Arifa Raza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race and Ethnic Studies. She received a a J.D. from UCLA in 2015 where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review, and a Ph. D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Riverside in 2018. She was also a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for 2022-2023. Dr. Raza's research examines the criminalization and racialization of immigrants through humanitarian laws, focusing on  relief for victims of human trafficking and immigrant children. Her scholarship is grounded in her experience as a non-profit immigration attorney where she specialized in deportation defense and representation of detained individuals. She has practiced before the Los Angeles and El Paso immigration courts as well as the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Select Publications

• Forthcoming, Raza, A. "The Rise and Fall of Cibola: An Examination of Transgender Migrant Detention in the Age of the Immigrant Detention-Industrial Complex." Social Justice
• Raza, A. "Filling the Gap between the T-Visa and Asylum Law: A Call to Expand the T-Visa to Cover Extraterritorial Trafficking." BU Pub. Int. LJ 31 (2022): 171.
• Raza, A. "Racial Difference and White Supremacy in the Legislative Intent of the Trafficking Victims  Protection Act," in Kempadoo, K. and  Shih, E eds. White supremacy, racism and the coloniality of anti-trafficking. Taylor & Francis, 2022.
• Raza, A. "Legacies of the racialization of incarceration: From convict-lease to the prison industrial complex." JIJIS 11 (2011): 159.