Theresa Cardinal Brown

Theresa Cardinal Brown is a senior advisor at the Bipartisan Policy Center and founder of Cardinal North Strategies, LLC. With nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law and policy, she has held influential positions in both the public and private sectors, including director of immigration and border policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and associate director of business immigration advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Brown’s government career spanned both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, where she played key roles in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including serving as the first DHS director of Canadian affairs and the first attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. She has been an active voice in media, contributing insights on platforms such as CBS, NPR, and CNN, and has been featured in major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Delaware, Brown was recognized as a Distinguished Visiting Immigration Scholar at Cornell University in 2023.

Theresa Cardinal Brown is a senior advisor of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and founder of her own consulting firm, Cardinal North Strategies, LLC. She has almost 30 years of experience in immigration law and policy serving in associations, federal government, think tanks and the private sector.

Brown’s career includes serving as director of immigration and border policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; associate director of business immigration advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association; and working in the immigration practices of large Washington, D.C.-based law firms. She also served as a director and of counsel at The Sentinel HS Group, LLC, a government contracting firm, before founding her own consultancy.

Her government career spanned the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the Bush administration, she was a policy advisor in the office of the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and was on Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s Second Stage Review of USCIS. In 2005 and 2006, she became a member and later director of the Immigration Legislation Task Force in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Policy. She then served as the first DHS director of Canadian affairs, and subsequently as the first DHS attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, continuing until she left government service in 2011.

Brown has done extensive media outreach, including appearances on CBS 60 Minutes, Fox News, NPR Morning Edition, PBS NewsHour, CNN International, CBC, and BBC World, and has been quoted in print publications including the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, Time Magazine, USA Today and others.

Brown is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Delaware and was named a Distinguished Visiting Immigration Scholar at Cornell University in 2023.