Up and Down in 2025
2025 was one of the hardest years of my professional life. 2026 will mark 10 years since I graduated from law school, and my career has not been the smooth, linear journey I hoped for or expected. Nonetheless, and particularly because 2025 is now firmly in the rearview mirror, I feel grateful.
I am grateful for my AJA Advocacy Solutions clients and partners who allowed me to serve them through 2025 by providing:
Incisive policy briefs that call out federal and state attacks on immigrant communities:
Insightful thought leadership on Black immigration issues on the SYNARCHY with Adina Appelbaum and Intersections with Dr. Felecia Russell podcasts and with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in a two-part alumni Q&A blog; and
Interdisciplinary academic guest lectures at the UCLA School of Law, UC Irvine, and University of Michigan.
AJA is my part-time labor of love, and I hope 2026 will bring more opportunities to support clients aligned with my values.
I am grateful to end the year with an incredible new opportunity as Director of Policy Advocacy at Legal Aid DC. In just a month on the job, I already feel positively challenged, energized, and excited about learning many new policy issue areas and digging deeper into what can be done locally to protect immigrants in DC. I haven’t felt any of those things in a long time from a full-time role.
I am grateful to have experienced a second round of being a federal employee, even though it meant being exposed to the demoralizing efforts of DOGE, Schedule F, the Fork in the Road, and more. Until the second Trump Administration, I envisioned what could’ve been a lengthy career pivot into ethics that could’ve represented a new tool in my arsenal. I made a plan and was executing it, until the wrecking ball of 47 came swinging. I have mourned that plan, but grief never really stops.
I am grateful for every “no” I received this year, even from organizations I have longed to join. I applied to 104 jobs in the corporate, nonprofit/state or local government, and private law firm sectors. I was interviewed by 13. I made it to the final round for just 3. Compared to past job searches, this was my worst yield. I won’t pretend to have enjoyed the constant rejection. It knocked the wind out of me and made me question every academic and career choice I’ve ever made. I lost sight of what I wanted, of how to describe my experiences, and of my own self-belief in what I think I can contribute to a workplace. And yet I can manage to feel grateful that the one “yes” I received was the right one. I am grateful for that serendipity, and I pray it comes to everyone I know who is navigating this job market—especially Black women.
I expect 2026 and every year after it to be trying. We are in for at least a generation of pain that I hope we can survive. As I enter 2026, and for the rest of my life, I’ll return again and again to Mariame Kaba’s philosophy of hope as a discipline:
"I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism.
I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad. The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but that actually it was really, really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced it all the time.
And so, I bowed down to that. I heard that many years ago and then I felt the sense of, Oh my god. That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.”
