When Rep.-elect Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) is sworn into Congress this week or whenever Republicans manage to elect a Speaker she will become one of the few members to have worked as a public defender. Many members of Congress are lawyers, and most of those who worked in the criminal justice system were prosecutors 29 House members in the 117th Congress that just ended were formerly prosecutors, according t o the Congressional Research Service.

But Crockett has taken a different path. After several years with the Bowie County Public Defenders Office, where she provided legal representation to the poor, Crockett started her criminal defense firm. Her frustration with the criminal legal system prompted her to run for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, where she filed more bills than any other freshman lawmaker , drawing on her experiences representing people she believes were unfairly punished.

Working within the Republican-controlled far-right Texas legislature, Crockett could not get any of the bills she was the main author signed into law. So, in 2021, she announced her candidacy to replace the retiring representative of Texas 30th Congressional District in Dallas County.

Crockett spoke with HuffPost in November after her congressional orientation in Washington, D.C., about her work as a defense lawyer and how that informs her political work.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I read in an interview you did with Darling in 2020 that you initially wanted to be an anesthesiologist but that you decided to go to law school, in part, because of the support you got from your lawyer after being the victim of a series of hate crimes. Are you comfortable discussing what happened and how that affected your career trajectory?

Yeah, absolutely. So I went to private schools from seventh grade on, which meant that I typically was one of the few African Americans in the class. When I went to undergrad at Rhodes College, there were only 18 African Americans that came into my class as a freshman. And were in the heart of Memphis the hood of Memphis, to be perfectly honest.

For me, walking into a space where Im in the extreme minority was just kind of a way of life for me after I started junior high.