Alumni profile: Swapna Reddy, A.B. '09

If Swapna Reddy hadn’t happened to be in Texas at the right moment, her career might’ve gone in an entirely different direction. Reddy, A.B. '09, was at Yale Law School in early 2015, and along with some classmates decided to volunteer for a week at a Texas detention center. There they met Suny Rodriguez, an asylum seeker from Honduras who arrived in the United States in January 2015 and spent four months in the detention center with her son. Rodriguez was about to face a hearing about the legitimacy of her asylum request, so Reddy and her classmates decided to help by digging up evidence necessary to prove she faced political persecution and potentially death in her home country.

“She won her case and was released that day,” Reddy said. “Rather than celebrate, she turned to us and asked what would happen to all the other mothers. More importantly, she asked, what we could do to help. Suny wanted to know what we could do to make sure other families in the future had support.”

Reddy and her classmates made good on Rodriguez’s request by co-founding the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a non-profit organization to provide community, resources and advocacy to help its members navigate the asylum process and immigration system. Reddy, a dual-concentrator in computer science and mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), with a secondary in economics, now puts both her technical and legal backgrounds to work as co-executive director of an organization that serves nearly a million asylum seekers.

“One of the reasons that immigrants can be underserved in the United States is that immigrant-serving organizations are lagging behind in technical adoption, which is often correlated with their ability to scale,” Reddy said. “ASAP is doing things differently. We’re reaching asylum seekers online and using technology to help our members and their families navigate a complex immigration process.”

Reddy’s interest in social impact goes back to her family’s experiences with immigration. Reddy’s parents were the first in their families to come to the United States. And while Reddy and her older brother have always lived in the United States, the high cost of early childcare led her parents to send her younger brothers to live with their extended family in India. They returned for kindergarten in their hometown outside Nashville, but their experiences here were forever altered by living abroad at an early age.

“A lot of my earliest memories of childhood relate to seeing the discrepancies between how my older brother and I were treated compared to my younger brothers: their accent, the fact that English was a second language, their different cultural norms,” she said. “My brothers and I are so similar, but small changes can really affect how people are treated and what opportunities they have.”

Despite the work that she does now, Reddy arrived at SEAS with very limited computer science skills. She became a research assistant in the labs of Barbara Grosz, Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences, and Stuart Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science. She stayed on with Grosz for a year after graduating, researching the potential benefits of artificial intelligence for teachers in underserved schools.

“I had never coded for a day in my life before the fall of my junior year,” she said. “Only somewhere like SEAS could I have written my first line of code as a junior and within a semester become a research assistant for professors as talented and influential as Barbara and Stuart.”

Reddy later worked for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT before becoming a paralegal at Ross, Silverman, Snyder and Tietjen LLP in Boston. Her work on political asylum, removal and immigration cases there convinced her she could best make an impact by studying law, and in 2013 she enrolled at Yale Law School.

While ASAP’s membership size grew slowly over the first five years, a 2020 legal victory that made it easier for ASAP members to get work permits caused its membership to skyrocket from 5,000 to 250,000 in a little over a year. Suddenly the organization’s tech capabilities were too meager, and Reddy found herself drawing on her SEAS education to come up with a solution.

“I was the only person at ASAP with a background in data and technology, so I took the lead on figuring out how to remake our member services system to be able to handle this scale of welcoming thousands of people per week,” she said. “I was able to work with a software engineer to spin out a new membership system within two weeks of our legal victory. From that time in September 2020 to the present, we’ve welcomed at least 1,000 new members each week, sometimes upwards of 4,000. It continues to be a big part of my job to keep up with the scale of our membership, and to expand our services and improve their quality even during periods of exponential growth.”

Because ASAP is a non-profit, fundraising is a central part of her day-to-day work. That’s proven to be one of Reddy’s biggest challenges given that three different administrations have run the White House since she founded ASAP, and each one has had a different approach to immigration.

“In the last nine years, there have been a lot of fluctuations in the narrative about asylum seekers,” she said. “The media narrative about who asylum seekers are can change, but nevertheless, asylum seekers need a stable source of information they can rely on. They have questions about how to submit an asylum application, when you’re eligible for a work permit and how to apply for it, and how to check the status of an upcoming hearing. Whatever the law is, asylum seekers need to be able to determine what it is and how to follow it.”

Because of her time at SEAS, Reddy has taken the lead on responding to technological challenges at ASAP. When members make requests for new services, such as a new self-help resource or communication through a new social platform, it’s Reddy’s job to meet with the software engineering team and determine how to execute that. It helps that Reddy’s background includes elements of mathematics, computer science, economics and data science, as all of those disciplines benefit the work she’s doing now.

“There were so many disciplines in which you could get a world-class education at Harvard that it made me excited to take challenging classes in as many different disciplines as possible,” she said. “Any time I realized there was something I wanted to learn more about, the next semester I could take a course in that area from one of the world’s leading experts. There’s so much of what I do at my job that wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t go to Harvard undergrad, and have that kind of flexibility, optionality and rigor.”