NRI Vanita Gupta, Civil Rights Attorney,  Confirmed As Associate Attorney General

Los Angeles, April 23, 2021
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/Agary Singh

US Senate narrowly voted to confirm Vanita Gupta as associate attorney general, elevating a longtime civil rights attorney to the third-highest position inside the Justice Department.
Vanita Gupta was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 49, with only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, breaking ranks to join Democrats in approving her nomination.
NRI Gupta, 46, will become the first woman of color in Justice Department history to serve as associate attorney general. She will oversee the department's civil rights litigation as well as its antitrust, civil and environment divisions.

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Joe Biden Appointed NRI Vanita Gupta as associate attorney general

Los Angeles, January 07, 2021
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/Agary Singh

Indian-American Vanita Gupta, who headed civil rights division in the Department of Justice in the Obama Administration, has been appointed as president and CEO of 'The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights', becoming the first woman to head the prestigious organisation.

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Obama Appointed NRI Vanita Gupta to Be Civil Rights Chief

WASHINGTON, Oct 15, 2014
NRIpress-Club/D.Singh

President Obama has appointed Vanita Gupta to lead US justice department’s civil rights division charged with enforcing laws that prevent discrimination and inequitable practices in housing, education and employment. She is a well-respected ACLU lawyer who has long been active on criminal justice reform issues, has called for the decriminalization of marijuana and is a critic of the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Gupta’s “trailblazing work” as a civil rights lawyer, and said she “has spent her entire career working to ensure that our nation lives up to its promise of equal justice for all,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday

“We come from a different side of spectrum than ACLU,” says Marc Levin, policy director for the conservative criminal justice reform organization Right on Crime which has an informal relationship with the ACLU. “But, I’ve found her interested in identifying areas where we can work together.”

“Those who seek a fairer criminal justice system, unclouded by racial bias, must at a minimum demand that the government eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, which tie judges’ hands; rescind three-strikes laws, which often make no distinction between, say, armed assault and auto theft; amend ‘truth in sentencing’ statutes, which prohibit early release for good behavior; and recalibrate drug policies, starting with decriminalization of marijuana possession and investment in substance-abuse prevention and treatment,” Gupta wrote in the New York Times.

BIO:

• Vanita Gupta was born in Philadelphia and graduated from  Yale and New York University Law School in 2001

• She became popular when she worked on famous case, working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), involved 46 African-Americans in Tulia, Texas, who had been convicted by an all-white jury on drug dealing charges. She won the release of all of the defendants in 2003, four years after they were jailed, then negotiated a $5 million settlement for those arrested

• In 2007, she fought to improve the conditions for children and their families in immigration detention and under which the conditions in the T. Don Hutto detention center improved and a number of children from the center were released. On August 6, 2009, the Department of Homeland Security announced intentions to improve the nation’s immigration detention system including family detention center in Taylor, Texas
• She has been praised for her ability to bring opposing parties together in matters of criminal justice and civil rights.