Duncan Lewis Solicitors

Immigration

Immigration director, Jenna McKinney, has extensive experience specialising in all aspects of immigration, European Economic Area (EEA) law, asylum, and human rights. She leads a team that specialises in representing detainees with their immigration and public law matters; specifically, appeals, asylum, general immigration, challenges against removal or deportation and unlawful detention judicial review claimant work in the High Court. She also represents in civil claims in the county courts and the Queen’s Bench Division.

Jenna attends attend prisons and immigration detention/removal centres throughout England and Wales and regularly assists clients with applying for bail, release and those facing deportation.

She has considerable expertise in unlawful detention judicial review claimant matters and has a significant practice in unlawful immigration detention cases with high net claims for damages and challenging immigration removal cases; in particular, Dublin II third country removal cases. Jenna conducts her own advocacy, representing clients at hearings before the First-tier and Upper Tribunal of the Immigration Asylum Chamber. She is a legal aid specialist, representing vulnerable clients, including: minors; vulnerable women who have been raped; those with mental health issues, and those with medical issues including people living with HIV.

She has also been involved in numerous complex cases that settled out of court including MO v SSHD in which MO was one of the claimants in the test litigation of Medical Justice V SSHD, Equality and Human Rights Commission intervening [2017] EWHC 2461 (Admin) which held that the Home Office had applied an incorrect definition of torture to immigration detainees and challenged the Adults at Risk Home Office statutory guidance for immigration detainees.

Jenna regularly provides training on challenging immigration detention. She has previously assisted the charity Detention Action in their litigation challenging the Detained Fast Track by providing expert witness evidence and case studies on behalf of Duncan Lewis Solicitors. This evidence was extensively referred to by the Court in the judgement declaring the Detained Fast Track Process unlawful in 2014.

Jenna qualified as a solicitor in 2004. She joined Duncan Lewis Solicitors in 2004 and became a partner-level director in 2012.

She is an accredited Advanced Caseworker (Level 3) of the Law Society’s Immigration & Asylum Accreditation Scheme; there are only a small number of immigration practitioners throughout England & Wales that hold this quality mark. She is also a member of the judiciary and sits as a magistrate.

In 2019 Jenna was appointed as a fee-paid judge of the First-tier tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber.

Jenna has obtained her LPC and an LLB (Hons).