National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 3, 2025

National Fair Housing Alliance Announces Enhanced Legal Capacity

Washington, D.C. – The National Fair Housing Alliance® (NFHA™) 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 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 & Skalet, where she started a flourishing fair housing and fair lending practice. She also previously served as Co-Managing Attorney at The Cochran Firm’s 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.

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’s fair housing and program enforcement attorneys, as well as much of HUD’s 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’s 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.

“The 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,” said NFHA’s President and CEO Lisa Rice. “Discrimination in our nation is not a relic of the past, and NFHA stands ready to ensure our country’s antidiscrimination laws and policies are enforced so that every person has fair access to the American Dream and opportunities they need to thrive.”

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The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) is the country’s 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.