{"id":10961,"date":"2025-03-03T09:11:51","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T14:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalfairhousing.org\/?p=10961"},"modified":"2025-03-03T09:11:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T14:11:51","slug":"national-fair-housing-alliance-announces-enhanced-legal-capacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalfairhousing.org\/national-fair-housing-alliance-announces-enhanced-legal-capacity\/","title":{"rendered":"National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\">FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE<br>March 3, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph has-text-align-center\"><strong>National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\">Washington, D.C. \u2013 The National Fair Housing Alliance\u00ae (NFHA\u2122) has announced the addition of two civil rights law experts to its legal team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\">Janell Byrd-Chichester has been named Interim General Counsel at NFHA. With a more than 30-year career as a civil rights litigator and authority on public policy, Byrd-Chichester served as the inaugural Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). She also previously served as Chief of Staff of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). Prior to her role at FHFA, she was a partner at the Washington, DC law firm Mehri &amp; Skalet, where she started a flourishing fair housing and fair lending practice. She also previously served as Co-Managing Attorney at The Cochran Firm\u2019s Washington DC Office, where she litigated police misconduct, public accommodations, and employment discrimination cases and served as a public policy consultant to civil rights organizations on a broad array of issues. For more than ten years, she litigated school desegregation and higher education affirmative action cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\">Sasha Samberg-Champion joins NFHA as Special Counsel for Civil Rights, where he leads efforts to protect and advance fair housing rights and protections. Samberg-Champion comes to NFHA from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where in the Biden-Harris Administration he served as Deputy General Counsel for Enforcement and Fair Housing. In that position, he oversaw HUD\u2019s fair housing and program enforcement attorneys, as well as much of HUD\u2019s policy and regulatory work related to fair housing and civil rights. Before that, he was Counsel at Relman Colfax, PLLC, where he litigated a variety of complex fair housing and other civil rights matters, including multiple cases against HUD for rolling back civil rights protections. He also served in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and in the New York Attorney General\u2019s Office. He has presented argument in dozens of appeals in federal and state courts and has filed numerous amicus briefs in the courts of appeals and in the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\">\u201cThe addition of Janell Byrd-Chichester and Sasha Samberg-Champion provide a breadth of expertise that well positions NFHA to defend hard-won civil rights protections for millions of people,\u201d said NFHA\u2019s President and CEO Lisa Rice. \u201cDiscrimination in our nation is not a relic of the past, and NFHA stands ready to ensure our country\u2019s antidiscrimination laws and policies are enforced so that every person has fair access to the American Dream and opportunities they need to thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph has-text-align-center\"><strong>###<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"content-wrap-item post__paragraph\"><em>The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) is the country\u2019s only national civil rights organization dedicated solely to eliminating all forms of housing and lending discrimination and ensuring equal opportunities for all people. As the trade association for over 170 fair housing and justice-centered organizations and individuals throughout the U.S. and its territories, NFHA works to dismantle longstanding barriers to equity and build diverse, inclusive, well-resourced communities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMarch 3, 2025 National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity Washington, D.C. \u2013 The National Fair Housing Alliance\u00ae (NFHA\u2122) has announced the addition of two civil rights law experts to its legal team. Janell Byrd-Chichester has been named Interim General Counsel at NFHA. With a more than 30-year career as a civil [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":433,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-releases"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity - NFHA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMarch 3, 2025 National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity Washington, D.C. \u2013 The National Fair Housing Alliance\u00ae (NFHA\u2122) has announced the addition of two civil rights law experts to its legal team. Janell Byrd-Chichester has been named Interim General Counsel at NFHA. 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