Jackie Kelley is the Director of the Immigration Legal Services (ILS) program of Rian Immigrant Center, where she directs and supervises a team of attorneys, support staff, and interns, and maintains a caseload of immigrant and refugee clients in a variety of humanitarian and family-based immigration matters. Prior to becoming Director of ILS, Jackie held various roles at Rian including Associate Director of Attorney Supervision, Senior Immigration Attorney, and Manager of Medical-Legal Partnerships, facilitating Rian’s direct partnerships with Boston Medical Center and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. From 2016-2018, Jackie, who speaks Spanish and French, held a prestigious Equal Justice Works fellowship to expand Rian’s capacity to provide comprehensive representation to immigrant domestic violence survivors. She is a graduate of Georgetown University’s Faculty of Language and Linguistics and of Northeastern University School of Law, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar and was named a Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy Fellow to assist asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border. Prior to law school, Jackie worked for six years at Ayuda, a nationally-recognized leader in legal aid for immigrants, asylum-seekers and domestic violence survivors in and around Washington, D.C., where she helped hundreds of low-income immigrants navigate complex immigration laws. In her close work with immigrant communities, Jackie has developed a passion for trauma-informed and culturally-competent legal aid, and for using the law as a tool for personal empowerment.
