she/her
Nicole Prchal Svajlenka is the director of research for the Rights and Justice department at American Progress. She works with teams across Rights and Justice to develop research strategies, projects, and analyses to advance their policy agendas.
Prior to this role, Svajlenka was a member of American Progress’ Immigration Policy team. In this position, she worked on a diverse set of immigration issues ranging from enforcement to winning protections for undocumented immigrants, with a focus on bringing together data and quantitative analysis with individuals’ experiences. Svajlenka has spent more than a decade working in think tanks, including at the Brookings Institution, where she conducted research on immigration, human capital, and labor markets in metropolitan areas across the United States, and The Pew Charitable Trusts, where she examined the relationships between federal, state, and local immigration policies.
Svajlenka holds a Master of Arts in geography from George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts in environmental geography from Colgate University.
DACA continues to be a lifeline for its beneficiaries, their families, and communities across the nation.
Immigrant women are integral members of U.S. society, working across industries that serve all communities and spur economic growth. As the pandemic continues to disproportionately affect women in the workforce, future policy must consider the contributions and needs of immigrant women.
Five million undocumented essential workers across the United States have important demographic and economic ties to their communities.
Four fact sheets highlight the contributions of undocumented immigrants to the construction, food supply chain, health care, and home care sectors of the economy.
Millions of undocumented immigrants are on the front lines working to keep Americans safe, healthy, and supported during the coronavirus pandemic.
As the Supreme Court’s decision goes into effect, the Trump administration must now allow 300,000 young people to file new applications for DACA, including 55,500 of the youngest DACA-eligible individuals who did not previously have the chance to apply.
Accurate data are key to understanding the prevalence of COVID-19 in immigration detention facilities, but ICE’s data muddles the full picture.
If the Supreme Court announces that the Trump administration’s termination of DACA was lawful, it will be jeopardizing the lives and futures of hundreds of thousands of recipients as well as their families and communities.
Locally, DACA recipients and their families play an important role in metro economies across the country.
More than 130,000 TPS holders at risk of soon losing work authorization are considered “essential critical infrastructure workers.”
Nearly 203,000 DACA recipients are working in occupations at the forefront of the COVID-19 response in health care, education, and food services.
Across the nation, nearly 650,000 DACA recipients live, raise 254,000 U.S.-citizen children, and pay $8.7 million in taxes each year.
