UCLA School of Law’s Ahilan Arulanantham, who is among the nation’s leading authorities and advocates in immigration law, has earned the Distinguished Alumni Award from Equal Justice Works for his decades of leadership, service and contributions to the field. Arulanantham is a faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law, where he is a professor from practice.

Equal Justice Works is among the most prominent public interest legal organizations in the country. It funds and trains law students and young lawyers to work with legal services entities in order to foster excellence and transform the landscape of the public interest sector. Arulanantham was an Equal Justice Works fellow in 2000, and he worked with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where he represented immigrants who were detained while they sought asylum in the United States.

Arulanantham accepted the award in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15, at an event that included more than 800 attendees from across the national public interest ecosystem.

“Ahilan is a vivid example of how Equal Justice Works Fellowships develop and launch public service leaders,” Verna Williams, the CEO of Equal Justice Works said in a statement. “In the 20 years after his fellowship, Ahilan not only has advocated effectively for communities in need, he also is educating the next generation of leaders.”

Celebrated for his visionary efforts both inside and outside of the courtroom, Arulanantham’s record is remarkable. Highlights include his leadership in several transformative lawsuits that worked to expand the right to public defense for people facing deportation, including Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, which was the first case to establish a federal right to appointed counsel for any group of immigrants (people with serious mental disorders).

Arulanantham’s work has had a profound and positive impact on the lives of noncitizens in the United States – initiatives that have in turn inspired many lawyers to also confront and combat the immense challenges that immigrants presently face. In keeping with that approach, he focused his remarks in accepting the Equal Justice Works award on the ongoing due process crisis in the nation’s immigration courts, where the vast majority of people facing deportation remain unrepresented, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children. He vowed to continue efforts to correct that “gross miscarriage of justice.”

Arulanantham joined UCLA Law in 2021 from the ACLU of Southern California, where he had led immigrants’ rights and national security advocacy and litigation in several capacities since 2004. He had also worked as an assistant federal defender in El Paso, Texas. He earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Georgetown University, a second B.A. as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

His many previous accolades include the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant,” in 2016. For Arulanantham, who is the child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, the efforts that have shaped his career are quite personal.

“Although the work has been hard, very hard, I have found tremendous joy in this struggle. And I’m not alone: My partners in it have become some of my closest friends,” he said in accepting his Equal Justice Works award. “I exhort all of you, tonight, in the spirit of Equal Justice Works, in whatever kind of work you do: Follow your conscience — do what’s right. Ultimately, that is where our greatest strength will always lie.”