Featured, Roddenberry Fellowship
Meet Gautam, a 2019 Roddenberry Fellow
Gautam Jagannath is a leading innovator and founding director of Social Justice Collaborative. Gautam was certified by the State Bar of California as an Immigration & Nationality Law expert. SJC provides deportation defense and related legal services to low-income immigrants, mostly refugees, in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley of California.
“Our work is aimed towards promoting family unity and a more inclusive society by defending families from separation and other legal barriers regardless of their legal status. We are unique in providing full-scope representation in all deportation and legal matters for immigrant adults and unaccompanied minors by fighting for them from start to finish.”
During the 2019 Fellowship
Gautam is working on a total technological overhaul of their client management system by using high end, multilayered AI automation to overhaul mundane and routine administrative tasks which essentially dominate the time commitment involved in civil rights litigation, especially for trial level immigration defense. The end result will be a new way to interface with clients from the intake to case completion, and the use of high-level technology to reduce the costs involved with representing more immigrants and refugees in deportation proceedings. The project will involve working with a team of back-end engineers and data scientists to alter the way data flows through the organization, and to improve the architecture of the way staff interface with the program. The goal is to produce the bones of a new way of approaching deportation defense.
“Success here means that our model is flexible and viable for other disciplines — that it is something that can be altered to suit various other forms of legal aid. This is the exciting part of this project is that not only will it serve the needs to expand SJC services across the nation but it will serve as a foundation for disruptive change in the future for all legal aid providers.”
Ways to get involved
Help out by joining our movement, signing up for our newsletter and donating to the cause of deportation defense. If you are or know any progressive-minded undergraduate or law students, we are open to accepting full and part-time internships as well.
Donate: Donate to Social Justice Collaborative
Intern: Intern for Social Justice Collaborative
Learn more about Gautam and Social Justice Collaborative: https://www.socialjusticecollaborative.org/
