Vanita Gupta

Vanita Gupta
United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Acting
In office October 20, 2014 – January 20, 2017
Preceded by	Molly J. Moran
Succeeded by	Thomas E. Wheeler II
Personal details
Born	1974/1975 (age 41–42)
Education	Yale University (B.A.) New York University (J.D.)

Vanita Gupta was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and acting head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice until January 20, 2017. She was appointed to lead the division by Barack Obama in October 2014. Formerly, she was a civil rights lawyer and the Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she oversaw the ACLU's national criminal justice reform efforts. Prior to that, she was Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). Throughout her career, she has drawn support from a wide range of liberal and conservative activists, as well as law enforcement leaders, for building collaborative support and finding common ground on policing and criminal justice reform.

Gupta was born in the Philadelphia area of Pennsylvania to Indian immigrant parents. She is a graduate of Yale and New York University School of Law, graduating from law school in 2001.

Her first case, while working for the LDF directly after law school, involved 40 African Americans and 6 white or Latino people who were romantic partners of African Americans in Tulia, Texas, who had been convicted by an all-white jury on drug dealing charges. In almost every case, the only evidence was the testimony of an undercover agent, Tom Coleman. Coleman did not use wiretaps, and records showed that he had "filed shoddy reports", and had a previous misdemeanor charge for stealing gasoline from a county pump. Gupta won the release of her clients in 2003, four years after they were jailed, then negotiated a $6 million settlement for those arrested.

In 2007, after becoming a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, Gupta filed a lawsuit that was subsequently settled with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency on detention conditions for asylum seekers. In August 2007, a landmark agreement was reached between ACLU and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under which the conditions in the T. Don Hutto detention center improved and a number of children from the center were released.

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