[1] In 2023, Glenn D Magpantay was appointed as a Commissioner to the United States Commission on Civil Rights by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer.
He next served as executive director at the University of California Student Association,[9] then as an immigration law clerk at Catholic Charities Legal Services, Inc.
[10] In 2005, the Asian American Lawyers Association of Massachusetts bestowed him with their Community Service Award for his work on voting rights in Boston.
[11] Starting in 2006, he spent two years at the Asian American Bar Association of New York in the role of Continuing Legal Education Instructor.
He then spent 17 years as a civil right attorney and Democracy Program Director at the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund.
He also lobbied the United States House of Representatives for LGBTQ immigrants rights, meeting with 15 congressional offices to support the Reuniting Families Act.
[23] He is known for filing a demand that the FBI open a federal investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice commence a federal prosecution of a white man responsible for the death of Jaxon Sales—a 20-year-old gay Korean/Filipino young man who was found naked and dead in a San Francisco apartment in March 2020, pursuant to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, 18 U.S.C.
[24] In 2021, Magpantay, was awarded a prestigious "George Soros Equality Fellow" from the Open Society Foundations where he is documenting the history of the LGBTQ Asian American community over the past 25 years.
From 1992 to 1993, he was a board member for the NYC chapter of Citizen Action of New York, a grassroots organization dedicated to social, racial, economic, and environmental justice.
[35] Within that time, from 1996 to 1998, Magpantay also acted as an executive committee member for the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a longstanding progressive public interest legal association.
[36] Within that time, in 2002 he was also appointed by the New York City Council to the NYC Voter Assistance Commission to support efforts to ensure accessible, accurate, and secure elections.
[79] They were married in a civil ceremony on February 8, 2013 by State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan, who had originally struck down New York's prohibition against same sex marriage in Hernandez v. Robles in 2004.