar in 1997.  She is also admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ms. Jacobson’s second language is Farsi.
E-mail:  Nikki@GreenCard4You.com