Perpetual Foreigners: The Asian American Fight for Civil Rights; USALI Speaker Program
245 Sullivan Street NY ,10012 (view map)
Perpetual Foreigners: The Asian American Fight for Civil Rights
USALI Speaker Program
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024
Time: 11:30 AM- 1:00 PM (ET)
Furman Hall 212 and on Zoom
Pizza and beverages provided
About the event:
The U.S.-Asia Law Institute kicks off its 2024-2025 programs by taking a close look at a problem right here at home: racial profiling of Asian Americans, including at universities. During the Trump administration, the Department of Justice created the China Initiative, a program presented as safeguarding universities and businesses from economic espionage. In practice, it raised widespread concerns of racial profiling of Chinese American and immigrant academics and researchers, many of whom were accused of failing to disclose routine academic activities – but not of espionage or national security breaches. Although the program ended in 2022, there are ongoing efforts to revive it. The Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), a new civil rights advocacy organization created in response to the China Initiative, reports that Asian American and Asian researchers and scholars continue to face bias and heightened scrutiny in their working and living environments. AASF Executive Director Gisela Perez Kusakawa will discuss the current challenges faced by Asian American and Asian researchers, scholars, and students, the chilling effect this has, and the need for legal scholars to help develop innovative solutions to the tensions between national security and American values.
About the speaker:
Gisela Perez Kusakawa has been executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum since 2022. Before that, she was the founding director and supervising attorney for the Anti-Profiling, Civil Rights, & National Security Program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, one of the largest and leading national Asian American civil rights organization in the country. She has worked with asylum seekers and detained immigrants, and is an expert on policy and advocacy on anti-profiling, national security and civil rights. She spearheaded a successful coalition effort to end the China Initiative, a program created in the US Justice Department during the Trump administration that aimed to safeguard universities and businesses from espionage but resulted in racial profiling of ethnic Chinese researchers. Ms. Kusakawa has served on the boards of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association Education Fund, the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership, and the National Filipino American Lawyers Association. She is admitted to practice law at the District of Columbia and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and received her J.D. from The George Washington University Law School.