Overview[1]

John Deacon Bates was born into an Episcopalian family in Elizabeth, New Jersey on October 11, 1946. He earned a BA degree from Wesleyan University in 1968, then served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army from 1968-1971, and went on to obtain a JD degree from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1976.

After completing his legal studies, Bates:

• clerked for Judge Roszel C. Thomsen of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland from 1976-1977
• was an associate with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Steptoe & Johnson from 1977-1980
• was an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia from 1980-1997
• was an attorney with the D.C.-based law firm of Miller & Chevalier from 1998-2001

On June 20, 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Bates for a judgeship on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. After that nomination was returned to the President on August 3, 2001, Bush resubmitted it on September 4, 2001. The U.S. Senate then confirmed Bates for the post by a 97-0 vote on December 11, 2001. Bates has held that position ever since.

Along the way, Bates has also served stints as:

• a judge with the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) from 2006-2013
• director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts from 2013-2015 – a position to which he was appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts

Dismissing a Lawsuit Intended to Protect Al-Qaeda Terrorist

On March 7, 2010, Judge Bates dismissed a lawsuit that the father of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had filed against the American government with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The suit aimed to block the government from trying to kill the younger al-Awlaki, who: (a) was a dual U.S. and Yemeni citizen with ties to al-Qaeda; (b) stood accused of helping to plan terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen; and (c) was hiding somewhere in the Middle East in order to evade detection by U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In an 83-page opinion, Bates said that:

• the plaintiff had no legal standing to file the lawsuit on behalf of his son, and
• decisions about targeted killings in such circumstances were a “political question” to be dealt with by executive branch officials — not judges.

“The ruling,” reported The New York Times, “which clears the way for the Obama administration to continue to try to kill Mr. Awlaki, represents a victory in its efforts to shield from judicial review so-called targeted killings, one of its most striking counterterrorism policies.”

Judge Bates noted that the al-Awlaki case raised “stark, and perplexing, questions” — including whether the president could “order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.” Rejecting the claims of critics who held that his ruling granted the President “unreviewable authority to order the assassination of any American whom he labels an enemy of the state,” Bates said: “The court only concludes that it lacks capacity to determine whether a specific individual in hiding overseas, whom the Director of National Intelligence has stated is an ‘operational member’” of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch, “presents such a threat to national security that the United States may authorize the use of lethal force against him.”

Authorizing Widespread NSA Surveillance

In October 2011, Bates, in his role as a FISC judge, scolded government lawyers regarding the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) had belatedly admitted, for the third time in less than three years, that its mass surveillance program — which ostensibly sought to collect Internet-related metadata of exclusively foreign targets with suspected terrorist ties — was failing to abide by the restrictions it was supposed to observe. Specifically, the program was collecting far more data than it was legally authorized to gather– i.e., information that went beyond metadata, and which sometimes was entirely domestic. “NSA acquires valuable information through its upstream collection,” wrote Bates, “but not without substantial intrusions on Fourth Amendment protected interests.” According to CNN.com: “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court estimated the mistaken collection of domestic data, including e-mails and other Internet activity of Americans, totaled 58,000 communications a year.”

The NSA’s “upstream collection” program referenced by Bates routinely amassed screenshots of the entire inbox of each foreign email address that was being tracked. And, like a wide dragnet drawn along the bottom of a lake, each of those screenshots inevitably dredged up a host of items whose presence could not have been predicted. In the case of the “upstream collection” initiative, such items included email addresses — often belonging to U.S. residents — that the government would have had no reason to monitor or surveil. As one NSA official explained: “[I]f you had a situation where one of those emails may have referenced your targeted email in the subject line, you’d nonetheless collect the whole inbox list.” Fedscoop.com offered a sobering assessment of the massive scope of the surveillance program in question: “This type of collection comprises roughly 10 percent of NSA’s total electronic communication gathering, which is more than 250 million electronic communications annually.”

In an undated opinion, Bates wrote: “The government has provided no comprehensive explanation of how so substantial an overcollection occurred.” While he considered the “upstream collection” program to be unconstitutional in practice, he permitted it to continue after the NSA agreed to filter and archive all purely domestic communications separate from the foreign ones, and to eventually delete them after two years — as opposed to the existing practice of deleting them after five years. 

Ruling That the Trump Administration Must Fully Restore DACA (2018)

On September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announced that the Trump administration had decided — in fulfillment of a 2016 campaign promise — to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which former President Barack Obama had enacted in 2012 by means of an illegal and unconstitutional executive action designed to prevent the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who had first come to the U.S. as minors.[2] People with existing DACA status were told that:

• their protections would remain in place until their scheduled expiration date;
• if that expiration date was on or before March 5, 2018, they could apply by October 5, 2017 to renew; and
• no entirely new applications for the DACA program would be accepted

In a 60-page decision issued on April 24, 2018, Judge Bates — asserting that Trump’s “unlawful” decision to terminate the DACA program was based on “virtually unexplained” grounds — ordered the administration to resume accepting new DACA applications, though he stayed his decision for 90 days in order to allow time for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to better explain the reasons for the “arbitrary and capricious” cancellation. The judge was eager to get to that point as quickly as possible, however, as evidenced when he wrote: “Each day that the [DHS] agency delays is a day that aliens who might otherwise be eligible for initial grants of DACA benefits are exposed to removal because of an unlawful agency action.”

In his April 24 decision, Bates purposefully elected to use the phrase “undocumented immigrant” rather than “illegal alien,” because he felt that some people might find the latter phrase “offensive.”

With his April 24 decision, Bates became the third U.S. federal judge in recent months to have ruled against the termination of DACA. Previously:

• In January 2018, Judge William Alsup of the Federal District Court in San Francisco had ordered that DACA beneficiaries be permitted to renew their status.
• In February 2018, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn had decided in favor of several advocacy groups that teamed up with the attorneys general from 15 U.S. states to file a lawsuit aimed at blocking President Trump from terminating DACA.

On August 3, 2018, Bates published a 25-page opinion that reaffirmed his earlier ruling that the Trump administration had failed to articulate adequate justification for its proposal to end DACA. Thus, the judge ordered the program’s full restoration.

Ruling Against the Trump Administration’s Expansion of Association Health Plans (2019)

On March 28, 2019, Judge Bates published a 43-page opinion vacating a Trump Department of Labor rule designed to expand the use of Association Health Plans (AHP), by which small businesses and trade associations allow their employees or members to pool together and purchase health insurance as a group – a strategy providing them with increased bargaining power to obtain coverage at a lower cost. The Trump policy sought to permit self-employed individuals who were sole proprietors of a business establishment to likewise join such associations in conjunction with other people from the same trade or industry.

But Bates held that such a policy – by “unreasonably” stretching the definition of “employer” to “include groups without any real commonality of interest” or “employment relationships” — was “designed to end run the requirements of the ACA” (Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare). “The Court,” Bates wrote, “cannot believe that Congress crafted the ACA, with its careful statutory scheme distinguishing rules that apply to individuals, small employers, and large employers, with the intent that fifty-one distinct individuals employing no others could exempt themselves from the individual market’s requirements by loosely affiliating through a so-called ‘bona fide association’ without real employment ties.”

Forcing the Federal Government to Restore Web Pages That It Had Purposefully Deleted

In early 2025, President Trump signed a number of executive orders that directed federal agencies to remove or modify a host of government web pages that featured content promoting:

• the virtues of “Diiversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) initiatives;
• the need for “environmental justice” to address the alleged dangers of climate change; and
• the ever-continuing expansion of radical gender ideology

For example, On January 20, 2025 – the first day of his second term in the White House — President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, which called for the banning of “gender ideology extremism.” Toward that end, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a memorandum to all agencies titled “Initial Guidance Regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women” — a memo that instructed all federal agency heads to:

• “take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology”;
• “withdraw any final or pending documents, directives, orders, regulations, materials, forms, communications, statements, and plans that inculcate or promote gender ideology”;
• “ensure that all applicable agency policies and documents, including forms, use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender'”

In response to such measures, on February 4, 2025 the organization Doctors For America (DFA) — represented by the Public Citizen Litigation Group — sued the federal agencies that had complied in making the changes demanded by Trump. Those agencies included the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).

On February 11, 2025, Judge Bates imposed a temporary restraining order (TRO) on the CDC. He also instructed the federal government to restore public access to several webpages and datasets that DFA had identified as missing from government websites, and to identify others that likewise had been deleted “without adequate notice or reasoned explanation.” Emphasizing the damage he believed could result from the absence of those pages, Bates wrote: “No backend remedy could ameliorate the inability to provide all required care during an appointment time to a patient who cannot return in the future.” The TRO was slated to remain in effect until such time as Bates could hold a full hearing to examine the facts of the matter.

On February 24, 2025, Republican Congressman Andy Ogles introduced articles of impeachment against Judge Bates for high crimes and misdemeanors. Said Ogles in a press release regarding this matter:

“Judge Bates is attempting to force the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restore radical LGBTQ propaganda on taxpayer-funded websites. His decision nullifies Executive Order 14168, an action from the President removing and restricting any of this content from being published on government websites.

“Requiring taxpayer funds to disseminate information endorsing the castration of children [via so-called ‘gender-affirming care‘] is repugnant…. Judge John Bates’s order demonstrates a purposeful disregard for President Trump’s authority, serial incompetence, and blatant weaponization of his bench. In short, Judge Bates joins the ranks of hundreds of political activists disobeying their oaths to score political points. The continued socialization of this grave moral evil necessitates immediate Congressional action against those promoting it. America’s founders gave Congress the authority to impeach judges to defend the will of the people. My articles will do just that. It is unacceptable for rogue judges to implicate taxpayers in woke LGBTQ propaganda and the irreversible destruction of children’s bodies.”

Blocking President Trump’s Executive Order Targeting a Hostile Law Firm

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that targeted the Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block by:

• instructing federal government officials to revoke security clearances from members of that firm;
• instructing federal government officials to stop providing any goods and services to the firm;
• terminating any government contracts that may have existed with the firm; and
• making all employees of the firm off-limits from consideration as hires for any future federal jobs.

Trump’s executive order specifically singled out Andrew Weissmann, an attorney who had served as a lead prosecutor in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s 2017–2019 investigation of allegations regarding election-rigging collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and agents of the Russian government. Those allegations were ultimately proven to be hoaxes and falsehoods concocted and promoted by key Democrat figures including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, CIA Director John Brennan, Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey, among others.

On March 28, 2025, Bates issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the implementation of Trump’s executive order targeting Jenner & Block.

Two months later — on May 23, 2025 — Bates placed a permanent injunction on Trump’s executive order, claiming that it infringed on the First, Fifth and Sixth amendments. “This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers,” Bates wrote. “It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.” Portions of the executive order, Bates added, resembled “something of a screed airing the President’s grievances with Jenner” and conveyed a “great deal of animosity” towards the firm. Bates further noted that the executive order “makes no bones about why it chose its target: it picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed” – meaning Weissmann.

Footnotes:

1. https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/biography/144352/john-bates
   https://ballotpedia.org/John_Bates
   https://dcchs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Bates-Complete-Oral-History-c.pdf
2. Both before and after enacting DACA, President Obama repeatedly made it clear that he had little, if any, authority to act unilaterally – without input from Congress — on immigration. Some examples:
   • October 25, 2010: During an online town hall, Obama stated: “I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things [revising immigration laws] just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen.”
   • February 14, 2013: Responding to questions about the possibility of taking unilateral action on immigration reform, Obama declared: “I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed. And Congress right now has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system. And what that means is that we have certain obligations to enforce the laws that are in place, even if we think that in many cases the results may be tragic…. We’ve [already] kind of stretched our administrative flexibility as much as we can.”
   • May 5, 2010: In remarks he made at a Cinco de Mayo celebration, Obama said: “Anybody who tells you it’s going to be easy, or that I can wave a magic wand and make it [immigration reform] happen, hasn’t been paying attention to how this town works.”
   • September 2013 interview: “If we start broadening [the DACA program any further],” Obama stated, “then essentially I’ll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally. So that’s not an option.”