Grace Benton is an immigration attorney with a background in refugee rights, forced displacement, and education in the Middle East. As a staff attorney at the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice, she provides direct representation to non-citizens, mentors law students, drafts impact litigation documents, and coordinates outreach to bring the Center’s wide-ranging work and expertise to the forefront of the national conversation on immigrant justice.
Grace has worked on immigrant and refugee rights issues in the U.S., Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq, with organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. As the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship through which she taught high school in Amman, Jordan, Grace co-founded a night school for marginalized urban refugees. Prior to coming to Maryland Carey Law, Grace represented non-citizens in Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) detention in their deportation cases as an Immigrant Justice Corps fellow at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.
Grace has published scholarly and legal articles on issues ranging from U.S. immigration detention, the legality of sanctuary cities, access to interpretation in asylum proceedings, internal displacement in Iraq, refugee resettlement, and refugee rights across the Middle East. Grace has taught short courses on international protections for refugees and presented her research in numerous fora, including the IOM, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, World Bank, International Association for the Study of Forced Displacement, the Qatar Foundation, and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her research interests include exploring notions of belonging and integration among immigrant communities and examining the historical underpinnings of the U.S. immigration system and detention apparatus. She is particularly interested in and committed to centering the lived experiences of displaced people and immigrants.
Grace holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, an M.A. in Arab Studies and a Certificate in Refugee and Humanitarian Emergencies from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a B.A. in International Studies, Spanish, and Arabic from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In her free time, Grace enjoys hiking, baking sourdough, and spending time with her cat Mishmish and dog Aloo.