Cecillia Wang

Cecillia Wang is the legal director at the national ACLU. Previously she served as the deputy legal director, directing the Center for Democracy, working on immigrants’ rights, voting rights, national security and human rights.

Early life and education

Wang earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1995. While at Yale Law School, she was an Articles Editor for The Yale Law Journal.
Wang served as a law clerk to retired Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, for Judge William Albert Norris on the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Career

Wang served as a fellow with the ACLU from 1997 to 1998. She then joined the federal public defender's office for the Southern District of New York as a staff attorney. She then entered private practice law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP in San Francisco.
Wang was appointed to the federal Criminal Justice Act indigent defense panel for the Northern District of California. Wang became the director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. Wang joined the national ACLU as a deputy legal director directing their Center for Democracy.
Wang was an adjunct lecturer in law at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley teaching immigration law courses.
Wang has been mentioned by the legal organization Demand Justice as a potential nominee for a federal judgeship by President Joe Biden.

Notable cases

In 2010, Wang was part of the legal team that won a class action lawsuit against a policy and practice of racial profiling and illegal detentions by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. The court ruled that Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's department has violated the rights of Latino drivers by racially profiling them.
In 2011, Wang was part of the legal team in a civil rights lawsuit challenging Alabama’s HB 56 anti-immigrant law.
In 2014, Wang was part of the legal team that won a victory in a class action lawsuit challenging an Arizona constitutional amendment that prohibited bail to suspected undocumented immigrants. The court ruled the amendment violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In 2017, Wang was part of the legal team that represented nine Delta Air Lines passengers that sued the Department of Homeland Security and CBP. The passenger's lawsuit claims they were forced to provide identification before de-boarding a domestic flight from San Francisco to New York.