Biography
Before joining Seattle University School of Law, Professor Batra Kashyap was an immigration attorney at the law firm of Gibbs, Houston & Pauw in Seattle, where she represented detained and non-detained individuals in removal proceedings. She began her legal career as an Equal Justice Works Fellow in New York City, where she represented immigrant youth in foster care.
Professor Batra Kashyap has been a Visiting Clinician with the Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic at Seattle University School of Law, where she teaches the Immigrant Justice Clinic.
Her scholarship is focused on the intersections between immigration law and Critical Race Theory. Her law review articles have been published in the California Law Review (online), Tulane Law Review, Fordham Urban Law Journal, NYU Review of Law & Social Change, and Michigan Journal of Race & the Law. And her article documenting her experiences community organizing in the South Asian domestic worker community in New York City was published in an immigrant labor studies textbook, The New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models For Labor Organizing.
Professor Batra Kashyap has served on the Board of the Northwest Immigrant's Rights Project (NWIRP) for nearly a decade. She has also served on the boards of two organizations dedicated to ending violence in South Asian communities: Sakhi for South Asian Women in New York City, and API-Chaya in Washington State.
She received her J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and her B.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.
Publications
- Monika Batra Kashyap, Toward a Race-Conscious Critique of Mental Health-Related Exclusionary Immigration Laws, 26 MICH. J. RACE & L. (Special Michigan Issue on Critical Race Theory, 2021).
- Monika Batra Kashyap, Heartless Immigration Law: Rubbing Salt into the Wounds of Survivors of Domestic Violence, 95 TULANE L.R.,1 (December 2020).
- Monika Batra Kashyap, U.S. Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and the Racially Disparate Impacts of COVID-19, 11 CALIF. L. REV. ONLINE 517 (Nov. 2020).
- Monika Batra Kashyap, Rebellious Reflection: Supporting Community Lawyering Practice, 43 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & & Soc. Change, 403 (July 2019).
- Monika Batra Kashyap, Unsettling Immigration Laws: Settler Colonialism and the U.S. Immigration Legal System, 46 Fordham Urb. L. J., 548 (June 2019).
- Monika Batra, Organizing in the South Asian Domestic Worker Community: Pushing the Boundaries of the Law and Organizing Project, in The New Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models for Labor Organizing (Sarumathi Jayaraman & Immanuel Ness eds., August 2005).
