Newsman: President Joe Biden nominated a Bangladeshi origin and a Muslim woman for a federal judgeship for the first time in U.S. history Wednesday as part of his administration’s push to reshape the federal judiciary with diversity. If confirmed by the Senate, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury would become the first Muslim woman to serve as a federal judge and the first Bangladeshi American. She is one of the eight nominees President Biden announced Wednesday that brings Biden’s judicial nominees to 83 in total.
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, is Biden’s nominee for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Choudhury emerged as the top choice among Muslim American advocates last summer for one of New York’s federal court vacancies; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer backed her as an expert in civil rights and liberties.
Nusrat Choudhury, who previously worked at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, would be just the second Muslim American federal judge after the Senate confirmed Zahid Quraishi – another Biden nominee – to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in June.
Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights organization, wrote in a July letter to Schumer and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., that Choudhury has a “stellar reputation” for advancing the rights of minority communities and that her nomination would make much-needed history.
Sixty-two of Biden’s federal judiciary nominees have been women, including seven of the eight new nominees. The new group includes two Black women, a Taiwanese immigrant, an Asian American, a Latina and one nominee who identifies as Asian American, Latino and white. Three nominees are civil rights lawyers, two are labor lawyers and two are public defenders
The latest round of eight nominations – the 13th since Biden took office one year ago – brings Biden’s total judicial nominees to 83 and continues his administration’s efforts to put more women and judges of color on the federal bench.
Other new nominees are:
Tiffany Cartwright, a partner at the civil rights law firm MacDonald Hoague & Bayless, for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Ana Isabel de Alba, a California Superior Court judge in Fresno County for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
Robert Steven Huie, an attorney at the law firm Jones Day, for the the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
Natasha Merle, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Jennifer Rearden, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Nina Nin-Yuen Wang, a U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Colorado, for the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
President Joe Biden is also nominating Arianna Freeman, a federal public defender in Philadelphia, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Pennsylvania. Freeman is the eighth Black woman Biden has nominated as a federal appellate judge, matching the total number of Black women who have ever served as federal appellate judges. Freeman would become the first African American woman to ever serve on the Third Circuit if confirmed.
In his first year in office, Biden won Senate confirmations of 41 of his federal judge nominees, the most of any president during their first 12 months since John F. Kennedy.
Twenty-four of Biden’s judicial nominees have been Black (29%), 17 have been Hispanic (20%) and 16 have been Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (19%).
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury background:
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury has more than a decade of experience in advancing reform in the criminal legal system and policing. She has led litigation to protect immigrants from dangerous detention conditions and serves as counsel for community organizations enforcing a federal consent decree to reform Chicago police patterns of excessive force.
Her team advances First Amendment rights, government transparency, change in the criminal legal system and policing, voting rights, access to reproductive health care, gender equity, and the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, children in the foster system, young people in juvenile detention, and people in prisons and jails.
Prior to joining the ACLU of Illinois, Nusrat served as Deputy Director of the national ACLU Racial Justice Program, a staff attorney in the ACLU National Security Project, and a Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow.
At the ACLU, Nusrat led efforts to challenge racial profiling and unlawful stop-and-frisk, the targeting of people of color for surveillance without evidence of wrongdoing, and practices that disproportionately punish people for being poor. Her work against practices that disproportionately punish people for poverty without prior court hearings, consideration of ability to pay, or legal representation changed practices in Georgia, Mississippi, Washington, and South Carolina, and helped secure national guidance from the American Bar Association and other entities to promote fairness and equal treatment of rich and poor in courts. Nusrat helped secure the first federal court ruling striking down the U.S. government’s No Fly List procedures for violating due process. She filed litigation to challenge the NYPD’s unjustified and discriminatory profiling of Muslims for surveillance, which resulted in a court-ordered settlement agreement, and to secure public records about the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program.
Nusrat clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York. She is a recipient of the South Asian Bar Association of New York Access to Justice Award and the Edward Bullard Distinguished Alumnus Award of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Nusrat is a graduate of Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale Law School.
