His practice includes litigation and advocacy relating to immigration detention and immigrants' access to education. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School and also holds a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from New York University. After law school, Michael clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked at IRP as Skadden Fellow and a Liman Public Interest Fellow. In 2014, he was awarded a California Lawyer of the Year Award in Immigration Law for his work on Rodriguez v. Robbins, a class action lawsuit challenging the prolonged detention of immigrants without bond hearings. Outside the ACLU, Michael co-chairs the ABA Committee on the Rights of Immigrants and serves as a Steering Committee member of the Detention Watch Network and a board member of the Refugee Reunification Project.