Nusrat Choudhury, a civil rights attorney, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, making her the nation’s first Bangladeshi-American and female Muslim federal judge.

On a 50-49 vote, Ms Choudhury, the legal director of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was approved. 

Previously, Ms Choudhury worked on racial justice and national security issues for the national ACLU for the majority of her professional career. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the organisation’s racial justice programme’s deputy director. She received a federal bench nomination from U.S. President Joe Biden in January 2022.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a leading Democrat, said in a statement that Ms Choudhury’s “experience as a talented and dedicated civil rights litigator has prepared her to serve with integrity and professionalism on the federal bench, and she will follow the facts and administer justice with fairness and a deep respect for the rule of law.”

She received criticism from several Senate Republicans after giving contradictory answers to the question of whether she had said, during a 2015 talk at Princeton University, that police killings of unarmed Black males occur “every day.”

She later in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee panel said that “such a statement is inconsistent with my deep respect for law enforcement.”

Ms Choudhury served as a law clerk for a judge in the Southern District of New York trial court and the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears appeals from the federal courts in Vermont, Connecticut, and New York.

U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, who was chosen by Mr Biden, is the nation’s first Muslim judge. The Senate confirmed him to the New Jersey federal trial court in 2021.