Michael Kagan

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Director, UNLV Immigration Clinic

Professor of Law

Expertise: Immigration Law, International Human Rights Law, Administrative Law

Biography

Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, teaches administrative law, professional responsibility, international human rights and immigration law. In both his research and his clinical teaching, Kagan focuses on the tension between immigration law and civil rights.

Kagan has been published by numerous top law reviews and journals and wrote several of the most widely cited articles in the fields of international refugee and asylum law, which have been relied on by courts in multiple countries. Kagan’s research on credibility assessment in asylum cases “guided most subsequent research and analysis on the topic,” according to a 2012 commentary. He is frequently interviewed on immigration issues by local, national and global news media, and is a frequent Op-Ed writer, with his work appearing in The Washington Post, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, World Politics Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Before coming to UNLV's Boyd School of Law, Kagan spent 10 years building legal aid programs for refugees throughout the Middle East and Asia, and lived in London, Cairo, Beirut and Jerusalem. He held teaching positions at Tel Aviv University and the American University in Cairo. His role in expanding refugee legal aid in the global south was profiled in Zachary Kaufman’s Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Atrocities (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012).

Education

J.D., University of Michigan Law School
B.A., Northwestern University

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Michael Kagan In The News

After years of Texas being the first stop for people illegally crossing the border, Lone Star State officials are volunteering to let President-elect Donald Trump use a state ranch as the last place immigrants set foot on American soil before being forcibly deported.On Tuesday, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered Trump a 1,400-acre ranch near the border in South Texas to host a mass deportation facility. Buckingham bought the ranch earlier this year, she said, because the previous owner refused to let Texas build a border wall across it.

Nevada’s captains of industry and political leaders are doing little, if anything, to prepare for the potential economic hit as well as the human toll of President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to deport at least 11 million undocumented immigrants, including 189,000 who live in Nevada.

With Donald Trump in line to be the next president of the United States, immigrant communities across Nevada and the nation are bracing for his promise to carry out the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” removing millions of immigrants in mass roundups and raids. Among the most immediate effects of such a move would be to tear Nevada families apart, experts predict.

Giddel Contreras lives in the Bronx, works as a chef at a hotel-resort in Queens and is as much a New Yorker as the next guy. But the Honduran native's decision to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border back in 1995 means he may now be a target for deportation – despite being married more than a decade to a U.S. citizen, living and working legally in the U.S. for more than 25 years and having a child who's a U.S. citizen.