as he seeks a return
to the White House next year.
to the White House next year.
On Sept. 26, a New York judge held former president Donald Trump liable for fraudulently inflating his net worth in business transactions. (Video: Reuters)
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
How Jamaica-born Judge Tanya S. Chutkan became Trump’s latest target
How Jamaica-born Judge Tanya S. Chutkan became Trump’s latest target
Updated September 27, 2023 at 6:11 p.m. EDT|Published September 27, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“Donald Trump’s lawyer stood in court in late August before Judge Tanya S. Chutkan and said he planned to challenge the case against the former president as a politically motivated violation of the First Amendment that would be decided by residents of a hopelessly biased city.
“I can’t wait,” Chutkan responded dryly.
Trump’s lawyers soon put Chutkan on their list of complaints, arguing that the judge should recuse herself because her comments in past cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot made it impossible for her to give him a fair trial. Chutkan denied that motion Wednesday, although Trump could ask an appellate court to weigh in. Assuming that fails, as legal experts predict it will, Chutkan will preside over the first criminal trial of a former president in U.S. history, in the middle of a presidential race in which the defendant is the leading Republican contender and tied in polls with the Democratic incumbent he is accused of illegally trying to keep out of power.
Chutkan, 61, will try Trump in the same courthouse where she became a U.S. citizen after emigrating from Jamaica, where she became a federal judge, where she blocked his administration on death penalty and abortion policies, and where she ordered that his records be given to lawmakers investigating the U.S. Capitol riot. To the trial she brings an entire career of experience, first as a public defender, then as a high-powered private attorney, and finally as a federal judge who has handled dozens of Jan. 6 cases over nearly three years and developed a reputation for being more punitive than her peers.
She is one of only two D.C. judges to give every convicted rioter before them some time behind bars. And she is three times as likely as others to grant or exceed prosecutors’ recommendations, according to Washington Post data, often noting that Jan. 6 defendants benefited from advantages other criminals lack.
When Trump’s attorneys, who declined to comment for this story, claimed they needed two years to prepare for trial because of the millions of pages of evidence, Chutkan pushed back. She said she knew from her law firm days that they would never actually read every document, and from her public defender experience that murder cases are regularly tried under far more difficult circumstances.
“Mr. Trump will be treated exactly, with no more or less deference, than any other defendant would be treated,” she told his attorneys in August.
Ever since Chutkan was assigned to the case, she has been the target of threats by the public. And Trump has been attacking her on social media, calling her “highly partisan” and “unfair.”
“I don’t think he has a chance in hell of getting a different judge,” said John Osgood, who represented one of the Jan. 6 rioters, a Kansas City man whom Chutkan gave four months in jail on a misdemeanor charge. Osgood, a Trump voter twice over, said that while he disagreed with her sentence, Chutkan was, “procedurally, quite reasonable.”
He predicted similar treatment for Trump. “I think she will give him a fair trial,” Osgood said. “If he’s convicted, she will be harsh with him at sentencing.”
“There’s a lot of problems with the justice system in this country, but I can tell you, and I’m telling you this as an immigrant, I don’t know any place that does it better,” Chutkan told one Jan. 6 riot participant.
Chutkan, who declined to comment for this story, was born in Kingston to parents of African and Indian heritage. They raised their children with a strong commitment to education, her sister Robynne Chutkan said in an interview. It was a boarding school scholarship that took their father, the son of indentured servants, from harvesting sugar cane to performing orthopedic surgery. Robynne and her brother are both doctors; their mother, formerly an English professor, went to law school a year after her daughter. The future judge went to a rigorous all-girls school in Kingston before getting a degree in economics at George Washington University in 1983 and a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987.
For a time, Tanya Chutkan tried for a career in dance; her mother was a performer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, which combines modern and ballet with Afro-Caribbean traditions. (Her mother was also a competitive player of bridge, squash and tennis.) She said at her investiture in 2015 that she chose GWU because it was still accepting applications when she made up her mind not to pursue science or medicine like her siblings and father.
“I have loved Washington from the time I arrived here as a 17-year-old,” she added. “And it has been my home ever since with a brief detour for law school.”
In Jan. 6 cases, she has repeatedly defended the city often derided — including by Trump — as a “swamp.” She even corrected one rioter who mentioned in his allocution that D.C. was built on swampland.
“You know, that’s actually a myth,” she said. “It is very hot and very humid, but it was not a swamp.”
With their multicultural upbringing and all-girls education, she and her sister were able to grow up free of negative stereotypes tied to their race and gender, Robynne Chutkan said.
“When you walk into a situation feeling like, because I’m a woman or because I’m a person of color, people are going to think x or y of me — we didn’t have that,” she said.
But in her senior year at GWU, Chutkan did write an op-ed for the school newspaper sharing her frustrations with how those prejudices persisted on campus. “Not all of us are radio-carrying, lazy individuals with ‘natural’ rhythm,” she wrote. “(In fact, to my delight, I have encountered several non-black students here who exhibit a fair amount of ‘rhythm!’) A great many of us are socially and politically aware, articulate and fed up with an administration that flagrantly disregards the rights and opinions of minorities.”
Classmates remember her as serious and impressive even four decades ago, unafraid to jump in and answer questions other students tried to avoid.
In their final year of law school, Chutkan and Robert Valihura Jr., now a Delaware attorney, were legal writing fellows, paid to help younger students with legal writing. She was also an associate editor of the law review at Penn. “She has the right temperament, the right skill set,” Valihura said.
After law school, Chutkan worked for four years as a law firm associate before leaving to become a public defender. It was a decision that cut her pay in half, she later said.
Chutkan spent 11 years as a public defender in D.C., including several as the office’s lead homicide attorney. Former colleagues say she was exhaustive in her research and preparation, coming into court knowing the evidence better than the police and prosecutors who collected it. Even when her clients were convicted, she often had laid the groundwork for successful appeals.
Karl A. Racine, a former D.C. public defender who stepped down as D.C.’s attorney general this year, said Chutkan was able to see a case from all vantage points, identifying holes in evidence the government missed. “Tanya has natural talent, and she works harder than other people,” he said.
“She was very even-keeled — cool, calm, collected. If she had a murder trial, she just did it and she won it,” said Edward Ungvarsky, a veteran of the public defender’s office who is now in private practice. On one case they worked together, they had told a defendant to show up for his jury trial dressed for church.
He appeared in a bright yellow suit and snakeskin shoes. Ungvarsky was nervous; Chutkan was not.
“She just looks at him and says, ‘Well, that’s him,’” Ungvarsky recalled. Before the jury could weigh in, the prosecutor moved to drop the charges.
She was particularly good at making the right objections and arguments to lay the groundwork for having a ruling overturned, said Sandra Levick, a veteran of the office who focused on appeals. Levick handled three appeals of cases Chutkan tried and got the rulings overturned each time. “She had an unerring sense for justice and for what the law required,” Levick said.
Chutkan has said she went back to private practice in 2002 because, with two young children, it was hard to spend so much time in trial and at the D.C. jail. She was weeks into her job at Boies Schiller Flexner when she was tapped to handle the opening statement and the first witness in a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit accusing a Japanese company of conspiring to fix supplement prices.
David Boies, the lead attorney on that case, said he thought having a female attorney handle the opening would impress a jury that happened to be mostly female. “At that point you had far fewer women trial lawyers doing really big cases than you do today,” Boies said. Chutkan was “just thrown into … one of the larger antitrust trials of that era, and a case that had been going on for several years at that point.” They won a $148 million ruling.
Chutkan overlapped at the firm with Hunter Biden, who was “of counsel” from 2010 to 2014, something Trump and other Republicans have flagged to accuse Chutkan of bias.
But a spokeswoman for the firm said Chutkan and President Biden’s son — who was indicted this month on gun charges after a deal to plead guilty to tax misdemeanors in Delaware fell apart — never worked on any of the same cases; people at the firm, including Boies, say they probably never met.
Federal Election Commission records show that over the past two decades, Chutkan donated to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns — $2,273 to his 2008 campaign for president and $1,000 for his 2012 reelection campaign — and to Kirsten Gillibrand, a former Boies Schiller partner who is now a Democratic senator from New York. In 2012, she volunteered for a group called Lawyers for Obama, making calls for campaign events. Chutkan’s ex-husband, Peter A. Krauthamer, whom she met in the public defender’s office, was appointed by Obama in 2011 to D.C. Superior Court, the District’s local court, where he served until retiring in June.
Chutkan, one of four former public defenders appointed to the U.S. District Court in D.C. by Obama, was not a controversial nominee; she was confirmed in June 2014 on a 95-0 vote after a hearing where she was asked few questions. “A judge’s rulings should never be affected by political ideology or motivation,” she said in a written response to Senate Republicans at the time.
A few years later, she was just starting her bike ride to work when she fell and banged her elbow. She called her father, who said he was sure she was fine. So she finished riding to the courthouse, put on her robe and held a hearing. Only afterward did she have her arm checked, learning that her elbow was badly broken.
“As far back as I can remember, she’s not the excitable kind, and she’s not dramatic,” Robynne Chutkan said. The judge doesn’t use social media, her sister said, and didn’t jockey for the lifetime position she was nominated to in 2013. “I don’t feel like she spends a lot of time wondering, worrying what other people think. She says she’s going to come in, do her job and move on.”
For nearly a decade on the bench, Chutkan has handled high-profile cases, including that of Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty in a plot to penetrate conservative U.S. political circles without disclosing that she was advancing Russian interests. In that case, Chutkan imposed a gag order after ruling that Butina’s attorney, Robert N. Driscoll, “crossed the line” in his public defense of his client.
“It was a little frustrating,” he said, because he was responding to a false narrative, based on a government misreading of text messages, that Butina was a spy who traded sex for access. But he said Chutkan, who also reprimanded prosecutors, did what she thought was necessary. “She was trying to be fair,” he said. “At the time it was a pretty big case.”
Trump’s trial is magnitudes bigger, and Chutkan has so far refrained from issuing a similar order. The government has asked for limitations on Trump’s speech, saying people involved are likely to be harassed if disparaged by him. Less than a week after she was assigned to the case, Chutkan received a voice mail from a woman calling her the n-word and threatening her with murder if Trump lost the next election, according to court records.
Chutkan, her sister said, was not rattled.
“She kept saying, ‘I feel so sorry for her, I think she has a lot of problems,’” Robynne Chutkan said. “She really expressed compassion for this woman.”
Nor is the judge bothered by the more routine vitriol directed her way. “I’m an immigrant. I find it fantastic to live in a country where anyone can call a judge an idiot,” she said in a 2020 interview with Washington Lawyer magazine. “That’s a true democracy.”
During Trump’s presidency, when scores of challenges came through the D.C. District Court, Chutkan ruled about a half-dozen times against his administration; her opinions centered on the specific facts of the case. She guaranteed abortion access for teenagers in immigration custody, ordered the administration to resume collection of data on pay and educational disparities, and halted a plan to resume federal executions. That last decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority cleared the way for executions to resume.
But she ruled against opponents of a Pennsylvania pipeline, saying their “aesthetic interests or enjoyment of wildlife” were not constitutionally protected. And after the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s ban against travel from several majority-Muslim countries, she ruled that she was unable to do anything for people from those nations who had won visas from the United States.
After Trump left office, Chutkan ruled that his presidential records could be turned over to the House committee investigating Jan. 6 after he argued they should remain secret under executive privilege. Referencing a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, she said, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.” The committee held high-profile televised hearings that made public key evidence now being used by special counsel Jack Smith in the four-count indictment against Trump, and it recommended criminal charges, some similar to those he now faces in Chutkan’s courtroom.
Over the past 2½ years, Chutkan has repeatedly criticized attempts to compare Jan. 6 and its aftermath to injustices against Black people or protests for racial justice. At a sentencing in October 2021, she said “that to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the January 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.” She called it “offensive” and “audacious” when one of the few Black people charged with involvement in the Capitol attack said he was following in the footsteps of forebears who fought for civil rights in the 1960s.
Trump’s attorneys have since argued that two comments she made from the bench make her at least appear biased against him. At one sentencing in 2021, she said, “The people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man … a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” At another in 2022, she told a rioter who said he was misled by Trump and others that he “made a very good point” in noting that “the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.”
In refusing to recuse herself, Chutkan wrote that she was “legally bound” to address the rioters’ assertions that “their culpability ... was minor relative to the people they viewed as the riot’s instigators” but that she “specifically withheld judgment on whether other people should be charged for conduct related to January 6.”
Former public defenders often make for less punitive judges, and before Jan. 6 rulings, Chutkan fit that mode; data from Syracuse University indicated she was likely to impose less prison time than the average judge in her court.
“I represented defendants for murders and robberies and horrible violent behavior,” she told one Jan. 6 defendant. “People are complex. They do bad things, even though they may be in other respects good people.”
She gave that rioter, a 28-year-old Texan named Christian Cortez, four months in prison for joining a group fighting police and trying to break down Capitol doors — far less than prosecutors wanted.
But more often, she has broken from her past patterns and been tougher than other judges. Through mid-September, Chutkan had sentenced every one of the 34 defendants before her to at least some time behind bars, according to Washington Post data. She granted or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in about 53 percent of those cases, compared with 17 percent for the rest of the judges on the D.C. bench. Defense attorneys say they have been warned by friends in the federal public defender’s office to expect Chutkan to mete out incarceration.
Statistics can be misleading; Todd Onore says he was happy to see his Jan. 6 client get a year and a day from Chutkan, rather than the 11 months requested by prosecutors, because it meant he qualified for a “good behavior” credit that could reduce his sentence to 10 months. Some defendants also prefer a short sentence of incarceration to years of court supervision; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that judges cannot impose both in most misdemeanor Jan. 6 cases.
“She had obviously some strong opinions about these things,” Onore said. “But she didn’t do anything that made me think she wasn’t going to give him a fair shake.”
Judges, said Onore and other attorneys, are entitled to see certain crimes as particularly serious and sentence accordingly.
At Cortez’s sentencing, Chutkan explained why she feels that way about Jan. 6.
“To the extent that anybody comes in this courtroom and says this cannot happen again, they’re dreaming,” she said. “The threats, the level of rhetoric out there, the level of communications that we’re getting as judges and our staff because of these cases, and other people involved in these cases are getting, it absolutely could happen again, and it has to be made crystal clear to anyone who considers doing such a thing again that the consequences are going to be certain and severe.”
Tom Jackman, Matt Viser, Emma Brown, Ann E. Marimow, Magda Jean-Louis and Alice Crites contributed to this report.“
What We Know About a Judge’s Finding That Trump Committed Fraud
What We Know About a Judge’s Finding That Trump Committed Fraud
“New York’s attorney general sued the former president using a state law that grants her wide powers to pursue corporate wrongdoing.
When a New York judge ruled on Tuesday that Donald J. Trump had committed fraud by inflating his assets, he was effectively saying that the facts at the heart of the case against Mr. Trump would not be subject to debate during a trial that could begin Monday.
The civil case was brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, in 2022, and accuses the former president and his family business of lying to lenders and insurers about the value of their properties in order to secure more favorable terms. In a so-called summary judgment days before the trial, Justice Arthur F. Engoron of State Supreme Court in Manhattan found that they had done so — and that Mr. Trump was liable.
It is not a normal fraud case. Rather, it was brought under a powerful New York statute that gives the attorney general wide scope to investigate and prosecute corporate fraud. Because that law is being used, the questions that remain will be decided by Justice Engoron in a bench trial — one decided by a judge rather than by a jury.
What is a summary judgment?
In a civil case, either side, making an argument that some or all of the facts of a case are undisputed, can ask the judge for a decision without a full trial.
On Tuesday, Justice Engoron denied a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers for a summary judgment on certain issues, while granting a similar motion by the attorney general’s office.
Understand New York State’s Civil Case Against Trump
An empire under scrutiny. Letitia James, New York State’s attorney general, has been conducting a yearslong civil investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business practices, culminating in a lawsuit that accused Trump of “staggering” fraud. Here’s what to know:
In his ruling, he wrote that the annual financial statements that Mr. Trump submitted to banks and insurance companies “clearly contain fraudulent valuations.” He criticized the defense lawyers in strong language and even fined them for using arguments that he had already found were without merit.
While some of the language of the decision was harsh, granting a summary judgment before the trial was not extraordinary. But Justice Engoron also took the unusual step of canceling business certificates that allow some of Mr. Trump’s properties to operate.
John W. Moscow, a lawyer who has worked on fraud investigations for more than 40 years, said the dissolution of the companies — nullifying their very right to exist — was striking.
“Corporate dissolution as a sanction for misconduct is not something I’ve heard of,” he said.
What is the attorney general’s special power?
A state law that dates to 1956 gives the attorney general’s office expansive authority to investigate and punish corporations. It demands a lower burden of proof than other fraud cases. Crucially, prosecutors do not have to prove that the defendant intended to defraud — or that they hurt anyone financially in the process. Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that the banks he dealt with made money.
The New York attorney general’s office has relied on the law for years in high-profile cases, including against UBS, Exxon Mobil and Juul — as well as Trump University and the Trump Foundation, both of which paid millions of dollars to resolve the cases.
The statute allows investigators to issue subpoenas and gather information before filing a lawsuit, often resulting in many rounds of legal back-and-forth between competing sets of lawyers before a trial.
What comes next?
Mr. Trump has long derided the case as politically motivated and denied wrongdoing, and one of his lawyers, Christopher M. Kise, on Tuesday called Justice Engoron’s decision “outrageous” and vowed to appeal.
If the ruling stands, the case could have major repercussions for the Trump family. The attorney general’s office is seeking $250 million in penalties, and the judge could bar Mr. Trump and his sons from running any business in New York.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have also sued Justice Engoron himself, arguing that he ignored an appeals court ruling in June that they contend should have gutted the case. They argued that the judge ignored a key deadline that should have disqualified much of the evidence. They have asked the appeals court to delay the trial and to order the judge to implement the June ruling.
The appeals court is expected to rule as soon as Thursday.”
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
N.Y. judge finds Trump committed fraud and sanctions his attorneys - The Washington Post
N.Y. judge finds Trump committed fraud and sanctions his attorneys
Updated September 26, 2023 at 8:26 p.m. EDT|Published September 26, 2023 at 5:44 p.m. EDT
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron also ordered the cancellation of Trump business certificates and imposed sanctions on attorneys representing him, two of his adult children, two other company executives and the business for repeating arguments that failed multiple times previously and were called “borderline frivolous.”
The judge’s ruling represents a significant setback for Trump by revoking his company’s authority to do business in New York, where the Trump Organization is headquartered and where Trump has major real estate interests. It also represents a victory for Attorney General Letitia James (D), who had asked that Engoron simplify the upcoming trial by deciding in advance that fraud was broadly committed so the state would need to prove only specific illegal acts.
Trump and his attorneys have denied any wrongdoing. Trump spokeswoman Alina Habba said the judge’s ruling Tuesday would be appealed.
Five Trump attorneys have been ordered to pay $7,500 each to a state organization that reimburses clients whose attorneys misused funds. One of the attorneys sanctioned by Engoron is Christopher Kise, a former Florida solicitor general who also represents Trump in federal court there in the indictment over the retention and mishandling of classified documents.
The decision orders the parties to suggest candidates for receivers who will oversee the dissolution of the various entities that make up the Trump Organization’s corporate structure — a ruling that appears to mean the collapse of its operations in New York.
Kise issued a statement on behalf of the defense team calling the decision “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.”
“Without even conducting a trial, the Court substituted its own judgment for that of nationally recognized experts from the NYU Stern School of Business and beyond,” Kise said. “More importantly, the Court disregarded the viewpoint of those actually involved in the loan transactions who testified that there was nothing misleading, there was no fraud, and the transactions were all highly profitable.”
James filed a lawsuit against Trump and his company last year alleging that the Trump Organization and its executives defrauded lenders and insurance companies from 2011 to 2021 by inflating Trump’s net worth in business transactions.
By manipulating the value of Trump’s property and other real estate assets by up to $2.2 billion annually, the real estate, hospitality and golf resort company obtained better interest and policy rates than it otherwise would have, according to the lawsuit.
Trump is expected to stand trial along with his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who served as executives, longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and long-serving comptroller Jeffrey McConney.
The trial is scheduled to begin Monday but could be postponed because of an ongoing appellate court issue. It is unclear whether Tuesday’s decision will change the schedule.
A preliminary witness list compiled by the attorney general’s office included nearly 60 names, including the former president. Trump is expected to testify at the trial.
In finding that the defendants committed fraud under the state’s civil law, Engoron will now be left to determine at the bench trial whether specific illegal conduct occurred as well as what other penalties the defendants should face. The case is civil so the defendants can only be found liable for engaging in that conduct and do not face prison.
Trump, however, faces the potential of prison in four unrelated criminal cases, one of which was filed in New York. He could stand trial on those cases next year while he campaigns for the 2024 presidential election.
In the decision, Engoron criticized the Trump defense team’s failed arguments that earned it the sanctions because it kept repeating them.
“Defendants’ conduct in repeating these frivolous arguments is egregious,” Engoron wrote. “The defenses Donald Trump attempts to articulate in his sworn deposition are wholly without basis in law or fact.”
As Haley and Ramaswamy Rise, Some Indian Americans Have Mixed Feelings
As Haley and Ramaswamy Rise, Some Indian Americans Have Mixed Feelings
Democrats and Republicans have been courting the small but fast-growing and vital demographic in purple suburbs and swing states.
“Suresh Reddy, a centrist Democrat and city councilman, is watching the Republican presidential primary with a mix of pride and disappointment.
When Mr. Reddy and his wife, Chandra Gangareddy, immigrants from southern India, settled in the Des Moines suburbs in September 2004, they could count the number of Indian American families on one hand. Only one Indian American had ever served in Congress at the time, and none had dared to mount a bid for the White House.
Now, for the first time in the nation’s history, two Indian Americans — Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — are serious presidential contenders who regularly invoke their parents’ immigrant roots. But their deeply conservative views, on display as they seek the Republican nomination, make it difficult for Mr. Reddy to fully celebrate the moment, he said.
“I’m really proud,” he said. “I just wish they had a better message.”
That disconnect, reflected in interviews with two dozen Indian American voters, donors and elected officials from across the political spectrum — in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and across the country — may complicate the G.O.P.’s efforts to appeal to the small but influential Indian American electorate.
Indian Americans now make up about 2.1 million, or roughly 16 percent, of the estimated 13.4 million Asian Americans who are eligible to vote, the third largest population of Asian origin behind Chinese and Filipino Americans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey. Indian Americans also have tended to lean more Democratic than any other Asian American subgroups, according to Pew.
Though a small slice of the overall electorate, the demographic has become one of the fastest-growing constituencies, and is large enough to make a difference at the margins in swing states and in purple suburbs, including in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.
Debate over the prominence of Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy is playing out in Indian American homes and places of worship in Des Moines and beyond. In interviews, many described their rise as a political triumph at a time when Indian Americans have become more visible in fields beyond medicine, tech and engineering.
Venu Rao, a Democrat and retired engineer and program manager in Hollis, N.H., said Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy captured the ideological diversity among South Asian Americans, even if he doesn’t agree with their positions.
“I am glad that we have a choice,” Mr. Rao said.
But many of those interviewed also expressed frustration and dismay over the candidates’ hard-line positions on issues like race, identity and immigration. Some worried Mr. Ramaswamy’s pledges to dismantle agencies like the Education Department would destroy the same institutions that had been crucial to Indian American success and upward mobility.
Others said they appreciated Ms. Haley’s attempts to strike a more center-right tone on some topics like abortion and climate change but indicated concern about what they described as her tepid pushback against former President Donald J. Trump and his 2020 election lies.
“It can be really easy to see this as a win and be like, ‘Oh my god — look there, those are two brown faces on national TV. That’s amazing,’” said Nikhil Vootkur, 20, a student at Tufts University in Boston. But, “the diaspora, it has matured, and when a diaspora matures, you have a lot of ideological cleavages.”
Over the past decade, Indian Americans have been rapidly climbing the political ranks. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat and the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, is the first woman, first Black person and the first Asian American to hold her office.
In 2015, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a onetime rising Republican star, became the first Indian American to run for president. But Mr. Jindal, who changed his name, Piyush, to Bobby and converted to Christianity when he was young, made a push for assimilation that turned off many Indian American voters. Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy have toggled between proud embraces of their roots and scorching criticism of the “identity politics” that has been known to alienate the Republican Party’s largely white and evangelical Christian base.
Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, a political newcomer and millionaire entrepreneur from Cincinnati, Ohio, uses his Hindu faith to connect with Christian voters and expresses gratitude that his parents immigrated from the southwestern coast of India to the “greatest nation on Earth.”
Ms. Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador from Bamberg, S.C., has written and spoken extensively about her experience as the daughter of Sikh immigrants from northern India, including the pain of watching her father, who wears a turban, endure racism and discrimination.
Mr. Ramaswamy, who is running in the mold of Mr. Trump, has made a concerted effort to appeal to Indian Americans in the primary. He has made several appearances at the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa, where many patrons have met his parents, and he has drawn the independent support of its Hindu priest, Khimanand Upreti, who in an interview described Mr. Ramaswamy as “very fresh and clean” and without Mr. Trump’s controversies.
On the trail, Ms. Haley has talked less about her identity and often describes her immigrant family in general terms. But in a response to a voter question at a town hall in Hampton, N.H., on Thursday night, she explained how her father’s experience with prejudice helped her connect with a hurting community and persuade state lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston. She also used her parents’ immigrant background to tear into President Biden’s decision to provide temporary protected status and work permits for Venezuelan migrants.
“My mom would always say if you don’t follow the laws to get into this country, you won’t follow the laws when you are in this country,” she said.
At their home in Waukee, west of Des Moines, Nishant Kumar and Smita Nishant, who immigrated from New Delhi and Mumbai some two decades ago, and their daughter, Anika Yadav, 17, said the 2024 Iowa caucuses would be the first election they would all be able to participate in. The Nishants have only recently obtained citizenship, and Ms. Yadav will be old enough to vote in the next presidential election.
The family first became politically engaged when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 — and would have backed Democrats in the past few elections if they could have voted. But as they weigh the 2024 presidential contenders, they have found Mr. Ramaswamy smart and refreshing, they said.
They have seen less of Ms. Haley, but Ms. Yadav says she likes Ms. Haley’s experience on foreign policy and the way she holds herself on the national stage, even if she has not made her Indian American identity central to her campaign.
“I think a lot of women, specifically young women, are leaning toward Nikki Haley — even young women who are Democrats,” she said.
Still, some Indian American Democratic-leaning voters and prominent Indian American Democrats expressed concern or sadness over Mr. Ramaswamy’s and Ms. Haley’s approaches to issues of race and identity, saying they fed into “model minority” stereotypes and carried dog whistles that minimized or diminished the specific systematic racism faced by Black Americans.
Both, when discussing their life story, tend to emphasize their successes as evidence of racial and ethnic progress in the United States. Both promote hard-line immigration measures and denounce race-conscious policies such as affirmative action in school admissions.
Mr. Ramaswamy in particular has generated criticism for suggesting white supremacy was an exaggerated “boogeyman” and for pledging to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Ms. Haley has said she opposes birthright citizenship for people who have illegally entered the country.
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, criticized their approach on immigration and faulted them for ignoring the history of Asian exclusion in the nation’s immigration laws. The work of Indian and Black leaders during the civil rights movement helped open the pathways to migration and citizenship for Indian families to enter the United States, he said.
“Their story about the Indian American experience will not fully connect because it has so many omissions,” Mr. Khanna said.
But Bhavna Vasudeva, a longtime friend of Ms. Haley’s in Columbia, S.C., argued that Ms. Haley’s Republican values held real appeal for second-generation Indian Americans, adding that her approach to her family’s racial struggles exhibited a strong sense of “Chardi Kala,” an expression that for Punjabi and Sikh Indians and Indian Americans has become synonymous with “resilience” and a “positive attitude” in the face of fear or pain.
“You can’t tell anyone who is a brown woman about racism and discrimination,” Ms. Vasudeva, a donor to Ms. Haley’s campaign, said. “We have faced it all with our heads high and crown straight.”
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.
Jazmine Ulloa covers national politics from Washington. Before joining The Times, she worked at The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and various papers in her home state of Texas. More about Jazmine Ulloa“
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