Mary Yanik
Co-Principal Investigator
Mary Yanik is a Professor of Practice and the Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane Law School. In the clinic, she supervises students in representing immigrants in deportation defense, affirmative applications for lawful status, constitutional litigation, and strategic advocacy. She specializes in assisting immigrant workers, including victims of labor trafficking, and in defending constitutional rights of immigrants, as well as in providing legal support to organizers.
Yanik previously worked at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, leading a law & organizing practice in support of community-directed campaigns for labor, migrant, and racial justice. She served as local and trial counsel in federal litigation challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s marriage license law and, separately, prolonged immigration detention in Louisiana. She represented dozens of immigrant workers in reporting labor abuse to the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and National Labor Relations Board, including the immigrant whistleblower who complained of unsafe conditions at the now-collapsed Hard Rock Hotel site in New Orleans.
Her research agenda focuses on immigration detention, constitutional litigation, and models of lawyering that support social change. In the inaugural year of the clinic, she co-authored No End in Sight: Prolonged and Punitive Detention of Immigrants in Louisiana, which analyzed ten years of litigation by detained immigrants seeking release from detention in Louisiana.