Speakers

Roxana Bacon
Former Chief Counsel
U.S. Citzenship and Immigration Services

Roxana Bacon has studied, taught, practiced, written and lectured on immigration law and policy for 40 years, first as a social worker in San Francisco and then as a lawyer in Arizona. She has been senior partner in international law firms and founder of her own firm. She has served as a Ninth Circuit Lawyers’ representative and a member of the Ninth Circuit Advisory Board, President of the University of Arizona Board of Visitors, President of the State Bar of Arizona, and General Counsel of American Immigration Lawyers Association. She received the Margaret Brent Award from the ABA. Until January, she served as Chief Counsel for the Citizenship and Immigration Service. She was in the Peace Corps in Chile in 1965, and received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. She hopes she never fully recovers from the reform missions of the ‘60s.

Paul Schiff Berman
Dean, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Arizona State University

Paul Schiff Berman’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of international law, conflict of laws, cyberspace law and the cultural analysis of law. Before arriving at ASU, he was the Jesse Root Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Dean Berman earned his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton University and his J.D. from New York University School of Law. He has served as law clerk to then Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering law school, Dean Berman was a professional theater director in New York City and Artistic Director of Spin Theater.

Chris Bray
Sergeant, Vice Enforcement Unit Drug Enforcement Bureau
Phoenix Police Department

Chris Bray is a sergeant in the Phoenix Police Department, where he has served for 31 years, 22 of those as a sergeant.  For the past 16 years, he has been an investigative supervisor in the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement bureaus. He is a subject matter expert on human trafficking for Arizona POST and California POST.  He has a bachelor’s degree in police administration from Northern Arizona University and is a contributing author on the topic of human trafficking.

Susan M. Breall
Judge
San Franciscio Superior Court

Susan M. Breall presides over a felony jury trial department. Prior to her appointment to the bench in 2001, she was Chief of the Criminal Division of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office for all crimes of violence against women, children, the elderly and intimate partners. She prosecuted felony domestic violence cases for 10 years, and was an Assistant District Attorney for 17 years. She is currently on the board of the nonprofit, Asista, which provides technical assistance to immigrant survivors of violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. In 1997 she traveled to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina where she conducted domestic violence trainings for the Federation of Bosnian Judges on police investigations, interview techniques and evidence gathering for domestic violence cases.

Sarah Buel
Faculty Director, Diane Halle Center for Family Justice
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Arizona State University

Sarah Buel, who NBC has called one of the five most inspiring women in America, heads the Diane Halle Center for Family Justice, which houses the Halle Center Family Violence Legal Clinic. Buel, a survivor of domestic violence herself, has worked for more than 30 years with battered women and children. She graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she founded the Harvard Battered Women’s Advocacy Project, the Harvard Women in Prison Project, and the Harvard Children and Family Rights Project. She was a prosecutor for six years in Boston and Quincy, Mass., and for 14 years was a clinical professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where she founded and co-directed their Domestic Violence Clinic, co-founded the University of Texas Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, and served as special counsel for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

Dennis Burke
United States Attorney
District of Arizona

Dennis Burke leads one of the largest U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country, serving more than 8 million residents across the state, including 22 Indian nations. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Arizona, worked as counsel under former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, as chief deputy in the state Attorney General’s Office, as a chief of staff to former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, and as a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary Napolitano for Homeland Security.

Susan B. Carbon
Director
Office on Violence Against Women
U.S. Department of Justice

Susan B. Carbon was nominated by President Barack Obama on Oct. 1, 2009, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Feb. 11, 2010. She serves as the liaison between the Department of Justice and federal, state, tribal and international governments on crimes of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking. She is responsible for developing the Department’s legal and policy positions regarding the implementation of the Violence Against Women Act and oversees an annual budget of nearly $400 million. She previously served as Supervisory Judge of the New Hampshire Judicial Branch Family Division, and has trained judges and other professionals across the country on family violence, firearms, child custody and child protection.

Bridgette Carr
Public Interest/Public Service Faculty Fellow
Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor
University of Michigan Law School

Bridgette Carr directs the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. It is the first clinical law program solely dedicated to the issue of human trafficking. She and her students provide a range of services, including direct representation of foreign nationals trafficked into the United States, advocacy for domestic and foreign national victims, community education and training and legislative reform. The Clinic works with survivors of human trafficking, government officials, and NGOs to identify solutions to combat human trafficking. She has also done anti-trafficking work in Europe, Mexico and the Middle East.

Sheila Lynn M. Catacutan-Besario
Senior In-house Counsel, Gender  Watch Against Violence and Exploitation
Professor of Law, Silliman University
Assistant Director, Dr. Jovito Salonga Law and Development Center
Director, Office of the City Legal Assistance Office
Dumaguete City, The Philippines

Sheila Lynn M. Catacutan-Besario practices law in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental, The Phillipines. She teaches gender law, laws related to women and children, international human rights, ethics, constitutional law, election law and transportation and insurance law. She earned her Masters of Law in Biotechnology and Genomics at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law while on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2009. She is an advocate of women and children’s rights.

Laura Dickinson
Faculty Director. Center for Law and Global Affairs
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Arizona State University

Laura A. Dickinson’s work focuses on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law. Her book, Outsourcing War and Peace, was recently published by Yale University Press. It examines the increasing privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government, considers the impact of this trend on core public values, and outlines mechanism for protecting these values in an era of privatization. Previously, she was on faculty at the University of Connecticut School of Law, served as a senior policy adviser to Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, and was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer, and to Judge Dorothy Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cindy Dyer
Vice President, Human Rights
Vital Voices Global Partnership

Prior to joining Vital Voices in 2008, Cindy Dyer served as the Director of the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was nominated to this position by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She served as the liaison between the Department of Justice and federal, state and international governments on crimes involving violence against women. She was a specialized domestic and sexual violence prosecutor for 13 years and has received numerous awards and recognition for her service to victims. She served for 10 years as a member of the Public Policy Committee of the Texas Council on Family Violence and she was a weekly hotline volunteer for nine years at a shelter for battered women and their children.

Mary C. Ellison
Director of Policy
Polaris Project

Mary C. Ellison is responsible for formulating national and state advocacy priorities for the Polaris Project, which works to combat human trafficking and serves U.S. and foreign national victims. She also drafts and analyzes proposed federal and state legislation, builds coalitions with advocates, and monitors proposed legislation related to human trafficking. Previously, she was a staff attorney for The Advocates for Human Rights, and  helped build a coalition to combat sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation in Minnesota through participation in the statewide Human trafficking Task Force. She helped draft critical amendments to Minnesota’s human trafficking law, which was unanimously passed and signed into law on May 21, 2009. She earned her law degree from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn.

Alice Chamberlayne Hill
Senior Counselor to Janet Napolitano, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security
Department of Homeland Security

Alice Chamberlayne Hill joined the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in June 2009, and has led the internationally recognized anti-human trafficking initiative, known as the Blue Campaign, the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force and the Anthrax Steering Committee. She also serves as the Department’s representative in the White House Interagency Environmental Justice Working Group, the President’s Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children, the White House Inter-Agency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, the DHS-DOE Aviation Security Enhancement Partnership Governance Board, The HHS/DHS Joint Executive Steering Medical Countermeasures Committee and the Senior Policy Operating Group, which is part of the President’s Inter-Agency Task Force to Combat Human Trafficking. Before joining DHS, she served for 13 years as a judge in Los Angeles, including as Supervising Judge of the North Valley District for the Los Angeles Superior Court, the largest trial court in the world. Prior to joining the bench, she served as Chief of the Major Frauds Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, and was the co-lead prosecutor in the federal prosecution of Charles Keating Jr., which, at that time, was the largest white collar prosecution ever mounted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Lucia Fakonas Howard
President, Board of Directors
Co-chair, Avon/Domestic Violence Committee
O’Connor House

Lucia Fakonas Howard  is a founder and past president of the Arizona Women Lawyers Association, served on the Phoenix Ad Hoc Committee on Child Prostitution and has been an active presence in civic issues in Phoenix and the state for many years.   In addition to her law practice and community volunteer work, she served as a special aide to Phoenix mayors Terry Goddard and Paul Johnson on Economic Development. She holds a B.A. from Arizona State University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Li-Ling Ker
Senior Prosecutor
Taiwan High Prosecutors Office

Li-Ling Ker has served as prosecutor or head prosecutor in several local prosecutors offices in Taiwan since 1986. She also has worked in the Ministry of Justice, first in the Counsellors Office and then the Division of Prosecutorial Affairs. In 2007-2008, she was assigned as head of the department of student affairs in the Judges & Prosecutors Training Institute. For the past decade, she has been involved in implementing law and regulation relating to domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. She is now a member of two Supervisory Task Forces established in the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office, one for human trafficking cases and the other for domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

Kathleen Kim
Associate Professor of Law
Loyola Law School

Kathleen Kim teaches torts, immigration law and human trafficking. Her scholarship provides critical perspectives on the impact of laws, policies and practices on the rights of immigrants and human trafficking survivors. Before joining Loyola Law School, she pioneered civil litigation on behalf of human trafficking survivors at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. As a Skadden Fellow, she launched and directed the Human Trafficking Project, the first of its kind to focus on the civil rights of trafficked individuals to receive monetary compensation for the abuse of forced labor. In 2005, she became the inaugural Immigrants’ Rights Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School. She continues to provide technical assistance in human trafficking civil cases.  She currently co-directs the Anti-Trafficking Litigation Assistance and Support Team and was a gubernatorial appointee to the California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery. She graduated from Stanford Law School where she was an associate editor of Stanford Law Review and a Judge Takasugi Public Interest Fellow.

Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director
National Immigrant Justice Center
Heartland Alliance

Mary Meg McCarthy has grown the Justice Center into one of the nation’s leading immigrant and human rights advocacy organizations, serving 10,000 noncitizens each year through an unparalleled pro bono network of more than 1,000 attorneys. Through its unique combination of direct service, impact litigation and advocacy, the Center promotes due process protections before the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress and the Administration. Prior to joining the Center in 1998, she practiced civil litigation and served as a pro bono attorney for the Center’s asylum project. Early in her career, she lived in Chile and worked in local communities to help safeguards the rights of individuals living under a dictatorship.

Jack McDevitt
Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies
College of Criminal Justice
Northeastern University

Jack McDevitt directs the Institute on Race and Justice and the Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research. He is the co-author of three books – Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed, Hate Crime Revisited: American War on Those Who Are Different (both with Jack Levin) and Victimology (with Judy Sgarzy). He has also co-authored a number of reports on hate crime, racial profiling and human trafficking including a monograph for the U.S. Department of Justice on local law enforcement experiences with cases of human trafficking. Presently, he is working with Dr. Amy Farrell to develop the first national data collection system for human trafficking investigations, and is working on a project to identify barriers to identification and prosecution of human trafficking cases. Over this period, he has published numerous articles on a wide variety topics in criminal justice. He has spoken on hate crime, racial profiling human trafficking and security both nationally and internationally and has testified as an expert witness before the Judiciary Committees of both U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives and as invited expert at the White House.

Ruth McGregor
Chief Justice
Arizona Supreme Court (ret.)

Ruth McGregor was a justice of the state’s highest court from 1998, when she was appointed by Republican Gov. Jane Dee Hull until her retirement in 2009. She served a term as Chief Justice that ended with her retirement from the court on June 30, 2009. She received bachelor and master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and her law degree from Arizona State University. She was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s first clerk. She served on the Arizona Court of Appeals from 1989-1998.

Karen McLaughlin
Secretary & Treasuerer
International Organization for Victim Assistance
Former Executive Director
Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance

Karen A. McLaughlin served from 2005-2010 as the director of the U.S. Department of Justice Task Force to Combat Human Trafficking in the northeastern United States, coordinating efforts across the country to rescue victims and investigate and prosecute those who engage in this growing domestic and international form of slavery. She is a major architect of pending Massachusetts state legislation and is advising the U.S. Congress on pending federal legislation that provides comprehensive rights and services to victims, mandates stringent criminal penalties for traffickers and establishes initiatives related to stemming demand. She launched the first national program to disseminate best practices in preventing commercial sexual exploitation of children. In her present positions, she is a consultant for a ground breaking U.S. initiative to end the demand for commercial sexual exploitation sponsored by a philanthropic donor collaborative. She is an advisor and Chair of the Board of Directors for the Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Program to Stop Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery. After 9/11, she directed a national terrorism initiative that evaluated the country’s response, recovery and preparedness.

Susana Medina de Rizzo
Judge, Supreme Court of Entre Rios
Argentina

Susana Medina de Rizzo is responsible for a Program Against Human Trafficking, which will be held in Argentina in the next two years in collaboration with the U.S. State Department. She is president of the Argentinian Women Judges Association, secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Women Judges, and a member of the Entre Rios Judges Association, the Argentinian Federal Courts and Supreme Courts Board and the Committee on Access to Justice-Supreme Court of Argentina. She has created and promoted programs that provide access to the judiciary system, and is a founding member of the Argentinian Victimology Association and creator of the second Argentinian Assistance Center for Victims of Crimes.

Sandra Day O’Connor
Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (ret.)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (ret.) was nominated to be the first woman on the country’s highest court by President Ronald Reagan. She served from Sept. 25, 1981, until her retirement on Jan. 31, 2006, and during that time was often a crucial deciding vote in 5-4 decisions on some of the most controversial issues of our time. She was born in El Paso, Texas, on March 26, 1930, and has long ties to Arizona, spending much of her childhood on the Lazy-B, a cattle ranch along the Arizona and New Mexico border near Duncan. She received her bachelor’s and law degree from Stanford University, but could not find a law firm willing to hire a woman when she graduated, and began her career volunteering in the County Attorney’s Office in San Mateo County, Calif., where she eventually became Deputy County Attorney. She married John Jay O’Connor III (now deceased) in 1952 and has three sons – Scott, Brian, and Jay. She returned to Arizona in 1957, and opened a practice in Maryvale, served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, in the Arizona State Senate, as a Judge in the Maricopa County Superior Court and on the Arizona Court of Appeals. In March of 2006, the College of Law at Arizona State University was named in her honor, and she frequently speaks and teaches there.

Josh Patrick Parecki
Assistant United States Attorney
Arizona District

Josh Patrick Parecki  is assigned to the National Security and Border Security Section, and has worked with various federal, state, and local agents to further investigations and prosecutions in complex human trafficking, immigration, and national security related crimes. He has also conducted multiple federal jury trials related to these investigations. Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was employed as a Deputy County Attorney with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, where he specialized in various federal, state and local efforts to combat illegal immigration, and border-related violence. Previously, he was a law clerk for Federal District Court Judge Earl H. Carroll. He attended Arizona State University as an undergraduate and graduated from The Dickinson School of Law at Penn State.

Katie Resendiz
Anti-Trafficking Supervisor
Arizona League to End Regional Trafficking
International Rescue Committee

Katie Resendiz works with the Arizona League to End Regional Trafficking. The project works to provide services for victims, raise awareness of trafficking issues in the community, and support anti-trafficking efforts throughout the state. She oversees direct service provision for clients and provides professional training on topics related to anti-trafficking, including basic introduction to the crisis of trafficking, understanding victim experiences, and protocol development for working with victims. She has designed curricula and conducted workshops on a variety of conflict zone and public health issues and has focused her academic and professional life on education as a tool for peacebuilding. She received her master’s degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Meghan Rhoad
Researcher, Women’s Rights Division
Human Rights Watch

Meghan Rhoad is a researcher in the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, currently specializing in violence against migrant and refugee women. Her work at Human Rights Watch has included research into sexual violence affecting Somali women and girls in Kenyan refugee camps, documentation of abuses suffered by women in U.S. immigration detention, and, most recently, fact-finding in Haiti on the situation of women and girls displaced by the 2010 earthquake. She was formerly a women’s law and public policy fellow at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., where she researched federal judicial nominations and analyzed policy developments affecting the economic security of low-income women and their families. Her previous work includes international advocacy projects using the human rights framework to address issues such as reproductive health and gender discrimination in inheritance law. Rhoad is a graduate of Harvard University and Georgetown University Law Center.

Daniel Rothenberg
Executive Director, Center for Law and Global Affairs
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Arizona State University

Daniel Rothenberg has more than 15 years of experience combining field research, project management and scholarship on international human rights and the rule of law. His research focuses on human rights documentation and analysis and transitional justice, particularly truth commissions, amnesty laws and reparations. He has designed and managed rule of law projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout Latin America including programs to train human rights NGOs, aid indigenous peoples in using international legal remedies and collect and analyze thousands of first-person narratives of victims of severe human rights violations. Previously, he was Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law, Senior Fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is the author of various articles and monographs as well as With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today (Harcourt Brace) and the forthcoming Memory of Silence (Palgrave).

Laura Rundlet
Coordinator, Senior Policy Operating Group
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
U.S. Department of State

Laura Rundlet serves in the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons as the Coordinator for the Senior Policy Operating Group on Trafficking.  The Office leads the United States’ global engagement in the fight against human trafficking, partnering with foreign governments and civil society to implement effective strategies to confront modern slavery.  In addition, the Office supports Secretary Clinton in her role as Chair of the President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking.  The Senior Policy Operating Group (SPOG) was established by Congress to implement the vision of the Task Force.  As SPOG Coordinator, she works with more than a dozen federal agencies to coordinate the government’s interagency response to human trafficking.  She is a lawyer and previously served for eleven years in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser where her responsibilities included foreign assistance matters related to trafficking and law enforcement, human rights treaties, bilateral and multilateral negotiations of free trade agreements, and international investment policy and arbitration.

Maria Sanchez-Gagne
Assistant Attorney General
New Mexico Attorney General’s Office

Maria Sanchez-Gagne directs the newly created Border Violence Division in the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, which provides specialized legal and technical assistance and training to local and state agencies in New Mexico in matters of international criminal extraditions, human trafficking and money laundering. She assisted in drafting New Mexico’s state human trafficking law. She also serves as Vice-Chairperson of the Southwest Border Anti-Money Laundering Alliance. She has prosecuted a variety of cases including homicides and all violent crimes, with a specialization in crimes of violence against children. She has conducted numerous trainings for law enforcement personnel, social workers and prosecutors throughout New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico, covering areas pertaining to trial procedures, child abuse, sexual assault, foreign prosecutions and human trafficking. She obtained her law degree from the University of Denver School of Law.

Marilyn R. Seymann
Chief Executive Officer
Bruce T. Halle Foundation

Marilyn R. Seymann oversees the Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation, which was founded in 2002 to consolidate the philanthropic interests of the Halle family. It focuses on investment in systemic change and collaboration to solve pressing issues in Arizona and in the communities around the country served by Discount Tire. In 2010, the Foundation provided a $1 million grant that funded creation of the Diane Halle Center for Family Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Seymann has had experience in banking, education and government, and is currently the CEO of M One, a consulting firm advising corporations in the areas of strategy and governance. She is the founder of the Arizona Foundation for Women and the Man’s Anti-Violence Network.

William Simmons
Associate Professor, Social & Behavioral Sciences
Arizona State University

William Paul Simmons is director of the master’s program in Social Justice and Human Rights at Arizona State University. His research is highly interdisciplinary relying on numerous methodologies including theoretical, legal, and empirical approaches to social justice and human rights issues. His first published book was a theoretical exegesis of the possibilities of invigorating liberal politics from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy of the Other. He has also published two law review articles and a book chapter on violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. His second book examines the potential for reinvigorating human rights law from the perspectives of marginalized peoples. He has served as a consultant on human rights and social justice issues in The Gambia (West Africa), China, and the United States.

Linda Smith
President and Founder
Shared Hope International

In 1998, while a member of the U.S. Congress, Linda Smith traveled to Falkland Road in Mumbai, India – one of the worst brothel districts in the world. The hopeless faces of desperate women and children forced into prostitution compelled her to found Shared Hope International. Believing that authentic rescue requires restoration also, she focused Shared Hope’s efforts around “one life at a time” and what it would take to make that life whole again – a safe home, education, spiritual renewal, and life skills. From the first Village of Hope until today, she has kept Shared Hope aligned with that goal.To build momentum in the international anti-trafficking movement, she founded the War Against Trafficking Alliance in 2001, which two years later co-sponsored a World Summit with the U.S. Department of State.