Sally Bevill

Paralegal

s.bevill@yourmira.org

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Rev. Sally Bevill grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.  She earned a Bachelor of Music with emphasis on voice performance at Milsaps College in 1981. Bevill received her graduate degree, summa cum laude, from Candler at Emory in 1991. She was ordained a United Methodist Church Deacon in 1989 and Elder in 1991. She has led several churches in Mississippi and is currently pastor at Vancleave United Methodist Church.

Rev. Bevill served as a missionary in Bolivia and is fluent in Spanish.  As a result, she has been director of Hispanic/Latino Ministries for the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church as well as coordinator for those ministries for the East Jackson and Seashore districts.  Sally was a founding member and sat on the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance for several years.

Sally was the founder of Trinity Mission Center and Hispanic outreach in Forest .  She was also a founder of The Village El Pueblo and was a Board of Immigration Appeals accredited representative with that organization.  Rev.  Bevill has extensive experience in advocating on behalf of and assisting immigrants with the preparation and submission of immigration documents to federal authorities.  The MIRA is extremely pleased that Sally has returned to work with us in our Gulf Coast office.

Bill Chandler
Executive Director
b.chandler@yourmira.org

An eyewitness to the brutal immigration raids during the 1950’s, Bill Chandler, a California native, has been continuously involved in supporting the rights of immigrant workers for more than 45 years. He began with union organizing and community activism in the 1960s in Los Angeles.   He participated in the 1965 grape boycott effort and organized cross-border actions with Mexican and American workers to support the United Farm Workers in their efforts to improve conditions, even in the face of police harassment and brutality.

Since then, Bill’s organizing focus has been primarily with the lowest paid workers in the South, including farm workers, hospitality, health care, public and immigrant workers. Beginning in 1989 i n Mississippi, he organized the aggressive Mississippi Alliance of State Employees/Communications Workers of America. He helped start the successful effort by some 5,000 casino workers to organize into UNITE HERE in Mississippi.

Responding to attacks on immigrant workers and discrimination against Latino school children in Mississippi, Bill brought a group of immigrants, labor, civil rights, religious, social and human rights activists and organizations together to form the MIRA in November of 2000. Initially an organization of volunteers, the MIRA has grown into a major force with a staff of organizers, an attorney and advocates, led by a board made up of mainly African American and Latino leaders in Mississippi.

Bill has six successful adult children and six grandchildren. He is married to L. Patricia Ice, the MIRA Legal Project Director. They live in Jackson with three dogs and three cats.

Ingrid Cruz

Field Organizer

i.cruz@yourmira.org

Ingrid Cruz was born in San Salvador, El Salvador and raised in Los Angeles, California.  She studied Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine and was involved with various organizations and coalitions that worked to improve workers’ rights, to improve  the educational system, and to bring about awareness of the root causes of immigration.  She lived briefly in Washington, DC and Mexico City where she spent time getting to know locals and their political struggles.  After college she continued to be involved in these causes, mainly through photography.  She moved to Jackson in August 2011 to work as the Field Organizer for MIRA.

Alexis Farmer Sylvester

Research Attorney

a.farmer@yourmira.org

Mrs. Sylvester was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a licensed attorney in Mississippi. After law school, Alexis returned to Jackson, Mississippi to help immigrants and all Mississippians in need by working as an attorney with the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance and as the newly elected Secretary of the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees Local 3570/AFL-CIO.

She received her bachelor’s degrees in Criminal Justice and Psychology, and then went on to earn her Juris Doctor degree all from the University of Mississippi in 2011.  As a law student, she focused on Criminal and Family Law. She worked as a research assistant for Professor Deborah Bell assisting with the publication of the second edition of Bell on Mississippi Family Law. She has interned in various positions related to Criminal and Family Law including the District Attorney General’s Office in Memphis, Shelby County Tennessee, the Attorney General’s Criminal Appeals Division in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Fifth District Chancery Court as a Clerk for Judge Patricia D. Wise.   She has worked with nonprofit organizations in Jackson, Mississippi since she was ten years old focusing most of her efforts with the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees-Communication Workers of America (MASE/CWA). She continued working with nonprofit organizations statewide throughout her undergraduate and law school years such as the Mississippi Center for Justice, North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, and the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Clinic.

Mary K. Green

Development Coordinator

m.green@yourmira.org

Mary K. Green moved to Jackson in 2009 from Columbia, Missouri where she lived for 17 years and where she founded and was director of a progressive community elementary school for 10 years.  She has bachelors degrees in history and design.  Mary has worked in the non-profit inhousing, education and community arts.  Green is the MIRA grant writer and is also spearheading our new database technology project.  She is the very proud mother of a young adult daughter and lives in Jackson with her husband, William H. Green, Ph.D., an assistant professor of religion at Tougaloo College, and their adorable dog, Pepper.

L. Patricia Ice
Director, MIRA Legal Project
p.ice@yourmira.org

Ms. Ice served for two years as a United States Peace Corps volunteer English teacher in Porto Novo, Benin, West Africa in the 1980s. Later, after teaching English in the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras and the United States, Ice developed an interest in immigration law.  She moved to Mississippi in 1998 to work as a reference librarian at the Mississippi College School of Law. A year later, she began an immigration law practice in Jackson, continuing with the work she had started in Michigan in 1994. Ice joined MIRA in 2001 as an attorney volunteer and then as a board member. She joined the MIRA staff in 2006 after being awarded an Equal Justice Works Katrina Legal Fellowship. Ice has been a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association since 1993. She writes an immigration advice column which appears online at imdiversity.com and in the Mississippi print publications of La Noticia and The Jackson Advocate. She holds a B.A. in History from Spelman College, an M.A. in Linguistics with a major in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Ohio University, and M.L.I.S. (Library Science) and J.D. (Law) degrees from Wayne State University. A native of Detroit, Ice is an attorney admitted to practice law in Michigan, Mississippi and New Mexico.