Matthew Kacsmaryk
Matthew Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. As a federal judge, he has helped shape Texas into the “legal graveyard for Biden policies,” as CNN described it. Before becoming a judge, he was the Deputy General Counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a far-right group that attacks LGBTQ rights and is a Project 2025 advisory board member.
Kacsmaryk has been an activist judge and a darling of the far-right and right-wing legal groups for his longtime opposition to abortion, birth control, and LGBTQ rights. Balls & Strikes, in its series “The Worst Trump Judge in America,” called Kacsmaryk “the poster boy for one of the more valuable tools in the conservative legal movement’s toolbox: judge-shopping, the practice of filing in a specific court to get a specific judge.”
As the only judge in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, Kacsmaryk enjoys outsized authority over lawsuits that are being used to set policy for the whole nation, and far-right litigants have taken advantage of this opportunity. Republican attorneys general and right-wing legal groups have been “judge shopping” their cases to his courtroom in search of favorable outcomes, according to news reports.
Kacsmaryk has put his controversial right-wing agenda on display in a number of cases since becoming a federal judge.
He has frequently ruled against the Biden administration. For example, in 2021, he sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the case, Biden v. Texas, which was related to a controversial Trump-era border policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” The policy, also referred to as “Migrant Protection Protocols,” required tens of thousands of immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while their case is being processed. Despite the Supreme Court overturning his ruling, Kacsmaryk issued another, similar decision on the matter in December 2022.
In particular, Kacsmaryck has a long record of hostility to LGBTQ rights and abortion. In his most widely known and notorious ruling, Kacsmaryk suspended the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill, mifepristone, a case brought by a shell group called the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine,” which was really led and argued by the anti-LGBTQ nonprofit litigation giant Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is an SPLC-designated hate group. The ruling never went into effect. “His opinion trying to ban mifepristone faulted the FDA for failing to consider a ‘study’ which found that 77 percent of women who submitted anonymous blog posts to a website called ‘Abortion Changes You’ reported a ‘negative change,’” as Ian Millhiser described.
The far-right faction dominating the U.S. Supreme Court later unanimously remanded the case because the initial plaintiffs plainly lacked standing to sue, although they may revisit the case, as Kacsmaryk has already granted standing to other states as intervenor plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Kacsmaryk has also effectively “tried to bankrupt Planned Parenthood,” according to James LaRock: “Texas and Louisiana had both banned the organization from participating in Medicaid, but after federal courts paused those orders, Medicaid continued to reimburse Planned Parenthood as usual. When the Fifth Circuit eventually allowed the bans to take effect, a ‘whistleblower’ sued, claiming that Planned Parenthood had committed Medicaid fraud by submitting claims in the interim—claims that federal courts had expressly told them they could submit.”
The case is ongoing, and notably stems from a 2013 case in which a group of anti-abortion activists called the “Center for Medical Progress” (CMP) sought to release heavily edited, deceptive videos of meetings with Planned Parenthood officials in an effort to ultimately discredit and defund the organization. (In 2015 Leonard Leo and his right-hand man Jonathan Bunch advised CMP on “how to ensure successful prosecutions” against Planned Parenthood.) In 2019, a federal court in California ordered CMP to pay Planned Parenthood over $2 million. Despite all this, the Louisiana and Texas health departments referred to CMP’s videos in their letters to Planned Parenthood affiliates, banning them from participating in Medicaid. As Millhiser reported, “The name of the party suing Planned Parenthood is not identified in court filings… but their complaint reveals them as a central figure in the Center for Medical Progress who ‘conducted an extensive undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.’”
In May 2024, he also sided with Paxton to block the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule in Texas that would expand gun background checks.
Kacsmaryk’s nomination to the federal bench was very controversial. Ahead of the Senate confirmation vote, 75 organizations supporting LGBTQ rights sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging them to vote against his confirmation. After Kacsmaryk’s nomination was returned to President Trump twice, the right-wing Senate majority ultimately confirmed Kacsmaryk 52-46 in 2019.
Additionally, in 2017, as Kacsmaryk was privately interviewing to be nominated to be a federal judge, he emailed the editor of a Texas Review of Law and Politics and asked to have his name removed as the sole author of a recently submitted article and replaced with the names of two colleagues at First Liberty, citing “reasons I may discuss at a later date.” The article attacked the Obama administration’s protections for reproductive care and for transgender patients. Kacsmaryk wrote that physicians “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.” On the required Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Kacsmaryk was required to disclose all his published work, but he did not disclose this article.
From 2014 to 2019, Kacsmaryk worked for the First Liberty Institute (FLI), a 501(c)(3) Christian non-profit law firm founded by anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice activist Kelly Shackelford, who is a member of the far-right Council for National Policy and is the former chair of its 501(c)(4) arm CNP Action. First Liberty calls itself “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty,” and it specializes in cases to destroy the wall between church and state separation and litigation to enshrine discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals as an exercise of “religious liberty.”
First Liberty’s influence grew rapidly during the time Kacsmaryk worked there. The group has filed numerous cases that eventually went to the Supreme Court, including Kennedy v. Bremerton. At First Liberty, Kacsmaryk described preparing or assisting in preparing amicus briefs in the following cases before the U.S. Supreme Court: Holt v. Hobbs, Obergefell v. Hodges, Zubik v. Burwell, Stormans v. Wiesman, Knight v. Thompson, Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., and Advocate Health Care v. Stapleton.
Before working at First Liberty Institute, Kacsmaryk was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Texas and from 2003 to 2008, he was an associate for the law firm Baker Botts.
Kacsmaryk has also been a long-time member of the Federalist Society.