WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden has picked a longtime federal magistrate in Dallas for the influential 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez would be the first Latina on the conservative court, which handles federal appeals from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The White House announced the nomination Friday morning.
Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz enthusiastically supported Ramirez for a lifetime post at the trial court level in 2016. This appointment has far higher stakes but won’t come close to tilting the ideological balance on the court, and both endorsed her for the appellate post.
“Judge Ramirez’s distinguished track record of judicial excellence throughout her decades of service in Texas makes her exceptionally qualified for the 5th Circuit,” Cornyn said. “I am proud to recommend her for this position with Sen. Cruz, and I look forward to seeing her continue to uphold the rule of law on the federal bench.”
Four of the 16 judges on the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit were named by Democrats. This is the second vacancy Biden would get to fill.
Appeals courts are one step below the Supreme Court, with sway over countless topics from death row appeals to complaints about gerrymandering and, most recently, access to the abortion drug mifepristone.
Last Friday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Amarillo, Texas, ruled the FDA’s approval of the drug in 2000 was invalid.
On Wednesday, the 5th Circuit rebuffed the Biden administration’s demand to overturn the ruling.
Instead, the court limited access to seven weeks of pregnancy, three less than the FDA deems safe. It also banned sending it to patients by mail, ordering that only physicians can dispense the drug, and only after women make at least two in-person visits.
NARAL Pro-Choice America called the ruling “disastrous.” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday the Justice Department will seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
Such fights explain why Senate confirmation battles over appeals court slots are so intense, and why most end with votes largely along party lines.
As a magistrate judge since 2002, Ramirez would have a thin record of controversial rulings of the sort that senators and ideological groups hunt for to size up or torpedo a nominee.
In 2019, Ramirez tossed out a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Dallas by the family of Botham Jean. That was among her most high-profile cases.
Jean was shot by a neighbor, off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger. Now serving a 10-year prison term for murder, her defense was that she mistook him for an intruder after thinking she’d entered her own apartment.
Ramirez found that Jean’s family hadn’t shown a pattern of police racism or other wrongdoing that would implicate the city.
Federal district Judge Barbara Lynn upheld the ruling, writing that “the Findings and Conclusions of the Magistrate Judge are correct” – though she reversed herself a year later, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.
President Barack Obama nominated Ramirez in March 2016 for a lifetime appointment as a U.S. district court judge in Dallas. But the Senate never voted on her.
By then she had served 14 years as a magistrate.
At her Sept. 2016 confirmation hearing, Cornyn spoke about her in glowing terms. He noted that her parents were poor immigrants who had come to the United States under the “bracero” guest worker program and that she had overcome hardscrabble roots.
She was born in a small Panhandle town near Lubbock and grew up on a ranch.
After college at West Texas State University she won a full scholarship to Southern Methodist University law school in Dallas.
She worked at the prestigious firm now known as Locke Lord, then as a federal prosecutor.
The White House called her “extraordinarily qualified, experienced, and devoted to the rule of law and our Constitution.”
Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who tracks judicial nominations, called Ramirez an “experienced, mainstream jurist” whose experience on the bench has only deepened in the seven years since Obama’s nomination.
“She brings two decades of experience as a federal Magistrate Judge” plus seven as a federal prosecutor and “ethnic and gender diversity,” he said. “One Democratic appointee will not dramatically change the very conservative nature of the court. However, Judge Ramirez’s long experience in the federal system will serve the court and the public well and she can make a difference on three-judge panels.”
Magistrates are appointed by the local federal judges and serve renewable eight-year terms.
Their authority is limited. They can issue warrants and typically handle arraignments, pretrial motions and hearings, and criminal cases involving petty offenses.
If their cases ever make headlines, it’s not usually on the front page.
Last June, for instance, Ramirez accepted a guilty plea related to the hostage drama at a Colleyville synagogue six months earlier – not the attacker, Malik Faisal Akram, but the man who sold him the pistol.
Henry “Michael” Dwight Williams pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In 2017, Ramirez hit Deion Sanders, the former Dallas Cowboy and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, with a $2,200 fine when he skipped a deposition. The case involved a whistleblower allegation that he and others involved with a defunct charter school cheated the federal school lunch program.
In early February, she presided over the initial appearance of a Plano man charged with stealing more than a dozen guns from a pawn shop in Duncanville.
In October, she was on the bench to record the not guilty plea of Joseph Garza, a Dallas tax lawyer – and fellow SMU law graduate – accused of using fraudulent tax shelters to help clients hide $1 billion in income from the IRS and shave $200 million from their tax bills.
She released the 79-year-old defendant on the condition that he not contact the clients or anyone else involved.
In 2018, a Frisco accountant accused of running a $60 million health care fraud scheme asked the court to seal his indictment – because landing a new job would be easier if it didn’t show up in a background check.
Ramirez said no, citing higher court rulings that such records are public without a far more compelling and uncommon reason.
