Bio
Rachel Meeropol (she/her) is a Senior Staff Attorney with the Racial Justice Program, focusing on the Indigenous Justice docket as well as the general racial justice docket. Rachel came to RJP from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where she was a Senior Staff Attorney and the Associate Director of Legal Training and Education. Rachel was lead counsel on Turkmen v. Ashcroft, a class action lawsuit against high-level federal officials for the post-9/11 detention and abuse of Muslim non-citizens, which she argued before the Supreme Court in 2017. Among her extensive body of litigation, Rachel also represented the Ramapough Lenape Nation in their struggle against discriminatory zoning, federal prisoners in restrictive Communication Management Units, California prisoners held for decades in solitary confinement, and environmental activists targeted as “terrorists” for non-violent protest activities. Rachel has co-edited and written three editions of the Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook, a do-it-yourselflitigation manual for prisoners distributed free by CCR and the National Lawyers Guild, and was the contributing editor of America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the War on Terror, published in 2005 by Seven Stories Press. Rachel completed her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University, and graduated from NYU School of Law in 2002.