Overview[1]

Indira Talwani was born in Englewood, New Jersey, on October 6, 1960. She earned a BA degree from Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1982, and a JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley in 1988.

Talwani served as a clerk for the Oakland, California-based labor law firm Mocine & Eggleston from 1986-1987, and for the San Francisco-based firm of Neyhart, Anderson, Nussbaum, Reilly and Freitas from 1987-1988.

She then clerked for Judge Stanley A. Weigel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California from 1988-1989.

Talwani thereafter spent the next ten years as a private-practice attorney with Altshuler Berzon LLP in San Francisco — first as an associate from 1989-1996, and then as a partner from 1996-1999.

She then worked for 14 years with Segal Roitman LLP, where she specialized in federal and state court litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. She was an associate with the firm from 1999-2003, and a partner from 2003-2014.

During her years as a private-practice attorney, Talwani established herself as a strong supporter of Democratic Party candidates and causes. Between 2004-2012, for example, she donated money to such high-profile figures as John Kerry (2004 presidential campaign), Barack Obama (2008 presidential campaign), and Elizabeth Warren (2012 Senate campaign). She also gave money to the Democratic National Committee and performed volunteer work for the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign of Deval Patrick in 2006, the presidential bid of Barack Obama in 2008, and the U.S. Senate runs of Martha Coakley (2010) and Elizabeth Warren (2012).

On September 24, 2013, President Obama nominated Talwani for a federal judgeship with the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Talwani’s nomination was returned by the Senate on January 3, 2014, and she was renominated by President Obama three days later. She then had a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 8, and the Senate confirmed her on May 8, 2014, by a vote of 94-0.

In addition to her aforementioned activities and positions, Talwani also served as:

• a senior editor of the American Bar Association and Bureau of National Affairs’ treatise on the Family and Medical Leave Act
• an adjunct instructor at the Northeastern University School of Law
• a lecturer on labor and employment issues for the American Bar Association, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Bar Association of San Francisco, and numerous other organizations

Barring ICE Arrests at U.S. Courthouses

On April 29, 2019, a coalition of prosecutors, public defenders, and other immigration activists filed a lawsuit seeking to outlaw the practice of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents making arrests inside, and in the vicinity of, courthouses. The plaintiffs argued that the possibility of such arrests had the effect of making illegal aliens afraid even to step into a courtroom, thereby making it more difficult to persuade such people to testify as victims or witnesses of crimes. The lawsuit alleged that there were “at least three reasons” why it was illegal for ICE to arrest anyone inside or near a courtroom:

• Congress had “never authorized ICE to conduct civil courthouse arrests.”
• The federal government did not have the authority to make such arrests.
• The practice violated the constitutional right of access to the courts.

Trump administration immigration authorities, by contrast, argued that courtroom arrests were highly desirable because they were safer for both agents and the community at large, since everyone inside a courtroom would already have been required to pass through a metal detector, thereby ensuring that they were unarmed.

On June 20, 2019, Judge Talwani issued a preliminary injunction that barred ICE agents from arresting – for civil immigration violations – “parties, witnesses and others attending Massachusetts courthouses on official business while they are going to, attending or leaving the courthouse.” The order not only prohibited apprehensions inside the courthouse buildings, but also in the outdoor vicinity of such structures – e.g. on courthouse steps or in nearby parking lots. Talwani’s ruling was the first in the nation to prohibit these types of immigration-related arrests across an entire state.

Ruling Against a Teen Student’s “There Are only 2 Genders” T-Shirt

On March 21, 2023, Liam Morrison, a student at Nichols Middle School (NMS) in Middleborough, Massachusetts, wore a t-shirt to school that bore the slogan, “There are only two genders.” He wore it as a way of expressing his belief that the increasingly widespread notion that there are many genders – or even an infinite number of genders — was radical and false. In response, the principal as well as a school counselor pulled the boy out of class and ordered him to remove the garment. When the boy politely declined, school officials said he could not return to class because the shirt violated the school’s dress-code provision which stated: “Clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”

In an April 27, 2023 letter to the Middleborough Public Schools District (MPSD), the conservative Christian advocacy group Massachusetts Family Institute said that NMS’s hate-speech code was “facially unconstitutional and would be struck down if challenged in federal court.” The letter also said:

“NMS has made its position on gender ideology clear through the use of banners, flags, and curricula. Because Liam dissented from this orthodoxy, he was censored. But NMS has not pointed to any evidence of substantial disruption that took place because of Liam’s shirt that would justify such an action…. Nor is there any evidence that other students’ rights were infringed – how could they have been, when Liam’s expression was passive and could easily be ignored or avoided? Complaints by other students and staff that Liam’s shirt made them feel upset or uncomfortable simply do not come close to the level of disruption required to justify censoring speech. Finally, it is important to note what Liam’s shirt did not say. Liam’s shirt did not threaten students or staff who identify as transgender. It did not express ill will, disdain, or judgment toward them. Indeed, the shirt did not mention transgender-identifying people at all. It merely stated something that is, from Liam’s perspective, a fact: there are only two genders. […] By allowing speech that supports gender identity ideology, but forbidding speech that opposes it, NMS is unconstitutionally ‘picking and choosing’ speech that it favors and disfavors. Liam’s shirt did not in fact come close to expressing ‘hate speech’ toward transgender-identifying students, but even had it done so, it could not be prohibited absent evidence of a material and substantial disruption to school operations.”

In May 2023, the Massachusetts Family Institute and a fellow conservative advocacy organization, Alliance for Defending Freedom, represented Morrison in filing a lawsuit against the MPSD, arguing that NMS had violated the youngster’s “right to free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.”

In July 2023, Judge Talwani ruled against Morrison – citing a 1969 Supreme Court case known as Tinker v. Des Moines, which had affirmed the right of school administrators to restrict students’ speech when it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” Talwani in her decision said that “school administrators were well within their discretion” to interpret the message on Morrison’s shirt as a claim “that only two gender identities — male and female — are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent.” And that message, the judge stated, interfered with the “right” of “students who identify differently” to “attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities.”

In response to Talwani’s ruling, Morrison’s lawyers appealed their case to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Talwani by reaffirming the right of administrators to determine what types of speech might cause a “negative psychological impact” resulting in “material disruption” to a school’s learning environment.

Barring the Deportation of a Radical Islamist Student

On January 29, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order stating that: “It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

In accord with Trump’s executive order, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents took 30-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Muslim who had graduated from Columbia University and was now a doctoral student at Tufts University, into federal custody on March 25, 2025.

• According to a DHS senior spokesman, Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of” the Islamic terrorist group Hamas.
• StopAntiSemitism.org — a self-described “grassroots watchdog organization dedicated to exposing groups and individuals that espouse incitement towards the Jewish people and State [of Israel] and engage in antisemitic behaviors” — said: “After graduating from Columbia, [Ozturk] led pro-Hamas, violent antisemitic, and anti-American events as a PhD student at Tufts.”

In addition, Ozturk was listed as one of several authors who, in a March 2024 opinion essay published in the Tufts student newspaper, had denounced university leaders for their “wholly inadequate and dismissive” response to demands that the school “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest itself financially from any companies with economic ties to Israel. Some excerpts from the piece:

• “On March 4, the Tufts Community Union Senate passed 3 out of 4 resolutions demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.”
• “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
• “In this case, the ‘systemic changes’ that the collective voice of the student body is calling for are for the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law.”

A senior DHS spokesperson said that while Ozturk indeed had been “granted the privilege to be in this country on a visa,” “a visa is a privilege, not a right.” “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the spokesperson added. “This is common-sense security.”

On March 25, 2025, Judge Talwani issued an order stating that DHS could not remove Ozturk from the state of Massachusetts without first notifying the court in writing at least 48 hours in advance.

Ozturk was eventually released on bail in May 2025, after another U.S. District Judge, William K Sessions of the United States District Court for the District of Vermont, ordered that she be freed immediately and without restrictions.

Blocking the Deportation of Migrants with “Humanitarian Parole” Status

On March 25, 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would soon be shutting down a “humanitarian parole program”[2] which the Biden administration had implemented in 2022. Formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), this Biden initiative was designed to provide “safe and orderly pathways to the United States” for as many as 30,000 nationals from those four countries each and every month. Beneficiaries of the program were permitted to live and work in the U.S. for a period of two years.

When the Trump administration made its announcement of March 25, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned that all impacted migrants would be given just 30 days — until April 24 — to self-deport before law-enforcement authorities would begin searching for them. All told, an estimated 532,000 migrants of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan heritage had entered the U.S. through the Biden program.

On April 14, 2025, Judge Talwani issued an order that blocked the deportation of the CHNV migrants, claiming that the Trump plan wrongly “revokes, without case-by-case review, previously granted parole and work authorizations for individuals currently in the United States.” Asserting that Trump’s plan, if enacted, would have dire consequences for paroled migrants nationwide, Talwani wrote: “The immediate impact of the shortening of their grant of parole is to cause their lawful status in the United States to lapse early — in less than two weeks. If their parole status is allowed to lapse, [the migrants] will be faced with two unfavorable options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings.” And if they were to choose the former option, lamented the judge, “they will face dangers in their native countries.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller denounced Talwani’s ruling in a social media post, writing: “These are the illegals that Biden flew by airplane en masse into the United States, including the Haitian migrants now occupying Springfield [Ohio]. Biden gave these illegals free housing, healthcare and welfare. Now a local judge says they have to stay here for forever.”

In a similar spirit, Bill Melugin of Fox News wrote on X: “Biden admin created the program out of thin air using his executive parole authority, and it was temporarily halted due to fraud in the program, and this judge [Talwani] is now blocking Trump from using his own authority to cancel the humanitarian parole grants.”

The federal government appealed Talwani’s decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, only to have that court decline to stay the judge’s order of April 14.

As a next step, the federal government filed an emergency application on May 8, 2025, asking the Supreme Court to stay Talwani’s order.

On May 28, 2025 — before the Supreme Court had yet rendered a verdict on the matter — Talwani, rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that it possessed the authority to terminate migrant parole programs like CHNV, ordered the administration to resume processing applications from CHNV migrants seeking to obtain work permits or to renew their status. “This court emphasizes,” the judge wrote, “as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families. Nor is it in the public interest for individuals who enlisted and are currently serving in the United States military to face family separation, particularly where some of these individuals joined the military in part to help their loved ones obtain lawful status.”

And Talwani’s order went further still, as a May 28 New York Times report noted:

“As part of the order, Judge Talwani … also moved to certify all those affected as a class, extending blanket protections temporarily to those in several [humanitarian parole] programs pending a final decision in the case. They included Afghans who worked with the U.S. military during 20 years of war in Afghanistan; Ukrainians fleeing violence after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022; and those in a family reunification program that allowed migrants from some Central and South American countries to join their family members in the United States while awaiting a visa.”

Then, in a 7-2 decision issued two days later (on May 30, 2025), the Supreme Court granted the federal government’s request for a stay on Talwani’s order. The only dissenters were Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.

Demanding Forced Federal Funding for Planned Parenthood

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), into law. Section 71113 of that legislation blocked the flow of federal Medicaid funds to certain “Prohibited Entities” for a period of one year. Specifically, the new policy cut off federal funds from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and any other entities — as well as their affiliates, subsidiaries, successors, and clinics — that:

• “will be an ‘essential community provider’ … that is primarily engaged in family planning services, reproductive health, and related care”;
• “will be structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization”;
• “will provide abortions (except cases involving rape or incest or if the woman’s life is endangered)”; and
• “received more than $800,000 in Federal and State Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2023”

On July 7, 2025, Planned Parenthood, claiming that the loss of its Medicaid funding would have “devastating effects” on the organization, sued the Trump administration over the foregoing provisions of OBBBA. And just hours later on that same day, Judge Talwani issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) that granted Planned Parenthood’s request for a temporary suspension of the Medicaid funding cuts to the organization and its affiliated health centers. Openly demanding that the executive branch defy a newly enacted federal law (OBBBA), Talwani’s TRO stipulated that:

“Defendants, their agents, employees, appointees, successors, and anyone acting in concert or participation with Defendants shall take all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes to Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its members; Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts; and Planned Parenthood Association of Utah.”

Four days later — after the federal government had moved to vacate Talwani’s TRO of July 7 on grounds that its explanation of the judge’s reasoning was insufficiently clear — Talwani issued an amended TRO.

In its opposition to Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) argued that the abortion provider “has no right to taxpayer money,” and that the “court should not invent such a right.”

On July 21, 2025, Talwani replaced her TRO of July 11 with a preliminary injunction protecting federal financial support for Planned Parenthood affiliates whose total Medicaid expenditures were less than $800,000 per year.

On July 28, 2025, Talwani issued a nationwide injunction requiring the federal government to continue providing Medicaid funding to all Planned Parenthood clinics across the United States. She warned that “restricting Members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”

Talwani also claimed that the OBBBA provision to defund Planned Parenthood:

• violated Planned Parenthood’s Fifth Amendment right to equal protection
• violated the First Amendment right of Planned Parenthood’s various chapters to freely associate with their parent organization while not necessarily performing abortions themselves
• singled out Planned Parenthood for punishment in a manner that made Section 7113 essentially a “bill of attainder” targeting one entity for punishment without the due process afforded by a courtroom hearing or trial

In September 2025, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit stayed the two injunctions that Talwani had issued in July, and allowed a congressionally approved measure stripping Planned Parenthood of federal Medicaid dollars to go forward.

Blocking a Pause on Funding for SNAP Food Assistance during Government Shutdown

On October 1, 2025, the U.S. federal government initiated a so-called “shutdown” led by congressional Democrats who — after having failed to reach an agreement with their Republican counterparts on appropriations legislation for the upcoming 2026 fiscal year — refused to accept a Republican-proposed Continuing Resolution that would have kept existing spending levels in place while negotiations proceeded.

As the shutdown neared the end of its first month in late October 2025, the Trump administration said that the federal government:

• would not have enough money to pay the full $8.5-to-$9 billion in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for the program’s 42 million beneficiaries in November, and
• lacked legal authority to cover SNAP shortfalls by diverting money from other emergency-contingency funds

On October 28, 2025, a group of Democratic Governors and Attorneys General from 25 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit aimed at thwarting the Trump administration’s plan to suspend or curtail the distribution of SNAP benefits in November. Presiding over the case was Judge Talwani, who said in an October 30 hearing on the matter of funding for SNAP: “Right now, Congress has put money in an emergency fund for an emergency, and it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency when there’s no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits.” She further claimed that it was the Trump administration’s duty to “figure out how you’re going to stretch that emergency money for now.”

On October 31, 2025, Talwani issued a temporary restraining order declaring that the administration’s projected “suspension of SNAP benefits” — coupled with its stated refusal to use contingency-fund resources to cover SNAP budget shortfalls — was “unlawful.” Moreover, Talwani’s TRO directed government officials to “advise the court whether they will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November and, if so, their timeline for determining whether to authorize only reduced SNAP benefits using the Contingency Funds or to authorize full SNAP benefits using both the Contingency Funds and additional available funds.”

The issue of federal funding for SNAP benefits became moot when the government shutdown ended on November 12, 2025.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.fedbar.org/massachusetts-chapter//wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2019/10/Summer-2014-Newsletter-pdf.pdf
   https://ballotpedia.org/Indira_Talwani
2. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) defines the term “humanitarian parole” as a legal mechanism with the following characteristics:
   

   “Parole allows an individual, who may be inadmissible or otherwise ineligible for admission into the United States, to be paroled into the United States for a temporary period. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows the secretary of homeland security to use their discretion to parole any alien applying for admission into the United States temporarily for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. An individual who is paroled into the United States has not been formally admitted into the United States for purposes of immigration law. Parole is not intended to be used solely to avoid normal visa processing procedures and timelines, to bypass inadmissibility waiver processing, or to replace established refugee processing channels.”