Overview[1]

Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali was born in 1985 to Egyptian-Canadian parents in Kingston, Ontario. After earning a B.S.E. degree in Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2008, he launched his professional career by taking a job in that field with Google.

Ali subsequently earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2011. He then clerked for Judge Raymond C. Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2011-2012, and for Puisne Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada from 2012-2013. Next, Ali served as a litigation associate at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Jenner & Block LLP from 2013-2017.

From 2017-2024, Ali was employed by the D.C.-based Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center (MJC), where he was named president and executive director in 2021.

• Advocating on behalf of “people harmed by America’s oppressive and violent criminal legal system,” MJC calls for: “transforming” the U.S. justice system by implementing “sharp reductions” in police-force funding – with the ultimate aim of “making police departments obsolete.”
• A strong supporter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, MJC in 2021 joined the Illinois BLM Uprising Defense Committee in calling for the dismissal of all remaining charges against rioters who had been criminally charged for their participation in illegal activities during George Floyd-related demonstrations in Chicago.
• MJC’s National Parole Transformation Project focuses on “challenging the parole systems feeding mass incarceration” and striving “to end the expansion of carceral systems of post-conviction supervision across the country.”

In 2018, Ali served as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. That same year, he became a director of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Appellate Clinic. He also went on to be a lecturer at Harvard Law School for the next six years thereafter.

In 2019, Ali became a U.S. citizen.

From 2020-2023, Ali was a Board of Directors member with The Appellate Project, a nonprofit organization whose mentorship program seeks to increase the number of nonwhites who choose to pursue careers as appellate lawyers. Toward that end, the organization in 2023 published a Clerkship Handbook that encourages aspiring law clerks to emphasize their race, gender, and LGBTQ credentials when applying for jobs.

In 2023-2024, Ali was an adjunct professor at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.

On January 10, 2024, President Joe Biden nominated Ali for a judgeship with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The U.S. Senate confirmed him for that post on November 20, 2024, by a vote of 50-49.

In addition to the aforementioned positions which he has held in the legal profession and academia:

• Ali served a stint on the Board of Directors of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI), a nation­al non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that publishes data and analy­tical pieces on issues related to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. While claiming to “not take a posi­tion on the death penal­ty itself,” DPI “is crit­i­cal of prob­lems” in its “arbi­trari­ness,” its “costs,” its potential for mistakenly executing innocent people, and the “racial dis­par­i­ties” in its application.
• Ali was once a Board of Directors member with the Mosaic Theater Company of D.C., which “produces bold, culturally diverse theatre that illuminates critical issues, elevates fresh voices, and sparks connection among communities throughout our region and beyond.”
• Ali was also a Key Society Member with Pathways to Housing D.C., an organization dedicated to eradicating homelessness in the District of Columbia.

Ali’s Involvement in Major Court Cases as an Attorney

During his years as an attorney, Ali argued numerous major cases, including some before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some examples:

1. Welch v. United States

When he was a fifth-year associate at the Jenner & Block law firm, Ali argued on behalf of a Florida man named Gregory Welch in the 2016 case of Welch v. United States. The case centered around an incident where police, believing that a robbery suspect named John Jacobs was inside Welch’s apartment, obtained Welch’s permission to enter and search the premises. In the course of their search, the officers found a gun and ammunition that Welch identified as his own. This was highly problematic for Welch because he was already a previously convicted felon and thus was not legally permitted to possess any kind of firearm. To make matters even worse for Welch, he had not one, not two, but three prior felony convictions on his rap sheet, meaning that he was now subject to the enhanced penalties mandated by The Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). This 1984 federal law mandates a minimum 15-year prison sentence for anyone who illegally possesses a firearm and has three or more prior convictions for “violent felonies” or “serious drug offenses.”

After Welch was sentenced to 15 years behind bars following his most recent weapons violation, he filed an appeal claiming that one of his three prior felonies – a 1996 “strong arm” robbery committed in Florida — did not qualify as an offense that could be counted as a predicate for triggering the ACCA. This, explains the Supreme Court judicial archive Oyez.org, was because “at the time he was convicted, Florida state law allowed for a conviction of robbery with a much lower level of force than the federal law required.” Both a district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected Welch’s claim. But when Ali subsequently argued the case before the Supreme Court, he cited the Court’s recent (2015) Johnson v. United States decision which held that the ACCA’s “residual clause” was “unconstitutionally vague” about what crimes were violent enough to be deemed sufficient predicates for the ACCA’s stiffer penalties. Ali’s approach turned out to be most successful, as Oyez.org explains:

“The Court held [in Welch] that the rule announced in Johnson, that the residual clause of the [ACCA] was unconstitutionally vague, was a substantive rule of criminal procedure because it altered ‘the range of conduct or class of persons that the law punishes.’ Unlike procedural rules that alter the permissible methods for determining whether conduct is punishable, substantive rules affect the reach of the statute itself rather than how it is applied. While procedural rules are generally not retroactive, substantive rules are; therefore, the rule the Court announced in Johnson should apply retroactively to this [Welch] case.”

2. President Trump’s “Muslim Ban”

While employed by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, Ali in 2017 filed an amicus brief challenging what Donald Trump’s critics commonly referred to as the President’s “Muslim ban.” At issue was the fact that in January 2017, Trump, professing a desire “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” issued Executive Order (EO) 13769, which called for: (a) a four-month suspension of almost all travel and refugee admissions to the U.S. from six nations that were hotbeds of Islamic terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen; (b) an indefinite suspension of admissions from Syria, where widespread terrorism was exacerbated by a bloody civil war; and (c) an “extreme vetting” process that any and all immigrants and visitors to the U.S. would be required to undergo.

Notably, the seven aforementioned Muslim-majority countries targeted by Trump’s executive action were precisely the same seven countries that had been named in the Visa Waiver Program Improvement & Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, which passed easily through Congress before being signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2015. Moreover, Trump’s instinct for caution was supported by previous statements that had been issued by a number of high-ranking Obama officials—including FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Michael Steinbach—all of whom were in agreement that it would be impossible for U.S. immigration authorities to reliably screen out terrorists posing as refugees.

After the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit placed a Temorary Restraining Order (TRO) on the enforcement of EO 13769 on February 3, 2017, Trump signed a replacement executive order — EO 13780 – on March 6, 2017. This new EO affected citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – not by placing an outright ban on their right to visit the U.S., but by requiring much additional scrutiny before they could enter the country. On March 7, the State of Hawaii brought a civil action asking for a declaratory judgment and an injunction halting the implementation of EO 13780. This civil action served as the basis for what eventually would evolve into the Supreme Court case of Trump v. Hawaii.

Arguing that Trump’s call for a temporary travel ban was driven chiefly by “animus against people of Muslim faith,” Ali, in a May 2017 opinion column in The Guardian, described the travel ban as a “shameful” directive that would prove to be “the historical blemish of our time.” Further, Ali likened Trump’s executive order to the now-widely-reviled Supreme Court decisions in: (a) Dred Scott v. Sandford, which in 1857 held that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens, and (b) Korematsu v. United States, which in 1944 upheld executive proclamations requiring the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Ali filed his aforementioned amicus brief on August 22, 2017. In a press release regarding the contents of that brief, he issued the following remarks:

• “The truth is that President Trump made his pledge to ban Muslims with remarkable specificity, down to the details of how he would make it appear neutral and the legal authority he would cite to get away with it.”
• “The fact is that President Trump selected a small minority faith [Islam], ran a campaign that vilified people of that faith, and made specific, repeated promises to persecute them.”
• “President Trump has never disavowed any of these [anti-Muslim] views. In fact, he has publicly reprimanded his own Department of Justice for making the Executive Order ‘politically correct’.”

In a vein similar to that of his January 2017 executive order (13769), President Trump on September 24, 2017 issued Proclamation 9645 restricting travel to the United States by citizens from eight countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. When that Proclamation was challenged in federal court as a measure that allegedly exceeded the President’s rightful power under the Constitution, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Proclamation.

The Supreme Court allowed the travel ban to go into full effect on December 4, 2017, pending legal challenges.

On December 22, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle affirmed an October 17 decision wherein a Hawaii federal judge had ruled that the latest iteration of Trump’s travel ban was unlawful on statutory grounds. The Ninth Circuit held that the President’s ban “exceeds the scope of his delegated authority.”

The Trump administration responded by petitioning the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to challenge the Ninth Circuit’s findings. The Supreme Court granted the writ on January 22, 2018, and five months later it delivered a 5–4 decision upholding the validity of the travel ban as within the President’s powers. Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited Ali’s amicus brief in her dissent from the majority opinion.

3. Garza v. Idaho

In the 2018-2019 Supreme Court case of Garza v. Idaho, Ali represented an Idaho man named Gilberto Garza Jr. who: (a) was charged with aggravated assault in January 2015 and then entered an Alford plea in which he claimed his innocence but acknowledged that a jury would be likely to convict him on the basis of the available evidence; and (b) pleaded guilty in February 2015 to possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Both of these plea agreements required Garza to waive his right to appeal. But after the local district court sentenced him for both crimes, Garza informed his trial counsel that he wished to appeal the verdicts. Citing Garza’s waivers, however, the counsel refused to file any appeal. Eventually — four months after his sentencing – Garza, claiming that his trial attorney had been ineffective, filed a petition for post-conviction relief on each of the two charges. After a district court dismissed Garza’s petition and an appellate court affirmed that dismissal, the Supreme Court – in a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor — upheld Garza’s claim. Specifically, the Court said that: (a) filing a notice of appeal is “a purely ministerial task that imposes no great burden on counsel,” and (b) the accused is ultimately entitled to decide whether or not to appeal his or her case.

4. Thompson v. Clark

Ali represented Navy veteran and U.S. postal worker Larry Thompson in the 2021-2022 Supreme Court case of Thompson v. Clark, which stemmed from a January 2014 incident where one Camille Watson, the mentally ill sister of Thompson’s wife, called 9-1-1 to accuse Thompson of having sexually abused his infant daughter. When a pair of Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) responded to Ms. Watson’s call and arrived at Thompson’s Brooklyn, New York apartment, they saw only a diaper rash on the baby’s skin, which Watson had mistaken for evidence of abuse. Concluding that nothing was amiss, the EMTs left the premises.

However, four police officers who likewise responded to Ms. Watson’s emergency call arrived at Mr. Thompson’s apartment shortly thereafter to investigate the alleged child abuse. When they insisted on seeing the baby, Thompson tried to physically block them from entering his apartment without a search warrant. But the officers forced their way inside and examined the premises to the best of their ability. Then they took Thompson into custody for two days on charges of resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. Just before Thompson’s trial was scheduled to commence three months later, prosecutors, having investigated the matter extensively, dropped the charges against him.

Thompson, in turn, filed a malicious prosecution claim alleging that the four officers who had come to his apartment violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful seizures. But the claim was dismissed by both a federal district court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — the latter of which had traditionally required plaintiffs like Thompson to show, as evidence of malicious prosecution, that they had been affirmatively found innocent of committing the crimes in question.

In April 2022, however, the Supreme Court reversed the judgments of the lower courts, ruling that in Fourth Amendment lawsuits, plaintiffs did not have to show that they had been affirmatively exonerated of the criminal charges against them, but only that their “prosecution [had] ended without a conviction.”

5. The Ahmaud Arbery Case

Ali also has ties to the case of the late Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was killed in an encounter with two armed white men — retired police officer Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael — near the city of Brunswick, Georgia on February 23, 2020. Most news reports stated that Arbery was merely out for an afternoon jog when he was accosted by the pair, who used their pickup truck to follow him as he ran along a local road. The McMichaels, by contrast, suspected that Arbery was a burglar running from the scene of a crime. When Travis McMichael attempted to place Arbery under a “citizen’s arrest,” the latter resisted and was fatally shot in the scuffle. Both of the McMichaels — as well as a third man, William Bryan, who had followed their truck with a second vehicle while they pursued Arbery — were indicted on criminal counts of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.

In February 2021, Ali became part of the legal team representing Arbery’s mother in a civil suit which she filed against Gregory and Travis McMichael, William Bryan, and several local law-enforcement officials and prosecutors. The suit claimed that Arbery’s death ultimately had been caused by systemic racism, and that his Fourth Amendment and civil rights had been violated.

Blocking Trump’s Effort to Freeze Funding for USAID

On February 11, 2025, Judge Ali was assigned to preside over a case where a host of nonprofit organizations and businesses asked him to block the January 20, 2025 executive order by which President Trump had announced a freeze on tens of billions of dollars in funding that Congress had already approved and allocated through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). InfluenceWatch.org says the following about USAID, its agendas, and the reasons why the Trump administration sought to defund it:

“[USAID] was an independent U.S. government agency that traditionally managed and administered American foreign aid, financial support for developing nations, humanitarian assistance programs, climate-related issues, and various global health programs….

“USAID was committed to the critical race theory-influenced concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and released two equity action plans between 2022 and 2024. During the Biden administration, USAID … faced criticism for allegedly funding groups with ties to terrorism, funding pro-migration groups, and supporting left-of-center gender policies.

“In January 2025, following the reelection of President Donald Trump, the Second Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began a series of job cuts and layoffs to reduce government spending within the Federal Government towards USAID. By March 2025, the U.S State Department announced that it would be shuttering USAID while assuming ‘responsibility for many of USAID’s functions and its ongoing programming’ [and] retiring ‘USAID’s independent operation.’ By July 2025, the organization officially dissolved with the remaining operations being absorbed by the State Department.”

On February 13, 2025, Ali stated that the Trump administration had been “arbitrary and capricious” in issuing a “blanket” funding pause without carefully examining every existing contract, one by one. That same day, Ali issued what he called a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) directing the government not to terminate any USAID-bound grants or contracts, nor to suspend any foreign-aid funds that Congress had allocated prior to Trump’s inauguration. But as National Review noted on March 6, 2025:

“Judge Ali called this a ‘temporary restraining order’ (TRO), but that’s a misnomer. A TRO is supposed to restrain one side of a case temporarily, so that nothing changes until the court can issue a final order changing things, which then can be appealed. But Judge Ali tried to force the government to pay money it can’t get back, including to NGOs that aren’t even parties to the lawsuit and that cannot be bound by the courts.”

On February 18, 2025, the Trump administration made it clear that its agencies were continuing to cancel grants and contracts that it deemed not to be in the national interest.

On February 25, Ali ordered the government to pay, by 11:59 p.m. the next night, all of the nearly $2 billion in foreign-assistance invoices it had accumulated for work that had been completed by February 13.

On February 27, Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced House Resolution 174, calling for the impeachment of Judge Ali. Some excerpts from the Resolution:

• “In issuing a temporary restraining order against the ‘pausing’ of funds promulgated in Executive Order 14169, Judge Ali has without merit marginalized the President’s Article II authority, which vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States…. This patent violation of Constitutional precedent … is entirely inconsistent with serving the United States as a district court judge.”
• “The understood purpose of the President’s Executive Order was to review such funds for consistency with United States foreign policy. By mandating immediate funding disbursement of funds paused by the President’s Executive Order, Judge Ali did so with no consideration for the troubled history of foreign assistance through [USAID]. A March 2021 GAO report indicates that from FY2015 until FY2019, USAID did not consistently ensure that subawards provided for projects in the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria complied with regulations aimed at preventing financial support for terrorism. More recently, in November 2024, USAID was found to have financed hundreds of thousands of meals for al-Qaida affiliated fighters in Syria.”
• “Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali has engaged in conduct so utterly lacking in intellectual honesty and basic integrity that he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, is unfit to hold the office of Federal judge, and should be removed from office.”

Hours before the deadline (11:59 p.m. on February 26) that Ali had set for the government to pay some $2 billion in foreign-aid obligations, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court to rule against Ali’s “arbitrary timeline.” At about 10 p.m., Chief Justice John Roberts announced that he was pausing Ali’s order while the nine justices reviewed the matter.

On March 5, the Supreme Court denied the government’s request to block Ali’s order of February 25, but also exhorted Ali to issue no additional next-day deadlines to the government.

On March 10, Judge Ali issued a new order that accused the Trump administration of advancing “an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected.” Upon learning that the administration was lagging behind the new payment schedule he had prescribed, Ali ordered the government to submit weekly status reports.

Footnotes:

[1] https://vettingroom.org/2024/02/05/amir-ali/
https://ballotpedia.org/Amir_Ali
https://www.fjc.gov/node/13761895
https://afj.org/nominee/amir-h-ali/
https://afj.org/article/afj-letter-of-support-for-amir-ali/
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/biden-nominates-head-of-anti-police-group-to-d-c-district-court/
http://web.archive.org/web/20250405135103/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/11/amir-ali-judge-usaid/politics/2025/03/11/amir-ali-judge-usaid/