New Minnesota director for ACLU stepping in at 'critical time for civil rights'

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota is turning to a longtime immigrant rights advocate and representative of asylum seekers to serve as its next executive director.

In an interview with the Star Tribune, Deepinder Singh Mayell described the role he will assume on May 10 as a "dream job" that he has coveted his entire two-decade career in advocacy and legal work.

"We are in a situation where this is a critical time in the United States and it's a critical time for civil rights," Mayell said. "There are significant assaults on our rights in several spaces — from reproductive health care to trans rights to immigrant justice to policing, and the ACLU is in that fight."

Mayell comes from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he served as executive director of the James H. Binger Center for New Americans, a clinical law program that uses litigation and advocacy to try to reform the immigration system. He was also co-chair of the Racial Equity and Justice Committee at the school.

Mayell is a member of the Legal Services Advisory Committee, a group that is part of the Minnesota Judicial Branch that allocates state funding to legal services programs.

Mayell will replace interim director Ben Feist, the group's chief programs officer, who stepped in for retiring director John Gordon last year.

The nonprofit civil liberties legal group has been at the center of such recent cases in Minnesota as a successful federal suit over how police have responded to journalists covering civil unrest, a legal battle over Minneapolis' handling of homeless encampments and a legal push to restore voting rights to felons who are on probation but not incarcerated.

ACLU-MN Board Chair Nicole Moen said in a statement that the group's board was "inspired by [Mayell's] strategic vision for the organization and his energy to tackle continuous challenges to our precious civil liberties."

Born in New York, Mayell is the child of parents who immigrated to the United States from India by way of Pakistan, where some of his relatives where forced to leave when the country was partitioned in the 1940s.

In New York, the roots of his activism and social justice work grew. That work was focused on anti-militarism and anti-racism.

"I really consider myself to this day to be an organizer," Mayell said. "Those are the skills that serve me most and the best."

Mayell graduated from Brooklyn Law School and later spent time as an attorney in Massachusetts representing victims of domestic violence.

His two decades of work in advocacy and the legal arena include a tenure as director of the Refugee and Immigrant Program at the Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis. There, he led the program's national asylum project that supported pro bono attorneys representing asylum seekers around the country.

"My parents came to the United States like so many people do because of the opportunity and the freedom and the rights that it offers," Mayell said. "And to be part of that story and to be part of the work that ensures that beacon, it is humbling."