Ahilan Arulanantham

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 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. In 1996, he graduated from Lincoln College, Oxford with a B.A. degree.

Arulnantham worked as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Stephen Reinhardt. He was also an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project in New York. and during that process Arulanantham argued the case twice before the Supreme Court. Los Angeles magazine described him as being "on the front line for civil rights in the Trump era",

Selected awards In 2010, the American Immigration Lawyers Association gave Arulanantham the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award. In 2014, he and the rest of the litigation team in Franco-Gonzalez v Holder were given the Jack Wasserman Memorial Award, also by the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He has also been repeatedly listed by The Daily Journal among the "top 100 lawyers in California".

Arulanantham was named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, for "leading advocacy and legal efforts to secure the right to due process for immigrants facing deportation and working to set new precedents for the constitutional rights of noncitizens."