Kyra S. Lilien is Senior Counsel at Van Der Hout, LLC, an immigration law firm based in San Francisco. She served as Immigration Judge for two years until the Trump Administration terminated her from that position in July 2025. As a judge, Kyra served on the San Francisco and Concord immigration courts. Prior to taking the bench, from 2021 to 2023, Kyra was the director of immigration legal services at Jewish Family & Community Services – East Bay in Concord, California. From 2016 to 2021, she served as staff attorney at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. From 2013 to 2016, she served as asylum officer and interim training officer at the San Francisco Asylum Office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Department of Homeland Security. From 2010 to 2013, Kyra was the immigration program director at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, California, where she represented noncitizens before EOIR and USCIS. From 2007 to 2010, she was an associate attorney at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in San Francisco, where she handled immigration cases on a pro bono basis. Kyra has prior experience with international human rights and war crimes prosecutions at both the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1996 from Smith College and a Juris Doctor in 2006 from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. For seven years she taught Asylum & Refugee Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Kyra is a member of the State Bars of California and New York.
