Fatma E. Marouf, Attorney at Law
Fatma E. Marouf graduated magna cum laude from Yale University
and received her J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, where
she served as an Executive Editor of the Human Rights Journal and
a Senior Editor of the International Law Journal. During law school,
Fatma worked as an Equal Justice Fellow at Hale and Dorr Legal Services
Center and received a Chayes International Fellowship to work with
the World Bank’s Corruption and Fraud Investigations Unit in Washington,
DC. She also helped organize an international conference on “Sexual
Rites, Human Rights,” which explored the ways in which sexuality
is implicated in many of the major rights struggles of our times.
Prior to practicing immigration law, Fatma clerked for the Honorable
Consuelo B. Marshall, then Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of
California, and worked for two years as a lawyer with California
Rural Legal Assistance in Stockton, CA, where she advocated for
the rights of low income people in housing, education and public
benefits. One of the major cases she worked on was Price v. City
of Stockton, which succeeded in obtaining relocation assistance
for hundreds of displaced people and helped protect numerous low
income residential units from extinction.
Fatma now practices exclusively in the areas of immigration and
nationality law. She is particularly interested in immigration law’s
intersection with constitutional and criminal law, and has handled
numerous cases involving issues such as the retroactive application
of immigration laws and administrative decisions, the sweeping definitions
of “terrorist activity,” and the deportation of permanent residents
based on old criminal convictions. As an impassioned advocate of
women’s rights, Fatma also handles many asylum cases involving persecution
based on gender, sexual orientation, and female genital cutting
(FGM). She has significant appellate experience representing clients
before the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals.
In addition, Fatma has worked with refugee and migrant populations
abroad. She spent several months with a human rights organization
in the West Bank researching water problems facing Palestinian refugees
and the issue of settlements. She also worked on a joint project
with the Legal Resources Centre in Ghana around access to health
care and sanitation in an impoverished migrant community. The project
challenged the user fee system of health care and its impact on
the poor.
Fatma volunteers on the Board of the Highlander
Research and Education Center in New Market, TN, an organization
that acts as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building
in Appalachia and the Southern part of the United States. Highlander
is currently doing cutting edge work building bridges and developing
leadership among immigrant communities.
Fatma is of Turkish-Egyptian origin. She is a member of the California
Bar, the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles County Bar Association,
and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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