Jacqueline Kelley
Jacqueline (Jackie) Kelley is the Senior Immigration Attorney and Manager of Medical-Legal Partnerships at the Rian Immigrant Center, a non-profit welcome center in Boston, Massachusetts serving immigrants and refugees from around the globe. At Rian, Jackie provides direct representation in humanitarian and family-based immigration matters. From 2016-2018, Jackie held an Equal Justice Works fellowship to expand Rian’s capacity to provide comprehensive representation to immigrant domestic violence survivors. Currently, she manages Rian’s medical-legal partnerships with Boston Medical Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, providing critical immigration legal services to hospital patients, many of whom are underinsured due to immigration status. She graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University’s Faculty of Language and Linguistics and received her J.D. from 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 serve 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 the Washington, D.C. area, 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 legal aid, and for using the law as a tool for personal empowerment.