Anila Ali
Anila Ali is a middle school teacher, mother, and community organizer originally from Pakistan. She became an American citizen in 2002. She currently lives in Irvine, California with her husband, daughter, and son.
Zuhair Mahd
Zuhair Mahd is a blind adaptive technologies specialist working at a state agency. Originally from Jordan, he came to the U.S. in 1991 at the age of seventeen through a scholarship from the U.S. Agency for International Development to attend high school in Massachusetts. He became a permanent resident in 1999. Despite taking his case to a federal court in 2006—the court ordered the Department of Homeland Security to make a decision on his application in 90 days—Mahd did not receive his American citizenship until March 2009, five years after initially filing his application in 2004. He currently lives in Vancouver, Washington.
Prakash Khatri
Prakash Khatri is a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Ombudsman who served in this position from 2003 to 2008. During his tenure at USCIS, he was a vocal critic of the FBI name-check process used in permanent resident and naturalization applications, and the resulting backlog and delays. He is currently a private practitioner in the D.C. area.
Shirin Sinnar
Shirin Sinnar is a civil rights attorney and a Stanford Law School fellow. She previously served as a public interest attorney with the Asian Law Caucus and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, where she represented individuals facing discrimination based on government national security policies and unlawful employment practices.
Cecillia Wang
Cecillia Wang is the managing attorney of the California offices of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. Her practice centers on the impact of national security policies on immigrants, and the intersection of criminal defense and immigration law.
Smita Narula, Project Director
Professor Smita Narula is Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law. She directs the Center’s work on racial profiling and counter-terrorism. Narula’s scholarship and clinical work focus on key human rights issues including: discrimination on the basis of caste, race, religion, and gender; counter-terrorism and human rights; economic and social rights; and the accountability of corporations and international financial institutions for human rights abuses. Narula is recipient of the 2007 South Asian Bar Association of New York Access to Justice Award and the 2008 North American South Asian Bar Association Public Interest Achievement Award. In 2008, she was appointed legal advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Before joining NYU, Narula was Senior Researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch.To read Professor Narula’s Huffington Post op-ed on Americans on Hold, please visit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/smita-narula/stop-putting-americans-on_b_554210.html
Patrick Flynn, Editor
Patrick Flynn is originally from Rochester New York, now based in Brooklyn. He has been editing video professionally since 1999, cutting news and entertainment programs for PBS Frontline World, VH1, ABC, BBC, CNN, FOX, ESPN, The New York Times and various jumbotrons around the world. As a producer, he has worked in the U.S., Western Europe, Venezuela, Ecuador and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is co-directing a feature documentary in the DRC called Tales from Kin, slated to be finished in 2011. He is presently co-producing and editing, “Elusive Justice: The Search for the Last Nazi War Criminals” with Saybrook Productions Ltd for PBS.
Amna Akbar, Producer
Lama Fakih, Producer
Julie Hassman, Producer
For their generous contributions, we thank:
New York University School of Law
North American South Asian Bar Association Foundation
Ashurst Foundation
We are also very grateful to a number of individual donors for their support.