News & Commentary written by Cecillia Wang

Cecillia Wang is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. She oversees over 200 lawyers and support staff in the national ACLU’s Legal Department, works in collaboration with hundreds more legal staff in the ACLU’s 54 state affiliates, and leads the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Wang has been an ACLU lawyer for more than two decades. From 2016 to 2024, she served as deputy legal director at the national ACLU and directed the Center for Democracy, which encompasses the ACLU’s work on immigrants’ rights; voting rights; national security; human rights; and speech, privacy, and technology. Under her leadership during the Trump administration, the ACLU successfully challenged the President’s Muslim ban, border wall, and family separation policies, and his effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Prior to that, she directed the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and was an adjunct lecturer at the Berkeley and Stanford law schools.

Wang’s notable cases include:

An argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in a case challenging the government’s draconian interpretation of an immigration detention statute to require the jailing of immigrants defending against deportation charges based on prior criminal history, without any hearing, even when they have completed service of their criminal sentence years or even decades in the past.

A winning argument before the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in an Establishment Clause challenge to then-President Trump’s proclamation barring entry of visitors and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries.

A trial victory in a class-action lawsuit against a policy and practice of racial profiling and illegal detentions by the Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Office, before the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.

An appellate victory before an en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a class-action challenge to an Arizona state constitutional amendment categorically prohibiting bail to suspected undocumented immigrants.

Successful arguments before both the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in a civil rights challenge to Alabama’s notorious HB 56 anti-immigrant law.

A trial victory in a narcotics and carjacking case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in which her client faced a 44-year mandatory minimum sentence. She previously had quashed the government’s grand jury subpoena seeking her client’s DNA sample based solely on an allegation of gang affiliation.

Wang began her career at the ACLU as a fellow in 1997-98 and then worked as an attorney with the federal public defender’s office for the Southern District of New York and at the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP. While in private practice, she was appointed to the federal Criminal Justice Act indigent defense panel for the Northern District of California.

Wang is a 1995 graduate of the Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor for The Yale Law Journal. She served as a law clerk to retired Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States, working in the chambers of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and to Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1992 with an A.B. in English (with highest honors) and Biology.