Washington, Dec 15 : Vanita Gupta, the first woman of colour and the highest-ranking India-American at the US Department of Justice (DOJ), will step down as the 19th US Associate Attorney General in February next year. Gupta has been serving in her present role since her confirmation by the Senate on April 21, 2021, and holds the number 3 post at the DOJ, charged with overseeing all the civil litigating components and grantmaking entities. In a statement released on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland thanked Gupta for her extraordinary service and for being one of his trusted advisers. "Vanita's commitment to the pursuit of justice, and her relentless focus on bringing people together to find common ground, has made her an incredibly effective leader in dealing with some of the most complex challenges facing the American people," Garland said. "She has distinguished herself as the kind of leader who is also a partner to the career and non-career employees who work for her, to the stakeholders the Department works with, and to the public we all work for," he added. Gupta has led the Department's Reproductive Rights Taskforce to defend the reproductive freedoms that are protected by federal law. She also played an integral role in efforts to combat violent crime and gun violence and to support the victims of crime, according to a DOJ release. In adition, she has facilitated the Department's efforts to advance a criminal justice system that keeps people safe and reflects our values, Garland said. Gupta has supervised DOJ's civil litigating divisions, grantmaking components, Office for Access to Justice, Office of Information Policy, Community Relations Service, US Trustees Programme, and Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. She chairs the Department's Reproductive Rights and Opioid Epidemic Civil Litigation Task Forces, and has convened a Tribal Issues working group to better coordinate the Justice Department's Tribal work. In addition, Gupta also spearheads the Department's efforts to implement more than 90 deliverables from the President's Executive Order on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety. From October 15, 2014, to January 20, 2017, she had served as Acting Assistant Attorney General and Head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Gupta graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received her law degree from New York University School of Law, where later she taught a civil rights litigation clinic for several years. /IANS