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VERIFY: Claims that Trump administration has not confirmed any Black judges are false

The administration has confirmed a much smaller number of Black judges to the federal bench than previous administrations, but not zero.

WASHINGTON — There is a lot of confusing information online about the Trump administration, especially with the election looming. That is why the Verify team exists. To tell you which facts are real, and which are just plain wrong.

We found a claim online shared several different ways, but the gist of it is that President Trump's administration has confirmed 198 judges across the country and not one has been Black.

Question:

Has the Trump administration not confirmed a single Black judge?

Answer:

False, the claim that the Trump administration hasn’t confirmed a single Black judge is not correct.

To give you some context, we compared the numbers between the Trump administration to the Obama administration.

Diversity of the Federal Bench | ACS Current statistics on the gender and racial diversity of the Article III courts. Diversity of the Federal Bench Courts should look like the people they represent. While judges who sit on the federal bench are overwhelmingly white and male, previous administrations have put an emphasis on increasing representation for both women and people of color.

The American Constitution Society shows nearly 4% of President Trump’s judge confirmations have been Black. Under President Obama, 18% were Black.

The demographics of the court nominations have followed a similar suit. Under President Trump, 86% of the judicial confirmations have been white. That's compared to President Obama, where 64% of judicial confirmations were white.

The two are most similar in confirmations of Asian-American judges. Roughly 6% of both presidents' confirmations were Asian-American.

 

Credit: WUSA


Our Sources:

The Federal Judicial Center (FJC) and the American Constitution Society.

Our researchers dove right into the Federal Judicial Center data. The FJC keeps track of all presidential judge nominations since the beginning of the country. That data includes gender and ethnicity.

The numbers show, so far, the Trump administration has confirmed 203 federal judges. Of that number, eight have been Black.

We checked that data against a study from the American Constitution Society, and the numbers are the same.

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