The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU attorney, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, has been named the first Muslim woman judge of the agency in the U.S. on Thursday.
The first Bangladeshi American to serve in this position is Choudhury, 46. She will serve as a judge on the US court for New York's eastern district.
All federal judges must be approved by the Senate, which confirmed her nomination in a narrow 50-49 decision.
The conservative Democrat Joe Manchin voted against her nomination because he said he believed some of her past comments made her biased against law enforcement.
As a staunch supporter of our men and women in uniform, I opposed Ms. Choudhury's nomination, Manchin said in a statement.
Manchin also opposed the nomination of two other Biden-nominated federal judges: Dale Ho, a judge on the southern district of New York, and Nancy Abudu, a judge on the U.S. court of appeals for the 11th circuit. They have been confirmed without his support.
Choudhury, formerly the assistant director of ACLU's Racial Justice Program, has a track record for fighting racial profiling and unequal treatment of the poor.
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 lawsuits challenging the NYPD's mistreatment 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. As a Muslim young girl of color here in the Chicago area, race was a part of my reality, Choudhury said in a virtual ACLU event in March 2021. It led to police stops that shouldn t have ever happened, it led to family members facing problems at airports, and resulted in 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. In 2021, the first Muslim federal judge in the United States was Zahid Quraishi.