Mitzia was born and raised in Mexico. She attended primary school there until fifth grade. At the age of nine, she, her two siblings, and her parents migrated to the United States, where they ultimately settled in San Jose, California, a city Mitzia holds close to her heart.

Mitzia graduated Valedictorian of her high school class. The consequences of Mitzia's undocumented status crystallized in high school. She excelled in the International Baccalaureate program, an advanced learning curriculum, yet her college counselors lacked the necessary training to support undocumented students and discouraged her from applying to college. She was also rejected from various college preparation programs and prestigious scholarships because she didn’t have a social security number. She felt capable of attending college but was denied the tools to tackle the application process. A Latinx teacher in her high school provided her with the personalized mentorship she needed. With his help, Mitzia became one of the first undocumented students in her high school to receive a full merit-based scholarship to UC Berkeley.

Mitzia began working at Ceres Policy Research immediately after graduation, a woman-led community research organization in Oakland, California. She helped found the immigration research unit at Ceres, where she conducted national and bi-national research projects to challenge practices of the crimmigration system – a legal collaboration between immigration law and the criminal justice system that undermines immigrants’ due process rights and the inalienable rights granted to them by the Constitution. You can find the reports on this work in the Publications tab. She spent two years at Ceres before going back to school to pursue a doctorate degree.

Mitzia is now a third-year doctoral student at the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program at Berkeley Law School. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study, a prestigious fellowship award for highly qualified entering doctoral students who will enhance the diversity of the graduate student population at Berkeley. She was also chosen as the recipient of the Mentored Research Award, a fellowship that assists diverse doctoral students in acquiring sophisticated research skills by working under faculty mentorship on their own pre-dissertation research.