Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has appointed two women to fill judge vacancies in the Second Judicial District, which covers Ramsey County.

On Friday, the governor announced that Veena Iyer and Jennifer Verdeja would fill those roles.

The two will fill the vacancies created when JaPaul Harris moved up to the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Elena Ostby retired, according to a news release.

Verdeja is assistant director of the Trial and Pretrial Justice Division in the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. She was previously an assistant public defender in the Second Judicial District , a community corrections worker for Ramsey County, and served on the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Human Trafficking Investigators Task Force and the Second District Ethics Committee.

Iyer is the executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. She was previously a shareholder at Nilan Johnson Lewis, an Equal Justice Works fellow at Legal Aid Chicago, a law clerk for Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Natalie Hudson, Fourth Judicial District Judge Susan Burke and U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Judge Matthew Kennelly.

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