Lankan lawyer wins Genius Award in US for defending immigrant children
Sri Lankan Ahilan Arulanantham, the Deputy Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, has been selected for the “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.
The US$ 625,000 grant is a merit-based honour that one does not apply for, so anyone selected for it is taken by surprise. According to a report in Fusion.net, the Foundation identifies people doing groundbreaking good deeds, studies them from afar and calls with the good news.
Mr. Arulanantham is currently working on a federal case to ensure unaccompanied immigrant children are provided lawyers when they go through deportation proceedings, the report says. He was raised by Sri Lankan parents in Southern California.
Mr. Arulanantham has represented thousands of immigrants over the past two decades, Fusion says. His work has been in defence of the Fifth Amendment which guarantees that no person should be deprived of his or her liberty without due process.
In 2006, Mr. Arulanantham worked on the landmark class action lawsuit Nadarajah v. Gonzales, which challenged the indefinite detention of immigrants. The case granted immigrants in deportation proceedings the right to a bond hearing after six months in detention.
Now Mr. Arulanantham is representing Central American children as young as three who have fled Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. And he says “it doesn’t take a genius” to know that kids facing deportation can’t defend themselves in court against professional government prosecutors.
Mr. Arulanantham says he has not had enough time to process what he’ll do with the $625,000 prize, but says he may put some of the money towards supporting human rights work in Sri Lanka. After all, that was his original calling to the cause, and one he now has the financial freedom to dedicate more time to.
“One thing I’ve thought about is supporting human rights work in Sri Lanka because I care deeply about that and I have not been able to devote my work to it,” he told Fusion. “I ended up doing more work with refugees in U.S. than in Sri Lanka.”