Biography
Cecillia Wang is the National Legal Director of American Civil Liberties Union, managing over 200 staff in the ACLU’s national legal department, coordinating with hundreds more attorneys in 54 ACLU state affiliates, and directing the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Cecillia has argued appeals in the Supreme Court of the United States and the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second, Fourth (en banc), Ninth (including en banc), Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits. She has tried cases in the U.S. District Courts for the Southern District of New York, Northern District of California, and District of Arizona. In addition to leading the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court since October 2024, Cecillia’s previous notable ACLU matters include challenges to: the government’s interpretation of an immigration statute to require civil detention without any individualized hearing; an executive order barring the entry of nationals of majority-Muslim countries; a pattern and practice of racial profiling and unlawful traffic stops by a sheriff’s office (and a subsequent contempt proceeding after obtaining a preliminary injunction and trial victory); an Arizona state constitutional amendment that prohibited the pretrial release of criminal defendants accused of being unlawfully present in the United States; and several other state anti-immigration laws.
Cecillia is a past director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy and ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. Between starting her civil rights career at the ACLU as a fellow in 1997-98 and returning as a staff attorney in 2004, Cecillia was a trial attorney in the federal public defender office for the Southern District of New York, worked at the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest, LLP, and served on the federal Criminal Justice Act indigent defense panel for the Northern District of California. Cecillia is a 1995 graduate of Yale Law School, where she was an Articles Editor on the Yale Law Journal and participated in the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic and Immigration Clinic. She clerked for Judge William Norris on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun and Stephen Breyer.
