Professor Alvaro M. Bedoya is a Visiting Professor of Law and the Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic at Georgetown Law, where he also serves as the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology. He is an expert on digital privacy and surveillance, with a focus on their impact on immigrants and people of color. In 2016, Alvaro was co-author of The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, a year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in unregulated criminal face recognition databases — and that face surveillance has a disparate impact on African Americans. The report fueled oversight actions and legislation in Congress and state legislatures, where Alvaro testified on behalf of the Center. His writing on this and other matters has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Slate.
Before coming to Georgetown, Alvaro served as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. As the lead staffer of that Subcommittee, he negotiated NSA reform, cybersecurity, and privacy legislation and conducted oversight hearings and investigations into the country’s leading technology companies. He also served as an advisor on immigration reform and in the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
A naturalized citizen born in Peru and raised in upstate New York, Alvaro is the co-founder of the Esperanza Education Fund, which has awarded nearly $1 million in scholarships to immigrant students regardless of their immigration status. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, where he received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Jolina Cuaresma is a Supervising Attorney and Clinical Teaching Fellow in Georgetown’s Federal Legislation Clinic where she collaborates with students to help clients achieve their legislative and policy goals. She also teaches a regulatory seminar that focuses on rulemaking in the student lending area at UC Berkeley Law School.
For the last 15 years, Jolina has worked on the full range of regulatory matters facing financial
institutions and those who do business with them. As a Federal regulator, she conducted investigations, brought administrative proceedings, oversaw supervision examinations, and played a significant role in promulgating consumer finance rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act). As a defense attorney, she represented clients in government matters before the U.S. Department of Justice, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities Exchange Commission, and FINRA. She also developed and evaluated compliance management systems for fintech companies, and handled internal investigations for Fortune 50 companies. Jolina has particular expertise in data and privacy, banking, student loan servicing, automobile financing, debt collection, credit reporting, credit cards, and fair lending.
Jolina graduated from Boston University with dual degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. Prior to earning her JD from UC Berkeley Law School, she was a financial analyst and graduated corporate honors from GE’s Financial Management Program.
Emily Tucker has spent the last decade working with grassroots groups to organize, litigate, and legislate against the criminalization and surveillance of poor communities and communities of color. She served for six years as the Senior Staff Attorney for Immigrant Rights at the Center for Popular Democracy, where she helped build state and local campaigns on a wide range of issues, including sanctuary cities, language access, police reform, non-citizen voting, and the expansion of publicly funded deportation defense programs throughout the country. Prior to CPD, she was the Policy Director at Detention Watch Network, advocating with members of Congress and the executive branch for an end to the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. Emily’s primary of area of legal expertise is the intersection between the immigration and criminal justice systems, and she is especially interested in studying and learning from the histories of resistance to these systems by the communities they target. Emily earned her BA at McGill University, a Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and her JD at Boston University Law School.