Sandra Segal Ikuta will step down from her role as an active judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, giving President Donald Trump a seat to fill on a longtime liberal-leaning court he moved further to the right in his first term.
Ikuta plans to take senior status, a form of semi-retirement afforded to judges that allows for a lighter workload, upon the appointment of her successor, a court representative confirmed.
Ikuta, 70, is an appointee of George W. Bush. She presides in Pasadena, California, and has served over a decade on the court. She is the first circuit court judge to announce plans to take senior status since Trump took office in January.
Democratic-appointed judges have long held a majority on the San Francisco-based court that underwent a rightward shift during Trump’s first presidency after he flipped four seats with his 10 appointees. President Joe Biden appointed eight judges.
The court is now closely divided between 16 Democratic-appointed judges and 13 Republican-appointed judges.
The new vacancy puts Trump at five US circuit court seats to fill in the judiciary. He made 54 lifetime appointments to the US appeals courts in his first term.
Ikuta wrote the 2019 majority opinion siding with the Justice Department’s program tying federal grant money for policing to a focus on illegal immigration and cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement policies.
She also wrote the 2020 majority opinion upholding the Trump administration’s rule that withheld Title X funding from family planning services providers that perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning.
A native of Los Angeles, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 and earned her law degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988.
She clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge Judge Alex Kozinski and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before joining O’Melveny & Myers. She was general counsel of the California natural resources agency at the time of her 2004 nomination. She was confirmed, 81-0, by the Senate in 2006.
Ikuta, who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, was once a journalist who edited publications such as Martial Arts Movies and Inside Kung Fu.
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