Soros Justice Fellowships

Legal Aid Society

The vast majority of immigration detainees are housed in county jails on a contractual basis with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Meaningful governmental oversight and community accountability has not accompanied the increased reliance on county jails. By establishing the Community Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, Sunita Patel will build on past efforts in New York and New Jersey to develop a replicable model for greater transparency and public accountability for detention operations in New Jersey jails. The project aims to collect and expose the problems with detention through a volunteer network to conduct both human rights/detention standards documentation and individual advocacy. Patel also seeks to create independent community oversight for detention operations through public accountability boards.

Patel is a law clerk for the Hon. Judge Ivan L. R. Lemelle, Eastern District of Louisiana. She obtained her MA at Tulane University and her JD from American University Washington College of Law, where she started the Immigrant Rights Coalition, which focused economic/workers’ justice and immigrant detention. As a law student, she was a student attorney in the Human Rights Law Clinic and interned with Senator Kennedy’s office of the Judiciary Committee. She worked with civil rights and immigrant rights organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Legal Aid Society of Manhattan, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Patel recently published an article entitled “Performative Aspects of Race: ‘Arab, Muslim, and South Asian’ Racial Formation After September 11” in the UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal.

Prior to law school, Patel worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta investigating conditions of confinement in Alabama and Georgia juvenile detention centers, prisons, and jails. She has also worked as a community organizer and trainer with a multiracial group of youth in New Orleans and for human rights organizations in India and in South Africa.

New York, NY |  One Year |