Career Retrospective: The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

People talk frequently about forward and backward movement in one’s career, but less so about the gift of lateral moves. On the surface, you might think a lateral move simply maintains your status quo or something close to it—level of seniority, pay, managerial responsibilities. I have been lucky enough to make at least one facially “lateral” move that drastically changed the scope and reach of my immigration advocacy work: as the first Policy Counsel for Immigration at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights!

The Leadership Conference is the nation's oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition, founded in 1950 by civil rights and labor giants A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Arnold Aronson. The organization adapted its work to the changing times, adding “human rights” to its moniker as threats to both civil and human rights loomed ever larger. The Leadership Conference convenes subject-matter task forces to concentrate the expertise of many member organizations and to act as generative solutions networks for policy and law.

Through the work of incredible jacks-of-all-trades on staff, The Leadership Conference has played an integral role in a number of major moments in the immigration space and maintained an Immigration Task Force. The organization wanted to concretize this work through the hiring of a full-time staffer, and on the heels of my work at the UndocuBlack Network I felt this role was the exact right fit. I grew up in a distinctly Jamaican household, visiting our home country most of my childhood summers, but I also sought out a sterling education in the Black American experience. As I wrote in my cover letter:

My work and experiences coalesce around the intersecting issues of anti-Blackness beyond borders, access, immigration, policing, and criminalization. I bring a unique perspective to my work: as the U.S.-born daughter of Jamaican immigrants, I understand intimately how precarious and capricious American legal systems are, how arduous navigating those systems can be, and how much radical empathy is required for healing immigrant justice work.

Thanks to my law school days writing about Black immigrant organizations, I know that one of the most critical roles those organizations play is in bridging the gap between Black American and Black immigrant communities. This gap, created by design, has inspired multiple writings, which I’ll share here in time. Black immigrant organizations must also combat anti-Blackness in legacy immigrant rights spaces, understanding that there is no immigrant justice without racial justice. Lofty as it may seem, I thought I might play a small role in helping to build and maintain meaningful relationships between legacy civil rights organizations and immigrant justice organizations that live beyond transactional, rapid-response moments.

As the first Policy Counsel for Immigration, I was responsible for reviving the Immigration Task Force, which had not met frequently due to capacity issues. I worked closely with the Immigration Task Force’s Co-Chairs to conceptualize what we wanted this task force to be and what boundaries it should have, taking into account the legislative and administrative landscape at the time. I came to my Co-Chairs with proposed topics for each meeting based on the latest immigration happenings on the Hill, in the courts, and at agencies, with speaker proposals based on my knowledge of the immigration policy space (and a desire to diversify who we hear from at these types of convenings!). I ran logistics for each virtual monthly convening of the Immigration Task Force, which routinely had 80+ individual organizations represented. Believe me when I say this type of work put my facilitation skills to the test! Many times I felt like a squid, with tentacles everywhere: ensuring accessibility with captions and slower speaking, telling speakers who is on deck or rearranging speaking order given absences, keeping time (!!!), facilitating discussions myself, defusing conflicts, enforcing community agreements, adjusting agendas in real-time, and much more. I hope that the revival of the Immigration Task Force was a valuable addition to an already-crowded space.

One of my proudest moments at The Leadership Conference was also one of the most complex, challenging moments of my career—trying to connect the dots between seemingly disparate, painful topics to highlight the interconnectivity of our racial justice and immigrant justice movements. In May 2022, a white supremacist espousing the “Great Replacement Theory” committed mass murder in a Buffalo, New York grocery store. The killer targeted a Black American neighborhood specifically, while being inspired by a distinctly anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic theory. The “Great Replacement Theory” and its talking points about waves of non-white immigrants flooding the country to “replace” white people had also become one of the central conservative talking points for the continuation of Title 42. Title 42, the nickname for a public health authority granted to the CDC, essentially closed the U.S.-Mexico border to most asylum seekers from March 2020 to May 2023. Title 42 allowed for summary expulsions of asylum seekers from the U.S., representing an unprecedented abdication of our country’s moral and treaty obligations to afford due process to people fleeing death and persecution in their home countries. For me, the line between the so-called “theory,” the targeting of Black Americans in Buffalo and the deleterious, disproportionate effects of Title 42 on Black asylum seekers couldn’t have been brighter. I felt The Leadership Conference was perfectly poised to connect those dots in a public way, by co-leading a sign-on letter to the Biden Administration. But I had to make my case with both internal and external partners with care and finesse, drawing on all of my education and experiences to guide me. No community wants to feel as though another community is opportunistically seizing a moment to elevate its interests while riding on the backs of others. I am proud to say that I persuaded a number of skeptics, many of whom were rightfully protective of their communities and civil rights legacies, to see the urgency of drawing these connections for those in power. Through this effort, I was reminded that the work of connecting the Black diaspora is arduous, but can bear powerful fruit.

I am grateful for the folks who have followed me on my early career retrospective journey. Candidly, thinking about past employment was more challenging than I expected; the words felt stuck in my mind or in my throat. I am not yet sure what my career will look like in its next phase, but I believe this exercise in purposeful retrospection will be worth the effort—and I can’t wait to figure out exactly how! Thanks for reading.