A new audit of all 58 foreign-born federal judges currently sitting on the U.S. bench found they rule against immigration enforcement and hand down below-guideline criminal sentences at far higher rates than the federal judiciary as a whole — but the study concludes the pattern traces back to the judges’ pre-bench careers and the president who appointed them, not their countries of origin.
The audit was conducted by Bench Receipts, a watchdog group that tracks decisions by judges, prosecutors and sheriffs. It examined Article III judges — those appointed by a U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate — across the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeals and District Courts.
Across the full group of 58 foreign-born judges, the audit found anti-border-enforcement rulings averaged 61.9%, compared with a 34.0% baseline for the U.S. federal judiciary overall. Below-guideline criminal sentencing departures averaged 45.3% among the group, versus a 31.0% national average.
When the audit controlled for appointing president and pre-bench career, researchers said those two factors — not national origin — explained the gap. Bench Receipts wrote that “controlling for Appointing President and Pre-Bench Career reveals the true driver.”
Of the 58 judges studied, 43 (74.1%) were appointed by President Biden (28) or President Obama (15), and the audit said many of those judges came from backgrounds at the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center, or as public defenders. That subgroup blocked border enforcement actions at an 80.1% rate, according to the audit.
By contrast, the audit found the 14 Trump appointees and one Bush appointee in the group averaged a 14.3% anti-border ruling rate and scored 86.9 out of 100 on what the group calls a “Sovereignty Score,” putting them above the broader U.S.-born federal baseline for enforcement-aligned rulings.
San Francisco judge named as outlier
The audit identified Judge Jon Tigar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, based in San Francisco, as the judge with the most lopsided record in the study. According to Bench Receipts, Tigar issued anti-border rulings in 94% of relevant cases and ruled below federal sentencing guidelines in 65% of criminal cases reviewed.
Tigar, who was born in London, served as an Alameda County judge and a San Francisco public defender before President Obama appointed him to the federal bench in 2013.
The audit listed four other judges — all but one Biden appointees, with one Obama appointee — as rounding out the five most frequent rulers against border enforcement, each voting against border-sovereignty positions more than 90% of the time and in favor of criminal defendants in more than 60% of applicable cases. Bench Receipts’ materials provided to Breitbart News did not name those four judges or the judges it identified as the most enforcement-aligned among Trump appointees.
Bench Receipts describes its mission as tracking the real-world outcomes of decisions made by judges, prosecutors and sheriffs. The group’s methodology, including how it defines an “anti-border enforcement” ruling or calculates its Sovereignty Score, was not fully detailed in the materials reviewed for this report.
