Saira Hussain
Saira Hussain is a Senior Staff Attorney focusing on litigation at the intersection of racial and immigrant justice, government surveillance, and technology. Among her work at EFF, she has represented U.S. travelers challenging border searches of their smartphones and other electronic devices; protesters for racial justice challenging police's live camera monitoring of their movement; Asian community leaders challenging a utility company and police's dragnet surveillance of customers' energy usage data; immigrant rights advocates challenging California law enforcement's out-of-state sharing of automated license plate reader data, including with ICE; and academic researchers challenging the California prison system's withholding of race data (to build an AI tool that can detect patterns of bias in parole denial determinations).
Previously, Saira was a Staff Attorney in the Criminal Justice Reform Program at Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus (ALC), where she focused on disentangling federal immigration enforcement from local law enforcement through policy advocacy, litigation, and coalition-building. She started at ALC as a Berkeley Law Public Interest Fellow in the Immigrant Rights' Program, representing immigrants in deportation proceedings. Saira received her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley. She speaks Spanish and Urdu.
