Today we’d like to introduce you to Arwa Zakir Kakavand.
Hi Arwa, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
If we go allll the way back, I was born in Brooklyn, New York and moved to New Jersey when I was about 7 years old. Then I ping-ponged between New York and New Jersey for the next several years after high school —St. John’s University (NY) for undergrad, Seton Hall Law School (NJ) for my juris doctorate, and then back to living in Queens, New York after a brief stint in Paris, France.
During law school, I was the inaugural International Human Rights/Rule of Law scholar and was able to work at my school’s Center for Social Justice all three years of law school. As a student, I was involved in the representation of individuals in their asylum cases and other forms of humanitarian protection. That work was so meaningful and I truly believed I had found my purpose and calling. I graduated from law school in 2009, which was memorable timing, but not in a good way! The market had just collapsed, offers were being rescinded, and the plan most of us had built a legal education around had stopped existing…what is the saying about best-laid plans? So, I left the country (as one does!). I spent the next two years in Paris on a women’s rights fellowship with the International Federation for Human Rights, drafting position papers for the United Nations, writing a pro se legal guide for women, and advising community-based organizations in Africa and the Middle East on how to use international law to hold their countries accountable for women’s rights violation. It was not in the plan, but this was my first lesson in learning how to be nimble and pivot (more on that later…) and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel around Europe on a whim.
I came back to New York in 2011 and spent four years administering class action settlements including the Deepwater Horizon settlement; I trained and supervised a team of attorneys. I was good at it, I was well compensated for it, and it is where I met my now-husband! But it wasn’t what I had set out to do. And by 2015, I realized that I was building a life I did not particularly want for myself; I wanted a slower pace and I wanted to be closer to the actual work of representing people who needed someone to be their voice and tell their story.
I chose San Diego—sight unseen—entirely on the strength of what other people told me about it. My now-husband and I quit our jobs, saved enough to live comfortably for six months, and drove across the country in two cars, me in mine and him in his. Twenty-one epic days, camping, and seeing as many national parks as we could, with a very clear understanding that we would never get this opportunity again. We were right.
Soon after we arrived to the left coast, I added California to my New York and New Jersey Bar Admissions, and then the rest arrived in quick succession: engaged (2016), married (2017), and our son, Darius (2018). We have lived in nearly every neighborhood that suited the stage of life we were in: Little Italy, Carlsbad, East Village, Hillcrest, and now North/South Park, which is where we stopped. San Diego gets described as a big little city, and as a city girl at heart, that is the through line that has allowed me to thrive here and the reason I have stayed. Big enough that there is always something happening; small enough that I keep running into the same people while it does. I can walk everywhere. I cannot get more than a few paces without running into someone I know. Best of all, we found our people and formed a community —something I had been longing for — and we are still NOT in the suburbs! We will go to the suburbs kicking and screaming.
Professionally, San Diego is where the work finally matched the intention. I joined Casa Cornelia Law Center in early 2016 and eventually ran its Litigation Program, spent a year at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies training asylum attorneys nationally and another working for a genius solo appellate immigration attorney learning new skills and honing preexisting ones, and in 2025 came back to Casa Cornelia to launch and lead the Community Legal Response Project.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No. It started rough, in 2009, and it has never stopped requiring the reflexes that year taught me.
Immigration law is a field where the ground moves under you, sometimes twice before lunch. Policies change overnight and protections that were settled for decades get rewritten while your case is pending. You learn what it means to be nimble, adaptable, and pivot, and you build strategies that survives bad case law and policy. Of course with your clients’ best interests at the heart of it all.
The harder challenges were the ordinary human ones. Early on I was routinely the only South Asian woman in the room, and I spent more energy than I would like to admit deciding how much space to take up. Moving across the country in my thirties, with no local network and no clients and no idea where anything was, was humbling and challenging, but then again, I am always up for the challenge. And the work carries weight. When you sit with people who have fled inconceivable trauma for simply being who they are, week after week, some of it comes home with you. For years I treated that as the price of admission. It is not. It is an occupational hazard, it is manageable, and it is why I co-founded Sehat Wellness—a resource for those whose jobs and lives expose them to a high risk of secondary trauma and burnout,—and why I fiercely proselytize advocate wellbeing. Rest is not the reward for saving everyone. It is what makes doing the work possible.
The thing I would want a younger attorney to hear is this: everything I have achieved came from hard work, passion, sacrifice, refusing to become complacent, and a considerable amount of ancestral good luck. Nothing was handed to me. I am occasionally envious of people who were given a head start, and I have made my peace with it, because the absence of that head start is most of what made me capable and has built my thick skin and character. I would not trade the version of myself that had to just figure it out.
As you know, we’re big fans of Casa Cornelia Law Center. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I am the Managing Attorney of the Community Legal Response Project at Casa Cornelia Law Center. We are built for emergencies. When someone is detained unlawfully, that is the call we take. We file federal habeas corpus petitions challenging ICE’s unlawful detention practices, and we have overwhelmingly won them. We provide Know Your Rights education in multiple languages. And we co-manage the Immigration Legal Services Coalition of San Diego, a multilingual hotline run with three partner organizations that connects people facing detention or enforcement access to free legal help.
The other half of the job is multiplication. One attorney can carry a caseload; only a trained network can carry a crisis. I train and mentor attorneys, on the theory that the useful outcome is a hundred lawyers who can do this, not one who can.
The work I am proudest of is the Afghan Asylum Project, which I co-founded at Casa Cornelia after the Taliban takeover in 2021. We represented more than a hundred Afghan asylum seekers: judges, journalists, interpreters, women whose careers had made them targets overnight. These cases stay with you in more ways than one, and even five years on, the fight is far from over.
Outside of Casa Cornelia, I also serve as President of the South Asian Bar Association of San Diego and chair its Afghan Outreach Project, was the former Board Secretary for my son’s school Foundation, and chair of annual SoNo Fest judging committee (mark your calendars … first Sunday in December!). Oh, and I became a trauma-informed yoga teacher (virtually) during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic! I came here for a slower life and instead found a faster one that I chose and created intentionally. I am a live wire that runs on justice and I’ll admit I say yes more than I say no. I am still working on boundaries, but San Diego is one of the most beautiful places in the world to have unhealthy boundaries, and I get to call it home!
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Stop looking for the mentor. No one handed me a single wise elder who mapped out my career over coffee. What I have is closer to a committee, a dozen people who each gave me one necessary thing. Collect the pieces. Nobody has all of them.
The practical version: say YES. Join the bar association, committee, board, etc. and then actually do something in it. Every good thing in my career traces back to walking into a room not knowing a single person. Then turn around and do it for someone else before you feel qualified, because you already know something that the person two years behind you badly needs.
The last part is about San Diego specifically, and I say it as someone who arrived here never having seen the place. This city is generous in a way I did not expect. People answer the email. They make the introduction. They show up. I came here for a slower life and to start a family, and I ended up with a community and friends I expect to have for the rest of it. If you are new here, pick a room and walk into it. Someone in it will help you. Who knows? Maybe it will be me.
Contact Info:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arwa-zakir-kakavand-aba3b251/
- Other: https://sabasandiego.org/about/#officers
