With a background of Democratic Party involvement that includes volunteering for Joe Biden and giving tens of thousands to Democratic causes, the federal judge who prevented President Trump from enacting an executive order prohibiting transgender people from serving in the military is no stranger to activism.
During her confirmation process, Ana C. Reyes, the first openly homosexual federal judge in the District of Columbia and a U.S. District Judge appointed by Biden, confessed in her Senate questionnaire that she volunteered for Biden’s 2020 campaign “providing limited legal assistance regarding potential election law issues.”
After taking office in February 2023, Reyes donated over $38,000 to Democratic organizations since 2008, according to FEC data. The money went to leftist groups including ActBlue, the campaign of Democratic Senator Jon Ossof, and Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
On top of that, Reyes has been a consistent funder of Defeat By Tweet, a Democratic-aligned super PAC that backs the Justice Fund. According to Influence Watch, this fund “raises money for liberal groups in swing states each time President Donald Trump makes a post to his controversial Twitter account.”
Even though Defeat By Tweet’s website is down for the time being, the organization claims to be “transferring” funds to Black Church PAC, an organization that supports police defunding and received at least $150,000 from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
During her time as a lawyer, Reyes actively represented illegal immigrants; she was born in Uruguay but her family came to the US while she was in kindergarten.
At the 2017 Woman’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia’s Woman Lawyer of the Year ceremony, Reyes expressed her gratitude to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies for their legal assistance, calling it a “privileged” position to represent asylum seekers. She went on to say that it had been an honor “fighting for the rights of refugees in the United States.”
A “cutting edge organization dedicated to women’s equality, reproductive health, and non-violence,” the Feminist Majority Foundation is a place where Reyes worked for a year before returning to law school, as she mentioned in the same address.
While her name isn’t now on the organization’s website, Reyes claimed in her Senate questionnaire that she was a board member from “2014-present” for the nonprofit.
Previous statements from the Feminist Majority Foundation include referring to abortion as a “necessity” and their opposition to the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which prohibits male participation in women’s sports, as stated in a news release issued in January.
The fact that she participated in a panel discussion titled “Did You Really Just Say That?” in 2021 is also included in the questionnaire. Anti-Microaggression Awareness and Response. Hosted by Centerforce, the debate focused on a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) series that encompasses many conferences with the goal of “address[ing] the obstacles posed by the backlash against DEI initiatives and the consequences of Affirmative Action repeal.”
In April of last year, Reyes reportedly sided with Trump after criticizing Biden’s Justice Department for two of its workers’ failure to show up for depositions connected to the Republican effort to remove Biden from office, according to NBC News. This was in spite of Reyes’s progressive activist background.
Reyes had previously characterized the leak of Trump’s tax returns by an ex-IRS consultant as “an attack on our constitutional democracy” in the same week.
Additionally, she criticized the attorneys for the eight inspectors general who were terminated by Trump and whose reinstatement was delayed last month, questioning, “Why on earth did you not have this figured out with the defendants before coming here?” There has been no resolution to the lawsuit filed against the Trump administration.
An executive order that Trump issued on January 27th mandates that the Defense Department revise its policies and procedures pertaining to “trans-identifying medical standards for military service” and “rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness.” This order is now under scrutiny.
Concerning the executive order, Reyes interrogated the Trump administration extensively, asking whether the measure constituted a “transgender ban” and whether the government saw transgender identity as a “ideology.”
This week, Reyes issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Pentagon from carrying out Trump’s directive, which claimed that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” Reyes has previously said that the concept of only two sexes is not “biologically correct.”
The musical “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda is one of the many sources that Reyes uses in her 79-page decision to uphold the ban on transgender personnel.
“Women were ‘included in the sequel’ when passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granted them the right to vote in 1920,” Reyes said in the footnotes. “That right is one of the many that thousands of transgender persons serve to protect.”