Deepa Bijpuria

Deepa Bijpuria is the Director of Legal Aid’s Immigrants’ Rights Legal Services Project. In this role, she provides leadership of the Immigration Project to deliver high-quality, client-centered and trauma-informed legal services to the community. Deepa represents and advocates on behalf crime survivors for humanitarian immigration relief in front of USCIS and EOIR. She also supervises staff attorneys and pro bono attorneys who take on immigration cases. As Project Director, she works on and supports Legal Aid’s policy efforts to address systemic issues impacting immigrant communities in the District through legislative, administrative and other reform. Additionally, Deepa delivers trainings and presentations on immigration topics to the community and other service providers.  

For almost two decades, Deepa has been an advocate for immigrant survivors of gender-based violence and crime. Immediately prior to joining Legal Aid in February 2024, Deepa was the Managing Immigration Attorney at Ayuda’s Maryland office where she supervised a team of attorneys and paralegals to deliver immigration legal services to low-income immigrant Marylanders. Deepa began her career as a Domestic Violence Protection Order Attorney at the Women’s Law Center of Maryland and then became the Project Director for their immigration legal project, the Multi-Ethnic Domestic Violence Project (MEDOVI). After almost seven years with the WLC, Deepa joined the Tahirih Justice Center where she represented immigrant survivors of gender-based violence to obtain affirmative and defensive humanitarian immigration relief, including asylum, the U and T visa, VAWA and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status for a decade. Deepa has also successfully litigated appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Deepa also regularly speaks at conferences on immigration issues at both the local and national level.  

Deepa received a Bachelor of Science in Social Policy, with an adjunct major in International Studies from Northwestern University. She attended the University of Maryland School of Law and received her Juris Doctor in 2003. During law school, Deepa served on the staff of The Business Lawyer and represented immigrant clients as a student lawyer in asylum and labor trafficking cases.