The Biden-appointed federal judge who is attempting to halt President Donald Trump’s freeze on foreign aid has a long history of engaging in far-left, anti-Trump activism, working for an organization that pushed for prosecutors to drop charges against leftist rioters and accusing the president of harboring religious hatred, The Daily Wire has learned.
Judge Amir Ali of the Washington, D.C. District Court recently ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze foreign aid and disburse millions of dollars through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), despite the President’s decision to halt the funding.
The Supreme Court paused Ali’s order through an administrative stay, allowing Trump to freeze foreign aid while it considers the president’s request to block the federal judge’s ruling. But Ali’s history of leftwing activism, donations to Democrats, and involvement with explicitly anti-Trump organizations, threatens to throw the Canadian-born judge’s impartiality into question.
Ali has donated to Democratic candidates, giving $2,000 to former President Joe Biden when he ran against Trump in 2020 and another $580 to Democrat Jaime Harrison, a former United States Senate candidate in South Carolina who chaired the DNC from 2021-2025.
The federal judge opposed Trump well before the 2020 election, however. Ali’s anti-Trump agenda extends back to the early days of the president’s first term, when he articulated how federal courts could “doom” the president’s travel ban, which critics called the “Muslim ban,” and pointed to a legal approach that could “be a huge weapon for those challenging the ban.”
“By continuing to block the entry ban, but allowing the government to conduct its 90-day review, the Ninth Circuit can give the challengers back this powerful argument to put an end to Trump’s Muslim ban,” he also wrote, using inaccurate leftwing rhetoric to describe Trump’s policy.
He also wrote in The Guardian that Trump’s travel ban was rooted in a “campaign of animus against people of the Muslim faith.” Ali stated in an interview that he had hoped to inform the Supreme Court, which was ruling on the travel ban at the time, of “the full record of President Trump’s history of animus and hatred towards Muslim people.”
He went on to charge that the legal profession should be diversified. “Within the Supreme Court bar in Washington, D.C., I am one of few people of North African or Middle Eastern descent, one of few immigrants to the country, and one of few Muslim Americans,” Ali said during the interview. “That’s true of many other backgrounds as well, and it is a problem.” He touted his work with the Appellate Project, which Ali stated “is breaking down the barriers to the representation of people of color and other minorities in the appellate profession.”
Ali became formally involved in leftwing activism when he joined the MacArthur Justice Center, a far-left organization that pushed to defund the police, allied with the Black Lives Matter movement, and advocated for prosecutors to drop felony charges against Black Lives Matter rioters. Ali would go on to become its director in 2021.
The group posted “#DefundPolice” in 2020, lobbied the New Orleans City Council to commit to defunding the police, and allied with the Illinois BLM Uprising Defense in “calling for prosecutors to drop felony charges against rioters at Black Lives Matter protests in Chicago.”
“These protests occurred because our criminal legal system has continuously devalued and disregarded, brutalized, tortured and killed Black people,” a letter from the organizations read as it attempted to justify the rioting.
Under Ali’s leadership, the organization filed a brief arguing that asking potential jurors about whether or not they support the Black Lives Matter movement “undermines judicial principles of equity and the public’s confidence.”
The judge’s activism extends beyond his role with the MacArthur Justice Center. Ali documented his role as the director of another leftwing organization on his questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Called Mosaic Theater, the organization celebrated the Black Lives Matter riots, writing on its website that “a summer of Black-led uprisings against state violence have made clear that this country requires fundamental changes, both systemic and institutional” and listing “equity and anti-racism” as its values.
“We believe that anti-racism, promoting racial and gender equity, working against abuse, and reducing harm are imperative to the art we make and how we make it,” the organization states. The theater also hosted a pride festival in 2022 that celebrated a playwright behind a play called “Alma,” a “poetic riposte against Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric.”
Ali’s activism won him the support of various other far-left organizations and activists. The federal judge was honored with a “Justice Tribute” award from the Arab American Civil Rights League in 2023. The organization not only supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, but even counts on its board a member who openly supported both Hamas and Hezbollah.
“Whether it’s called Hamas, whether it’s called Hezbollah, we stand with everybody who stands against the Israeli occupation,” said board member Amer Zahr, who was in attendance at the event in which Ali received his award.
Ali was also lauded by the Michigan branch of the NAACP, led by Rev. Wendell Anthony, who claimed that the United States was “choking the life out of black America.”