Young Center staff attorney Vanessa Pineda is featured in Las Doctoras Recomiendan, a children’s health podcast for Latinx parents. The podcast is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has stood alongside the Young Center as an outspoken opponent of family separation in recent months. The episode featuring Vanessa is titled “Leyes de Inmigración: lo que toda familia immigrante debe saber” (Immigration laws: what every immigrant family should know). Listen to it here. Vanessa describes current threats to immigrant families and how parents can prepare themselves, and their children, for the possibility of enforcement action.

Vanessa Pineda, a staff attorney in the Phoenix office, has been with the Young Center since 2016, working with particularly vulnerable unaccompanied children including very young children, children at-risk of turning 18 while still in government custody and most recently, children taken from their parents by US immigration authorities. Vanessa is a longtime advocate for immigrant children and families. Prior to joining the Young Center, she was the pro-bono coordinator and senior staff attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Phoenix. At FIRRP, Vanessa represented detained and released children before the Phoenix Immigration Court and Maricopa County Juvenile Court and mentored pro-bono attorneys handling children’s cases. Before FIRP, she was an associate at Tapia-Ruano & Gunn in Chicago, where she practiced removal defense and family-based immigration law. Vanessa obtained her law degree from the DePaul University College of Law, and her bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University.