US President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday nominated Indian-American Vanita Gupta to be the associate attorney general and named Judge Merrick Garland for the position of attorney general.
Gupta had served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department in former President Barack Obama's administration when Biden was the Vice President.
She gained fame when straight out of law school she won the release of 38 people, most of them African Americans, who had been wrongly convicted on drug charges in a Texas town by all-White juries. She also got them $6 million on compensation.
She is now the president and CEO of Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 human rights organisations.
She is the latest of a series of Indian Americans appointed to important posts by Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Former President Barack Obama had nominated Garland, considered a moderate, to be a Supreme Court judge in his final year in office but Republicans, who controlled the Senate, blocked the appointment.
Many African American leaders had pressured Biden to appoint someone from their community as the attorney general because of the need to redouble efforts to protect their civil rights and combat racism.