Nusrat Choudhury is the deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, which is dedicated to advancing opportunity and equality for communities of color in the United States by fighting white supremacy and drivers of inequality in education, housing, the economy, and the criminal legal system. She leads litigation and advocacy challenging police racial profiling and “debtors’ prisons” – the illegal arrest and jailing of people unable to pay money to courts.

Nusrat’s litigation and advocacy against debtors’ prisons has exposed and reformed practices in Georgia, Mississippi, Washington, and South Carolina, and has led to the development of national guidance promoting the fair and equal treatment of rich and poor in courts. As lead counsel in Kennedy v. The City of Biloxi, Mississippi, she helped secure model reforms to advance equal treatment of rich and poor and to enforce the right to counsel in the criminal justice system. Nusrat has advocated against racial profiling and unlawful stop-and-frisk practices in numerous cities, including through Collins v. The City of Milwaukee, a federal lawsuit that resulted in a landmark 2018 court-ordered settlement agreement requiring sweeping reforms

Previously, Nusrat served as a staff attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project, where she conducted litigation and advocacy against post-9/11 discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities.

Nusrat clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York. She completed her J.D. at Yale Law School, her M.P.A. at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and her B.A. at Columbia University. Nusrat is a recipient of the South Asian Bar Association of New York Access to Justice Award, the Edward Bullard Distinguished Alumnus Award of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.