Holly S. Cooper

Holly S. Cooper, Co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic, is a nationally recognized expert on immigration detention issues and on the immigration consequences of criminal convictions.

Cooper is a graduate of UC Davis School of Law, where she was on the Board of the King Hall Legal Foundation and an active member of the National Lawyers Guild. She received her B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. As an undergraduate, she also studied Political Science and Economics at the University of Padua in Italy. She speaks, reads and writes in both Spanish and Italian. 

After law school, Cooper worked for Reed Smith LLP (formerly Crosby, Heafey Roach & May LLP), The Law Offices of Fellom & Solorio, and the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project. At the Florence Project, Cooper started the Detained Immigrant Children’s Rights Project — the first friend of the court program for detained immigrant children — in collaboration with the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Cooper joined the School of Law faculty in 2006. In the Immigration Law Clinic, she focuses on advocating for the rights of detained immigrants. In 2011, she was the recipient of the King Hall Legal Foundation’s Outstanding Alumni Award and the Carol Weiss King award from the National Lawyers Guild.

She has been a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (“AILA”) since 1999 and was appointed for two years to the AILA Liaison Committee to the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge and Board of Immigration Appeals. She also served for a full five-year tenure on the ABA’s Immigration Commission and served on the Immigration Committee under the Criminal Justice Section of the ABA for nearly a decade.

Cooper is known for her involvement in suing the U.S. government to protect the basic human rights of immigrant children who Border Patrol detained during the last Trump administration. The children, including infants, lacked adequate food, water, and sanitation — caring for each other when they became ill — and were held weeks beyond the 72-hour limit. More recently, Cooper and the clinic won the class action case, Lucas R. v. Azar. The case secured the right to procedural protections when the federal government drugs detained immigrant children. It also won procedural protections for disabled children and children who are in jail-like conditions, as well as greater protections for children to be released to family and increased access to lawyers.

Cooper has served as an expert consultant to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for their reports on immigration detention conditions and the rights of immigrant detainees. She also provides expert legal advice for Kern and Santa Barbara County Public Defenders’ Offices.