Ehsan Zaffar, Commissioner
Ehsan Zaffar is a civil rights lawyer, social entrepreneur, and one of the country’s leading voices on building practical, market-driven solutions to inequality. Based in Long Beach, California, he brings nearly two decades of experience spanning federal government, academia, and community-based innovation to the Commission on the State of Hate.
Zaffar is the Founding Executive Director of The Difference Engine at Arizona State University, a first-of-its-kind venture studio headquartered in Downtown Los Angeles that treats communities as entrepreneurs, not problems to be solved. Under his leadership, The Difference Engine has grown to 76 people and raised millions of dollars to launch a portfolio of community-built products and programs tackling challenges that traditional advocacy alone has failed to fix.
Through initiatives like the DifferenceCorps, which embeds community innovators into six-week build cycles, and the Distinguished Innovation Fellows program, which equips accomplished professionals over 50 to launch their next world-changing idea, Zaffar has pioneered a model where everyday people design and ship real products: from the Women’s Power & Influence Index, the most comprehensive public measure of workplace gender equity in the country, to RideCentric, which increases transportation access for low-income communities, to StacksJournal, a platform for independent academic research free from government control and bias. He also serves as Professor of Practice at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and Professor in the School of Social Transformation, and has held faculty appointments at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, George Mason University’s Department of Criminology, Law & Society, and Temple University’s Fox School of Business. Across these institutions, he has taught over 100 courses on civil rights, civil liberties, and national security policy.
For nearly a decade, Zaffar served as Senior Advisor on Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, advising successive Secretaries on the civil rights dimensions of national security policy. His portfolio included hate crimes response, immigration detention oversight, building community resilience in the wake of national tragedies from the Boston Marathon bombing to the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and serving on the interagency team that designed and launched the TSA PreCheck program. He also served as Advisor on International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State, where he contributed to the implementation of U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 through workshops across Europe and Southeast Asia.
A native of Southern California, Zaffar founded the Los Angeles Mobile Legal Aid Clinic, pioneering a mobile delivery model for legal care to low-income Angelenos that has been replicated across the state and nation. He is the author of Understanding Homeland Security (Routledge Press) and writes on inequality and civil rights as a columnist for U.S. News & World Report and contributor to CNN.
Zaffar serves on the boards of the ACLU of Southern California, the Human Rights Watch Los Angeles Committee, and The Nonprofit Partnership in Long Beach. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of Advisors for Team Rubicon. His public service has been recognized with the U.S. State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy and the DHS Secretary’s Award for Excellence.
His journey began as a child refugee fleeing war, an experience that continues to shape his conviction that the affordability crisis is the civil rights issue of this era, and that communities themselves hold the solutions. He earned his J.D. from Pepperdine University School of Law and dual B.A. degrees from UCLA.