Bridget Bade

Trump nominated Bridget Bade to the Ninth Circuit in 2018. Prior to her confirmation, Bade served as a magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. Her record as a magistrate judge consisted largely of issuing orders, reports, and recommendations. The vast majority of the reports and recommendations deal with procedural issues stemming from cases before district court judges. At the time of her nomination, AFJ wrote, “It is notable for someone to be elevated directly from a magistrate judge position to a circuit court seat.” Since her appointment to the Ninth Circuit, she has joined other Trump judges to fight civil rights and protections for workers and immigrants. She would have upheld a district court ruling that a low-income Walmart employee should pay the company’s legal expenses arising from his age discrimination lawsuit. Bade also dissented from a decision requiring the Bureau of Immigration Appeals to reconsider a Vietnamese asylum-seeker’s testimony about her alleged abuse and sexual assault. 

Her record as a Circuit Court judge is no better. Recently, she dissented from a decision to overturn an injunction against ICE relying solely on its own (sometimes faulty) databases to determine whether arrested individuals were American citizens or non-citizens subject to immigration holds. The majority remanded for the lower court to reconsider whether all ICE databases are unreliable, or only some of them. Bade would have made a bad decision even worse by holding that injunctive relief against ICE’s use of faulty databases is a Congressionally-barred remedy, regardless of how unreliable those databases are

The Alliance for Justice strongly opposes the consideration of Bridget Bade for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Read more on Bade’s background.

Bridget Bade Up Next in Trump Wave of Appeals Court Judges