Protect Borrowers Welcomes Top Lawyers Eric Halperin, Cara Petersen, and Tara Mikkilineni as Senior Fellows

November 12, 2025 | WASHINGTON, D.C. — Three enforcement leaders formerly at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are joining Protect Borrowers as senior fellows to launch a strategic enforcement project focusing on the weaponization of corporate power that is plunging working people into financial crisis. Eric Halperin, Cara Petersen, and Tara Mikkilineni bring decades of enforcement, litigation, and civil rights experience both inside and outside government to Protect Borrowers for a new initiative that will use legal and policy levers to challenge products and practices that exploit workers, consumers, and small business owners.

Between 2021 and 2025, Halperin, Petersen, and Mikkilineni helped lead a team at the CFPB that secured orders for more than $9.5 billion in penalties and payments to consumers. They developed innovative legal theories to address predatory practices, coordinated enforcement actions with broader policy initiatives to achieve marketwide impact, worked closely with state and local law enforcement partners, and brought enforcement actions against the nation’s largest Wall Street banks and tech companies. As part of this strategic litigation project, they will use this unique experience to develop litigation that will challenge entrenched and emerging corporate abuses. They will also expand these forward-looking legal and policy ideas to a wide host of illegal practices that affect Americans’ everyday economic lives, and strategically partner with private firms, state and local law enforcers, and advocacy organizations to maximize the impact of this work.

“With federal law enforcers asleep at the wheel, corporations have been given a free pass to ignore the law and trample on Americans’ rights. We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to protecting working people from these abuses,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers. “Eric, Cara, and Tara are three tremendously accomplished consumer protection and civil rights attorneys who will bring cutting-edge legal strategies to the fight against unchecked corporate power, tech-powered surveillance, and rank corruption.”

“Indicators of deep economic pain for workers and consumers are flashing bright red, even as corporate profits are skyrocketing,” said Eric Halperin, Protect Borrowers senior fellow and former enforcement director of the CFPB. “That is not a coincidence. With no federal enforcement apparatus to ensure corporations are held accountable to the public, it’s only too easy for corporations to fleece consumers to line their pocketbooks. We are thrilled to be incubating a strategic litigation project at Protect Borrowers that so closely aligns with their mission to fight for families that are drowning in debt and struggling to make ends meet.”

The CFPB enforcement leaders joining Protect Borrowers as senior fellows are:

  • Eric Halperin, who was the enforcement director at the CFPB from 2021 to 2025 and has more than 25 years of experience as a consumer and civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department and litigating at national non-profit organizations. At the Justice Department, he led the Civil Rights Division’s post-financial crisis fair lending enforcement, bringing landmark federal enforcement actions for discrimination in subprime mortgage lending and the first-ever federal enforcement actions for illegal foreclosures against servicemembers. 
  • Cara Petersen, who was part of the founding team of the CFPB after the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act. She held a variety of senior positions there, including serving as the Principal Deputy Enforcement Director from 2018 to 2025. During her time at the CFPB, she was involved in many cases developed and brought in partnership with state and local law enforcers. She has nearly 25 years of experience litigating in private practice, at the Federal Trade Commission, and at the CFPB.  
  • Tara Mikkilineni, who was a senior advisor to CFPB Enforcement leadership and is an experienced civil rights litigator and former public defender who has worked closely with grassroots movement organizations in developing strategic impact litigation around the country, including coordinating litigation with advocacy and narrative change campaigns. 

This new project will work alongside Protect Borrowers’ ongoing litigation and legal strategy practice. Investigations and lawsuits driven by Protect Borrowers have delivered more than $1 billion in debt relief, returned hundreds of millions of dollars to borrowers, and won justice for teachers, healthcare workers, students, airline pilots, pet groomers, and millions of other working people across the country.

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About Protect Borrowers

Protect Borrowers (formerly Student Borrower Protection Center) is a nonprofit organization led by a team of experts, lawyers, and advocates fighting to build an economy where debt doesn’t limit opportunity. We investigate financial abuses, take predatory companies to court, and push for policies to protect working people from debt traps. We aim to deliver immediate relief to families while building power, driving systemic change, and fighting for racial and economic justice.

Learn more at protectborrowers.org or follow us on social @BorrowerJustice.