Ever since childhood as a daughter of immigrants, Ivy Lee (she/her) has been keenly aware of social and legal injustice. Ivy has spent her entire career advocating for victims and survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence, sexual assault, as well as the rights of immigrants. In 2020, Ivy was invited by Mayor London Breed of San Francisco to join her administration as a policy adviser on public safety. After four years, it was evident that Ivy was the right person to stand up the Office of Victim and Witness Rights, an office approved by the voters of San Francisco. For the past year and a half, Ivy has helped set up a Special Victims Unit in the SFPD and strengthened city policies on handling sex crimes. Read on to hear more about the remarkable career of Ivy Lee!

Where are you located?
San Francisco, California

What inspired you to get involved in activism?
My immigrant parents and grandparents. Like many children of immigrants, I often served as an interpreter—not just of language, but of culture and systems. I saw firsthand how unfairly they were treated due to language barriers and unfamiliarity with institutions not built for them. These experiences left deep emotional impacts, but also revealed incredible resilience, kindness, and community strength. That duality inspired me—and many in my generation—to join the movement for social justice.

Which came first—your desire to be a lawyer or your passion for civil rights?
My passion for justice came first. I was actually in a 7-year pre-med program after high school and never imagined becoming a lawyer—I’m the first in my extended family. The idea of law as a career came later, as a way to channel that passion.

Why did you focus on social justice law early in your career?
I wanted to use the law to make people’s lives better—to translate legal systems into tools for justice. I wasn’t sure which area of law to specialize in, so I used law school summers and early jobs to explore different paths.

How did your time at LCCR, Asian Law Caucus, and API Legal Outreach shape your views?
At LCCR, I was a Thurgood Marshall Fellow and worked on cases involving educational equity, immigrant rights, and language access. I saw how one case could drive systemic change.

At Asian Law Caucus, the country’s oldest Asian American civil rights legal org, I learned that lawyers must also be community organizers. You can’t serve a community from behind a desk—you have to be part of it and respect for your community has to be at the basis of all that you do.

At API Legal Outreach, I gained courtroom experience and helped build one of the first legal projects in the U.S. focused on human trafficking, and the first one focusing on Asian and Pacific Islander survivors. We combined direct legal services with policy and legislative advocacy, as well as community organizing, to create victim-centered reforms at every level of government.

What kind of work did you do on human trafficking cases?
I worked on everything from large group cases to complex individual ones involving children. Much of my work was providing legal representation directly to survivors – those experiences helped me to identify systemic problems, develop solutions with my clients and allies in the field, and ensured that my policy and legislative work was grounded and not theoretical. Policies and laws that aren’t grounded in reality and just sound good on paper are worthless. With Professor Lynette Parker, I co-authored two handbooks and developed national trainings through the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. I also consulted with law enforcement, attorneys, and nonprofits to promote a culturally aware, victim-centered approach to trafficking cases.

How did you become involved in Mayor Breed’s staff? What initiatives did you spearhead as Mayor Breed’s policy advisor? What were your greatest successes in this role?
Mayor Breed asked me to join her administration in early 2020 and I thought that it was an opportunity to work with someone who I knew loved the city deeply and understood what it meant to face barriers based on your race, your gender, and the resources that you had or didn’t have. I wanted to support a woman of color and the first Black woman to be mayor. She gave me the opportunity to work on victims’ rights and public safety issues that I cared about, even when we disagreed. A few weeks after I joined her team, George Floyd was murdered and my first assignment was to develop a roadmap for reform that balanced the responsibility of government to keep all its people safe, with the reality that the public safety system had serious flaws. Then there was this awareness of, and increase in, anti-Asian violence that was happening locally and nationwide, and as an Asian American woman, that was an issue that was very personal.

Some of the initiatives that I led include creating the city’s first police alternative model of response to behavioral health crises, to provide a more effective way for the city to respond to people in need without sending armed police officers. That model is still being used today. This work, to create a public safety system that didn’t rely solely on police officers to keep folks safe, continued with work to expand the options available to our 911 call-takers so that they had other folks who could respond and address calls for help, other than only police.

I also led work to create a community liaison unit within SFPD that would have dedicated bilingual and bicultural officers assigned, who could rapidly respond to potential hate crimes and help walk a survivor of a hate-fueled incident through the criminal legal system which can be a maze at times. I also worked with community-based organizations to launch a citywide senior escort program to help seniors safely get to and from their homes to their doctors’ appointments, run their errands, and socialize so that they would not suffer isolation. I worked on legislation designed to allow law enforcement to use technology, so long as strong civil liberties guardrails are in place, to help amplify their ability to prevent crime and to minimize redundant administrative work that was keeping a lot of officers behind a desk when we really needed them to be able to in our public spaces and performing community policing.

Last but not least, I worked to establish the country’s first legal program that affords crime victims free legal representation as their case proceeds through the criminal legal system – most people don’t realize that crime survivors are unrepresented through a criminal prosecution. They don’t automatically get lawyers, their rights are not enforced as a matter of course, and they need their own lawyers to make sure that they are not re-victimized by a legal system that is not designed to be victim-centered.

In May 2024, Mayor Breed named you as Director of the Office of Victim and Witness Rights. What were the origins of this office? Are there similar offices in other cities?
Our office, which goes by the Mayor’s Office for Victims’ Rights or MOVR, exists because of the leadership of Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, formerly a San Francisco supervisor, who authored a ballot measure to create this office and because of the San Francisco voters who passed the measure. The Board of Supervisors also are credited because without their support to fund the staffing of MOVR, we would not exist. The two problems that motivated the creation of this office are: 1) most crime victims do not report to police, for various reasons; and 2) the criminal legal system and victim services’ system can be incredibly confusing, fragmented, and can result in adding to the harm already being experienced by victims and survivors.

The closest model similar to MOVR is actually in London, England – they have someone called a “czar of victims’ rights” who leads an office designed to do a similar scope of work as MOVR because this London office focuses on system change that benefit victims and survivors. That is a focus of our department as well – we do have a broader scope of work but that is our central mission. Most cities have a “victim witness services” office but it is typically a part of the prosecutor’s office, is not independent from law enforcement, and has a primary role helping eligible crime victims apply for state or local victim compensation funds if available.

What can you tell us about the work and success you’ve had in this office?
We are an independent department designed to make government work better on behalf of victims and survivors through direct services; collaboration with victim service providers, law enforcement agencies, and other city departments; and legislative and policy advocacy at local, state, and federal levels. Many of our clients either are not, or have not, engaged with law enforcement but still need support and others have tried to get help from other agencies but are facing obstacles that they need help to overcome. Our focus areas are in gender-based violence such as domestic violence, sexual assault, sex trafficking, as well as labor trafficking, elder/dependent adult abuse, child abuse, hate crimes, and survivors of state violence.

We have momentum when it comes to system change. We’ve only been around since late 2024, but we’ve made strides in helping to prioritize staffing up the Special Victims Unit of SFPD, strengthening policies related to how sexual assault cases are handled from start to finish, elevated the role that community-based service providers play when it comes to handling the number of family violence cases in San Francisco vs. law enforcement (roughly 5 to 1) which is important when it comes to the city deciding where to invest resources in a rough budget landscape, and definitely more to come.

Clearly advancing the rights of survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault is a major focus for you. What got you into this work?
I was raised by women. My grandmother, my big sister, my aunts, my mother – my grandmother and aunts worked in garment factories, otherwise known as sweatshops, when they first immigrated here; I saw the struggles my mom experienced and overcame in her own ways in both the public and private spheres. All of these types of human rights abuses, from trafficking to DV to sexual assault, impact women in a completely outsized and incredibly unjust way. So when I began my legal career and handled my first Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) case, it just felt right to be fighting for, and with, women. Trafficking was an extension of this immigrant rights and gender-based violence work. This work is about human dignity. There is nothing that feels more right to me than to fight for that.

How can we better protect survivors?
Prevent these human rights abuses whenever and wherever possible. And that means different things when it comes to these different types of crimes: When it comes to labor trafficking, pay a decent, living wage to workers. Provide safe and reasonable paths to migration and lawful immigration status. That’s for a start.

When it comes to domestic violence and sexual assaults, two actions that we could do right now for folks who have already experienced harm: 1) Believe women. Stop victim-blaming – just stop. And 2) invest in survivor services as much as we do in law enforcement. We should be resourcing them the same way – both prevent future harm and violence, support healing, and both are essential to improve public safety. Of course we need to invest in prevention as well, there’s so much there that we can discuss as well.

What steps can be taken to reduce human trafficking?
Pay workers a decent, living wage. Safe migration, paths to legalize status. That would be a significant start.

What are your thoughts on the legalization of sex work? How do you think it would impact human trafficking?
I’m not an expert on sex work, and I believe those with lived experience should lead that conversation. I do think that there’s a lot to be learned from how drug criminalization and legalization have played out.

What advice do you have for someone who has found themselves in an abusive relationship?
You didn’t do anything to deserve what you are experiencing. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s your fault or you did something to deserve it. And there are people who are here to listen without judgment and help if and when you are ready.

What other activism have you done that is not part of your official job?
I don’t think of my “official job” as being separate from my life. So all the fights that I’ve been involved in, from Free City College to Ban the Box to marriage equality to anti-human trafficking to pro-immigrant rights is all part of my life and my work. It’s the same fight for justice.

What is your motto in life?
I think it would be, to be kind. But also, fight like hell for justice. You can do both.

Where can we find out more about you?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivy-lee-2991072?trk=contact-info

Ivy Lee - Lifelong Civil Rights Activist