Staff

Deana El-Mallawany

Counsel & Director of Impact Programs, Democratic Resilience

Deana Kim El-Mallawany oversees Protect Democracy’s work to prevent the threat of another autocratic presidency from dismantling our democracy, as well as its long-term work to drive the structural change needed to secure the multi-racial democracy of tomorrow. She also has led litigation and advocacy strategies to secure accountability for abuses of executive power. Before joining Protect Democracy, Deana served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Massachusetts and as an associate at a large law firm. She was a law clerk to the Honorable Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Robert P. Patterson, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Before law school, Deana was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Cairo, Egypt.

Work Themes

Featured in the Press

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Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ (opens a new window)

  • February 8, 2024
  • The Atlantic

“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”