Kati Barahona-López is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests focus on the role that deportation proceedings have on the day-to-day experiences of migrants. Using the scholarship on migration, law and society, transnationalism, and intersectionality she explores the impact that immigration policies have on new migrant populations.  Her dissertation work is a mixed-methods study of Central American Unaccompanied Minors living in San Francisco, CA titled: “The Deportability Enforcement System: Disciplining Central American Unaccompanied Minors Outside of Detention Centers”. She argues that unaccompanied minors experience the entrenchment of vulnerability discursive practices in the immigration legal processes, which do harm by force unaccompanied minors from Central America to emphasize their suffering and trauma in the United States and in their country of origin in order to qualify for public, private, and legal resources. Not only do their experiences can be understood as transnational vulnerability. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards including the Lionel Cantú Memorial Award, the 2017 Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Award, and the 2017 Chicago Ethnography Incubator Graduate Student Fellowship.