Emily Butera

Nonprofit and Philanthropic Advisor

Emily Butera is a senior strategist, advocate, and philanthropic advisor on asylum, refugee, and migration issues.

Emily has worked with a wide range of organizations, including the Women’s Refugee Commission, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and the Open Society Foundations.

Most recently, Emily directed the immigrant and refugee rights portfolio at Open Society-US, where she planned and oversaw strategies to drive pro-immigrant narrative and policy change and build the power of immigrant and refugee communities. Her work there included designing the Open Society Foundations’ Afghan American Initiative and Black Immigrant Justice Fund. These multimillion-dollar investments helped grow the service delivery capacity, infrastructure, and sustainability of historically underfunded organizations led by and serving immigrants and refugees.

At the Women’s Refugee Commission, Emily developed and ran a successful national campaign that changed Department of Homeland Security policy to enable detained and deported parents to participate in child welfare proceedings and defend their custody rights.

As an expert on issues at the intersection of immigration and child welfare law, she has frequently advised state and federal agencies, Congress, advocates, and attorneys on both individual cases and legislation.

Emily has spent much of her career investigating and writing about the effects of immigration enforcement, detention, and asylum policy. Her work includes Locking up Family Values, a groundbreaking report on family detention in the US, and Torn Apart by Immigration Enforcement, an examination of how detention and deportation threaten the rights of migrant parents.

Emily has also served on several advisory boards, including the Detention Watch Network and the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare, and been a visiting practitioner at academic institutions including the University of Sussex (UK) and Duke University. Her research and commentary have been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CNN, and NBC News.

In addition to her Fletcher degree, Emily holds a BA from Kenyon College.