César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández holds the Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University where he is a professor of law and incoming director of OSU’s Latinx Studies Program.
César writes and teaches about the intersection of criminal and immigration law. He has published three books, Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” (2024), Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (2019), and Crimmigration Law (2015). César’s two dozen scholarly articles about the right to counsel for migrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing have appeared in Dædalus, the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, BYU Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, among others, earning him a position among the ten most-cited immigration law scholars in the United States.
César’s analyses of policies affecting migrants regularly appear in media in the United States and abroad. He has published opinion articles in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Time, and many other venues. Through hundreds of interviews, he has lent his expert analysis to journalists in Brazil, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. He also served two terms as a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration.
César’s accomplishments have been widely recognized. In 2020, he delivered the Buck Colbert Franklin Memorial Civil Rights Lecture at the University of Tulsa, named after the pioneering African American lawyer who devoted countless hours to assisting victims of the Tulsa Race Riots. In 2019, the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center honored him with its Challenging Discrimination Award. He is a past Fulbright Scholar and has been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley and Texas Southern University. He is also a past recipient of the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award by the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups, an honor issued to a “junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice.”
César was born and raised in McAllen, Texas, and is of counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law, P.L.L.C.