Ahilan Arulanantham

Guest Author

Ahilan Arulanantham (Bluesky – LinkedIn) is Professor from Practice and Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law. He has successfully litigated a number of cases involving immigrants’ rights, including Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first case to establish a federal right to appointed counsel for any group of immigrants; Jennings v. Rodriguez, which secured the due process rights of immigrants jailed for years while litigating their deportation cases; and Ramos v. Nielsen, a challenge to the Trump Administration’s plan to end the TPS program. Ahilan has argued three times before the United States Supreme Court, most recently in the fall of 2021 on behalf of Americans of the Muslim faith who were targeted by the federal government for surveillance because of their religion in FBI v. Fazaga. Prior to joining UCLA, Ahilan was Senior Counsel at the ACLU in Los Angeles, where he worked for nearly twenty years. In 2016 Ahilan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.