Cara E. Palmer is a Staff Attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina's Immigration Pathways for Victims (IMMPAV). She assists immigrants who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking with applications for T nonimmigrant status, U nonimmigrant status, and Violence Against Women Act self-petitions, as well as applications for employment authorization and lawful permanent residency.As a high school student sifting through her father’s vinyl collection, Cara decided that a record by the 1960’s folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary deserved a listen. She stumbled upon “El Salvador,” a condemnation of human rights violations in El Salvador during the Cold War, linking history with emotion in passionate protest. She has worked for over ten years with Music to Life, a nonprofit organization founded by Peter, Paul & Mary's Noel “Paul” Stookey and his daughter, Elizabeth Sunde Stookey. Music to Life is dedicated to infusing music for social change with new relevance by harnessing its power to serve contemporary causes. Cara devoted her undergraduate and graduate studies to the history of U.S. foreign policies toward Latin America from a human rights perspective. She traveled to Nicaragua and El Salvador, realizing both the value of understanding current human rights violations from a historical perspective and the power of lawyers within the regional human rights community to effect positive change. She earned a B.A. in History with a Minor in Human Rights from the University of Southern California, an M.A. in History with a Graduate Certificate in Human Rights from the University of Connecticut, and two Certificates of Attendance from American University Washington College of Law’s Program of Advanced Studies on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.Cara earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) in 2020. During her time at GULC, she interned at the Due Process of Law Foundation in 2018 and at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights in 2019; she participated in GULC's Human Rights Institute's (HRI) Human Rights Associates Program during the 2017-2018 academic year; she held a student research assistantship with HRI during the 2018-2019 academic year; that same year, she participated in HRI's Fact-Finding Practicum, investigating and writing a human rights report on vulnerabilities to forced labor in the Hawaiian fishing industry; and in fall 2019, as a student representative in GULC's Center for Applied Legal Studies, she won asylum for a Honduran refugee on the grounds of religious persecution.
Listed skills include Editing, History, U.S. Foreign Relations, Writing, and 30 others.