Biden’s pick for Philly’s next U.S. attorney is the first woman ever nominated for the role

President Joe Biden has selected a career government lawyer to become the next U.S. attorney for the Philadelphia region, the White House announced Friday.

Jacqueline C. Romero, who has worked as a civil litigator in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania since 2006, is the first woman ever nominated to fill the position.

If confirmed by the Senate, she would also become the first woman of color to lead the office of 140 attorneys that oversees federal prosecutions for a nine-county region including Philadelphia, its suburbs, and outlying counties. She would replace Jennifer Arbittier Williams, who has held the post on an acting basis since the departure of former President Donald Trump’s appointee, Bill McSwain.

Romero’s nomination was among five announced by the White House Friday to fill U.S. attorney posts in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Idaho, and California. The president also announced the nomination of Gerard M. Karam — a partner in a Scranton law firm and former chief public defender for Lackawanna County — to fill the position in Harrisburg.

“These individuals were chosen for their devotion to enforcing the law, their professionalism, their experience and credentials in this field, their dedication to pursuing equal justice for all, and their commitment to the independence of the Department of Justice,” the White House said in a statement.

Romero was recommended for the post by Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican.

“For over two decades, Ms. Romero has dedicated her career to public service, including the past 16 years as an Assistant United States Attorney in Philadelphia,” Casey said in a statement. “She brings a breadth of experience and a historic perspective to this role as the first woman nominated to lead that office.”

Romero, 51, of Philadelphia, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Her selection is unusual because historically, presidents have often turned to outsiders — with some past experience as federal prosecutors — when choosing their nominees. McSwain, for instance, had spent nearly 12 years as a partner for the Center City law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP before his nomination in 2017.

However, Romero has spent nearly all of her legal career in government service, including her most recent job in the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s civil division.

In a 2017 interview with Al Dia, Romero described an interest in the law that developed at an early age and the challenges she faced starting out as a young lawyer and the first in her family to graduate from a four-year college.

The granddaughter of a Spanish immigrant, she grew up helping in her parents’ diner in Tenafly, N.J. She told the newspaper her father often jokes that she was reading the New York Times at the restaurant at age 4. At 5, she told the College of New Jersey’s alumni magazine in 2011, she announced to her family over Thanksgiving dinner that one day she would become a judge.

After law school at Rutgers and a stint working at a private law firm, she took her first government job in 1998 as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s commercial litigation section and has since worked as senior counsel to the U.S. Mint.

She has served as a president of the Hispanic Bar Association of Pennsylvania and committee cochair for the Philadelphia LGBTQ Bar Association.

At the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, Romero has overseen complex cases including a false claims suit that led to a $422.5 million settlement with the Swiss drug giant Novartis in 2010 and a 2011 case that recovered 10 famous $20 gold coins — valued at $80 million — that had been stolen from the Philadelphia Mint in the 1930s.

She also serves as the office’s civil coordinator for civil rights cases and as a liaison to the federal reentry court, a program aimed at easing the post-prison transition for those who have been convicted of federal crimes.

Several of the office’s line prosecutors — who asked not to be identified to speak candidly about personnel matters — hailed Romero’s appointment Friday, saying they hoped the nomination of one of their own might help to restore morale after three years under McSwain, whom many of them described as overtly political.

McSwain’s tenure was marked by constant public sparring with District Attorney Larry Krasner that many lawyers in the office viewed as unconstructive, at best, and, at worst, damaging to the office’s long-term reputation. Several attorneys of color also departed the office under his watch — a situation some current prosecutors said they were hopeful might be reversed under Romero’s leadership.

McSwain is now seeking the Republican nomination to become Pennsylvania’s governor, running a “law-and-order” campaign based on his record in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“It’s a nonpartisan position,” said Will González — an attorney and executive director of Ceiba, a Philadelphia nonprofit that serves the Latino community — who first met Romero through her work with the Hispanic Bar Association. “It’s not about self-promotion and political motivation for future candidacies.”

In Romero, he added, “I see somebody who’s a career person who respects and adores that office — somebody who knows what it stands for — and I think that means a lot to the community, be you Latina or whatever.”