As Beth Brelje recently reported in The Federalist,

1. Five of the fifteen judges sitting on the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia were born outside the United States.
2. All five of those foreign-born judges somehow managed to get selected to rule on controversial Trump cases.
3. All five of those judges had zero experience as a judge before being appointed to one of the most influential courts in the land.

The recently infamous James Boasberg, chief judge of the D.C. District Court, is one of the 15 principal judges on that court.  There are an additional 10 older, senior judges who occasionally hear cases, all of whom were born in the U.S.

This seeding of foreign-born judges to the D.C. court is another “transformational innovation” that can be traced back to Barack Obama, who in 2014 appointed Judge Tanya Sue Churkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica.  “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. ... He was raised in Maryland. Mehta will oversee four January 6 civil cases that aim to blame Trump for injuries and squeeze money, court time, and political embarrassment out of him.

Joe Biden picked up where Obama left off when he nominated Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, yet another appointee with no prior experience as a judge.

She is the first openly LGBT Latina to be appointed to this court. Reyes presided over an objection to Trump’s executive order declaring “gender dysphoria” as “inconsistent” with the “high standards for troop readiness,” as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported. Reyes blocked Trump’s order with a preliminary injunction.

Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali was born in Canada to Egyptian parents.  Educated in Canada, he earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2011 and became a citizen in 2019.  Ali worked for the Biden campaign and nonprofits “but never served as a judge until Biden appointed him in 2024.”

In his writing, he [Ali] said, “prejudice and intolerance” were “the very hallmark of [Trump’s] campaign against Muslims.” ... Ali single handedly restored $2 billion in USAID spending to foreign nonprofit contractors that the Trump Administration had paused for 90 days, in a stunning overreach of authority last month.

Before slipping out the back door, Biden (or his autopen?) got Judge Sparkle Sooknanan confirmed on Jan. 2, 2025.  She was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1983, came to the U.S. in 1999, and earned a law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 2010.

She [Sooknanan] 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 before Biden tapped her for her first ever judge gig in the D.C. Court, according to her Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees. Last week, Sooknanan dutifully did her part to slow Trump’s agenda, ordering the reinstatement of Democrat Susan Grundmann to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, a move that keeps the board in a Democrat majority.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with appointing a foreign-born judge, but someone not born and raised in the U.S. may have less regard for traditional American values than a native-born individual.  In any case, it’s obvious that these five judges were chosen for their ideological purity, certainly not their wealth of experience and reputations as actual judges.

There’s a lot riding on how Chief Justice Roberts will act, or fail to act, in the coming months — not only for his legacy, but for the integrity of the constitutional republic in which we are reputed to reside.  Let’s hope he “gets his mind right,” so to speak.

Image via Picryl.