MING HSU CHEN is the author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford Press 2020), and faculty-director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law program, and an associate professor of law and political science at the University of Colorado Law School specializing in immigration and public law. In 2016, the US Commission on Civil Rights appointed her to its 14-person Colorado State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. In 2017, she became the inaugural faculty-director of the University of Colorado Immigration Law and Policy Program.
Ming was born to parents of Chinese heritage who immigrated to Taiwan and then the United States after the 1965 liberalization of US immigration policy.
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in social studies and the study of religion, and she completed a JD at New York University Law School and a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley.
Before entering academia, Ming worked for the US Department of Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the US Equal Employment opportunity Commission, and the Brookings Institution. She also clerked on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals with Judge James Browning.
Ming is married to civil rights attorney Stephen Chen. Together they have a daughter, Maya, and reside in Boulder, Colorado.