Chiraag Bains

Chiraag Bains (Bluesky – LinkedIn) is the Executive Director of Go From Here, a law-and-policy lab that advances new rights and governing strategies to achieve equality, freedom, and shared prosperity.

From 2021 to 2023, Bains served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, leading the first-ever racial justice and equity team at the White House. He drove forward the president’s agenda on democracy, criminal justice and public safety, the racial wealth gap, LGBTQ+ equality, disability rights, Native affairs, and more equitable delivery of government services across the interagency. He also co-led a strategy to protect workers and consumers from algorithmic bias and helped develop the administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

Bains previously served as Special Assistant to the President for Criminal Justice and Guns Policy. In 2020, Senator Bernie Sanders appointed him co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Criminal Justice Reform. He was the Director of Legal Strategies at Demos from 2018 to 2021, where he led the organization’s voting rights litigation and policy advocacy.

From 2010 to 2017, Bains worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. He prosecuted police misconduct and hate crimes as a career attorney and then served as senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General. He was awarded the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service for his role in the investigation and litigation over unconstitutional policing, fines, and fees in Ferguson, Missouri. Bains also prosecuted sex offenses and domestic violence at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Bains has been a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, the Brookings Institution (nonresident), Democracy Fund, and the Open Society Foundations, and was on the Council of Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. He serves on the boards of Public Rights Project, Governing for Impact, and the Vera Institute of Justice.

Bains holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review, as well as an M.Phil. in criminology from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. from Yale University. He clerked on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and federal district court in Boston. He was a Truman Scholar, Gates Cambridge Scholar, Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, and Coro Fellow.