Attorney Huma Ashan Is Running for the Dane County Circuit Court: Prepared to Fight for the Rule of Law (Part 1 of 2)
Huma Ashan has experience working in the areas of immigrant rights and Indigenous law coming from a family of Indian immigrant parents.
by Jonathan Gramling
Although she is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in the United States, Huma Ahsan’s experience and much of what she draws from is that of an immigrant’s experience, as well as being “The Other” in many of her childhood experiences. And so Ahsan, a candidate for Dane County Circuit Court, is informed by those experiences in her approach to the law.
Both of Ahsan’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s from their native India.
“My dad came as an international student,” Ahsan said. “He studied satellite mapping and aerial photography. He got his Ph.D. and worked for NASA and his first teaching job was UW-Stevens Point. And my mom joined him there. Unlike my dad, she didn’t speak a lot of English. We lived behind the Piggly Wiggly. She took the bus from there to the tech school and she learned English there. At that point, around 1965-1966, my dad was looking for tenure. They weren’t giving tenure to people who looked like my dad at that time very often. Western Kentucky came and said, ‘If you come here to Bowling Green, Kentucky, on day one, you will have tenure.’ I think he came there in 1969-1970. And I was born in 1972 in Bowling Green.”
While Bowling Green’s schools had been integrated, Ahsan’s unique background made her “The Other.”
“I was the diversity,” Ahsan observed. “It was very interesting growing up in Southern Kentucky, particularly right after the Civil Rights Act and all of these things that had occurred. I started school a little before the 1980s. I didn’t understand the things that had happened in Southern Kentucky before I came along. I didn’t know anything about the racial history. ‘Why is it that I am the only one raising my hand that is a person of color?’ No
one knew what to call me. It was the 1980s. I am Indian American. Anything ethnic at the time, we were the terrorists. You had the Rambo movies. I was always the scary other in that context. I grew up knowing that I was always something different in the room. I guess that led me to being more compassionate about things.’
Ahsan enrolled at Western Kentucky University where her dad taught and became involved in social justice movements.
“I led a protest against the KKK,” Ahsan said. “I wrote articles against the KKK. They were wanting to march in Bowling Green on campus in the early 1990s. We led another protest movement against the KKK. So I’ve always been interested in social justice movements. And that led me into law school.”
Ahsan headed to Stetson College of Law in St. Petersburg, Florida where she had dreams of studying hard during the week and enjoying the sunshine and beach on the weekend. Ahsan met her husband there and their lives took another direction.
“My husband had an immigration issue,” Ahsan said. “ He’s from Pakistan. He’s a physician. I was graduating from law school. We had a choice. Either we had to go to a rural area for three years or to Pakistan for two years. We chose North Dakota. We were three hours north of Fargo. We were like five miles from the Canadian border. In the whole county, there were 2,500 people total. I began my legal career as a legal aid attorney in Minot for Legal Assistance of North Dakota.”
Ahsan got immersed in the work of a legal aid attorney, taking on a multitude of different cases from housing issues to domestic violence.
“I did a whole gamut of things that people of lower incomes would need legal representation for,” Ahsan said. “At that time, I was able to get a VAWA grant for $85,000 to do divorces, custody and protection orders and restraining orders for domestic violence and sexual abuse victims in North Dakota. That’s what I did with Legal Aid.”
She then moved on to the Turtle Mountain Community College to work on their Project Peacemaker. The mission was to basically shore up and strengthen the Turtle Mountain tribe’s legal system.
“We were trying to create an Indians into Law program with UC-Berkeley and the University of North Dakota,” Ahsan recalled. “All of these Indigenous tribes have court systems. But there aren’t a lot of attorneys. So they’ve been given these justice systems. We were trying to teach people from the tribe how to be their own attorney, how to create their own advocates and things like criminal and civil procedure. It was one of the first cohorts of an Indians into Law program. We were teaching people on the internet from different tribes how to have these justice systems. At the same time, the tribal courthouse burned down. And Turtle Mountain tribe said, ‘Can you come here and teach justice because the federal government is threatening to withdraw their funding for our tribal court system.’ I said okay. So I had to reconstruct court proceedings. There were backlogs on court processes. And the tribal judges had all left at the time. They said it was too much to handle. So I had to go recruit judges, hire judges, create budgets, reconstruct court proceedings, conduct oral arguments. And at the end of it, I think what we did was create a very transparent court that was centered around the community.”
When Ahsan’s husband completed his obligation, they moved to Madison in 2006. Ahsan worked for the UW Law School’s Indigenous Law Center — previously called Great Lakes Indian Law Center. And as the deputy director, she basically continued the work that she had been performing at Turtle Mountain, strengthening the tribal legal systems in Wisconsin.
“At this time, I appeared before the Supreme Court,” Ahsan said. “Shirley Abrahamson was the chief justice. And she was trying to put together a rule of court to grant what is called ‘full faith in credit’ to tribal court orders. If you got a divorce order in a tribal court like the Menominee or Ho-Chunk, that divorce order would be given full faith if someone came to a Wisconsin court and said they wanted to enforce it. That’s what ‘full faith in credit’ means. I went to the hearing. I wasn’t planning on speaking. But there were tribal chief justices who were talking about their oral history and where do they come from and which clan they belonged to. I remember a couple of the justices were very rude to them. One of them said, ‘Tell me your president.’ When they asked if anyone else had any questions, I raised my hand. And we had a great conversation with a full bench about public law 280 and how tribal systems need to have sovereignty and be respected in how they work. And the court asked us to prepare written comments for them. We drafted written comments regarding law 280 and how it should work in Wisconsin. Eventually the rule of court passed. It lasted several years. And then it led to a statutory law that codified that rule that you can get full faith in credit in Wisconsin.”
From there in 2009, Ahsan worked for the Ho-Chunk tribal court system for a couple of years before deciding that the long road trips were taking their toll and so she went into private practice in Madison.
“I worked with an old attorney in town here named Irene Wren,” Ahsan recalled. “She was one of the first woman attorneys in Madison. She taught me and three other women. And now we each have our own solo immigration firms. I always give credit for Madison Immigration Law to Irene Wren because I stand on her shoes. After she taught me, I opened Madison Immigration Law about 15 years ago. And I’ve been representing immigrants here in Southern Wisconsin who are unseen and unheard in all kinds of situations from criminal issues to victims of crime, marriage, naturalization, asylum seekers, reunifying families, and international students. I represent people from every continent.”
Next Issue: Why Huma Ahsan is running for Dane County Circuit Court
