Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary took oath as San Francisco immigrant rights commissioner. She will guide the mayor and board of supervisors on issues and policies that will affect immigrants who live or work in San Francisco
“I am the first South Asian in this position and the message that I want to give to the Indian American community is that I want to be involved in advocacy and policy issues for the community,” said Dutta Chaudhary, a lawyer who was born and brought up in Chandigarh, talking to the Times of India in an exclusive interview.
Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary took oath as San Francisco immigrant rights commissioner. She will guide the mayor and board of supervisors on issues and policies that will affect immigrants who live or work in San Francisco. “I am very excited about this role which, I hope, will give me a deep understanding about the political system of this city and the issues faced by immigrants,” she said. Despite thousands of Indians living in the San Francisco Bay area on nonimmigrant H-1B and L-1 work visas and on green cards and San Francisco working in the technology sector.
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She was also a student at King’s College London’s undergraduate summer school in 2014
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She has worked as a consultant for a political party, Australian Progressives, on refugee policies of Australia and delivered guest lectures on feminism, patriarchal violence and gender in international law at the Harvard Law School
A gender, human rights, child rights, and conflict resolution specialist, Chaudhary hoped that her appointment will be a step towards addressing immigration policy issues related to South Asians in San Francisco in a bigger way. “Even as I get a deeper understanding of how the commission works, I hope I will be able to address some of the problems faced by thousands of Indians who live in San Francisco and the Bay area and create a link between them and immigration policy makers,” she said.
She will be working with asylum applicants who have faced gender-based violence or persecution in their home countries. “I have done research work on human trafficking of women in Nepal after the earthquake of 2015 for my book on the subject. I am passionate about gender rights,” said Chaudhary who graduated from Punjab’s Army Institute of Law, and did a master in international law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
She was also a student at King’s College London’s undergraduate summer school in 2014. She has worked as a consultant for a political party, Australian Progressives, on refugee policies of Australia and delivered guest lectures on feminism, patriarchal violence and gender in international law at the Harvard Law School.
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