Then-ACLU’s Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho (C) flanked by New York Attorney General Letitia James (L) and Director of the Census for New York City Julie Menin (R) speaks to reporters outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 23, 2019, after arguing a case against the Trump administration. Ho is now a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2023. (Mandel Ngan/ AFP via Getty Images)
A federal judge appointed by President Joe Biden, with an activist past, last week blocked the Trump administration’s termination of protected status for Yemeni immigrants to the United States.
Before serving on the bench, Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York, who once jokingly said he has been caricatured as a “wild-eyed sort of leftist,” was a lawyer for both the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he litigated against voter ID laws and against verification of citizenship for voter registration.
On Friday, he temporarily halted the Department of Homeland Security from terminating the temporary legal status of about 3,000 Yemeni immigrants. The termination was set to take effect next week.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about ending temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria.
“They are ordinary, law-abiding people who have been granted status to be here because the Government has repeatedly determined, in accordance with the TPS statute, that Yemen is subject to an ongoing armed conflict, and that, due to that conflict, requiring them to return would pose a serious threat to their safety,” the judge wrote in a 36-page opinion.
From 2013 to 2023, Ho was the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where he supervised voting rights litigation. He was the first ACLU lawyer to be appointed directly to a federal judgeship since Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to the Asian American Bar Association of New York.
From 2009 to 2013, he was assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In 2018, he successfully litigated against a Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
In 2020, he argued against a Trump administration policy not to count illegal immigrants in the U.S. Census.
After Biden nominated Ho in 2023, the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal group, cited his past litigation against voter ID laws and against allowing the Census Bureau to confirm citizenship.
During his Senate confirmation in 2023, Republicans brought up Ho’s past comments, including a 2013 interview in which he described himself as a “wild-eyed sort of leftist” and said he is “accused of sometimes seeing racial discrimination everywhere I look.”
Ho told senators he was only describing a caricature others have of him and would be an impartial judge.
