who we are
Ana María Rivera-Forastieri is the Migrant Justice Organizing Director at Community Justice Exchange (CJE) where she supports local, regional, and national efforts that are challenging immigration enforcement, detention, and surveillance. Prior to joining CJE, Ana María served as the Co-Director of the Connecticut Bail Fund. She has over eight years of experience in organizing, leading policy and legislative campaigns, and advocacy in the area of migrant and workers’ rights. Her primary focus has been on the growing intersection of the criminal punishment and immigration systems. She holds a B.A. from the Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras and a Juris Doctor from Tulane University Law School.
Ana María Rivera-Forastieri
Migrant Justice Organizing Director
Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen roots for the Wisconsin Badgers, lives in Boston, and is learning all the time about liberation, solidarity, courage, and cowardice. She is the Migrant Justice Organizer with the National Bail Fund Network and previously did faith-based justice work and youth organizing. She is a Unitarian Universalist minister and part of the founding team of the Beyond Bond Fund in Boston. She is passionate about progressive organizing in the Vietnamese American community, and building power across prison walls.
Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen
Migrant Justice Organizer
Atara Rich-Shea is the Pre-Trial Freedom Organizer at the Community Justice Exchange. She supports organizers and organizations working to end pretrial detention and supervision in the criminal legal system. She also provides capacity, technical, and systems coaching for bail and bond funds in the National Bail Fund Network as well as for bail and bond formations responding to protest criminalization. For five years she was the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund where she oversaw the daily bail operations and larger ongoing projects aimed at ending the unjust system of pretrial incarceration and supervision in Massachusetts, including co-organizing the CourtWatch MA project. She was previously a Staff Attorney at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts where defended indigent clients in both District and Superior courts. Atara has worked with court involved youth and survivors of sexual violence. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and her J.D. from Suffolk University.
Atara Rich-Shea
Pretrial Freedom Organizer
Hyejin Shim is based in Oakland, California, where she has worked and organized around gender-based violence and criminalization for the past thirteen years. Her efforts have long been situated in feminist and abolitionist approaches to power and violence, and as CJE’s Gender Justice Organizer, she works to synthesize them in service of a more robust vision of prison abolition. Hyejin’s political orientation is rooted in challenging and complicating the myths of perfect victimhood and innocence, towards an unwavering support of the right to resist oppression. She is a co-founder of the national organizing project Survived and Punished, which advocates for the unconditional freedom of incarcerated victims/survivors of domestic and sexual abuse.
Hyejin Shim
Gender Justice Organizer
Daniella is the Immigration Bond Associate at Community Justice Exchange. For the last two years, Daniella has been co-running the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a hotline for people held in for-profit detention centers across the country, connecting hundreds of individuals with community bond funds to facilitate their release. Daniella has worked as a community organizer for several local and national groups, including CISPES—the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador—where she witnessed firsthand the impact of US interference in local elections and saw how free trade agreements end up hurting workers on the ground in Central America. She has a Masters in Media Studies from The New School, where she focused on human rights and the media, and a BA in English from Vassar College.
Daniella Ponet
Immigration Bond Associate
James Kilgore is a Building Community Power Fellow at Community Justice Exchange who is based in Urbana, Illinois. He has written widely on issues of mass incarceration, Southern African History, as well as published four politically-charged novels. Since being released from prison in 2009, he has focused extensively on the challenges of electronic monitoring and other forms of e-carceration and mass supervision. He directed the Challenging E-Carceration project at Media Justice from 2017-2023. Apart from this work, he is the Director of Advocacy and Outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois, an organization led by formerly incarcerated people that provides support, assistance and political education to people coming home from prison. His 2015 book, Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, won a National Book Foundation Literature for Justice Award. He is the father of two sons, grandpa to two granddaughters, and the life partner of historian Teresa Barnes.
James Kilgore
Building Community Power Fellow
Mario Perez is a community organizer and leader who has been directly impacted by the deportation system. Since his release from ICE detention in 2018, he has dedicated his work advocating for migrant rights through storytelling and narrative shifting. Mario joined Alejandra Pablos' Support Don't Deport Collective in 2020, a group of activists and storytellers advocating for the release of those facing deportation. At CJE, Mario is working to build power to abolish data criminalization, surveillance, and all forms of social control imposed on migrant communities. In his spare time, Mario enjoys going to live shows, museums, and local art walks.
Mario Perez
Resisting Surveillance Fellow
Puck Lo (she/they) is a researcher whose work seeks to understand power and systems of state, economic, racialized and gendered violence in order to imagine new conditions of possibility. Puck has spent two decades participating in social movements and came of age organizing independent media centers from NYC to Hong Kong. After running a worker-run, international daily radio news show for several years, Puck graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and completed an MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford University. Puck's non-fiction writing and films explore dystopias, carceral and liberatory states and structures, political memory and its embodiment. Puck is based in Brooklyn/ Lenapehoking, New York.
Puck Lo
Research Director
Yazan Zahzah, M.A., is a Palestinian organizer, community-based researcher, and longtime educator. Their work focuses on the proliferation of the terror-industrial complex with special emphasis on migration, surveillance, gender, and social welfare programming. They have co-authored community reports, academic articles, and book chapters surveying the various surveillance and repression tactics utilized by the US government and its allies. Yazan is a longtime member of the Palestinian Youth Movement and a co-founder of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Outside of work, they enjoy gardening, card games, and playing music.
Yazan Zahzah
Data Liberation Organizer
Mon is the Community Power Organizer and is a writer, organizer and artist originally from India, based in Lenapehoking (NYC) focusing on issues around jail closure, jail expansion and construction, abolition feminism, data ownership, disability justice and anti-caste solidarity. As part of the Community Justice Exchange Building Community Power Fellowship, she will be undertaking the further expansion of the No New Jails National Network, a network of campaigns across the country fighting to close jails and stop new jail construction. More of her work can be seen at pinkmohapatra.com.
Mon Mohapatra
Community Power Organizer
Rachel Foran is an abolitionist and organizer based in New York. At the Community Justice Exchange, Rachel creates resources and supports local organizers in their organizing campaigns to dismantle the criminal punishment system. Before joining CJE, Rachel was the Managing Director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, where she oversaw staff, programs, and advocacy projects, including community partnerships and coalitions. She is a founding member of Court Watch NYC, a community court monitoring and prosecutor accountability project, and organizes with Survived and Punished NY, a grassroots abolitionist group dedicated to freeing criminalized survivors of domestic and gender based violence from prison. She holds a masters degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and a BA in religion from Carleton College.
Rachel Foran
Organizing Director
Zohra Ahmed is an attorney and an assistant professor at Boston University School of Law. She has worked as a public defender in New York City and as a human rights attorney defending death row prisoners in Tanzania, incarcerated survivors of domestic violence in New York State, Syrians under Israeli occupation in the Golan, and communities attacked by U.S. drone strikes. At CJE, she supports organizers in their efforts to challenge criminal courts.
Zohra Ahmed
Strategic Advisor
Pilar has worked as an organizer and strategist across the social justice movement for over twenty years. She has a wide range of experience as an advocate for systems change having worked with community-based organizations, labor unions, and elected leaders, always with a focus on building grassroots community power.
Pilar is the founder and Director of the Community Justice Exchange. In 2016, Pilar launched the National Bail Fund Network, a collaborative partnership for the 50+ community bail funds working across the country to end detention in both the criminal legal and immigration systems.
Pilar served as an organizer, strategist, and leader in the labor movement for many years. She was the Political Director of the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada and later served as the Deputy Director of Politics & Communications for UNITE HERE, the national union of workers in the hospitality industry. In 2011, Pilar was awarded a Practitioner Fellowship at Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor where she focused on new strategies for organizing among unemployed workers in the post-recession economy.
Pilar has worked on a wide range of local, state, and federal election campaigns with an emphasis on creating long‐term civic engagement strategies for communities previously left out of the electoral process. She served as the Civic Engagement Director at the New Organizing Institute where she worked with community-based organizations across the country building people-powered campaigns. From 2012-2014, she was the Campaign Manager and Senior Advisor to Congressman Steven Horsford (NV‐4). Pilar also worked to launch the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an initiative of the Women Donors Network that is focused on removing barriers that keep women and people of color from positions of elected leadership.
Pilar grew up in rural Northern New Mexico and holds a master’s degree in Public Health from UC Berkeley and a BA in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico.
Pilar Weiss
Director
Tiffany Richards works with the bail & bond funds in the National Bail Fund Network in onboarding to the Bail Fund App, a CJE owned database built for and by bail funds to manage bail & bond requests . She is a graduate of the Columbia Justice through Code Bootcamp Intensive, and received her certification in Data Analytics through a Google & Shopify scholarship. She has worked as an Associate Engineer with CJE partner Emergent Works on creating customized tech solutions for grassroots organizations. She learned immense skills while working with Emergent Works, and is really enjoying her new role.
Tiffany Richards
Movement Technology Associate
Advisory Board
Andrea James, National Council of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls
Brenda Choresi Carter, Women Donors Network Reflective Democracy Campaign
Jee Park, Innocence Project-New Orleans
Jocelyn Simonson, Brooklyn Law School
Samah Sisay, Center for Constitutional Rights
Setareh Ghandehari, Detention Watch Network
*Organizational affiliation for identification only