Study Shows Foreign-Born Judges Rule Against Trump’s Migration Reforms
by Warner Todd Huston
An audit of decisions handed down by all 58 foreign-born federal judges looks to see if they are more likely to favor migrants’ legal claims and to oppose President Donald Trump’s border policies.
The decisions by the federal judges were measured against the decisions by the rest of the federal judiciary to see how the decisions by foreign judges stack up against the rest.
“Across the full 58-judge cohort, anti-border enforcement rulings average 61.9% (vs. the 34.0% U.S. federal court baseline) and below-guideline criminal departures average 45.3% (vs. 31.0% nationally),” the audit found.
The study was conducted by the watchdog group Bench Receipts, an organization that tracks actions by the judiciary, prosecutors, and sheriffs.
The audit looked at the decisions by federal judges who are Article III judicial appointees, or judges appointed to the bench by a U.S. president and approved by the U.S. Senate. The audit meant to answer the question of whether foreign-born judges were softer on crime and if they more often ruled against America’s safety and immigration laws.
The study was conducted by the watchdog group Bench Receipts, an organization that tracks the results of actions by the judiciary, prosecutors, and sheriffs.
The new study reviewed the 58 foreign-born judges across the federal judiciary, which comprises the Supreme Court, the Courts of Appeals, District Courts, and a handful of others. The audit hypothesis sought to answer the question of whether being foreign-born amounted to a controlling factor for rulings that sit below the U.S. federal judicial baseline for rulings that tend to go against the law and against America-first policies.
However, after the rulings of foreign-born judges were tabulated against the average rulings of the rest of the U.S.-born federal judiciary, the question was answered revealing a startling result. It wasn’t being foreign-born that caused these 58 federal judges to make rulings that all too often put blocks on America-first and U.S. sovereignty matters. Instead, it was what jobs they held before becoming a federal judge and what president appointed them.
As it happens, the bulk of the federal Article III judges appointed by Democrat presidents had jobs before taking the bench in left-wing think tanks, or social justice organizations such as the ACLU, or were public defenders. These jobs all lean decidedly toward activist leftism and are jobs were “the law” is only used to push an agenda, as opposed to being used to adjudicate a legal issue. And the audit found that once they became judges, their decisions ended up reflecting that ideological drive, pushing their rulings below the average baseline and into left-wing activist territory.