Building Resilient Immigration Legal Services in Northern California

Ellen Dumesnil has been the executive director of IIBA for 13 years. She initially became involved with immigrants and refugees while working overseas in Indonesia helping to assist the rescue of relocation of refugees fleeing war torn Vietnam. Since then she has worked in refugee camps across the globe. Ellen worked as the director of the US refugee program in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War and worked as an asylum officer in New York.

Alison Kamhi is the Legal Program Director based in San Francisco. Alison leads the ILRC's Immigrant Survivors Team and conducts frequent in-person and webinar trainings on naturalization and citizenship, family-based immigration, U visas, and FOIA requests. She also provides technical assistance through the ILRC’s Attorney of the Day program on a wide range of immigration issues, including immigration options for youth, consequences of criminal convictions for immigration purposes, removal defense strategy, and eligibility for immigration relief, including family-based immigration, U visas, VAWA, DACA, cancellation of removal, asylum, and naturalization.

Alison facilitates the eight member Collaborative Resources for Immigrant Services on the Peninsula (CRISP) collaborative in San Mateo County to provide immigration services to low-income immigrants in Silicon Valley.

Prior to the ILRC, Alison worked as a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic, where she supervised removal defense cases and immigrants' rights advocacy projects. Before Stanford, she represented abandoned and abused immigrant youth as a Skadden Fellow at Bay Area Legal Aid and at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York. While in law school, Alison worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, and Greater Boston Legal Services Immigration Unit. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Julia Gibbons in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Bianca Sierra Wolff brings 20 years of executive and legal experience to LCCRSF. Prior to joining LCCRSF, Bianca was the Executive Director of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ). At CCIJ, she was instrumental in transitioning the organization from a fiscally sponsored project to a 501c3 independent nonprofit.

Bianca served as both Deputy Director of California ChangeLawyers and CEO of ChangeLawyers' for-profit subsidiary, Cal Bar Affinity, from 2016 to 2020. From 2008 to 2016, Bianca was the Executive Director of Oakland’s Centro Legal de la Raza.

Her passion for social justice and liberation comes from her own lived experience as a woman of color and daughter of Mexican immigrants. The first in her family to graduate from law school, Bianca holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and a BA in International Relations from Stanford University. Once she finished law school, Bianca worked as a corporate associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Cooley LLP.  Bianca currently lives in the East Bay with her spouse, two children, and little dog Coco.

Eleni is ILD’s Founding Co-Executive Director, where she leads a growing team of over 30 attorneys and other staff providing legal services from DACA to complex detained removal defense, as well as policy and advocacy work to reimagine the U.S. immigration system. Since co-founding ILD, Eleni has supported the organization in launching groundbreaking partnerships with K-12 and higher education institutions to deliver equitable legal services to tens of thousands of students, staff, and family members. She has created innovative training programs to launch the next generation of immigration attorneys committed to immigrant justice. Eleni has extensive experience providing direct representation for detained and non-detained individuals in removal proceedings. She has supervised, mentored, and trained attorneys, paralegals, and law students throughout her career. 

 Prior to co-founding ILD, she grew the immigrant rights unit of Centro Legal de la Raza from 2 attorneys to a staff of 38. During her tenure as Centro’s Directing Attorney, she secured and managed over 50 annual public and private foundation grants and established novel partnerships with community groups, school districts, medical providers, and other stakeholders in order to increase access to counsel for noncitizens throughout the East Bay and the Central Valley. 

Prior to relocating to California from Chicago, Eleni worked at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC)’s Detention Project in positions that demanded complex immigration litigation, multidisciplinary advocacy expertise, and management of creative, cutting-edge legal programs. Many of the legal services programs and collaboratives that Eleni has launched over the course of her career at ILD and other organizations are now considered model programs within the field for their work advancing the goal of universal representation to immigrants in remote areas, those facing deportation, and those who have had contact with the criminal justice system. 

Eleni holds a B.A. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law. She is a member of the Illinois bar and is fluent in Spanish and Greek.