Houston U.S. Attorney, first Asian American to hold post, to resign before Trump takes office

Alamdar Hamdani, the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Texas and the first Asian American to hold the position, announced his resignation Wednesday after two years on the job. 

In a news release, Hamdani said his resignation would take effect on January 19. It’s unclear who will be acting U.S. attorney until President-elect Donald Trump names a successor. Hamdani’s first assistant, Jennifer Lowery, previously held the role after Ryan Patrick resigned in the wake of President Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Landing on Tuesday, Hamdani said he is unsure of his next steps. He added that it’s typical for U.S. attorneys to be asked to resign when a new administration takes office, especially if they were appointed by a president of the opposite party. Indeed, in recent days, U.S. attorneys in Massachusetts, California, Florida and Hawaii have announced their intention to step down. 

“We serve at the pleasure of the president,” Hamdani said at his downtown Houston office.

Hamdani said he has accomplished much of what he set out to do when he took office in December 2022: help lower Houston’s murder rate, combat violent crime, and prioritize public corruption, national security, white-collar crime, and drug cases. 

State data show that from 2022 to 2023, murders in Houston decreased by 20%, from 429 to 343. As of November, the city’s police department had recorded around 300 murders in 2024, down from a five-year high of 464 in 2021.

As part of a now two-year-old Department of Justice initiative focused on combating violent crime, Hamdani’s office has gone after people suspected of illegally possessing firearms and targeted suspected gang members for crimes ranging from drug dealing to murder.

“If you are a violent gang in Houston, be aware of what we’ve done,” Hamdani said, pointing to cases involving alleged members of the 100% Third Ward (103) Gang and Rich Kingz gangs. 

In August, when federal and state authorities arrested more than a dozen suspected drug traffickers, including a suspected leader of the Rich Kingz gang, officials said they had arrested 65 “violent offenders,” confiscated 130 firearms and seized about $1.3 million as part of the violent crime initiative.

Combating the spread of fentanyl was another goal of the longtime prosecutor. Under his leadership, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Texas has prosecuted suspected fentanyl dealers, and in July unveiled charges against a Chinese man suspected of smuggling chemicals used to make the powerful opioid.

Top of mind for Hamdani when he came into office was “building up” the office’s public corruption and white-collar divisions to shorten the time between “conduct and consequence.”

“To do that, you’re going to have enough lawyers on the case, you have enough investigators on the case, you’re going to have enough analysts on the case, all working towards investigating and putting together a case and then taking it to the grand jury,” Hamdani said.

The top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Texas says it has been a priority to ensure there were enough resources along the border. That meant hiring prosecutors in Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville to make up for ones that left when the Biden administration shifted away from Trump’s “zero-tolerance” approach to immigration. 

Texas’ Southern District is massive, spanning 43 counties and encompassing about nine million people. Hamdani estimated that his prosecutors have secured more than 10,000 indictments from federal grand juries in the last two years, with the bulk coming from border offices.

Prior to his appointment to the top job, Hamdani prosecuted national security and public corruption cases for the Southern District of Texas and spent five years in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism section. 

Before joining the federal government, Hamdani worked in the private sector, including as a civil rights attorney. In the wake of 9/11, he did pro bono work for Arab and Asian men in the Houston region who were being investigated and questioned by federal officials. 

Hamdani received a bachelor of business administration degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 and his law degree from the University of Houston in 1999. 

Hamdani, an avid swimmer – despite a chlorine allergy – and parent of two, said he has accomplished another goal that he hopes his successor will continue: running the office according to the “mama rule.”

Shortly after Chief District Judge Randy Crane swore him in, Hamdani said he organized a meeting with the 400 or so employees and 220 assistant U.S. attorneys he oversees and showed them a picture of his mother sitting at his desk. 

Pointing to his mother, who he said is four feet 10 inches tall, Hamdani told his employees that she represented the hundreds of thousands of migrants who come to this country every year; the migrants who find themselves victims of human traffickers; and the people of color who might have had their civil rights violated. 

“We don’t see them as a number, but we see them as a person,” he said. 

Hamdani, whose family came to the United States from the United Kingdom when he was 10, said his mother represented how they should treat one another. The “mama rule,” as he described it, also applied to federal judges, criminal defense attorneys, federal public defenders, law enforcement officers, and the defendants charged in court they encounter.

“Because when our hands touch the shoulder of the defendant, their lives invariably will go spiraling downwards if (they’re a criminal defendant), we make sure that before we bring a case, we’ve got the facts and we’ve got the law on our side, and we do that with every case we bring,” Hamdani said.

Hamdani said he hopes the next U.S. Attorney for South Texas will have the resources they need to do the job effectively. Hamdani said that while he inherited a “healthy” budget that has been in the black for the past two years, Congress has slashed funding for the Department of Justice in recent years and the job of a U.S. Attorney will only become harder with less resources. 

Hamdani declined to give an exact figure for his budget, but said it’s multiples of several million dollars.

“We need more AUSAs in this office than ever before,” he said. “That’s going to be a challenge, I think, for whoever takes office. How do you continue what you do and with the limited resources you have?”

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