Jessica Lefort is a clinical assistant professor in the Legal Practice Program at Michigan Law and the director of the Immigrant Justice Lab at the University of Michigan. 

Before joining the Law School, she was a deputy defender with the Federal Defender Office in Detroit, representing indigent criminal defendants in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Lefort previously was an Honors Trial Attorney at the US Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, in Washington, DC. There, she prosecuted national and international criminal conspiracies involving price-fixing and bid-rigging, as well as procurement fraud cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan war reconstruction contracts. 

The Immigrant Justice Lab is a collaborative public humanities project at the University of Michigan, with growing ties to other campuses and communities, and is part of the larger Carceral State Project. It partners with institutions, nonprofit agencies, and impacted communities to advocate for the rights of immigrants and helps to train the next generation of advocates and researchers.