Trial Division of the Public Defender Service | Washington D.C. 

Tala Alfoqaha is a third-year law student at Harvard. Since beginning law school, she has worked at the intersection of individualized public defense and system-wide criminal justice reform. Her work at Harvard Defenders exposed her to the devastating collateral consequences of a criminal charge, her summer at the Federal Public Defenders of Minnesota demonstrated the transformative potential of compassionate and client-centered defense; and her time at the MacArthur Justice Center allowed her to operationalize her knowledge of criminal law in service of system-wide reform against police brutality and mass incarceration.

Raised by Palestinian immigrants in the Minneapolis metro area, she believes that the local is intimately connected with the global. As such, she understands her work against over-carceralism in the United States to part of a broader struggle happening around the world.

Tala graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2021 with a double major in Mathematics and Global Studies. Throughout college, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of a student magazine and spent her summers working at The Advocates for Human Rights, the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

This summer, she will be at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she will have the opportunity to practice client-centered, holistic defense for individuals caught within the criminal legal system.