U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

For the second time in as many months, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California has found that the Trump administration has violated the Administrative Procedures Act in seeking some of the president's signature policy goals.

Seeborg on Monday blocked the Trump administration's policy of forcing Central American asylum-seekers to return to Mexico to wait for their cases to be heard in the United States. Seeborg found that the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” implemented late last year were not authorized by Congress under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and even if they were, they didn't provide proper safeguards to meet the government's obligation not to return any alien to a territory where his or her “life or freedom would be threatened.”

The ruling comes a little more than a month after Seeborg issued a decision finding that the Trump administration's decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 U.S. Census was “arbitrary and capricious.” There the judge found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided to add the question despite evidence provided by Census Bureau officials that it would likely significantly depress the response rates in non-citizen and Latino communities.

So who is this judge who has twice recently decided against lawyers in the Department of Justice?

The 62-year-old Seeborg had a significant stint in the DOJ himself, as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of California from 1991 to 1998. Seeborg also worked in private practice at Morrison & Foerster before and after his DOJ service, and had a clerkship to U.S. District Judge John Pratt for the District of Columbia on his resume prior to taking the federal bench as a magistrate judge in 2001.

Nominated to the district court bench in 2009 and seated in early 2010, Seeborg is the first of the 11 district judges nominated by President Barack Obama to the Northern District of California bench who occupy a majority of the district's 14 active judge slots. Seeborg, however, in a 2012 interview with The Recorder indicated that he comes at issues from an independent perspective. When asked what he liked most about being a judge, Seeborg responded: “I suppose it's that I get to look at very interesting issues from a unique perspective, and that perspective is, I get to try to figure out the right answer.”

Seeborg said, “I don't have an ax to grind or a particular cause to champion, and I think that's a really unique opportunity and it's wonderful.”