Ahilan T. Arulanantham is the Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU of Southern California and a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. He has successfully litigated a number of cases to protect the rights of immigrants, including several large class actions. In 2007, he was named one of California Lawyer Magazine’s Lawyers of the Year for his work at the intersection of immigrants’ rights and national security, and in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2012 was named one of the Daily Journal’s Top 100 Lawyers in California. He has served as a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught a course on Preventive Detention. In 2010 he received the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award by the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association.
Prior to joining the ACLU's Southern California office, Mr. Arulanantham was an Assistant Federal Public Defender in El Paso, Texas for two years. Before that, he was a fellow at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project in New York.
Mr. Arulanantham is a former law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a graduate of Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar.