Rebecca Sharpless

Professor Rebecca Sharpless is the founding director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Miami, where she teaches immigration law and researches the intersections of immigration, criminal law, and progressive lawyering. Her scholarship critiques the traditional immigration reform framework that contrasts model immigrants with those convicted of crimes, advocating for reforms informed by racial and class critiques of the U.S. criminal justice system. In the Immigration Clinic, she and her students represent low-income noncitizens in removal proceedings and engage in litigation before U.S. district courts and courts of appeals.

Her book, Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air (University of California Press, 2024), explores the U.S. immigration enforcement system through the stories of Somali men on a controversial ICE Air deportation flight. Previously, she served as a supervising attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice and held leadership roles in organizations such as the South Florida Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. Sharpless has received numerous awards, including the 2021 Provost’s Teaching Award and the 2019 Arthur C. Helton Memorial Human Rights Award. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.