Mary Murguia becomes chief judge of Ninth Circuit

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — There’s a new chief judge at the helm of the nation’s largest federal appeals court as Chief Judge Emeritus Sidney Thomas passed the gavel on Wednesday to Mary Murguia.

Murguia is the second woman, and first Latina, to hold the position, which she takes by virtue of seniority and will hold for a seven-year term. Murguia, 61, was appointed to the federal court for the District of Arizona by President Bill Clinton in 2000, and was elevated to the appellate bench by President Barack Obama in 2010. She currently maintains chambers in Phoenix.

A Kansas native, Murguia is one of seven children born to Mexican immigrants. Her brother Carlos is a former federal judge and her twin sister Janet is president of the civil rights organization UnidosUS, formerly the National Council of La Raza.

In 1982, Murguia graduated from the the University of Kansas with two bachelor’s degrees in art and science and earned her law degree from the University of Kansas School of Law in 1985. She was an assistant district attorney for Wyandotte County, Kansas, from 1985 to 1990 before becoming an assistant United States attorney for the District of Arizona. She also spent years as the director of the executive office for U.S. Attorneys at the Justice Department.

As a circuit judge, Murguia penned several noteworthy opinions centered around immigration, including Grigoryan v. Barr in 2019, where she and two colleagues held that the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals deprived three Armenian asylum seekers of their due process rights by revoking their asylum and ordering their deportation without allowing them to rebut accusations of fraud.

Murguia wrote that the government was required to provide a reason for denying visa applications in in Kerry v. Din, a decision from 2015 that dealt with a U.S. citizen's failed attempt to secure a visa for her Afghan spouse. That ruling was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2014, Murguia wrote the majority opinion in USA v. Victor Manuel Raya-Vaca, where the court held that the government wrongly denied due process to a Mexican national accused of illegally entering the United States.

In addition to her new administrative duties, Murguia will continue to hear cases on some of the most controversial legal questions facing the court; from gun rights to religious freedom, to vaccine mandates.

She recently sat alongside her predecessor Thomas on an 11-judge “en banc” tribunal that on Tuesday upheld California’s ban on large-capacity gun magazines. Earlier this month, she joined with two Trump-appointees U.S. Circuit Judge Danielle Forrest and Ryan Nelson in denying immunity to an Israeli spyware firm whose tools were used to hack the phones of some 1,400 journalists and activists.

Follow @MariaDinzeo

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