Sara Osman
Sara is a
Law Clerk for The Advocates for Human Rights' Refugee & Immigrant
Program. Sara's work focuses on supporting and representing Unaccompanied
Children in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, through a Universal
Representation model. She is working to provide direct representation,
individual consultations and conduct community outreach and education to
unaccompanied children and community partners.
Sara is a
graduate of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. There, she
earned certificates of specialization in Race and the Law, Public Interest and
Social Justice, and International Law. During law school, she was a clinic
researcher with the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Sara was selected as
a 2021 Berkeley Law Human Rights Center fellow, where she worked with the
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota on the community defense team and conducted
research on the detention conditions of Somali detainees in Minnesota. She was
an inaugural Take Back Tech fellow with Just Futures Law, researching
surveillance tech in Georgia. She was also a legal intern at the Center for
Constitutional Rights, as well as a legal intern for Reprieve UK on their
Africa team, and a graduate student researcher for Dr. john powell at the UC Berkeley
Othering and Belonging Institute. She served on an advisory board for the No
Kids in Prisons campaign with the Legal Rights Center in Minnesota.
Prior to
law school, she earned her Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate
School of Education and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota, where she
studied African-American and African Studies, and Global Studies with a
concentration on human rights in sub-Saharan Africa. As part of her studies,
she studied human rights and justice abroad in Nepal, Jordan, and Chile.
Before coming to The Advocates, Sara was a Berkeley Law Public Interest Fellow with Equal Rights Beyond Borders in Greece. There, she provided legal support and direct client services to asylum seekers arriving on the Greek island of Chios and conducted research on the experiences of Somali refugees, particularly as it relates to surveillance and gender-based violence. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at both the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and the University of Athens Institute for Migration and Diaspora Studies, with whom she has a research paper pending publication on the safe third country concept and status of Somali asylum seekers in Greece.
