Who is Amir Ali, the judge who blocked Trump’s USAID funding freeze?

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Confirmed under President Joe Biden last year, Ali is the former president and executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a civil rights organization. Here’s a guide to his background and his rulings in the case.

Early life
Ali was born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1985 to Egyptian parents.

While an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Ali interned at Google. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering in 2008.

He attended Harvard Law School from 2008 until 2011. During his final year in law school, Ali told Harvard Law Today that he made the pivot from software engineering to law because he wanted more “one-on-one interactions.”

“At Google, I was working more with computers than with people,” he said at the time.

Ali clerked for Judge Raymond C. Fisher of the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada.

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