General Reyes Reports For Duty

The Democratic Party’s judicial attack on the Trump administration and the Executive Branch is centered on the federal district court for the District of Columbia. One of those judges, Ana Reyes, has issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Department of Defense from implementing the President’s executive order barring transgender people from military service.

Judge Reyes, born in Uruguay, was appointed to the federal bench in 2023 by Joe Biden. Wikipedia describes her as “both the first Latina and the first openly LGBT person to serve as a district court judge in Washington, D.C.” In private practice at Williams & Connolly, she “focused on cross-border legal issues and international arbitration, while also taking on pro bono work to represent asylum seekers and refugee organizations.” So the Democrats knew what they were doing when they got this case before her.

You can read Reyes’s opinion at the link. It cites a few cases, mostly for boilerplate propositions. It is basically a 79-page explanation of why she disagrees with President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Her memorandum literally has a section titled “Transgender Persons Contribute to Society.”

Secretary Hegseth promptly made known his opinion of Judge Reyes’s order:

The Democrats’ judicial blitz is unlike anything we have seen in our history. Unable to stop President Trump’s nominations from being confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate, the Democrats have turned to judges to throw monkey wrenches into every possible administration policy. A few of these efforts might ultimately succeed, but most presumably will be reversed on appeal–although perhaps not by the D.C. Circuit, most of whose members are Democratic appointees. The real question is how effective these lawsuits will be in slowing down the Trump administration, on which the clock is already ticking.