Sofia Casini

Director of Monitoring and Community Advocacy | She/her

Sofia’s work with Freedom for Immigrants focuses on developing community-based visitation and human rights monitoring programs in detention centers throughout the south.

She also leads efforts to connect those formerly detained and their families with others sharing lived experience to create networks across the country. She believes there is no voice of the voiceless, only community-wide responsibility in creating avenues for people’s voices to be heard and supporting those most impacted in leading the movement work.

Sofia holds two decades of experience working with immigrants, refugees, and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. She also brings deeply personal experience, with her own father, an Italian national, suffering detention and deportation due to unjust criminal laws and immigration policies. Her own journey has led to the belief that no one is disposable, and our movement must hold space for intersectional understanding, healing and liberation.

Prior to joining Freedom for Immigrants, Sofia served as immigrant rights organizer for Grassroots Leadership, where she scaled the detention visitation program in size and impact and developed an organizing group of formerly detained women and their families. She also lead the Family Detention Coalition’s efforts to squash harmful policies at the Texas Legislature and built a thriving hotline for immigrants entangled in the deportation machine. Previous work includes advocacy for vulnerable populations within the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program in West Africa, including “rebel wives” barred entry on terrorist grounds, despite explicit gender-based violence, and unaccompanied minors separated from their families while caught in the crossfire of US immigration policy.

Past positions also include advocate with the National Domestic Violence Hotline, community organizer with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and executive director of both Refugee Services of Texas and AVANCE. Sofia holds an M.A. in International Migration and Development from the University of Amsterdam and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Evergreen State College.