Tea Party firebrand Anna Little has become one of the nation’s most immigrant-friendly judges

Anna Little built her political career as one of New Jersey’s most prominent Tea Party Republicans, riding the conservative wave of 2010 to within striking distance of unseating Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-Long Branch).

When Little left New Jersey politics in 2019 to become an immigration judge working for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, the expectation was that she would take hardline stances on asylum applications.

Her judicial record has defied easy political assumptions.

Today, the former Monmouth County freeholder and Highlands mayor has compiled one of the most immigrant-friendly records among federal immigration judges in the country.

According to data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Little has granted asylum or other humanitarian protection in 610 of the 677 asylum cases she has decided on the merits at the New York Immigration Court, where she now serves, since fiscal year 2020 — a 90.1% grant rate. She has denied relief in just 67 cases, or 9.9%.

Her full record is even broader.  Across all three immigration courts where she has sat since being appointed in 2019 — San Francisco, Newark, and New York — Little has decided 1,222 asylum cases on the merits, granting asylum or other relief in 1,033 of them, an 84.5% grant rate.  She has denied relief in just 189 cases, or 15.5%  — roughly a quarter of the national denial rate over the same period.

The numbers are striking when compared with her colleagues.

At the New York Immigration Court, judges have denied asylum in about 39% of cases during the same period — Little’s 9.9% denial rate is a fraction of that.  Nationally, immigration judges denied 58.9% of asylum applications.  Little’s denial rate is among the lowest in New York, making her one of the most favorable judges in the country for asylum applicants.

Her leniency holds up across all three courts where she’s served: in San Francisco, she denied 16.4% of cases against a court average of 28.7%, and even in Newark — her most restrictive court, and the only one where her denial rate topped the national average locally — she denied 39.4% against a court average of 67.6%. TRAC cautions that comparisons between judges are imperfect because caseloads differ by nationality, legal representation, and other factors.

Little’s record stands in sharp contrast to the political image she cultivated more than a decade ago.

After serving on the Highlands Borough Council, as mayor of Highlands, and as a Monmouth County freeholder, she emerged as a conservative insurgent for Congress in 2010, narrowly defeating establishment-backed newspaper publisher Diane Gooch by just 83 votes in the Republican primary in New Jersey’s 6th district.

Her campaign briefly put Pallone on the defensive during the height of the Tea Party movement.  A Monmouth University poll one month before Election Day showed Pallone’s lead had narrowed to just seven points, although he ultimately won by an 11-point margin, 55%-44%.

Pallone defeated Little by a much wider 63%-35% margin in a 2012 rematch after congressional redistricting made the district considerably more Democratic.

Trump’s acting U.S. Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, appointed Little as an immigration judge in 2019, assigning the immigration attorney to the San Francisco Immigration Court. While many Trump political appointees left government after President Joe Biden took office, Little remained because immigration judges became career Justice Department employees rather than Senate-confirmed federal judges.

Rather than replacing her, the Biden administration elevated Little in 2021 to become an Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, a supervisory position within the Executive Office for Immigration Review.  She was later assigned to the New York Immigration Court, one of the nation’s busiest immigration dockets, and then to Newark.

Little, 58, worked as an immigration attorney before becoming an immigration judge.  She was appointed to serve as an interim freeholder in early 2006 after Amy Handlin (R-Middletown) was elected to the State Assembly.   She won a special election that year, but by 2007, she had fallen out of favor with the county GOP organization and was denied party support to run for a full term.