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Harrisburg Office
Marielle Macher (she/her) is executive director of the Community Justice Project and has been an attorney with CJP since 2014. Marielle’s litigation docket focuses primarily on workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, and civil rights cases broadly, though Marielle litigates across practice areas. Marielle has broad experience representing plaintiffs in class action and other major impact litigation in federal and state court, as well as impact cases in administrative tribunals. more
Peter works out of our Harrisburg office and practices in the areas of public benefits, language access and other immigrant rights, and does a limited amount of housing work.
Peter received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1975 and his Juris Doctor from Dickinson School of Law in 1981.
DeJonna Bates is a staff attorney in CJP’s Harrisburg office. DeJonna focuses on immigrants’ rights, housing and employment cases arising in northeastern Pennsylvania, and specializes in language access issues across the state. Through that work, police departments, school districts and subsidized housing authorities, and properties have created language access plans and begun providing free translation and interpretation services.
DeJonna graduated from the Widener University Delaware School of Law in 2019 with Pro Bono Distinction and cum laude from Lincoln University of Pennsylvania.
Eric Marsteller is the controller at CJP. He leads CJP’s accounting and finance functions and shares human resource, grant management, and compliance responsibilities with the executive director.
Eric has a B.S. in accounting from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. In addition to his work with CJP, Eric is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Eric is a U.S. Army chaplain with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard spent a year deployed overseas in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.
Hazleton Office
Natalia Gomez is a paralegal in our Hazleton office. She focuses mainly on public benefits specifically Emergency Medical Assistance, SNAP, and Medical Assistance Benefits for Workers with Disabilities.
Prior to coming to CJP, Natalia worked 11 years for the NYC Department of Social Services determining eligibility.
Rossy is a paralegal in CJP’s Hazleton office. Her main focus is assisting clients with language access, public benefits, and identifying needs in the community for outreach. Rossy also helps plan local immigration clinics.Pittsburgh Office
Kevin Quisenberry is Community Justice Project’s Litigation Director. Since joining CJP in 2003, Kevin has helped to protect the rights and interests of lower income Pennsylvanians on a wide range of issues through strategic litigation, policy advocacy and community lawyering. A significant portion of Kevin‘s work has focused on enforcing the rights of renters and homeowners under the federal and state Constitutions and civil rights laws.
CONTACT:
412-434-6002
Daniel G. Vitek (he/him) is a supervising attorney at Community Justice Project’s Pittsburgh office and has been an attorney with CJP since 2018.
Dan’s practice area focuses on tenant rights, consumer access to affordable utilities, and civil rights more broadly. His work includes organizing tenant associations for residents of mobile home parks and subsidized housing communities so the residents can collectively address their concerns, training social workers and attorneys about tenant rights, and providing expert testimony on tenant access to utility services in rate cases before the Pennsylvania Utility Commission. Additionally, Dan has extensive experience pursuing impact litigation in state and federal court, including class actions, and before administrative tribunals. more
Jessica is the operations manager and legal secretary in CJP’s Pittsburgh office. As a trained communications specialist, she also assists with the firm’s media relations and social media accounts.
Reading Office
Matthew Lamberti, Immigration Attorney
Matthew received his J.D. from CUNY School of Law after participating in the Immigrants’ and Refugee Rights Clinic. He is licensed in Pennsylvania and New York, and speaks Spanish. He works with CJP’s Reading staff.
Previously, Matthew worked as an immigrants’ rights attorney at Justice at Work, Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, and Indiana Legal Services. Prior to law school, he worked in a library and taught high school and college English.
Thelma is a law clerk working primarily on immigration casework at CJP. Thelma has first-hand knowledge about the lives of CJP’s foreign-born clients – Thelma immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua when she was seven years old.
Prior to joining CJP, Thelma was an assistant district attorney at the Walton County District Attorney’s Office in Monroe, GA. In law school, Thelma was active in her school’s legal community: she was president for the Hispanic Law Students Association and the First-Generation Students Association, and was a Dean’s Ambassador. She participated in the Prosecutorial Justice Program, which served as the pathway that led her to her job as an ADA.
Thelma has worked on immigration-related retaliation faced by migrant workers, during her time as a law clerk with the Resilience Force Justice Project as a 2021 Justice John Paul Stevens Fellow. In that role, she helped a client recover $1,140 in unpaid wages.
Thelma received two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Georgia, in Criminal Justice and Sociology, and minored in Spanish. She earned a J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law.
Outside of work, Thelma enjoys reading any and all fiction, listening to true crime podcasts, playing video games, visiting family, and spending time with her husband.
Rafael Frank Benzecry is a Special Project Fellow at Reading’s office who deals with immigration law. Born and raised in Manaus, Brazil, he earned his Bachelor of Laws from the Federal University of Amazonas in 2017. Building on this foundation, he obtained a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage in 2020. In 2023, Rafael achieved a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School.
Currently practicing in the dynamic intersection of employment and immigration law, Rafael is adept at navigating complex legal landscapes. Fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French, he brings a global perspective to his practice, providing helpful solutions for clients.
Benita received a B.S. in Psychology from Mercy College in 2002.
Benita is a paralegal in our Hispanic Outreach Department in our Reading office. She focuses mainly on public benefits and immigration.
Samantha is an immigration paralegal in CJP’s Reading office. She provides comprehensive support to clients who are seeking for immigration benefits such as U, T-Visas and VAWA.
Born and raised in the Bronx, New York City. Samantha graduated with a bachelor’s degree in criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She pursued a paralegal certificate at the ABA accredited Lehigh Carbon Community College and was hired at a small law firm that had many practices but she was most interested in immigration law.
Samantha collaborates with Safe Berks Organization, formally known as Berks Women in Crisis and MidPenn Legal Services.
Isibell del Rosario is a paralegal in our Reading office. She is the first point of contact for many of our clients seeking services. She mostly works with immigration matters such as citizenship, VAWA, and U-Visa inquiries, but she also assists and connects clients to multiple services provided by CJP.
Isibell immigrated from Dominican Republic to Reading in 2013 and has since become invested in the needs of the community. She has a passion for supporting people in the communities that need it the most, amplifying their voices and listening to their concerns.
Isibell graduated with a Bachelor of Social Work in Kutztown University.
Scranton Office
Jenny is a paralegal who does outreach to the immigrant community to address issues related to public benefits, language access, mobile home residents’ rights and immigrants’ rights in the Hazleton, Wilkes-Barre and Scranton areas.
Jenny graduated from King’s College with a bachelor’s degree and received a Master’s of Social Work degree from Marywood University and is a licensed social worker.
As a McGowan Scholar, she volunteered for four years in the McGowan Hispanic Outreach Program as an aid to the ESL and Citizenship classes. As a Graduate Assistant (GA), Jenny studied LatinX families’ experience with public education in Northeast PA. She presented the findings at the 2018 Joint World on Social Work, Education and Social Development in Dublin, Ireland.
While a graduate student at Marywood University, she completed an international field placement in Embu, Kenya during the summer of 2018 with the goal to initiate the research and development of a human resource center to meet the changing and growing needs of a county experiencing growing rates of homelessness. She and her peers presented their work in Kenya at the 2018 National Association Social Work- PA Chapter Conference and at the 2019 IFSW European Conference in Vienna, Austria.
Of Counsel
Don did his undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1970. He received his Juris Doctor from Northeastern Law School in 1975.
He practices in the areas of civil rights, housing law, and consumer law in CJP’s Pittsburgh office.
Donald Marritz is of counsel at CJP where he consults on cases both within the program and in the state at large, especially on unemployment and housing matters. He writes weekly summaries of relevant items in the Pennsylvania Bulletin, reports of recent appellate cases, and occasional amicus briefs in cases involving the state constitution.