Rebecca Merton

Senior Visitation & Monitoring Strategist | She/her

Rebecca is committed to advancing immigrants’ rights and ending the immigration detention system as well as all other forms of mass incarceration and institutionalization.

Rebecca joined Freedom for Immigrants in 2016, and her work is primarily focused on monitoring and reporting on conditions in detention facilities and supporting volunteers in addressing structural racism in their direct service and advocacy work.

Before joining the team, Rebecca worked as a volunteer legal assistant and interpreter for the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project at the country’s largest immigrant detention center located in Dilley, Texas. In 2013, Rebecca was awarded a Frederick Sheldon Fellowship for a year of purposeful travel. While living in Argentina, Rebecca became inspired by the country’s groundbreaking immigration law, which establishes the right to migrate as essential and inalienable.

As a research assistant for the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Buenos Aires, Rebecca visited psychiatric institutions and group homes to report on the barriers that people with psychosocial disabilities face in exercising their rights to health care, legal capacity, access to justice, housing, employment, and social security; the findings were published in the 2015 book Cruzar el Muro.

Rebecca’s other experiences in anti-eviction and public benefits assistance, positive youth development, and disability rights impact litigation have helped her develop the intersectional lens through which she approaches her advocacy work. Rebecca graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in social studies and completed a postgraduate program in mental health and human rights at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.