Nicholás Espirítu

Nicholas Espíritu is the Spring 2025 Margaret Levy Public Interest Fellow at the UCLA School of Law. His two decades of work as a civil rights attorney, including at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Equal Justice Society, has focused on immigrants’ rights and voting rights. His immigrants’ rights litigation includes challenges to governmental policies discriminating against noncitizens, including the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban, the discriminatory expansion of the public charge rule, and Arizona’s S.B. 1070. He was part of the team of legal advisors to the undocumented activists who pushed the Obama administration to implement DACA, and most recently he was the innovator of the “Education for All Campaign,” which seeks to protect the ability of all students to attend K-12 education, regardless of immigration status. He has previously taught at the UCLA School of Law and USC Gould School of Law, where he taught Voting Rights, Immigration Policy, and Critical Race Theory, and he has served as a Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School.