Yasmin Cader is the ACLU’s Deputy Executive Director for Program, Strategy, and Culture. She works closely with the Executive Director and senior leadership team to help lead the organization’s strategic direction, strengthen organizational culture, and align its nationwide work to defend and advance civil rights and civil liberties. Before assuming this role, she served as the ACLU’s Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, where she led the organization’s work across criminal justice and racial justice. Throughout her career, Yasmin has been guided by a simple conviction: The Constitution's promises belong to everyone, and protecting the rights of any one of us ultimately protects the freedom of us all.
Under her leadership, the Trone Center spearheaded groundbreaking litigation and advocacy efforts to transform the criminal legal system, including by challenging unconstitutional policing practices, dismantling cash bail, protecting the rights and humanity of incarcerated people, and bringing systemic challenges to the death penalty across the country. Her team has been at the forefront of advancing racial justice in education, housing, employment, and economic opportunity.
Yasmin’s tenure at the ACLU coincided with some of the most consequential civil rights challenges of the past decade. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, she helped launch the Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative ensuring legal defense for providers and patients facing prosecution in the wake of abortion restrictions. She also oversaw the ACLU’s response to attacks on racial equity and diversity initiatives, advanced innovate approaches to policing and public safety, and helped secure President Joe Biden’s historic commutations for people on federal death row.
Before joining the ACLU, Yasmin spent two decades as a public defender in state and federal courts across the country, representing children and adults facing the most serious criminal charges, including capital cases and cases involving allegations of domestic and international terrorism. She later served as the Chief of Training at the Federal Public Defender (FPD) Office in Los Angeles, where she developed substantive legal and trial skills training programs for attorneys in Los Angeles and across the country.
Yasmin also co-founded Cader Adams Trial Lawyers, a women-owned litigation boutique in Los Angeles. During her time in private practice, she served on the Los Angeles Board of Police Commission’s Advisory Committee on Building Trust and Equity and the Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent’s Reimagining School Safety Task Force.
A proud graduate of Howard University and Yale Law School, Yasmin began her career as a law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She then joined the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, through the Honors Program, where she litigated individual and class-action claims of sexual and racial harassment and discrimination.
Yasmin has taught at NYU School of Law, UCLA Law School, and Wayne University Law School and delivered keynote remarks at Yale Law School, Bard College, Loyola Law School, and the University of Illinois College of Law, where she gave the 2025 Paul M. Van Arsdell Memorial Lecture. She has also presented events hosted by prominent businesses, media, and arts organizations, including Edelman, Fast Company, HARNESS, and Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY.
Passionate about developing the next generation of public interest lawyers and leaders, Yasmin has mentored and trained advocates at Gideon’s Promise, the National Criminal Defense College, and Harvard Law’s Trial Advocacy Workshop. Yasmin is also a fellow with The American College of Trial Lawyers.
Across every stage of her career — as a public defender, civil rights lawyer, teacher and organizational leader — Yasmin has remained committed to strengthening the institutions that protect constitutional rights for generations to come.
I try to lead with curiosity—especially when the stakes are high. I work alongside fierce, deeply committed people who know how to meet a crisis. My role is not to summon courage that is already there, but to keep asking what we may not yet see: What is beneath the immediate threat? What assumptions should we question? Where is there an opportunity that is not obvious? Curiosity helps us resist becoming so consumed by the urgency of the moment that we lose sight of the larger strategy.
I also believe that how we do the work matters. We need to find joy in the struggle, squeeze the fun out of a day, and be as intentionally kind and warm to one another as possible.
It reminds me that the struggle for democracy did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. Generations of freedom fighters have left us a blueprint for resisting injustice and for building movements broad enough to change the country. The movements that have endured understood that progress requires helping people see one another’s freedom as connected to their own.
I carry that history with me as a Black woman, as a former public defender, and as the mother of two incredible young men. My clients taught me what it means when our institutions fail to recognize someone’s full humanity. My children remind me that the choices we make now will shape the country they inherit and the country every child deserves.
That makes me impatient about injustice, but patient and disciplined about the work of change. We have to fight fiercely for what is possible now while building the relationships, strategies, and institutions that can carry the work forward. We may not finish the struggle, but we are responsible for advancing it. Meaningfully.
The first step is listening for what is underneath the disagreement. People may use different language, come from different political traditions, or disagree strongly about tactics, but there always is a deeper value or concern that we all share.
The goal is to be honest about what is nonnegotiable, curious about where someone else is coming from, and disciplined enough not to confuse disagreement with disloyalty. That is often where genuine common ground begins.
I prepare relentlessly, which lets me make the most of the unexpected when it comes—and it always comes.
I also try to surround myself with young people. They see things I cannot see and look around corners I do not even know are there. They have an energy, imagination, and impatience that I want to absorb. Experience is valuable, but it can also narrow your field of vision. I never want mine to become too fixed.
My mother. She is one of the bravest people I know, although she would never describe herself that way. Her strength is quiet. She has never needed to be at the center of the room or receive credit for what she has done, but she has always been completely clear about what she believes and willing to stand by it.
She taught me about injustice when I was very young—she taught me to notice who was being overlooked, who was being treated unfairly, and what responsibility we have to one another. She is brilliant and deeply curious, but there is no ego in the way she moves through the world. She lives humbly, gives with extraordinary generosity, and cares fiercely for her family and for people far beyond it.
She taught me that power does not have to be loud, that courage and kindness belong together, and that a principled life is built through the choices you make every day. So much of who I am began with watching her.
Distraction. My family is obsessed with playing and watching sports, so there is always a game to drive to, a score to check, or a debate in progress. My dog is also deeply devoted to me—far more than anyone else in the house.
I am also known to scroll The RealReal or eBay, convincing myself that I need something I absolutely do not.
The return of collective fandom. I loved how the World Cup gave us something to experience together—and how, for a while, it seemed as though everyone had become a Knicks fan. There are fewer and fewer moments when millions of people are paying attention to the same thing, at the same time, simply because they care about what happens next.
I love the arguments, the completely irrational loyalties, and the way sports can turn strangers into a community for a few hours. In a world that increasingly separates us into our own individual feeds, there is something joyful about all of us watching the same game.
Their Eyes Were Watching God. I come back to it every few years because it reminds me how gloriously complicated people are. Even in moments of profound hardship, Zora Neale Hurston never reduces her characters to victims or heroes. They are funny, flawed, resilient, contradictory, loving, selfish, courageous—all at once.
That has shaped the way I think about people, whether I was representing clients as a public defender or leading an organization today. We are all more than our greatest mistakes or the hardest thing we’ve endured. We are fully human, and any movement for justice has to begin there.
