A Third of All DC District Judges Were Not Born in United States

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the source of many of the cases interfering with President Donald Trump’s authority, has 15 judges, (Counting Chief Judge James Boasberg) and five of them were born outside the United States.

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The concept of foreign-born judges is a newer phenomenon in this district. {snip}

But starting in 2014, former President Barack Obama appointed Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was in the U.S. by 1979, attending George Washington University. Before sitting on federal court, she had no experience as a judge. Chutkan is overseeing the legal challenge to DOGE’s work to slash excess government spending.

Obama also appointed Judge Amit P. Mehta to the D.C. court. Mehta also had no previous experience as a judge. Mehta was born in Patan, Gujarat, India. {snip}

The other three foreign born judges were nominated by former President Joe Biden.

Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes was nominated in 2021, also with no prior experience as a judge. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and moved to Spain, and while still a child, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she grew up. She is the first openly LGBT Latina to be appointed to this court. {snip}

The first Muslim and Arab American in the D.C. district court, Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali was born and raised in Canada to Egyptian parents. According to his Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees, Ali was not required to register for the U.S. Selective Service. That is because he was not a citizen until 2019. He graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada with a software engineering degree in 2008 and then attended Harvard Law School in the U.S., graduating with a law degree in 2011. He worked as a volunteer on Biden’s 2020 transition team and for a phone bank in support of Biden’s presidential campaign. He worked for some nonprofits but never served as a judge until Biden appointed him in 2024. Amir has written extensively and negatively about Trump’s so-called “Travel ban,” a 2017 Executive Order which restricted travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days.

In his writing, he said, “prejudice and intolerance” were “the very hallmark of [Trump’s] campaign against Muslims.”

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The newest judge on the D.C. District Court is also foreign born.

{snip} Biden and his handlers got Judge Sparkle Sooknanan confirmed. She was sworn in Jan. 2, 2025. Born in the dual-island nation Trinidad and Tobago in 1983, she left her home country at age 16 to pursue college and graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2010.

She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and during the Biden Administration she was the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice {snip}

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