Washington, D.C.; (6/17/2023) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim organizations, congratulates Nusrat Jahan Choudhury on her United States Senate confirmation on June 15, 2023, as the First American Muslim woman appointed as U.S. federal judge.
Nusrat, 46, is a Chicago-born Bangladeshi American, Yale Law School graduate, and longtime American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer. She will serve as a life-tenured lawyer on the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn.
“This is a truly sunny day in America,” said Oussama Jammal, Council secretary general. “It shines a bit more light into our country’s future because Judge Nusrat is that rare federal appointee who has spent her legal career fighting on the civil rights front lines to put the “for all” in this nation’s “liberty and justice” pledge.
Choudhury’s 18-month Senate confirmation delay after her nomination by President Biden in January 2022 is sadly ironic, he said, because the hold up was politically motivated by the same discrimination, profiling practices, and civil liberties abuses of American Muslims and other U.S. communities facing institutional barriers to fair treatment in the justice system that the newly appointed judge systematically opposed as a career-long ACLU lawyer.
Indeed, Choudhury’s Senate confirmation passed by a single-vote 50-49 margin, with nominal West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin voting with Republicans against her on the same pretext for which Republicans tried to force Choudhury earlier this year into a bizarre rehearing, based on a murky claim of conflicting testimony about reports she had once stated that police killings of unarmed Black men happened daily in the U.S.
Judge Nusrat has worked on some of the most important racial justice and national security civil liberties cases of our times, including lawsuits challenging airlines racially profiling people they thought “looked” Arab, the New York Police Department’s notorious surveillance of Muslims and mosques, and its infamous Black and Brown people racial profiling and stop and frisk policies.
In March 2021, in an ACLU of Illinois program, Choudhury spoke of the experiences that led her into civil rights law.
“As a Muslim young girl of color here in the Chicago area, race was a part of my reality. It led to police stops that shouldn’t have ever happened. It led to family members facing problems at airports, and [it] led to what I saw around me, which was dramatic residential segregation and different opportunities for people of color than for white people in the city of Chicago.”
“On behalf of the Council and American Muslims, we whole-heartedly welcome your lifelong appointment to the federal bench in Brooklyn, Judge Nusrat,” said Council Secretary General Jammal.
“We have nothing but admiration for your lifetime of hard work and your brave choice in taking the civil liberties road less traveled by to get to your well-deserved federal appointment.
“May God grant you wisdom, goodness, and success throughout your service, and may this be but one recognition of distinction in many more honors of merit to come.”
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