Yliana Johansen-Méndez serves as the Chief Program Officer for Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), where she is a passionate and dynamic advocate with over fourteen years of experience in immigration law. With a career spanning both government and nonprofit sectors, Yliana leverages her unique expertise to lead, mentor, and inspire the next generation of immigrant defenders.

Yliana joined ImmDef in February 2018 as a Managing Attorney in the Children’s Representation Project (CRP). Her leadership and vision led to her promotion as Legal Services Director and subsequently as Associate Director and then Chief Program Officer, where she provides critical oversight and strategy across multiple programs and departments. Throughout her tenure, Yliana has played a pivotal role in shaping the organization’s strategic direction, overseeing administrative functions, and continuing to represent clients facing deportation.

Yliana has been integral to the expansion of ImmDef’s legal services for unaccompanied children and legal responses to emerging community needs. She helped lead ImmDef’s emergency response for children housed in temporary facilities at the Long Beach Convention Center and Pomona Fairplex in 2021, coordinated legal support for migrants sent by bus from Texas to Los Angeles in 2023, and played a central role in developing ImmDef’s rapid response initiatives in response to enhanced immigration enforcement actions in Southern California in 2025. In 2023 and 2024, she helped design and launch ImmDef’s Spanish Program for Lawyers, bringing more advocates into our work by providing them with on-the-job Spanish language training, as well as the Border Advocacy Training Project, a collaboration with the Justice Action Center which provides DACA recipients with hands-on experience in migrant shelters and an opportunity to travel with Advance Parole.

Yliana holds a B.A. from Occidental College and earned her J.D. from Boston College Law School. She began her legal career in 2011 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), where she pioneered advocacy for unaccompanied minors and authored the first One-Parent SIJS Manual, which became an invaluable resource for attorneys navigating special immigrant juvenile status (SIJS) cases in California family courts. Her subsequent acceptance into the DOJ Attorney General’s Honors Program led to her role as an Attorney Advisor at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in Las Vegas. She later became a Senior Asylum Officer with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, adjudicating asylum relief applications and focusing on highly complex cases including those with fraud and national security concerns. Yliana’s experience in government service gives her unique insights that she now uses to hold immigration enforcement agencies accountable. As an expert witness, she has provided critical testimony and reports in high-profile cases such as Gonzalez v. ICE, a class-action lawsuit challenging unlawful ICE detainers, and Wagafe v. USCIS, challenging the government’s secret Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), where her expertise was essential to defending immigrants' rights.

Yliana regularly serves as a speaker and trainer for attorney audiences on matters involving unaccompanied children, asylum, removal defense strategies, and current immigration enforcement policy trends.