President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced his first six new judicial nominees of 2024, including a civil rights lawyer tapped to become the first Muslim American federal judge to serve on the district court bench in the nation's capital.
Amir Ali, the president and executive director of the civil rights organization the MacArthur Justice Center, was among six diverse nominees who if confirmed by the U.S. Senate would serve as district court judges in Washington, D.C., California, Illinois, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
Ali, who is also the director of Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Appellate Clinic, would, if confirmed, also be the first Arab American to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Biden has pushed to fulfill a campaign pledge to diversify a federal bench long overrepresented by white men, former prosecutors and law firm partners. The vast majority of his confirmed nominees have been women and people of color.
Biden on Wednesday gained his 168th confirmed judicial nominee when the Democratic-led Senate voted 51-48 to elevate U.S. Magistrate Judge Kato Crews, the first Black magistrate judge in Colorado, to a district court judgeship.
Wednesday's nominees also included Melissa DuBose, a Black state court judge in Rhode Island who would become the first person of color and openly LGBTQ individual to serve as a life-tenured federal judge in the state.
Should she and Biden's pending nominee to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nicole Berner, win Senate confirmation, the Democratic president will tie former President Barack Obama's record of naming 11 openly LGBTQ judges to the federal bench, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Jasmine Yoon, a former federal prosecutor who is now the vice president of corporate integrity, ethics and investigations at the bank Capital One, was nominated to become the first Asian American judge in Virginia and was appointed to a seat in the state's Western District.
That court and the Rhode Island one are among 25 that have never had a non-white judge, according to the progressive group Alliance for Justice.
Another nominee is Chicago-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Sunil Harjani, who is a former federal prosecutor and lawyer at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If confirmed, he would become the second South Asian judge to serve on a federal district court in Illinois, according to the Leadership Conference.
Biden also nominated Ronald White, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Michigan, to join the bench in his district and San Diego County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Kanter to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
