Founded in 2020, the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy expands the law school’s role as a national leader in immigration law and policy. The Miñana Center generates innovative ideas at the intersection of immigration scholarship and practice; serves as a hub for transforming those ideas into meaningful changes in immigration policy at the local, state, and national level; and empowers students with unique opportunities for experiential learning through work with academics, practitioners, policymakers, and activists.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham

Faculty Co-Director

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Ahilan teaches in the law school and also maintains an active litigation practice. He has successfully litigated a number of cases involving immigrants’ rights, including Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first case to establish a federal right to appointed counsel for any group of immigrants; Jennings v. Rodriguez, which secured the due process rights of immigrants jailed for years while litigating their deportation cases; and Ramos v. Nielsen, a challenge to the Trump Administration's plan to end the TPS program. Ahilan has argued three times before the United States Supreme Court, most recently in the fall of 2021 on behalf of Americans of the Muslim faith who were targeted by the federal government for surveillance because of their religion in FBI v. Fazaga.

Prior to joining UCLA, Ahilan was Senior Counsel at the ACLU in Los Angeles, where he worked for nearly twenty years. In 2016 Ahilan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Read Ahilan T. Arulanantham's faculty biography.

Sandra Hernandez

Director of Strategic Communications

Sandra Hernandez is Director of Strategic Communications at the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. She has spent more than two decades in communications and media. Most recently, as vice president of communications and media at MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), she led communications efforts around the organization’s defense of DACA, voting rights, and challenges to the integrity of the 2020 Census. Sandra previously worked as director of communications at the ACLU of Southern California.

A veteran journalist, she wrote about immigration and criminal justice as an editorial writer at Los Angeles Times. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Daily Journal, she broke national stories about the U.S. immigration detention system, including a covert federal program to forcibly drug and deport detained immigrants. She has reported from Latin America on Colombia’s civil war, Venezuela’s political turmoil, and U.S. deportations to Haiti.

She served as an editor of Underground America and En las Sombras, a collection of oral histories of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The collection was published as part of The Voice of Witness Book Series that uses first person narratives to document human rights issues.

She was born in Colombia and raised in Southern California. She is a graduate of UCLA and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Talia Inlender

Deputy Director

Talia Inlender is Deputy Director of the UCLA Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Talia teaches the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic and plays a lead role in advancing CILP’s research, advocacy, and litigation. During her career, Talia has litigated cases on behalf of immigrants before Immigration Judges; the Board of Immigration Appeals; and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has been co-counsel in transformative immigrants’ rights litigation, including: Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first lawsuit to establish a right to government-appointed counsel for a class of immigrants with serious mental disabilities; F.L.B. (formerly J.E.F.M.) v. Lynch and C.J.L.G. v. Barr, lawsuits to vindicate children’s right to counsel in immigration proceedings; and International Refugee Assistance Project v. Kelly, a lawsuit challenging the detention of an Afghan family entering on Special Immigrant Visas during the so-called “Muslim Ban.” Talia has also played a pivotal role in advocacy to expand local and state funding for legal representation in removal proceedings.

Prior to joining the Miñana Center, Talia spent 13 years in the Immigrants’ Rights Project at Public Counsel, where she launched and led the agency’s detained deportation defense program.

Read Talia Inlender's faculty biography.

Hiroshi Motomura

Faculty Co-Director

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the UCLA Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), Americans in Waiting (Oxford 2006), and he is the co-author of Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (West 9th ed. 2021). He has received several university teaching awards and is one of 26 U.S. law professors profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his current book project, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford 2025). And perhaps most significantly, he is featured in the Try Guys video, The Try Guys Try Immigrating to America.

Read Hiroshi Motomura's faculty biography.

Chloe Lin

Program Coordinator

Chloe Lin is the Program Coordinator for the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Prior to joining UCLA, she was the Public Programs Assistant for the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. She has also worked as Project Coordinator for the Chinese Historical Society of New England and Marketing and Communications Associate for the Old North Church & Historic Site. Chloe holds a BA in History from Smith College and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the Harvard Extension School.

Vanessa Young Viniegra

Staff Attorney

Vanessa Young Viniegra is a staff attorney with the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Previously, Vanessa was a fellow with Public Counsel, where she worked on civil rights impact litigation and helped bring and litigate a challenge to conditions at an immigration detention center. Before joining Public Counsel, she clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Fernando M. Olguin on the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Vanessa graduated from Stanford Law School, where she participated in the Immigrants' Rights Clinic. She received her B.A. in History and Global Studies from UCLA.