Alka Sagar is an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles for 22 years and is currently a Deputy Chief in the Major Frauds Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  She was a litigation associate at two law firms prior to beginning her career in public service.  During her tenure in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Ms.  Sagar has handled a complement of corporate fraud, securities fraud and bankruptcy fraud matters, over 70 criminal tax cases, a complex fraud and money laundering case in which she worked closely with Scotland Yard, computer counterfeiting, sound recording piracy and the largest cash robbery in U.S. history, the $18.9 million robbery of Dunbar Armored.

Her most recent trial involved the prosecution of civil rights attorney, Stephen Yagman, for income tax evasion, bankruptcy fraud and money laundering.  She is a regular panelist at the American Bar Association’s Annual National Institute on Criminal Tax Fraud,  has volunteered her time to Project Lead, a program in which federal and state prosecutors teach inner city school children about the legal system and its impact on their lives, and has served as Judge Pro Tem for the Los Angeles Superior Court, Small Claims Division.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is the Director of Immigrants' Rights and National Security at the ACLU of Southern California. He has won lawsuits successfully stopping the detention and deportation of several non-citizens detained as national security threats under the immigration laws, brought an end to the government's policy of forcibly drugging deportees, and successfully represented a U.S. citizen wrongfully detained as an enemy combatant in Iraq. In 2007, he was named one of California Lawyer Magazine's Lawyers of the Year and in both 2007 and 2008 was named one of the Daily Journal's Top 100 Lawyers in California.

Prior to joining the ACLU's Southern California office, Mr. Arulanantham was an Assistant Federal Public Defender in El Paso, Texas for two years, where he represented people accused of criminal immigration violations as well as those accused of other federal crimes. Before that, he was a fellow at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project in New York, where he provided legal assistance to dozens of non-citizens detained after the September 11th attacks.

Mr. Arulanantham is a former law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a graduate of Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar.

Thomas P. O'Brien was nominated to be the United States Attorney for the Central District of California by President George W. Bush on July 12, 2007. He was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on October 4, 2007, and was sworn in as United States Attorney the next day. As the senior federal law enforcement official in the Central District of California, Mr. O'Brien is responsible for all federal criminal investigations and prosecutions, as well as all civil matters involving the United States, in the largest federal district in the country, encompassing seven counties and more than 18 million residents. In addition to his responsibilities as United States Attorney, Mr. O'Brien sits on the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force and is Chair of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee's Cyber/Intellectual Property Subcommittee.

Prior to being selected as the United States Attorney, Mr. O'Brien served for more than two years as the Chief of the Criminal Division in the United States Attorney's Office. Before that, he was Chief of the office's Civil Rights Section, where he investigated and prosecuted federal hate crimes, racially motivated murders, human trafficking violations, and police misconduct cases. Mr. O'Brien has received numerous awards from the law enforcement agencies he has worked with, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of State, the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, and the Los Angeles Police Department. He received the 2007 Anti-Defamation League Pacific Southwest Region's Helene and Joseph Sherwood Prize for combating hate. In October 2007, he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service - the highest award given by the Attorney General - for his role in investigating and prosecuting street gang members who committed hate-crime murders of African-Americans in Northeast Los Angeles.

Mr. O'Brien is a former Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County, where he was assigned to the Hardcore Gang Division for more than five years. During that time, he tried approximately 65 cases, including dozens of gang murder cases, as well as cases involving allegations of rape, assault, kidnapping, car-jacking, counterfeiting, and narcotics trafficking. He was named Prosecutor of the Month in July 2000 by the Los Angeles County Association of Deputy District Attorneys.

Mr. O'Brien graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1981, and from the University of San Diego School of Law in 1993, where he was an Associate Editor of the San Diego Law Review and received his degree with honors. He has accumulated 2,000 flight hours as a Radar Intercept Officer in the F-14 "Tomcat" fighter aircraft, and is a graduate of the United States Navy Fighter Weapons ("Top Gun") School.

Muneer Ahmad is a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, where he teaches in an international human rights clinic and also teaches immigration law. From July 2004 to April 2007, he represented a Canadian citizen detained at Guantanamo Bay, in both in civil proceedings in federal court and in military commission proceedings at Guantanamo. In his clinical teaching, he supervises students in the provision of representation to indigent immigrants in the D.C. area facing a range of legal challenges, including detention and removal, and labor exploitation in low-wage industries. He also supervises students on policy projects, including language access in D.C., as well as the availability of legal and social services in immigrant detention centers.

His scholarship examines the intersections of immigration, race, and citizenship in both legal theory and legal practice. He has also written and spoken widely about the impact of the September 11th attacks on Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities. He is a Commissioner on the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission, and serves as an advisory board member for the newly created D.C. Community Legal Interpreter Bank. He serves as a board member for Global Workers Justice Alliance (an organization committed to "portable justice" for transnational workers), and an advisory board member to South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).

Prior to joining the faculty at American, he was a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, where he represented low-wage Latina/o and Asian workers in L.A. sweatshops, represented immigrant workers who had been trafficked into the United States, and addressed the impact of welfare reform on immigrant communities. While in Los Angeles, he was also Legal Task Force Chair of the South Asian Network. He clerked for the Honorable William K. Sessions III in the U.S. District Court in Burlington, Vermont. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.