Meghan Phillips

About

Meghan Phillips is from a military family, and after her father’s deployment to Iraq, she developed a desire to one day work in diplomacy and international affairs.  To pursue this calling, she attended the University of Notre Dame where she majored in Political Science and French and wrote her senior thesis about the integration of immigrants in France. During her junior year, she studied abroad at Sciences-Po in Paris, France where she studied comparative politics and international relations classes in French. After graduating in 2011, she worked with the Victim/Witness Division of Ohio’s Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office.  In this role, she would travel to area hospitals to meet survivors of sexual assault to provide them with support and information during their forensic exams. She also volunteered with the Miami Valley’s Catholic Social Services’ Refugee Resettlement division where she assisted with immigration paperwork, data entry, and donation tracking. Her work with the Prosecutor’s office and the Refugee Resettlement division led to the realization that her abstract hope to work in foreign policy needed some concrete knowledge that only an education in law could provide. She decided to pursue her law degree at William and Mary, and has focused her legal studies on international law, immigration, and human rights.  Last summer, she interned in Cape Town, South Africa with People Against Suffering, Oppression, and Poverty (PASSOP) where she assisted with PASSOP’s mission to fight for the legal rights of asylum-seekers, refugees, and migrants in South Africa.  As she is fluent in French, she was particularly excited to use her language skills to help refugees from the DRC and other francophone countries in Africa.

This summer, Meghan will be interning with Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN) in Atlanta, Georgia.  GAIN provides pro bono legal representation through volunteer attorneys to asylum seekers, immigrant victims of human trafficking, domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes.  In addition to providing direct representation, GAIN also partners with Georgia’s legal community by referring cases to the region’s law firms.