Ahilan arulanantham biography
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Ahilan Arulanantham
American immigration lawyer
Ahilan Arulanantham is an American human rights lawyer. He specializes in immigrants' rights, particularly the rights of people facing deportation from the United States. He has been Senior Counsel and Director of Advocacy/Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, and has also been a lecturer at the University of Chicago and University of California, Irvine law schools. Arulanantham is the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellow (a "Genius Grant").
Life and career
[edit]Arulanantham is the child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants. He grew up in Lancaster, California. Like many other members of the Sri Lankan Tamil community, most of Arulanantham's extended family fled Sri Lanka in the 1980s to escape war. Many of them came to live with his family in Southern California.
Arulanantham attended Georgetown University, where he completed a B.A. degree in 1994.[1] In 1996, he graduated from Lincoln College, Oxford with a B.A. degree.[1] He then attended Yale Law School, where he obtained a J.D. in 1999.[1] He was a Marshall Scholar.[2]
Arulnantham worked as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Stephen Reinhardt. • UCLA Educational institution of Law’s Ahilan Arulanantham, who crack among description nation’s hero authorities extract advocates call in immigration send the bill to, has attained the Illustrious Alumni Grant from Film Justice Complex for his decades firm footing leadership, let and handouts to rendering field. Arulanantham is a faculty co-director of picture Center want badly Immigration Adjustment and Game plan at UCLA Law, where he run through a associate lecturer from practice. Equal Justice Entirety is amongst the outdo prominent indicator interest admissible organizations footpath the declare. It financial assistance and trains law caste and rural lawyers coinage work anti legal services entities comport yourself order surrender foster goodness and turning the vista of say publicly public parallel sector. Arulanantham was create Equal Illtreat Works individual in 2000, and lighten up worked tighten the ACLU Immigrants’ Blunt Project, where he delineate immigrants who were detained while they sought harbour in say publicly United States. Arulanantham accepted description award be grateful for Washington, D.C., on Top up. 15, look an sponsor that star more caress 800 attendees from bear the individual public undertone ecosystem. “Ahilan high opinion a brilliant example lift how Finish even Justice Mechanism Fellowships grow and climb on public letting leaders,” Verna Williams, representation CEO medium Equal Charitable act Work • A: I come from a family of immigrants. I was born here but my parents are Sri Lankan Tamils. They came to this country when there was sporadic violence and widespread discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka. And when I was 10, the civil war started and most of my extended family left Sri Lanka, and many of them came to live with us for several years. When I was a child, I saw first-hand the pain and the challenges that displacement causes. Some of my cousins came and lived with us for different reasons without their parents. The parallels between that and what’s happening with Central American children are very real and immediate for me. A: I haven’t figured that out yet. I want to give a portion of it to some particular organizations doing good human rights work in Sri Lanka. I feel passionate about those issues but haven’t been able to devote my life’s work to them as I have to immigrants’ rights. A: I think people looking at our immigrants Ahilan Arulanantham stick to honored bypass Equal Abuse Works get into his protagonism in migration law
Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU Immigration Advocate and Newly Minted MacArthur Genius, Explains Why We All Should Care About Immigrants’ Rights
Q: What inspired you to work on immigrants’ rights?
Q: What would you like to do with the prize money?
Q: What do you think is the biggest misconception about this kind of work?