Rebecca Heller

Becca Heller is the Executive Director and co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), the legal advocacy organization for refugees and displaced people in need of a safe place to call home. Founded in 2008 after Heller's first year at Yale Law School, IRAP has provided legal aid to over 30,000 individuals whose lives were in immediate danger, focusing on those most vulnerable: unaccompanied children, women at risk of trafficking or sexual and gender-based violence, LGBTI individuals, U.S. military allies, and survivors of torture. The organization's mission is to create and enforce a system of legal and human rights benefiting over 350,000 vulnerable individuals in search of safety. IRAP was the first organization to mobilize more than 1,600 volunteer lawyers at airports nationwide to defend the rights of those affected by President Trump's Muslim ban and is the lead plaintiff in the first lawsuit challenging the order in its entirety. Through impact litigation and advocacy, IRAP has won systemic reforms aiding over 170,000 displaced persons and secured the enactment of twelve pieces of U.S. Congressional legislation.

Heller's interest in refugee legal challenges began during a trip to Jordan after her first year of law school, where refugee families identified legal assistance as their most urgent need. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2010, where she participated in multiple human rights clinics and served as Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law. Prior to law school, she lived and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa for two years, including as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, and graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2005. Her exceptional work has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, the Charles Bronfman Prize, a Skadden Fellowship, an Echoing Green Fellowship, and recognition as Foreign Policy's Citizen Diplomat of the Year. She was a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School from 2010 to 2018, is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has engaged more than 2,400 law students and lawyers from 30 law schools and over 95 international law firms in human rights advocacy.