Patel, Sunita

Position

Staff Attorney

Biography

Sunita Patel recently joined the Center for Constitutional Rights as a Staff Attorney, where she is involved with racial profiling, immigrant rights and other human rights litigation.

Prior to her position at CCR, she held a Soros Justice Fellowship at The Legal Aid Society, Immigration Law Unit in New York where she represented immigrant detainees in removal proceedings and worked with criminal justice and human rights groups to create independent community oversight for detention operations through public accountability boards. Sunita is a former law clerk for the Honorable Judge Ivan L. R. Lemelle in the Eastern District of Louisiana. She published an article in 2006 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, Sunita investigated conditions of confinement in Alabama and Georgia juvenile detention centers, prisons, and jails as a paralegal at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. 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. She obtained her BA at Tulane University and her JD from American University Washington College of Law.