Diego Paz

Diego (he/him) is pursuing his B.A. in Political Science and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale College with a Human Rights Certificate through the Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is the son of an immigrant and grew up crossing the U.S.-Mexico border daily from Tijuana to San Diego to attend school. As an interdisciplinary learner dedicated to the public interest, his research sits at the intersection of human mobility, critical border studies, and political mobilization, with particular interest in how migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers today are responding to changing law, borders, and state-sanctioned practices of immigration enforcement.

His yearlong senior essay, supervised by Prof. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, examines migrant mobilization for cross-border space in the age of hyper-militarization at the highly trafficked, westmost edge of the U.S.–Mexico border. In particular, Paz is working with Friends of International Friendship Park, a non-profit working to reinstate Friendship Park, a historic binational gathering site in the San Diego-Tijuana region which closed in 2020. This project was born out of his summer volunteering with the organization. 

Beyond the classroom, Diego is the Legal Advocacy Team Coordinator for Elena’s Light, a non-profit supporting refugee women and children in New Haven. He also serves as a Community Partner for IRIS, further supporting the refugee and immigrant communities in New Haven. He has transcribed interviews with Central American migrant mothers at the U.S. southern border with the UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies as part of the UC Reimagining Refuge Project. Diego was the first undergraduate Paralegal Intern at the San Diego Public Defender Immigration Unit as a Yale ISPS Millstone Fellow and a Mitigation Intern at the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Connecticut as a Yale Law School Liman Undergraduate Summer Fellow. He has also worked with the University Network for Human Rights’s Disappearances in Mexico project. 

On campus, Diego serves as a Tour Guide for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, inaugural Social Media Ambassador for the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications, and assistant at the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School. He has held multiple elected and appointed positions in the Yale College Council, was a peer liaison, co-head Cultural Connections counselor, and events aide for Pauli Murray College. Additionally, he spent a summer studying advanced Spanish and area studies in Barcelona and a semester studying politics at the University of Oxford.