Beth Stickney

Beth is an attorney who has specialized in Immigration and Nationality law and policy since 1986. Beth began her career in Massachusetts where, while serving as the Directing Attorney at the International Institute of Boston, Beth was selected under a Ford Foundation grant to train other immigration legal aid providers nationwide in nonprofit management to improve their programs’ sustainability.

Returning to her home state of Maine, Beth co-founded the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Maine’s only nonprofit statewide provider of immigration legal aid to low-income Maine residents, where she served as executive director through June 2011. During her tenure, she grew ILAP from a purely pro bono attorney project to a brick and mortar agency with eleven staff and over 100 attorney and non-attorney volunteers.

In addition to her work at ILAP, she initiated and taught the immigration law course at the University of Maine School of Law from 1994 through 2005, and again in 2016. She is co-author of Immigration Law and the Family (Thomson Reuters), and of numerous articles covering various aspects of immigration and asylum law. Beth has been a frequent invited presenter at local, national and international conferences and continuing legal education seminars covering immigration and international human rights law issues, as well as immigration nonprofit management.

Beth is the executive director of the Maine Business Immigration Coalition (MeBIC), engaging Maine’s business community in advocating for positive laws and policies impacting immigrants. MeBIC engages in education, advocacy and action to support initiatives, laws and policies promoting economic growth and strong communities throughout Maine. In addition, Beth consults on immigration and nationality law and related policy advocacy.

Beth has also engaged in human rights and refugee and asylum work internationally, as a volunteer for Americas Watch (then Human Rights Watch-Americas) and then a legal officer for ONUSAL, the U.N. observer mission in El Salvador in 1991 and 1992, and from 2012 to 2015 with the Consiglio Italiano per i Rifugiati in Rome, Italy.