On April 16, 2003, President Bush appointed Daniel W. Sutherland to be the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This position was created by Section 705 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. In this position, Mr. Sutherland will provide legal and policy advice to the Secretary and the senior officers of the Department on a full range of civil rights and civil liberties issues. He will also work closely with the civil rights offices and the equal employment opportunity offices of the agencies being merged into the Department.

Mr. Sutherland has been a civil rights attorney throughout his legal career, serving fourteen years with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and nearly two years with the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Sutherland also served as the first Executive Director of the Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Commission, which is coordinating a major national effort to commemorate this landmark Supreme Court decision. He has co-authored Religion in the Workplace, a book published in 1998 by the American Bar Association, and he has served at the White House, with the Domestic Policy Council, and at the Bush-Cheney Transition headquarters.

Daniel W. Sutherland
Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Mr. Sutherland has handled a number of important civil rights lawsuits. His experience has been primarily in the areas of discrimination against immigrants and discrimination against people with disabilities. His litigation includes cases alleging discrimination by a large urban police department in its dealings with people who are deaf; allegations that a licensing authority would not adequately accommodate test-takers who are blind; and, allegations of discrimination against refugees from Vietnam and the former Soviet Union. Mr. Sutherland has handled a number of cases dealing with the intersection of civil rights laws and athletics, including handling the case of the first baseball player who defected from the Cuban national baseball team, a widely-publicized lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association on behalf of student-athletes with dyslexia, and the Casey Martin case which reached U.S. Supreme Court.

At the U.S. Department of Education, Mr. Sutherland provided legal and policy advice on issues such as racial preferences in postsecondary education, the development of race-neutral approaches to diversity, disability law and the harassment of Arab-Americans. He also served as the Chief of Staff, helping to manage the operations of one of the largest civil rights offices in the federal government.

Mr. Sutherland is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Louisville.