With more than 12 years of experience in the immigration field, Juan joins Duke Law from the North Carolina Justice Center (NCJC), one of the state’s leading nonprofit organizations. As a Mexican immigrant, his commitment to immigrant rights is both professionally grounded and personally meaningful.
For the past nine years, Juan served as a paralegal at the NCJC, collaborating with attorneys and advocates on impact litigation and policy initiatives supporting immigrant communities across North Carolina. In this role, he worked on matters involving removal defense, asylum claims, U visas, and family-based immigration petitions, and helped lead community education efforts to ensure immigrants understood their legal rights. In addition to his primary role, Juan served on the North Carolina Justice Center’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action committee, working closely with organizational leadership to help ensure that hiring practices were equitable, inclusive, and consistently applied.
Juan is excited to join Duke Law and the Immigrant Rights Clinic, where he looks forward to contributing to the Clinic’s mission and learning alongside a passionate and dedicated team. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling throughout different regions of Mexico to learn about his cultural heritage and spending time outdoors with his dog.
Juan received his B.S. in Biology and Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
