Omar de la Cruz

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Staff Attorney

Pronouns: He/Him

Omar focuses full time on providing technical assistance and training to advocates by drafting practice advisories, presenting at webinars and in-person trainings, and staffing CGRS’s Attorney of the Day program. Omar additionally works on monitoring and updating CGRS’s Expert Witness and Country Conditions Database.

Omar was previously employed as a senior program associate on the Acacia Center for Justice’s Legal Orientation Program (LOP) team, where he collaborated with legal services providers across the country to ensure that local LOP services were running effectively and that programs were responsive to the needs of people in immigration detention. Prior to his work at Acacia, Omar worked as a senior attorney on the Abolishing Immigration Detention Team at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, California. At Centro Legal, Omar served as the legal coordinator of the Alameda County rapid response hotline and represented detained adults before the immigration court, Board of Immigration Appeals, and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Omar additionally worked to uplift the demands of detained advocates challenging detention conditions and calling for collective liberation and an end to immigration detention.

During law school Omar externed at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Public Advocates.

Languages: English, Spanish

Education

University of California, Davis, School of Law, J.D.

University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A. in Sociology

Admitted to practice law in California

Honors

California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation:  2018 Outstanding Community Service Award