VANITA GUPTA: Championing the Cause for Justice

It came as a major victory for Vanita Gupta, an Attorney at Law when the Obama administration decided last month to improve the United State’s immigration detention system, including ending family detention at the T Don Hutto Residential Center, an erstwhile state penitentiary in Taylor, Texas.

"I am elated — I am really happy about it," said Vanita Gupta, a staff attorney with the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union, who had led the lawsuit against Hutto over two years ago and exposed the inhumane conditions under which immigrant detainees, especially children of mostly asylum seekers, were incarcerated. "As you know, it’s a case that I’ve worked on for the last few years and so it’s a big development that the government is closing this family center down. I filed the first complaint in federal court back in March 2007 and got the settlement in August of 2007. Since then I’ve been very actively engaged in the monitoring the compliance in the facility. Our settlement was about to expire in three weeks. So this was welcome news that the government’s actually closing the facility down."

Gupta had filed a suit on behalf of 26 children, many under the age of 10, charged the facility with illegally incarcerating them in inhuman conditions, in cells with open toilets and with no provision for schooling while their parents awaited immigration decisions. The children, the suit had charged, were often intimidated and threatened by the guards.

The settlement agreement of August 2007 required Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make a number of significant improvements to the conditions inside the facility and subjected ICE to external oversight. The ACLU had also called for the overhaul of the massive immigration detention system, which has produced over 90 detainee deaths since 2003. It has been estimated that DHS locks up about 32,000 civil immigration detainees each day, including several hundred immigrants from South Asia, who are pursuing their immigration cases in the courts.

"I don’t think that this would have happened in the previous administration and so it’s a testament to the Obama administration," Gupta said. "However, I will say that Hutto was just one piece of a major announcement that the government made about immigration detention reform and so I’m really excited to see that the Obama administration wants to engage in reform and acknowledges that the immigration system is broken. We had over 90 men and women who have died in immigration detention since 2003 and there’s been a real crisis in access to medical care these facilities. And, so, reforms were very, very badly needed."

Vanita Gupta joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) as a Soros Justice Fellow in September 2001. She is now an Assistant Counsel at LDF and works in the area of criminal justice and civil rights. Her work at LDF has centered on leading an effort to overturn the convictions of 38 defendants in Tulia, Texas and to promote more systemic reform of the criminal justice system. In August 2003, under her coordination, the Governor of Texas pardoned the Tulia defendants.

Gupta received her law degree from New York University School of Law, where she served as the Colloquium Editor of the Review of Law and Social Change and was awarded a Vanderbilt Medal. During law school, she participated in a yearlong capital defender clinic at LDF as well as a yearlong trial clinic at NY Legal Aid, Juvenile Rights Division. She received the Anne Petluck Poses Prize for her clinical work. She attended Yale University, where she graduated magna cum laude in History and Women’s Studies. Prior to attending law school, she worked at the Harvard School of Public Health as a community organizer and public policy coordinator for its Violence Prevention Programs.

The latest victory consolidates Gupta’s reputation as one of the stars of civil liberties advocacy. Earlier, when fresh out of college, she had fought to procure the release of 46 wrongly accused African Americans in Tulia, Texas – a victory that resulted in her winning a Soros Justice Fellowship and the India Abroad Publisher’s first Award for Excellence 2003, among other honors.

She was a key player in the infamous Tulia, Texas cases, in which she had coordinated attorneys from a dozen law firms in New York, Washington, D.C. and California to seek justice for the 38 people wrongfully convicted on drug charges. She recalls, "I got involved in these cases after seeing a troubling documentary made about the 1999 drug "Sting" by the William Kunstler Fund. The documentary presented facts that were almost too outrageous to believe. I then discussed the case with others at LDF and was encouraged to make a trip down to Tulia to investigate the legal situation – who was represented and by whom, where were the defendants in terms of their legal challenges, etc. Just a month and a half after I joined LDF, I traveled down to Tulia and spent five days meeting with family members of the defendants, a local civil rights attorney, Jeff Blackburn, who was representing the last two defendants to go to trial and others involved in the case, and also combing through and making copies of as many relevant documents as I could gather. By the end of my trip, I had collected so much information that I had to buy another suitcase from Wal-Mart to bring it all back. I spent the next month in New York organizing that information and charting out the legal picture for the defendants. The more I learned about the case, the more I knew LDF had to get involved."

Upakar, one of the only communitybased organizations supporting Indian- American higher education and excellence, awarded the 2004 Upakar Community Ambassador Award to Vanita Gupta, a lawyer from New York for her significant contributions to minority and disenfranchised communities. On her future plans, this is what Vanita has to say: "I aspired to be a civil rights attorney when I first entered law school. From where I am now, I see myself continuing to do civil rights work. I wake up every morning excited about going to work. The day I stop feeling that way about how I spend my days, I will look for something else to do."

[ BY AJAY GHOSH ]