The Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy welcomed Marielena Hincapié, John W. Nixon Public Policy fellow at the Brooks School, to Willard Straight Hall on Cornell’s Ithaca campus on Monday, April 7, for the 2025 Nixon Lecture “From Crisis to Renewal: Immigration, Inclusion, and the Next 250 Years.”

Hincapié’s remarks connected her personal narrative as an immigrant from Colombia to a 250-year overview of U.S. immigration policy while foregrounding today’s most pressing immigration policy debates. The event drew well over 100 attendees and featured a Q&A session with students who had studied immigration law and policy at Brooks.

“We are so lucky to have Marielena working with our students and sharing her expertise and wisdom on one of the most critical public policy issues of our time,” said Alexandra Dufresne, Director of the Brooks State Policy Advocacy Clinic and Co-Director of the Migration and Human Rights Program at Cornell Law School.

Hincapié, a legal and political strategist in the social justice movement and a leading voice in the national conversation on immigration, served as executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center (NILC).

Hincapié has also played a key role in supporting youth leaders in the creation and successful implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and co-founded the Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) coalition. She brings a bilingual and bicultural perspective to her work in the areas of equity, justice, and democracy. She is writing a forthcoming book Becoming America: A Personal History of a Nation’s Immigration Wars (Flatiron Books, 2026).

“I want to thank the Brooks School’s faculty and students for engaging in difficult discussions about immigration policy,” Hincapié said. “As I said in my lecture, public policy and law are snapshots in time of a moment when policies and laws are created. But to move society forward you have to create the social and cultural conditions for more inclusive laws and policies that function well for all stakeholders, and Cornell students are the ones who will make that happen in our country.”