Dale E. Ho ran the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights litigation department when President Trump’s first administration tried to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
The question, he said at the time, would “wreck the once-in-a-decade count of the nation’s population” by intimidating immigrants legal and not. In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he argued against the plan, and the court blocked it. The administration eventually abandoned the effort.
Now, as a federal jurist in Manhattan, Judge Ho is facing the Trump administration from the other side of the bench. He is presiding over the criminal prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams and on Wednesday will hold a hearing on the government’s contentious motion to dismiss the charges against the mayor. The move set off mass resignations in the Justice Department.
From the moment Mr. Adams’s case was randomly handed to him in September, Judge Ho was thrust into a singular position: overseeing the first federal criminal prosecution of a sitting mayor of New York City — one who has recently allied himself closely with the president the judge once argued against in court.
Before joining the bench, he worked at the American Civil Liberties Union for about a decade.
David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, who worked closely with him at the organization, said Judge Ho was “diligent, careful, and unstinting in his pursuit of justice.”
“Dale Ho is one of the very best lawyers I’ve ever worked with,” he said in a statement on Tuesday.
Judge Ho, born in San Jose, Calif., in 1977, graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School; had internships at prestigious law firms; federal clerkships; and a summer internship at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He also spent two years as an actor in New York before he went to law school.
He had a reputation as a tough litigator and a fierce advocate for civil liberties, a stance often showcased in impassioned social media posts, articles and speeches. His 2019 Supreme Court battle against the Trump administration was highlighted in a documentary called “The Fight.”
His high profile won him few fans among Republican senators. President Biden submitted Judge Ho’s nomination to the Senate in 2021, but it was nearly two years before he was confirmed, as his public statements became points of dispute between Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a questionnaire prepared for senators, Judge Ho said, “I recognize and regret that I have engaged in overheated rhetoric on social media.” He pledged to “maintain high standards of professional courtesy and respect in both formal and informal communications, in both public and private.”
He narrowly made it onto the bench after a 50-to-49 party-line vote in the U.S. Senate.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said he trusts the judge will have no issue separating his past role as an advocate from his current obligations. Judge Ho has clerked for judges in the past, he pointed out.
“He appreciates the difference in being an advocate representing your client and doing everything you can to win the case, and the neutral arbiter,” Mr. Tobias said.
Judge Ho has had scant experience presiding over criminal cases since he took his seat in the Southern District of New York in 2023. In an interview last year, he told Bloomberg Law that he did not “have experiential knowledge of criminal procedure at the trial level” and was learning from colleagues.
He said in the interview that he “definitely experienced a bit of impostor syndrome.”
Now, he will handle a case that has had nationwide repercussions already. Mr. Adams was indicted in September on charges of bribery, fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and conspiracy as part of a scheme involving the Turkish government.
Mr. Adams’s lawyers have filed motions to dismiss the charges in the past, but federal prosecutors have vehemently defended their case in court filings and hearings before Judge Ho.
Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general, last week ordered prosecutors to ask the judge to throw out the case. He told them said that the decision had nothing to do with its legal strength. Rather, the prosecution was impeding Mr. Adams’s ability to cooperate with President Trump’s plan to deport immigrants, Mr. Bove wrote.
In response, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned. In a letter to the attorney general, Ms. Sassoon blasted Mr. Bove’s request and conduct.
At a meeting in Washington with Mr. Bove and prosecutors, Mr. Adams’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo,” she said: The mayor would help the Trump administration with immigration enforcement if the case was dismissed.
Her accusations set off a drumbeat within the legal world urging Judge Ho to look deeply into the federal government’s motives.
The law gives judges almost no ability to refuse a government request to drop criminal charges. But Mr. Adams’s case may challenge those limits and that precedent.
Judge Ho could call witnesses and ask for the government to supply evidence, such as notes from meetings that Ms. Sassoon said Mr. Bove had ordered collected, said Andrew Weissmann, a law professor at New York University who has been an opponent of the president.
“There clearly is a dispute as to what happened,” Mr. Weissmann said, adding: “In order to resolve the dispute, you can’t do that just on the papers, because you have just a bunch of written statements conflicting with each other.”
Mr. Weissmann said that no amount of experience could prepare a judge for a case like the one now before Judge Ho.
“Somebody could be on the bench for a very, very long time and never have dealt with this,” he said.
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