Amir Ali

Overview

Judge Amir H. Ali sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where in 2025 and 2026 he issued two of the Trump administration’s most consequential judicial defeats: a March 2025 order to pay nearly $2 billion in frozen foreign-aid funds, and a September 2026 ruling blocking the administration from tying counterterrorism grants to election-administration changes (Associated Press; Associated Press). The Senate confirmed him to the lifetime appointment in November 2024 by a 50-49 vote (Federal Defender Services Office). Before the bench, Ali spent seven years as a civil-rights appellate litigator at the MacArthur Justice Center, arguing three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and winning the two he argued for the Center (MacArthur Justice Center; The Vetting Room).

Education and early career

Ali immigrated to the United States and eventually became a naturalized citizen (The Vetting Room). He earned a B.S.E. in software engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, in 2008, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2011 (The White House (archived)). After law school he clerked for Judge Raymond C. Fisher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2011 to 2012, and for Justice Marshall Rothstein on the Supreme Court of Canada from 2012 to 2013 (The White House (archived)). He then joined Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C. as an associate, where he practiced from 2013 to 2017 (The White House (archived)).

Civil-rights appellate work

Ali joined the MacArthur Justice Center in 2017 to found its Washington, D.C. office and build the organization’s Supreme Court and Appellate Program, representing indigent people whose legal rights had been violated (MacArthur Justice Center). In that role he argued two major civil-rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won both: Garza v. Idaho, which expanded the constitutional right to counsel, and Thompson v. Clark, in which the Court recognized that government actors could be held civilly accountable for initiating false charges against someone (MacArthur Justice Center). During the same period he held a faculty position at Harvard Law School, where he established and taught the Criminal Justice Appellate Clinic (MacArthur Justice Center).

A detailed nomination-tracker account fills in the case record. In Welch v. United States (2016), Ali argued for Gregory Welch, who had been sentenced to 15 years under the Armed Career Criminal Act; the Court ruled 7-1 that its earlier decision in Johnson v. United States striking down the Act’s residual clause announced a substantive rule change and was therefore retroactive, with Justice Thomas the lone dissenter (The Vetting Room). In 2017 he filed a brief in Hawaii v. Trump challenging the executive order restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries; Justice Sotomayor cited his brief in her dissenting opinion (The Vetting Room). In Garza v. Idaho (2018), he represented Gilberto Garza Jr., whose trial counsel had declined to file a notice of appeal because of plea-agreement appeal waivers; in a 6-3 decision the Court found ineffective assistance of counsel and reversed and remanded (The Vetting Room). Also in 2018, the Center and the Promise of Justice Initiative petitioned the Supreme Court on behalf of Corey Williams, an intellectually disabled man with an IQ of 68 who had been convicted of first-degree murder as a 16-year-old in 1998 and spent 20 years in a Louisiana prison; in response to the petition, the Caddo Parish district attorney’s office agreed to his immediate release (The Vetting Room). In Thompson v. Clark (2022), Ali represented Navy veteran Larry Thompson, whom four police officers had forced their way in on, restrained, and held in custody for two days after a 911 call about his infant child; after charges were dismissed, lower courts had required Thompson to show he had been affirmatively found innocent, but the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that he “need only show that his prosecution ended without a conviction” (The Vetting Room).

In 2021, Ali became the MacArthur Justice Center’s president and executive director, its second executive director in the organization’s nearly four-decade history (MacArthur Justice Center). He stepped down on August 5, 2024 (MacArthur Justice Center). His work there drew several honors, including the Justice Tribute Award from the NAACP and ACRL, finalist status for the American Constitution Society’s David Carliner Public Interest Award, Bloomberg’s “40 under 40,” and Bloomberg Law’s Pro Bono Innovators Award (MacArthur Justice Center). The Vetting Room also noted political contributions by Ali to President Biden and Democratic candidates for the Georgia and Texas House of Representatives, recorded in OpenSecrets data (The Vetting Room).

Nomination and confirmation

President Biden nominated Ali to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on January 10, 2024, in the forty-fourth round of judicial nominees (The White House (archived)). He was nominated to the seat of Judge Beryl Howell, who had assumed senior status on February 1, 2024 (The Vetting Room). The Senate confirmed him in November 2024 by a 50-49 vote (Federal Defender Services Office). He was the fifth Muslim American nominated as an Article III judge by President Biden; at confirmation, the Federal Defender Services Office described him as the first Arab American and first Muslim to receive a lifetime appointment to the D.C. federal trial court, and the third Muslim Article III judge in the nation (The Vetting Room; Federal Defender Services Office).

The USAID funding litigation (2025)

Weeks into the second Trump administration, Ali drew the legal fight over its freeze on foreign-assistance funding. On February 13, 2025, he issued a temporary restraining order in two combined cases — one brought by USAID contractors, the other by USAID grant recipients — challenging Executive Order 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” which had paused almost all foreign assistance (Crowell & Moring LLP). The court found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits because the government “ha[d] not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs” (Crowell & Moring LLP). The order barred the State Department, USAID, the Office of Management and Budget, and their actors from suspending or pausing disbursement of funds under any federal foreign-assistance award in existence as of January 19, 2025, and from giving effect to terminations, suspensions, or stop-work orders on those programs — while making clear it did not stop the government from enforcing the terms of contracts or grants (Crowell & Moring LLP).

On March 7, 2025, Ali ordered the administration to pay nearly $2 billion owed to USAID and State Department partners for previously completed work (Associated Press). The Supreme Court had rejected the administration’s attempt to preserve the funding freeze and instructed Ali to clarify what the government must do to comply (Associated Press). In remarks quoted by the AP, Ali characterized the frozen funding as “earth-shaking, country-shaking” appropriations that Congress had made (Associated Press).

The counterterrorism-grant ruling (September 2026)

In June 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would withhold 20 percent of funding under grant programs for preparing for terrorist attacks and other threats until state or local governments adopted election-administration measures favored by the administration (Reuters). To receive full funding, states and localities would have had to submit a plan to move away from voting equipment using bar codes or QR codes toward hand-marked paper ballots, manually audit at least 5 percent of ballots cast, reconcile the number of participating voters with ballots counted, and run voter-registration records — plus the citizenship status of poll workers and election vendors — through a DHS citizenship-verification database (Associated Press; Democracy Docket).

The city of Columbus, Ohio; Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee; and El Paso, Harris, Dallas, and Travis counties in Texas sued on August 17, 2026 (The Tennessean; Associated Press). The grant programs at issue totaled roughly $1.1 billion, with the AP putting the figure at more than $1 billion across about 56 expected awards (Reuters; Associated Press).

On September 28, 2026, Ali ruled for the jurisdictions in a 24-page opinion, finding that DHS and FEMA likely violated federal law by conditioning the funds on election changes (Associated Press; Democracy Docket). He held that FEMA had no “authority to extract unfunded reforms from states in exchange for grants,” writing: “FEMA’s conditions here — which are imposed on states and localities at their own expense, rather than funded by grants, and which address routine election administration decisions rather than the types of terrorist act threats contemplated by the statute — go beyond what Congress authorized” (Democracy Docket). “Congress did not authorize the grant program to be used for the sort of election administration reforms FEMA demands here — changes that, whether sound or not as a matter of policy, are not advanced to prepare for or respond to ‘acts of terrorism,’” he wrote (Reuters). DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin had said the new requirements would protect election systems from foreign interference and cyberattacks (Reuters). A separate challenge to the policy by 25 states and Washington, D.C. remained pending, and the ruling came just days after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to revive use of the SAVE immigration database for verifying voters’ citizenship (Reuters; Democracy Docket).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Ali’s date or place of birth: the claim seen online that he was born in 1985 in Kingston, Ontario could not be verified against a citable fetched source, so it is not repeated. It does not give the date he received his judicial commission or was sworn in, which was not verified. It does not name the case captions of the USAID suits, which none of the fetched sources provided. It does not describe the September 2026 ruling as a final vacatur of the grant conditions or claim that a permanent injunction was granted or denied; the fetched sources support only that Ali ruled for the jurisdictions and blocked enforcement of the conditions. It does not connect Ali’s USAID cases to the Supreme Court’s later 2025 foreign-aid decisions, a link no fetched source confirmed. The “first Arab American and first Muslim” lifetime-appointment description is attributed to the Federal Defender Services Office report alone and has not been independently verified against the Senate record. Finally, the Reuters wire report is cited from its full text as delivered verbatim through the search tool rather than from a separately fetched page, as noted above.