has announced that she is running for a seat in Congress in next year’s elections.
Akhlaghi is running as a Democrat in the 2nd Congressional District of California. That is a largely Democratic district. So, if she can win the Democratic primary next June 2, she might have an easy cruise through the November election.
The district is a long but thin one that runs 300 miles along the Pacific Coast from the Oregon border all the way to northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge just north of San Francisco. Due to redistricting after the 2010 Census, this district has no incumbent congressman.
It is too early to say whether she will face stiff opposition in the primary.
If she wins the Democratic nomination, Akhlaghi will become the first Iranian-American with a serious chance to win election to the US Congress since 2004, when Goli Amiri ran as a Republican in Oregon trying to unseat an incumbent Democrat. The national GOP considered her one of its best chances that year to pick off a Democratic seat, but she fell well short on Election Day.
Akhlaghi left Iran with her parents at the age of five and had all her education in the United States. She got her BA from the University of San Francisco and her law degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. She began her career teaching constitutional law at John F. Kennedy University east of San Francisco.
In her campaign biography, she says she got a call shortly after 9/11 from a former student seeking help for a friend who had been interrogated by the FBI three times. That led her eventually to leave teaching and open her own law firm to help others facing immigration and related challenges in the wake of 9/11.
She soon became well known among Muslim groups on the West Coast for her advocacy. In 2004, she expanded beyond her legal practice to form the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement to promote civil rights and help those caught up in the post 9/11 hysteria and challenged by no-fly lists, surveillance, charges of violating the Iranian sanctions laws, deportation threats and the like.
Akhlaghi’s campaign site makes clear and prominent her Iranian roots. It doesn’t use the word Muslim anywhere and describes her work generally without mentioning that most of her clientele has been Muslim, though that should be clear to anyone reading her biography thoughtfully.
At one time, being Iranian had a negative connotation in politics. Now it is often seen more as exotic, but Muslim ties stir many on the right into active opposition.
