Ediberto Roman

Professor Ediberto Roman is a national leader in the fields of immigration policy, constitutional law, and citizenship and critical race theory. A founding faculty member of the FIU College of Law, a former associate dean for Academic Affairs, and current director of the College’s Immigration Initiatives. Roman’s work has had an impact on public policy debates, particularly in the area of immigration, a subject upon which he has been called to testify before congressional committees, acted as an expert witness in federal court cases, and has testified before state legislative bodies. In addition to being a sought after public intellectual on these issues, he founded and serves as series editor for the prestigious New York University Press series “Citizenship and Migration in the Americas.” In the past few years, he has written four books, six law review articles, numerous legal essays and encyclopedia entries. He has represented hundreds of immigrant families for President Obama’s DACA program. Well over two thousand families were served, and hundreds of dreamers can now live out their dreams of higher education. Roman assisted in developing FIU's legal basis to be the state’s first public university or college to provide Dreamers in-state tuition, eventually the legislature passed allowed all dreamers this right. Roman also paired with one of his many civil rights organization partners, and served as the Southern Poverty law Center’s expert witness and legal advisor in their federal lawsuit against the state for its denial of in-state tuition to U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents—he takes great pride in that the lead plaintiff in that case now attends FIU. With Roman’s help, plaintiffs in that case won a summary judgment in their favor with the judge tracking the arguments Roman wrote for the Huff Post a year earlier. Roman's has been invited to the White House on several occasions to attend or address forums on immigration reform. He has presented at several congressional panels participating with Representatives Joe Garcia, Federica Wilson, and Luis Gutierrez. On issues concerning immigration, Roman has been cited, interviewed, and quoted by more newspapers than any other law professor in the state, particularly with respect recent proposed immigration and citizenship legislation. Roman also puts his community engagement and activism into practice in additional ways, writing op-eds and blog essays for numerous legal and news related blogs. He is now a featured columnist for the Huffington Post, On related national fronts, Roman’s views on immigration reform as well as race relations have been featured in periodicals and related services, such as the Associated Press, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera International, the Houston Chronicle, the Los Angles Times, the Miami Herald, and the Sun Sentinel, just to name a few. His interviews and quotes have been featured on NPR, MSNBC, Telemundo, FOX Latino, PBS’s Vsions, the Haiti Journal, and PBS’s Viewpoint. On the international stage, Roman was the first U.S. writer and advocate to bring attention to the statelessness issue in the Dominican Republic. His campaigns have included writing several op-eds on the matter, law reviews, and assembling over 100 law professors throughout the country to join him in a letter to the White House urging our president to act on the matter. More recently, he has led a campaign to write once again to the State Department to push them to act. This effort will be joined by hundred of lawyers, law professors, and human rights organizations, eventually leading the State Department to follow the professors' recommendation.