ACLU SoCal Names New Executive Director

Human rights advocate Chandra S. Bhatnagar has been named executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, becoming just the third head of the national organization’s Los Angeles affiliate in more than 50 years, it was announced Tuesday.

Bhatnagar has a 20-year track record as an organizational leader and change-maker spanning the nonprofit sector, federal government and higher education, according to the civil rights organization.

“I am deeply honored to return to the ACLU as the Southern California affiliate’s next executive director,” Bhatnagar, who previously worked as senior staff attorney in the Human Rights Program at the national ACLU, said in a statement.

“For more than 100 years, the ACLU SoCal has been indispensable in the fight for fundamental civil rights and civil liberties in California,” he said. “As our region and country confront the greatest threat to our constitutional rights of this generation, we will remain on the frontline of the struggle to protect and advance the dignity and well-being of all our communities.”

Over the course of his career, Bhatnagar has used litigation, community organizing, public education and policy advocacy to defend communities who have been historically marginalized including migrant workers, the ACLU said. In 2015, he was part of a team that successfully represented H- 2B guest workers from India who were defrauded and exploited in a labor trafficking scheme in Mississippi and Texas.

Bhatnagar also served in the administration of former President Barack Obama as the senior legal and policy advisor to the chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In 2017, Bhatnagar left the EEOC to join UCLA, where he helped establish and led the institution’s Civil Rights Office, a neutral and independent civil rights enforcement entity that serves all of UCLA and the UCLA Health System.

“Chandra is a proven fighter for the people,” said Carlos Amador, president of the ACLU SoCal and chair of the ACLU Foundation SoCal. “His extensive experience as an organizer and movement lawyer, his keen understanding of systemic oppression and his genuine empathy for people make him the ideal leader for the affiliate in this extraordinary time.”

Bhatnagar will lead the work of an office that so far this year has filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s “unconstitutional and discriminatory mass deportation campaign, among other attacks on constitutional rights,” according to the ACLU SoCal.

He follows Hector Villagra, who led the ACLU SoCal since 2011, and during whose tenure offices were opened in the Inland Region and Kern County.

Established in 1923, the ACLU SoCal is the first affiliate of the ACLU, which now has 53 affiliates across the nation. Civil rights icon Ramona Ripston led the ACLU SoCal from 1972 to 2011.