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President Biden’s nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has argued that the criminal justice system is rooted in “racial animus” passed down from “apartheid” America.
Biden announced Nusrat Choudhury’s nomination along with seven other federal judicial nominees in January, aiming to fulfill a “promise to ensure that the nation’s courts reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country,” the White House said at the time.
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, a district judge nominee, listens during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 27, 2022.
(Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
Choudhury, an ACLU lawyer, has routinely talked about systemic racism in the criminal justice system. During a 2018 event at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, she argued the system is “premised on structural inequality.”
“A lot of the racial animus that undergirded apartheid in America was shifted into the criminal justice system,” she said, citing arguments made by “The New Jim Crow” author Michelle Alexander. “So the criminal justice system started doing the work of apartheid, which was criminalizing low-income Black and Latino people and keeping them down.”
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“And I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that thesis,” she said at the time. “I see my work as hoping to transform the system.”
Choudhury clarified that she doesn’t think all cops are racist, but that “we all live in institutions that promote certain types of behavior.”
During a May 2021 panel with WTTW Chicago, Choudhury said, “It’s important to recognize that the roots of policing systems are actually grounded in slavery and segregation and upholding institutions of racial insubordination.”
During a 2021 ACLU virtual lunch, Choudhury said, “Policing and race are entwined.”
“Most of us should know that the modern police department was founded based on slave patrols and that was the foundation of the first municipal police department in Charleston, South Carolina,” she said at the time.
“And we’ve seen that connection between racialized police violence in cities across the country even through Jim Crow, through segregation in the North, and we need look no further than the city of Chicago,” she said, citing Jon Burge, the late disgraced Chicago Police Department commander who was convicted of lying about his role in torturing suspects.
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A hearing on Choudhury’s nomination and others was held on April 27, when she was grilled by Republican senators about her past comments on race. Republicans requested a rare second hearing after she appeared to contradict herself regarding past statements about police killings of Black people. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., rejected the request on Tuesday, and the committee voted to advance her nomination Thursday morning.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
