Meet our team

Our small team of attorneys has a deep knowledge base and diverse backgrounds in child advocacy, removal defense, immigration, family, and administrative law.

We have worked in small firms, big firms, and non profit organizations and we have been pro bono attorneys and pro bono coordinators. CILA has over 40 years of collective experience that we are pleased to be able to share with the community.

Dalia Castillo-Granados
Director

Dalia Castillo-Granados is the Director of the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy. She is a2008 graduate of the University of Houston Law Center. Prior to working at CILA, Dalia was a SeniorAttorney atKids in Need of Defense, a Staff Attorney at Tahirih Justice Center, a Clinical SupervisingAttorney at the University of Houston’s Immigration Clinic, and began her public interest career as a Greenberg Traurig, LLP Equal Justice Works Fellow with Catholic Charities’ Cabrini Center in Houston. During law school, Dalia was active in the Immigration Clinic and interned at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Catholic Charities, and was a Public Interest Law Fellow at Boat People SOS. She was previously the chair of the State Bar of Texas’ Immigration Law Task Force. She is currently an Executive Committee member of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, on the Board of Directors for the Houston Association of Women Attorneys, and she is the president of Latino Giving Houston, a giving circle devoted to promoting philanthropy in Houston’s Latino community.

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Children's Immigration Law Academy - Yasmin Yavar

Yasmin Yavar

Deputy Director

Yasmin Yavar
Senior Staff Attorney

Yasmin Yavar is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy.  She is a 2004 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where she fell in love with immigration law through Barbara Hines’ immigration clinic and a brief summer internship at ProBAR. She began her legal career as a commercial litigator at the Houston office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw. After three years, Yasmin relocated to Harlingen, Texas for a year to work for the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR) and learn the ropes of removal defense for detained adults.  She returned to Houston and was the first employee of Kids in Need of Defense’s Houston office, serving as the pro bono coordinator.  Immediately prior to working at CILA, Yasmin worked as a consultant for ProBAR’s Children’s Project.

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Victoria (Vickie) Giambra

Managing Attorney for Technical Assistance & Training

Victoria (Vickie) Giambra
Senior Staff Attorney

Vickie Giambra is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy. She has been practicing immigration law since 2009. Previously in private practice working on a variety of matters, Vickie began her nonprofit immigration law career when she joined Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston in January 2017. As a Managing Attorney, she led the General Immigration Program at Catholic Charities, which encompassed family immigration matters and provided a full range of immigration services for refugees and asylees. With a B.A., cum laude, in Latin American Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University, and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, Vickie began her career working in HR and recruitment for a large international law firm in New York and London. This sparked an interest in employment and immigration law, which led Vickie to enroll in the University of Houston Law Center, graduating in May 2009. She is a member of the Texas Bar and is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach.

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Laura Egan

Managing Attorney for Pro Bono & Communications

Laura Egan
Senior Staff Attorney

Laura Egan is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy (CILA). She graduated from The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, DC in 2011. She obtained a certificate in Comparative and International Law and participated in the International Business and Trade program in Krakow, Poland and interned in a Human Rights clinic while in Krakow. Laura became passionate about immigration law during law school when she participated in her school’s Columbus Community Legal Services Families and the Law Clinic and worked with refugees and asylees while interning with International Rescue Committee’s immigration program. Laura started her legal career as a disability attorney with Russell & Hill in Everett, Washington. Prior to joining CILA, Laura worked in removal defense for Carney and Marchi, an immigration law and criminal defense law firm in Seattle, Washington.

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Nadia Danilovich

Senior Staff Attorney

Nadia Danilovich
Staff Attorney

Nadia Danilovich is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy. She has a B.A. from Scripps College in Anthropology and Spanish. She is a 2015 graduate of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where she participated in the Immigration Clinic. She began her legal career as a Staff Attorney representing unaccompanied immigrant children in removal proceedings at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, California. Nadia relocated back to her hometown of Chicago, Illinois, and began working at the National Immigrant Justice Center on the Immigrant Children’s Protection Project as a Staff Attorney and then as a Supervising Attorney. She has worked on many Asylum, SIJS, and T Visa cases for both detained and released children from all over the world. She is a member of the California Bar.

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Sarena Bhatia

Senior Staff Attorney

Sarena Bhatia
Staff Attorney

Sarena Bhatia is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy (CILA). She previously worked as a Managing Attorney, prior to that as a Staff Attorney, at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, California, where she represented both detained and released unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings. She has experience in asylum, SIJS, and suppression/termination arguments in immigration court. Sarena began her career as a legal fellow at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where she drafted Refugee Status Determination Assessments and conducted interviews of applicants seeking refugee status in the Caribbean region. She graduated from The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC in 2016 and completed a program in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. Sarena is a member of the D.C. Bar.

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Marissa Barrera

Social Worker

Marissa Barrera
Social Worker

Marissa Barrera, LMSW is the Social Worker for the ABA’s Children’s Immigration Law Academy (CILA), in Houston, Texas. With over 15 years of social work experience, her education and career have always focused on her passion for working with children and families. She has advocated for children and family in a variety of settings in various roles (e.g. child protective investigator, school social worker, medical social worker, residential treatment center social worker, among other roles).

Marissa has a strong background working with unaccompanied immigrant children and understanding the immigration process through both trauma-informed and strengths-based lenses. Prior to CILA, Marissa served as a mental health provider/clinician in a shelter located in Houston for unaccompanied minors for eight years. In this position, she was able to provide trauma informed care focus services such as individual, group and family therapy and assessment for trauma, abuse, neglect and human trafficking.
Marissa graduated with a Bachelor in Social Work from Texas A&M-Kingsville University and a Master of Science in Social Work with a clinical concentration from the University of Texas Austin.

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Colleena Payne

Grants & Operations Manager

Colleena Payne
Grants and Operations Manager

In her former role, she served as the Grants Manager and Logistics Section Chief at Fort Bend County’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management in which she coordinated the allocation of resources in response to natural disasters, terrorism, and hazardous events. Colleena comes to ABA CILA with extensive experience in pre and post-award management in federal, state, and local grant administration.

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Brenda Garcia-Carrera

Outreach Associate

Brenda Garcia-Carrera
Outreach Coordinator

Brenda Garcia-Carrera is a Political Science graduate from the University of Houston-Downtown with minors in Public Policy and Gender Studies. She worked at Chinese Community Center as a Program Coordinator to connect Houstonians with resources to improve their quality of life before working at CILA.

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Children's Immigration Law Academy - Meredith Linsky

Meredith Linsky

Director of the ABA Commission on Immigration in Washington, DC

Meredith Linsky
Director of the ABA Commission on Immigration in Washington, DC

Meredith Linsky is the Director of the ABA Commission on Immigration in Washington, DC.  She was formerly the Director of ProBAR, the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, located in Harlingen, Texas, from 2000 to 2014, where she supervised staff and mentored volunteers working on behalf of detained immigrants and asylum-seekers.  Previously, she worked as a Research and Writing Attorney at the Office of the Federal Defender in the Eastern District of California. In 2012, the American Immigration Lawyers Association awarded Ms. Linsky with the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award for her outstanding service in advancing the cause of human rights.  In 2013, the State Bar of Texas honored her with the J. Chrys Dougherty Legal Services Award.  Ms. Linsky is a 1998 graduate of the University of California, Davis, School of Law.

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