About

Professor Angélica Cházaro joined the faculty of the University of Washington School of Law in 2013 as a visiting assistant professor. Her teaching areas include Critical Race Theory, Poverty Law, Professional Responsibility, and Immigration Law. She earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she received the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for Excellence in Clinical Advocacy, was a Lowenstein Fellow, and served as an editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Prior to law school, she obtained a B.A. in Women's Studies from Harvard University. Her professional background includes over seven years at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) in Seattle, where she specialized in representing immigrant survivors of violence, directed an office focusing on farmworkers' immigration legal services, and served as a chief negotiator during a 56-day hunger strike at the Northwest Detention Center. Her research and advocacy focus on immigration and refugee law, with a particular emphasis on challenging deportation practices, criminalization of immigrants, and issues related to immigration enforcement. She has been actively involved in movements for racial justice and police abolition, working with groups such as La Resistencia, No New Youth Jail, Decriminalize Seattle, and Solidarity Budget. Professor Cházaro has contributed to public discourse through media interviews and has been quoted on topics related to immigration enforcement, deportation, and criminal justice reform.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• Process management

Selected publications

• Due Process Deportations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• The End of Deportation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-04-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This Article introduces to legal scholarship a new horizon for pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy: deportation abolition. The ever-present threat of deportation shapes the daily lives of noncitizens. Instead of aiming for a pathway to citizenship, most noncitizens must now contend with dodging the many pathways to banishment. The Trump administration’s 2017 pronouncement that no group will be exempt from immigration enforcement only heightened this reality. The administration’s numerous anti-immigrant actions, from the travel ban for people from Muslim-majority countries, to the separation of migrant parents and children at the US-Mexico Border, to the raids on immigrant communities carried out by newly-emboldened immigration enforcement officers have reinforced immigrant deportability. Despite growing threats to immigrant survival, pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy that aims to reduce migrant suffering assumes deportation as inevitable. The focus remains on improving individual outcomes by aligning the process of deportation with due process and the rule of law. But considered from the point of view of those facing deportation, even a “fairly” adjudicated deportation proves devastating. Moreover, none of the improvements in deportation’s management can eliminate the racialized violence that defines the practice. While post-entry social control and extended border control purportedly justify deportation, the stated goals of deportation law obfuscate its true character as an indefensible act of violence. The underlying assumption that deportation can and should continue indefinitely currently demarcates the outer limits of the arguments for addressing deportation - limits a commitment to deportation abolition would abandon. In an effort to denaturalize the common sense of deportation, this Article explores the fundamental failures that characterize the practice. By questioning commonly held assumptions about its inevitability, critiquing reform proposals that reify its logic, and providing examples of interventions that point towards the possibility of its demise, this Article opens the door to the end of deportation.

  Publisher

• Mitigating the Health Consequences for Youth in Families Affected by Immigration Policy Changes

  JAMA Pediatrics · 2019-06-25 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Our website uses cookies to enhance your experience. By continuing to use our site, or clicking "Continue," you are agreeing to our Cookie Policy | Continue JAMA Pediatrics HomeNew OnlineCurrent IssueFor Authors Podcast Publications JAMA JAMA Network Open JAMA Cardiology JAMA Dermatology JAMA Health Forum JAMA Internal Medicine JAMA Neurology JAMA Oncology JAMA Ophthalmology JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery JAMA Pediatrics JAMA Psychiatry JAMA Surgery Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry (1919-1959) JN Learning / CMESubscribeJobsInstitutions / LibrariansReprints & Permissions Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Accessibility Statement 2023 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved Search All JAMA JAMA Network Open JAMA Cardiology JAMA Dermatology JAMA Forum Archive JAMA Health Forum JAMA Internal Medicine JAMA Neurology JAMA Oncology JAMA Ophthalmology JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery JAMA Pediatrics JAMA Psychiatry JAMA Surgery Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry Input Search Term Sign In Individual Sign In Sign inCreate an Account Access through your institution Sign In Purchase Options: Buy this article Rent this article Subscribe to the JAMA Pediatrics journal

  PublisherDOI

• Rights of Incarcerated Parents

  2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Beyond Respectability: New Principles for Immigration Reform

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2015-09-24 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Current pro-immigrant reform efforts focus on legalization. Proposals seek to place as many of the eleven million undocumented people in the United States as possible on a “path to earned citizenship.” However, these reform efforts suffer from a significant and underappreciated blind spot: the strategies used to advocate legalization harm those to whom the path to citizenship is barred — such as those with prior deportation orders, prior criminal convictions, and those who have yet to arrive. The problem begins with rhetoric: in making the push for legalization, immigrant rights groups have deployed imagery of the undocumented as law-abiding, hard-working, and family-oriented — the ideal respectable candidates for an invitation into the protected sphere of citizenship. The flaw in this approach is evident in the comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013. While the bill would have provided additional safeguards for those who qualify for the path to legalization, it would have simultaneously rendered more vulnerable the millions of immigrants who do not qualify. For that latter group, the bill would have meant further criminalization of employment, increased border enforcement and deaths, and a cemented pipeline between local law enforcement, detention, and deportation.This Article proposes that the push for legalization is responsible for the legislative bait-and-switch, which appears to fix a broken system by offering legalization to some, but in fact makes the system worse for many. To avoid that result, advocates should avoid prioritizing legalization, and instead address the systemic harms related to the category of “illegality.” Pro-immigrant advocacy and scholarship should be guided by the question, “Will this intervention increase or decrease the harms related to living without lawful status?” Such a strategy would move the focus away from an individual’s eligibility for citizenship and towards issues that confront the most vulnerable among the undocumented. By addressing those most harmed by “illegality,” new opportunities emerge for crafting reforms that dismantle immigrant vulnerability.

  Publisher

• Challenging the "Criminal Alien" Paradigm

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2015-09-24 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Deportation of so-called aliens has become the driving force in U.S. immigration enforcement. The Immigration Accountability Executive Actions of late 2014 provide the most recent example of this trend. Even for immigrants’ rights advocates, conventional wisdom holds that if deportations must occur, aliens should be the first to go. A voluminous crimmigration scholarship notes the ever-growing entwinement of criminal and immigration enforcement, but does not challenge this fundamental premise.This Article calls for a rejection of the formulation of the alien — the figure used to increasingly justify the preservation and expansion of a harmful immigration regime. It thus defends a normative claim that is starkly at odds with settled assumptions in advocacy and the literature: Deportations should not be distributed along the lines of migrant criminality. As a consequence, this Article argues, scholarship and advocacy should embrace aliens as the priority group to defend against immigration enforcement efforts.This move is long overdue. Across the political spectrum, calls are being made to trim back the excesses of the criminal justice system, with both policing and incarceration practices suffering from crises of legitimacy. Yet the immigration system continues to layer the shortcomings and dysfunctions of the criminal justice system onto immigration enforcement efforts. The latest immigration reform effort, the Immigration Accountability Executive Actions, refine what it means to be a alien, thereby expanding partnerships with the criminal justice system and creating stronger nets of social control over broad swaths of the noncitizen population. While offering the possibility of deportation relief to part of the undocumented population, the Executive Actions ultimately do not curb deportations. Rather, the programs refocus enforcement efforts on an ideologically acceptable target: the alien. To avoid this outcome, and to begin to dismantle immigrant vulnerability, the alien paradigm must be challenged.

  Publisher

• Beyond Respectability: Dismantling the Harms of "Illegality"

  Harvard journal on legislation · 2015-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Rolling Back the Tide: Challenging the Criminalization of Immigrants in Washington State

  Seattle journal for social justice · 2012-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Getting Away with Murder

  2010-01-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth Dawson-Hahn

  Theodore Roosevelt High School

  3 shared

• Katherine Ruhl

  1 shared

• Jennifer Casey

  University of Manitoba

  1 shared

Labs

• UW School of LawPI

Awards & honors

• Jane Marks Murphy Prize for Excellence in Clinical Advocacy
• Lowenstein Fellow