Chandra S. Bhatnagar is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.
Chandra joined the SoCal affiliate in July 2025. A leading expert on civil rights and human rights, he brings a distinguished 20-year track record as an organizational leader and changemaker spanning the nonprofit sector, federal government and higher education.
Chandra's professional background includes more than a decade of experience working with the ACLU national office in the Human Rights Program as the senior staff attorney leading the program’s litigation and strategic policy on racial justice and immigrants’ rights issues.
Chandra also served in the Obama administration as the senior legal and policy advisor to the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In that role, Chandra oversaw the office of the chair’s strategic efforts on issues including communications; immigrant, migrant and vulnerable workers; complex employment relationships; policing and labor trafficking.
In 2017, Chandra joined UCLA as its inaugural assistant vice chancellor for civil rights, where he helped establish and lead the institution’s Civil Rights Office, a neutral and independent civil rights enforcement entity that serves all of UCLA and the UCLA Health System.
Over the course of his career, Chandra has creatively used litigation, community organizing, public education and policy advocacy to defend communities who have been historically marginalized. For instance, he was part of a legal team that successfully represented more than 500 H-2B guest workers from India who were subjected to race discrimination and exploitation in a labor trafficking scheme in Mississippi and Texas. In recognition of this effort, Chandra and co-counsel were recipients of the 2015 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award.
Chandra began his career as a staff attorney and Skadden fellow with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he directed the South Asian Workers' Project for Human Rights, a community-based project in New York City providing legal services to low-wage workers from South Asia in the post-9/11 environment.
Chandra holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an LL.M. with a focus on international human rights law from Columbia Law School.