The Mariposa Legal Team
ALEJANDRA AGUILAR
Legal & COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT
Alejandra is Mariposa’s Legal and Communications Assistant. Alejandra grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and has experience serving the Hispanic/Latinx immigrant population in Indiana. She is also currently an undergraduate student at the University of Evansville double majoring in International Studies and Spanish with a minor in Legal Studies. Alejandra is determined to assist individuals and their families with resources and information about immigration legal service providers in their area.
Contact: alejandra [at] mariposalegal.org
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Hannah Cartwright, Esq
Mariposa Legal Executive Director, AttornEy
Hannah, one of Mariposa Legal’s co-founders, is an immigration attorney who represents immigrants in removal (deportation) proceedings. She is a licensed attorney in both Indiana and Maryland and her practice is primarily limited to federal immigration practice. She has represented detained immigrants since 2016 and is passionate about raising awareness about the injustices in the US immigration detention system. Hannah’s work at Mariposa is dedicated to providing holistic legal representation to her clients and engaging in collaborative work with community organizations and activists to work for abolition of immigration detention and immigrant justice more broadly, especially in Indiana. Hannah grew up on the southside of Indianapolis, IN and earned her Bachelors of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from Valparaiso University (‘08) in northwest IN. She obtained her Masters of Social Work and her Juris Doctor from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC before she served as an an Attorney Advisor at the Philadelphia Immigration Court. Since her clerkship, she has worked in nonprofit legal services organizations where she has creatively used both her social work and legal skills to fight on behalf of, and with, her clients in their immigration court cases. Hannah has also represented individuals with serious mental illness through the National Qualified Representative Program since 2017.
You can find Hannah tweeting about immigration politics on Twitter at @hccartwright. In 2020, she also published an an article about the need for proactive responses to vicarious trauma by immigration attorneys to improve legal services for clients. She occasionally carves out time to do presentations and workshops on vicarious trauma and immigration legal representation.
Contact: hannah [at] mariposalegal.org
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MEGAN HOPE
MARIPOSA LEGAL SOCIALWORKER
Megan Hope, LMSW, MA, is the National Qualified Representative Program Social Worker at Mariposa Legal. She supports clients throughout the United States who have been appointed counsel through the NQRP, after being determined mentally incompetent to represent themselves. Megan also presents occasional trainings on secondary trauma, trauma-informed practice, working with immigrant clients with mental health conditions, collaboration between social workers and legal professionals, and other topics.
Before joining Mariposa in 2023, Megan was the Social Service Project Director at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN). There she oversaw the development of the interdisciplinary provision by masters-level social workers of behavioral health advocacy, legal case support, and social service coordination for particularly vulnerable detained adults and clients represented by RMIAN’s Children’s Program. During her 12 years at RMIAN, Megan was also a Department of Justice fully accredited legal representative, member of RMIAN’s Legal Orientation Program team, and coordinator of RMIAN’s Anti-Human Trafficking Project.
Megan has worked with immigrant communities since 1995, including as a former staff member and current member of the board of directors of Annunciation House, Inc. in El Paso, Texas; migrant advocate, immigration paralegal, and grant writer with Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Migrant Farmworker Project; board president and wage-theft clinic coordinator of the Kansas City Worker Justice Center; and activist with other immigrant and worker rights organizations. For several years she performed program evaluations of child sponsorship and community development programs in Latin America and Asia. Megan has a MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Kansas, and MSW and Certificate in Latinx Social Work from the University of Denver.
Contact: megan [at] mariposalegal.org
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SARA JACOBS
Mariposa Legal Accredited Representative
Sara is a fully Accredited Representative on National Qualified Representative Program cases representing individuals determined to have limited competency. Sara is passionate about immigrant justice and advocating for the rights of those in detention and removal proceedings.
Sara grew up in Springfield, Illinois. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish/Latin American Studies from American University in 2012 and her Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University in 2018. She previously served as the Legal Orientation Program Coordinator and Detention Project Paralegal at the National Immigrant Justice Center and joined the Mariposa Legal staff in October 2021. Sara is honored to work alongside individuals facing deportation and their family members.
Contact: sara [at] mariposalegal.org
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Matthew king
FOUNDER, PRESIDENT, AND CHAIRMAN OF COMMON FOUNDATION
Dr. Matthew King is the Founder, President and Chairman of the COMMON Foundation. He is an American author, international consultant and “creative” residing in Boulder, Colorado with two decades of experience leading projects, strategy, and research in the fields of governance, sustainable development, and social and environmental entrepreneurship. He’s worked for the government, academia, non-profits and the private sector and advises leaders worldwide.
Matthew is a student of the world. He has traveled the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and hiked the Rockies, Alps, Andes, Great Dividing Range, Appalachians and the Cascades. He’s been to every continent on Earth with the exception of Antarctica, completed learning expeditions to over 30 countries, lived in five, and studied in four—completing his Ph.D. in Political Geography at the University of Cambridge, England. He is a former US Presidential Management Fellow (Clinton and Bush Administrations); a Founding Member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association; a post-graduate Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Kinship Conservation Fellow; Distinguished Alumnus Lecturer in Politics and Law, University of Tulsa; and a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He’s available for writing assignments, to consult or conduct strategic research and development for clients focused on social or environmental challenges.
You can follow on his Website | Facebook | LinkedIn
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Romelia graefrath
Mariposa Legal research Director, Accredited Representative
Romelia, one of Mariposa Legal’s co-founders, is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants. Romelia is completing her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. Her research focuses on the consequences of mass detention on immigrant political engagement. Her work with Mariposa is dedicated to producing scholarship that elevates immigrant voices and leverages qualitative and quantitative evidence to help immigration advocates protect immigrant rights and build power in immigrant communities.
In January 2021, Romelia had an article published in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage in which she pushed back on the ‘deserving’ immigrant narrative. Her research on Latino vote choice and mobilization in the 2016 election has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Romelia has also contributed to public commentary on detention conditions in the Midwest and the obstacles to obtaining parole for asylum-seekers.
Romelia grew up in Illinois and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016. She earned her Master of Arts in Political Science from Notre Dame in 2018 before serving as the detention project paralegal at the National Immigrant Justice Center. In her free time, Romelia volunteers at the Westville prison in northern Indiana and enjoys watching telenovelas with her mom and grandparents.
Contact: romelia [at] mariposalegal.org