Crimmigration: Beyond Borders x Duke Justice Project

Kate Evans

Clinical Professor of Law

Duke University (Law School)

Kate Evans joined the Duke Law faculty in 2019 as a clinical professor of law and inaugural director of a new clinic focused on immigration law and policy. She previously directed the Immigration Litigation and Appellate Clinic at the University of Idaho College of law, where she also taught Immigration Law and Policy.  She earlier completed a teaching fellowship at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Binger Center for New Americans, where she led the law school’s merits litigation in Mellouli v. Lynch at the U.S. Supreme Court and supervised students in their successful challenge to the prolonged detention of their refugee client. 

Evans published immigration law scholarship in the Minnesota Law Review, Brooklyn Law Review, NYU Review of Law and Social Change, and several practitioner-oriented publications.

Evans received her JD in 2009 from New York University School of Law where she received a Root-Tilden-Kern scholarship for public interest and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. She clerked for Judges Harriet Lansing and Thomas Kalitowski on the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Diana Murphy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She also had a private immigration practice focusing on appellate litigation.

She earned her BA, magna cum laude, at Brown University where she majored in international development studies. She subsequently worked for Doctors Without Borders in New York, Guatemala, and Uganda as an advocate and administrator.

Yesenia Polanco-Galdamez

Principal Attorney & Owner of Polanco Law

Polanco Law

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yesenia-l-polanco-galdamez-a5031453/

Yesenia Polanco is the very proud owner of Polanco Law, PC, where she practices Immigration and Criminal Defense