Biography
Urooj Rahman is a human rights lawyer and activist arrested during the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. Urooj has spent her legal career protecting the rights of refugees, as well as low income New Yorkers facing eviction as a long-time resident of Bay Ridge.
She was indicted on seven counts for causing damage by fire to an abandoned and previously vandalized police vehicle. No one was harmed. After over a year of fighting federal charges that together carried a mandatory minimum of 45 years in prison and a possible life sentence, Urooj initially took a non-cooperating plea to one count of possession of an unregistered destructive device which carries a sentence up to 10 years. Prosecutors indicated that they would seek to apply a “terrorism” sentencing enhancement against Urooj, which would make it much more likely that she would be sentenced to the full 10 years. In June of 2022, after months of additional litigation and negotiation, Urooj entered a new non-cooperating plea deal to only one count of Conspiracy. On November 18, 2022, Urooj was sentenced to 15 months in prison with two years of supervised release and over $30,000 in restitution.
In a December 17, 2021, letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rashida Tlaib, Dwight Evans, and Seth Moulton cited the prosecution of Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman as an example of what they considered disproportionate use of terrorism sentencing enhancements. The lawmakers asked the Justice Department to review potential discrimination in pending cases and publish clearer data on enhancement requests. This was congressional criticism of prosecutorial policy, not a court ruling on the legality of this prosecution. Source: https://aflegal.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/21110235/3-31-Final-Response-Package.pdf (PDF pages 51–53).
The June 30, 2020 appellate opinion records an actual bond release to home detention before Rahman’s remand following a June 5 stay. Her May–June pretrial detention therefore cannot be counted as one continuous 31-day prison interval. The separately documented 2023 interval remains a 292-day subtotal; additional early custody has unresolved physical boundaries.
