Sarah Cross

Sarah Cross is Director, 21st Century Protection at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and a Nonresident Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. She has more than 25 years of experience in the field of forced migration across government, philanthropy, academic, and nonprofit sectors.

Most recently, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), overseeing the Office of Refugee Admissions. In that capacity, she led the U.S. government’s global refugee resettlement program. Under her leadership, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was rebuilt and modernized, enabling resettlement arrivals to reach a 30-year high, and the State Department launched Welcome Corps, an innovative new refugee sponsorship program. 

Ms. Cross has served in a number of other senior roles, including as Director for Refugee and Migration Policy at the White House National Security Council under the Obama and first Trump administrations, overseeing U.S. government-wide collaboration around refugee resettlement and U.S. engagement in multilateral fora on international migration policy. She also served as Advocacy Director for the International Migration Initiative at Open Society Foundations. And she served on the Biden-Harris presidential transition team.

She holds a bachelor of arts from Bowdoin College, a master’s in forced migration from Oxford University, and a master’s in international relations from Georgetown University.