Ann Block

Ann Block is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ILRC based in Davis and San Francisco. She has been with the ILRC part-time since 2009 on a contract basis, and in 2019 transitioned to a staff position.  She also maintains a small, part-time private practice in Davis, California. Ann has expertise in family immigration, naturalization and citizenship, VAWA and U visas, asylum, removal defense, as well as extensive experience with the immigration consequences of criminal convictions.

Ann provides technical assistance through the ILRC’s Attorney of the Day program, mentoring and assisting nonprofit attorneys and staff, public defenders and private attorneys with a wide variety of immigration law questions and cases.  She has also contributed to most ILRC manuals, has authored or edited numerous articles and practice advisories, presented webinars, led the ILRC 40-hour basic immigration law training, as well as serving as both a trainer and a panelist on a number of immigration issues for the ILRC, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the California State Bar, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG).

Prior to the ILRC, Ann gained extensive private and nonprofit experience as a staff attorney with Park & Associates, Catholic Charities in San Mateo, the International Institute of San Francisco, and her own solo private practice. Ann has additional teaching experience as a former adjunct professor at McGeorge School of Law, supervising the Immigration Clinic and teaching the podium course on Immigration Law.  She has also served on the California State Bar’s Immigration and Nationality Law Commission (INLAC), the entity that certifies attorneys as immigration law specialists, including as both vice-chair and chair of INLAC.

Ann earned her law degree from the University of California at Davis where she represented clients through the prison law and immigration law clinics. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she double-majored in psychology and political science. Ann is admitted to the bar in California and is conversant in Spanish, with working knowledge of written French.