Biography of Lucas Guttentag
Lucas Guttentag is the founding national director of the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation. He began coordinating the ACLU's immigration work in 1985, established the Immigrants' Rights Project in New York in 1987 and opened the California IRP office in 1996.
Mr. Guttentag has litigated major class action and constitutional cases on behalf of immigrants throughout the United States for more than twenty-five years. He has argued landmark appeals, including in the United States Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and many federal circuits. He has testified before Congress, frequently speaks and writes on immigration law and civil liberties, and is often quoted in national print and electronic media.
In 2009-2010, Mr. Guttentag will be on partial leave from the ACLU to teach at Yale Law School as the Robina Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow in Residence. He regularly teaches courses on immigration law and the constitutional rights of immigrants at the University of California Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) and Stanford Law School.
Mr. Guttentag received his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School (1978), his AB with honors from the University of California Berkeley (1973), and served as law clerk to Judge William Wayne Justice in Texas. Before joining the ACLU he was on the clinical faculty of Columbia Law School and a staff attorney at the Center for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI) in Los Angeles.
He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, was named a Human Rights Hero by the American Bar Association's Human Rights journal (2001), recognized as one of the country's leading immigration advocates of the last twenty-five years by the National Immigration Forum in Washington, DC (2007), named among California's top 100 lawyers (2007, 2008) and as California Lawyer of the Year for Appellate Law (2002), received the annual outstanding litigation award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (2002, 1997, 1991, 1990), honored for his contributions to immigration law by the National Lawyers Guild (1998, 1991), and recognized for achievements in civil rights, human rights and immigrants' rights by Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Immigrant Legal Resources Center, the Central American Refugee Center and other national and community-based organizations. He serves on boards of non-profit organizations and has chaired or co-chaired committees of the American Bar Association, the American Constitution Society and other entities.
Mr. Guttentag designed and led the ACLU's five-year nationwide legal strategy to challenge the jurisdiction-stripping provisions in the 1996 immigration law and successfully argued INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001), and Calcano-Martinez v. INS, 533 U.S. 348 (2001), in the Supreme Court. The rulings preserved access to habeas corpus for immigrants and overturned retroactive application of a new immigration deportation provision. Other significant cases in which he served as lead counsel or played a major role include class action litigation challenging the indefinite detention of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Naval Base, Haitian Centers Council v. McNary, 823 F.Supp. 1028 (E.D.N.Y. 1993); a nationwide class action settlement providing new asylum adjudications for more than 250,000 Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, 760 F.Supp. 796 (N.D. Calif. 1991); constitutional challenges to a federal law penalizing citizens and immigrants who marry during deportation proceedings, Manwani v. U.S. Department of Justice, 736 F. Supp. 1367 (W.D.N.C. 1990), Azizi v. Thornburgh, 908 F.2d 1130 (2d Cir. 1990), that led to repeal of the statute; and litigation to hold former Secretary Rumsfeld and high-level military commanders liable for the torture of Iraqi and Afghan civilians in U.S. military custody, Ali v. Rumsfeld, 479 F. Supp. 2d 85 (D.D.C. 2007) appeal pending.
Under his leadership, the Immigrants' Rights Project's staff of eighteen conducts the country's premiere program of strategic impact litigation to advance the constitutional and civil rights of immigrants and supports the immigration program of ACLU affiliates nationwide. The IRP's current priorities include preserving judicial review for immigrants facing removal, challenging unlawful immigration detention, challenging post-9/11 policies and practices, litigating racial profiling of immigrants by local police, and bringing legal challenges to state and local anti-immigrant measures.