Author
Aarti Kohli
Executive Director
Aarti Kohli
Executive Director
Aarti Kohli is the Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus (ALC), the first organization in the country to represent and promote the legal and civil rights of Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Aarti leads ALC with a vision of increasing the power of low-income immigrant communities to help advance economic and racial justice in our democracy. She currently leads a national table of Asian American leaders addressing anti-Asian hate with a focus on policy, messaging, and solidarity work. Aarti is committed to advancing local, state, and federal policy solutions that recognize and address the needs of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Aarti is an experienced leader with over twenty years of experience working at the intersections of immigration, civic engagement, criminal justice, economic equity, and national security. Prior to joining ALC, Aarti led her own consulting practice where she advised philanthropy and managed a project on the politics of demographic change and immigration reform at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Aarti also served as the Director of Immigration Policy at the Warren Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law where she led the institute’s immigration initiative on issues of equity for immigrant families. Formerly, she worked on a range of issues, from bankruptcy to voting rights, as Judiciary Committee counsel to Representative Howard Berman (D-CA). Before working for Congress she served as Assistant Legislative Director at UNITE in Washington, DC where she lobbied on behalf of low-income garment workers.
For half a century, the Asian Law Caucus has used legal strategies to defend the rights of Asian American and immigrant communities and to advance a broader multi-racial social justice movement. We are building on this legacy of community lawyering to take our work to the next level.
Fifty-two years ago, a small team of volunteer attorneys saw their neighbors, parents, and friends struggling to assert their legal rights in the face of rampant racial discrimination and economic inequity. They turned to each other and said what can we do to grow our communities’ power? Inspired by the Black Panthers and the Third World Liberation Front, these intrepid lawyers opened the Asian Law Caucus (ALC).
The Asian Law Caucus’ first class action lawsuit, Chann v. Scott, ended racially discriminatory dragnets used by the San Francisco Police Department to target Chinese youth. The attorneys were deeply aware that ours was not the only community being targeted by police and our ultimate goal was to deter biased police practices for all. Beyond winning the case at hand, our staff also supported the community to tell their own story and demand more lasting safety for all children and families.
This and other early cases are the antecedents to the community lawyering practices ALC carries forth to this day. We represent individuals to make them whole, and also employ larger class action and impact cases, policy advocacy, and community education to achieve longer-term systemic change. This work is most often done hand-in-hand with grassroots partners, including base-building organizers and our clients who are central to defining and implementing a lasting victory.
We center communities in our legal practice because we know that victories for racial and economic justice are not achieved exclusively in courtrooms or the halls of Congress. They are predicated on building community power that shapes public narratives and decision-making.
Today, we apply our model of community lawyering to cases with tenants, working people, immigrant families, students, voters, and many others.
In 2018, for example, we filed Chhoeun v. Marin and Trinh v. Homan to challenge ICE’s mass arrests and deportations of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. Alongside these national lawsuits, we have advocated for pardons for individual clients, organized Know-Your-Rights workshops, and mobilized state and local policy campaigns. Clients and their parents, siblings, and partners have been emboldened to share their own stories with reporters, elected officials, and others harmed by ICE detention and deportation. Through this multi-pronged approach, we are educating the public and shifting the narrative around detention and deportation. It is an exercise in cultivating hope that we can and must change a harmful immigration system.
As part of our economic justice work, ALC’s clients have recovered over $10 million in unpaid wages across dozens of cases in the San Francisco Bay Area and California in the past several years. Equally important, together with our clients and organizing partners, we have transformed workplace practices around fair pay, sick leave, scheduling, tip transparency, health and safety, and anti-harassment and discrimination protections. With the support of community lawyers and organizers, working people are able not only to enforce wage laws but also use these cases to advocate for long-term solutions to inequity.
Our work is informed by the belief that no single case will protect our communities from the racial and economic harms they endure. Our work must be in service of creating, strengthening, and sustaining movements of people who together can achieve the world we deserve.
As we step out of the Asian Americans Advancing Justice affiliation and chart a new chapter for ALC, we want to seize the opportunity to bring more community lawyering capacity to greater parts of California and the U.S.
For example, we are offering support to partners in Texas, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and other states to bolster voter protection and poll monitoring programs during elections this November and beyond. By sharing legal strategies and expertise from our long-standing voting rights program in California, we are working to address barriers to language and disability access in voting, and helping ensure people can cast their ballots freely and fairly in the face of rampant voter suppression. In tandem with our legal advocacy to defend and promote the rights of all voters, especially those traditionally underrepresented, our work with partners helps more community members learn about their rights, advocate for themselves, and become active as participants in our multiracial democracy.
As we contend with rising threats against our rights and liberties, there is tremendous need for accessible legal resources and creative advocacy. Looking ahead, I have no doubt the more we invest in community empowerment, resiliency, and agency, the greater chance we have of a world abundant with belonging, compassion, and justice.
