Swapna Reddy: From an Indian immigrant family to championing a million asylum seekers in the US

(Oct 16, 2026) A daughter of Indian immigrants, Harvard and Yale alumna Swapna Reddy co-founded ASAP. Through it she has helped more than one million asylum seekers from 175 countries navigate the US immigration system. Her work earned her a place on TIME100 Next in 2026.

When Swapna Reddy’s twin younger brothers returned to the United States after spending part of their childhood in India, she began noticing things that might have escaped others. They were part of the same family, yet their accents, their use of English and their familiarity with American cultural norms affected how people treated them. The differences were small, but the consequences were not always so.

Swapna’s parents were the first in their respective families to immigrate to the United States. While Swapna and her older brother grew up in America, the high cost of early childcare led her parents to send her younger brothers to live with extended family in India. The boys returned to the US for kindergarten in their hometown outside Nashville, but the experience of growing up across two countries had already shaped them in ways their older siblings had not experienced.

“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,” Swapna recalled in an interview with Harvard’s alumni publication. “My brothers and I are so similar, but small changes can really affect how people are treated and what opportunities they have.”

Years later, she would encounter people for whom migration was not simply a story of adjusting to a new accent, a different classroom or unfamiliar cultural expectations. For asylum seekers, the stakes could include the possibility of returning to a country where they feared persecution, the uncertainty of an unresolved legal case and the difficulty of supporting a family while waiting for permission to work.

Swapna’s response to those challenges has been to combine two fields that rarely occupy the same space in the public imagination: technology and immigration law.

As co-founder and co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), she has helped build an organization that uses digital tools, legal resources and collective advocacy to serve more than one million asylum seekers from 175 countries across the United States. In September 2026, Swapna Reddy and her co-founder Conchita Cruz were named to TIME’s TIME100 Next list, which recognizes emerging leaders shaping the future.

It is incredibly difficult for immigrants to build new lives in the United States. At times they make unspeakable sacrifices. But they persist, and they make this country stronger.

Swapna Reddy

The story of ASAP began with a mother who had just won her asylum case and was thinking about everyone else still waiting.

Conchita Cruz and Swapna Reddy, Co-founders of ASAP | Photo Credit: TIME

The question that changed everything

In early 2015, Swapna was studying at Yale Law School when she and three classmates decided to spend a week volunteering at an immigration detention centre in Dilley, Texas.

There, they met Suny Rodriguez, a Honduran woman who had arrived in the United States with her young son. By the time the students encountered her, she had spent four months in detention and was approaching a hearing to determine the outcome of her asylum request.

Rodriguez needed to demonstrate that she faced political persecution and potentially death if she returned to Honduras. The students set about gathering the evidence needed to support her case.

They succeeded. Rodriguez won her case and was released with her son that day. For the students, the outcome was a significant victory. Their work had helped a mother and child leave detention and secure a future in the United States. Yet the moment that stayed with Swapna was what happened next.

Rather than simply celebrate, Rodriguez asked what would happen to all the other mothers. What could be done to ensure that other families received the help they needed?

It was a question that shifted the focus from one successful case to a much larger problem. The students had seen how legal knowledge and timely assistance could make a difference to a family. They had also seen that many others might never receive the same help.

Rodriguez’s question was not merely about finding more lawyers to represent more people. It was about creating a way for asylum seekers to obtain information, understand the process and access support over the course of their cases.

Swapna Reddy and her three classmates responded by co-founding the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project in 2015.

The idea was to help asylum seekers navigate a complex immigration system while building a community around people facing similar challenges. Instead of treating each case as an isolated problem, ASAP would develop resources that could reach many people and support them over time.

That distinction would become central to the organization’s growth. A person seeking asylum might need help understanding an application today, information about a work permit several months later and guidance on a forthcoming hearing after that. A resource that helped one individual could potentially help thousands more if it were designed to be accessible at scale.

For Swapna, the question was no longer only how to help the next family. It was how to make help easier to find for families across the country. Later, in an interview with Equal Justice Works she mentioned:

ASAP’s ultimate goal is to end the wrongful detention and deportation of asylum seekers in the United States. Though this goal may sound lofty, I believe it is possible if asylum seekers are provided the resources and support they need to chart their path forward.

Swapna Reddy

From Harvard’s laboratories to Yale Law School

Swapna’s route into immigration law was shaped by an academic background that initially seemed far removed from the courtroom. At Harvard University, she pursued a dual concentration in computer science and mathematics at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, alongside a secondary field in economics. She graduated in 2009.

She did not arrive at Harvard with an extensive background in coding. In fact, she later recalled that she had never written code before the fall of her junior year. Her introduction to the field came through coursework and research opportunities. She worked as a research assistant with Harvard professors Barbara Grosz and Stuart Shieber, then remained at Harvard for a year after graduation, researching how artificial intelligence could support teachers in underserved schools.

That early exposure to technology was followed by work in economics research at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT and experience with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She also worked as an immigration paralegal at Ross, Silverman, Snyder and Tietjen LLP in Boston, where she handled matters involving political asylum, removal and immigration cases.

The legal work brought her closer to the practical difficulties faced by people trying to establish their right to remain in the country. It also helped her decide that studying law would allow her to make a greater contribution.

In 2013, she enrolled at Yale Law School. Looking back, Swapna has credited Harvard’s interdisciplinary environment with giving her the freedom to explore several fields and the foundation to combine them later.

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.

Swapna Reddy

That breadth would become useful in an unexpected way. At ASAP, understanding immigration law would be essential, but so would the ability to develop systems that could handle large amounts of information, respond to growing demand and connect people with resources efficiently. Her education had prepared her to think across disciplines. Her work would require her to put that ability into practice.

When a legal victory brought an unexpected challenge

For the first five years after its founding, ASAP’s membership grew relatively slowly. The organization was developing its resources and establishing a way to support asylum seekers beyond individual legal encounters.

Then came a major change in 2020. A legal victory that made it easier for ASAP members to obtain work permits led to a dramatic expansion in membership. The number of members grew from approximately 5,000 to 250,000 in a little over a year.

For asylum seekers, access to work authorization could open up a route to earning an income and supporting their families while their immigration cases continued. For ASAP, the surge meant that many more people needed information and assistance.

Its existing technology was not equipped for that scale. Swapna found herself confronting a challenge that connected her Harvard training directly to the organization’s mission. She was the only person at ASAP with a background in data and technology, and she took the lead in rethinking how the organization managed its members and delivered services.

“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 told Harvard’s alumni publication.

Working with a software engineer, she helped develop a new membership system within two weeks of the legal victory. From September 2020 onwards, ASAP welcomed at least 1,000 new members each week, sometimes more than 4,000.

Making legal information accessible

One of the central challenges facing asylum seekers is that the immigration process involves more than submitting an application and waiting for a decision.

People need to understand procedures, keep track of important dates, learn whether they qualify for work authorization and determine what they must do next. Changes in policy can make those questions even harder to answer. ASAP has built its model around providing information that members can access throughout this process.

The organization offers detailed guides explaining different aspects of the asylum system, regular updates about procedural changes, breaking news alerts and a remote legal help desk staffed by lawyers. Its digital approach allows it to serve members across the United States rather than limiting its reach to people living near a particular office.

The intention is to provide support for the long haul. A member may need different information at different points in a case, and the organization aims to make those resources available as circumstances change. Swapna has argued that technology adoption is an important factor in whether immigrant-serving organizations can expand their reach.

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. 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.

Swapna Reddy

The people being served also shape the mission

ASAP’s approach goes beyond delivering information from lawyers and staff to people who need it. It is also a membership organization in which asylum seekers help determine its priorities.

People navigating the asylum system understand the obstacles they encounter in their daily lives. Their experiences can help identify where information is missing, which procedures are difficult to understand and what kinds of support would be most useful. By involving members in setting priorities, ASAP seeks to make its work responsive to the people it serves rather than relying exclusively on outside assumptions about their needs.

The scale of its impact is significant. According to the organization, its work has helped hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers access authorized employment and contribute to their local communities. ASAP estimates that this has generated more than $1 billion in additional household income for immigrant families.

A million people, and a continuing commitment

Swapna Reddy’s work has received recognition from several organizations, including Ashoka, Echoing Green, Equal Justice Works, the J.M.K. Innovation Prize and the Fast Forward Tech Accelerator. Her selection for TIME100 Next in September 2026 has brought further attention to the organization she helped establish.

Yet her response to the milestone reflects the philosophy that has guided ASAP’s development. “It is a privilege to serve more than 1 million immigrants and to follow their lead!” she said following the recognition. In reflecting on the organization’s growth, she has said she will do whatever she can to ensure that immigrants in the United States are treated humanely and have the information they deserve, no matter what comes next.

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