First Female Muslim Federal Judge in US History Confirmed by Senate

The upper house of the United States legislature confirmed Thursday long-time civil rights attorney of Bangladeshi ancestry, Nusrat Choudhury, as the first Muslim female federal judge in the nation’s nearly 250-year history.
Choudhury will serve as a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York State, which spans metropolitan New York City. She had previously served as legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois since 2020, and received her Juris Doctor from Yale University in 2006.
U.S. President Biden had also nominated the nation’s first Muslim federal judge–Zahid Quraishi–confirmed to the bench in New Jersey in 2021. The Biden administration seemingly has made good on its promise to diversify the judiciary, having also nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court last year, who was successfully confirmed shortly thereafter.
Not surprisingly, Choudhury faced pushback from Senate Republicans over her controversial-yet-searingly-accurate commentary that police killings of unarmed Black men “happens every day in America.”