Vanita Gupta

Vanita Gupta (born November 15, 1974) is an American attorney who served as United States Associate Attorney General from April 22, 2021, to February 2, 2024.

She received her Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law in 2001.

Gupta's first case, while working for the Legal Defense Fund directly after law school, involved 40 African Americans and six white or Latino people who were romantic partners of African Americans in Tulia, Texas.

They had been convicted by all-white juries of dealing drugs.

In almost every case, the only evidence was the testimony of an undercover agent, Tom Coleman.

Coleman did not use wiretaps or marked money, and records showed that he had "filed shoddy reports".

He had previous misdemeanor charges for stealing gasoline from a county pump and abuse of official capacity.

Gupta won the release of her clients in 2003, four years after they were jailed, then negotiated a $6 million settlement for them.

In 2004, she received the Reebok Human Rights Award.

In 2007, after becoming a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, Gupta filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about detention conditions for children whose parents were asylum seekers.

In August 2007, a landmark agreement was reached between ACLU and ICE, under which the conditions in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center improved and several children were released from the center.

On August 6, 2009, the Department of Homeland Security announced intentions to improve the nation's immigration detention system, including ending family detention at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

After her time as a staff attorney at the ACLU, Gupta served as its deputy legal director and director of its Center for Justice.

She has been credited with pioneering the ACLU's National Campaign to End Mass Incarceration.

She built bipartisan coalitions to advance pre-trial and sentencing reforms around the country.

From 2014 to 2017, Gupta served as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama.

A career civil rights attorney, Gupta served as deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she oversaw its national criminal justice reform efforts.

She has also served as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Throughout her career, she has drawn support from a wide range of liberal and conservative activists, as well as law enforcement groups, for building support for policing and criminal justice reform.

In October 2014, President Barack Obama appointed Gupta as the United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

Under Gupta's leadership, the Civil Rights Division worked to advance criminal justice reform and constitutional policing, including by investigating and working to reform police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Cleveland; Baltimore, and Chicago, among other cities.

Gupta also oversaw a wide range of other enforcement efforts for the Division, including prosecuting hate crimes and human trafficking, promoting disability rights, protecting LGBT rights, and combating discrimination in education, employment, housing, lending and voting.

Gupta's tenure was marked by several high-profile matters, including the investigations of the Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago police departments; the appeals of the Texas and North Carolina voter ID cases; the challenge to North Carolina's HB2 law and other LGBTQ2 rights litigation; enforcement of education, land use, hate crimes, and other statutes to combat religious discrimination; the issuance of statements of interest on bail and indigent defense reform, and letters to state and local court judges and administrators on the unlawful imposition of fines and fees in the criminal justice system; and the administration's report on solitary confinement.

In 2016, under Gupta's leadership, the division sued North Carolina, alleging that the state's implementation of House Bill 2 discriminated against transgender individuals in violation of federal civil rights laws.

In August 2016, an investigation by Gupta's division concluded that the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of conduct that violated the Constitution and federal statutory law, including unconstitutional stops, searches, arrests, excessive force, and enforcement strategies that produced an unjustified disparate impact on African-American residents.

On January 7, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Gupta to serve as the United States Associate Attorney General.

On March 9, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on her nomination.

Before becoming Associate Attorney General, Gupta served as president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights from 2017 until her nomination as Associate Attorney General in 2021.

Gupta was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Indian immigrant parents.

She is the daughter of Muzaffarnagar-born businessman Rajiv L. Gupta and Kamla Varshney.

Her father is the chairman of Aptiv, an automotive parts company.

As a child, Gupta regularly moved with her family, and lived in the United Kingdom and France before returning to Philadelphia.

She received her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Yale University.

Gupta credits her experience at Yale with helping form her "passion for social activism".

In 2017, Gupta became president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

In this role, she criticized the Trump administration for its response to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and accused then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions of trying to increase mass incarceration.

As of 2018, Paramount is making a film, Tulia, about the case.

In June 2020, Gupta testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the murder of George Floyd and the need to end police brutality in the United States.

During her time at the organization, Gupta worked to combat harmful online misinformation, and "often sat shoulder-to-shoulder with tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg" to discuss content moderation strategies.

She took a leave from the organization in January 2021 and formally left once confirmed as Associate Attorney General in April 2022.