The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Nicholas Ganjei, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, to a lifetime federal judgeship in Houston. The Senate approved Ganjei’s nomination by a 51–45 vote that fell largely along party lines, with four senators not voting.
Ganjei will step down from the U.S. Attorney’s Office after serving just over one year in the role, The Houston Chronicle reported.
He was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas on Jan. 30, 2025. Ganjei initially served in an interim capacity and was never confirmed by the Senate.
Instead, he was appointed to the permanent position by the district’s judges in May. Those same judges will now serve alongside him on the federal bench.
Ganjei was nominated for the judgeship in October and advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in December.
President Donald Trump praised Ganjei as a “fearless proponent of immigration enforcement, strong borders, and law and order.”
U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz endorsed Ganjei’s nomination. Ganjei previously served as Cruz’s chief counsel from 2022 to 2025. He has also worked as a federal prosecutor and briefly served as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas in 2021.
Ganjei was raised in California. He attended American University and earned his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
Ganjei’s confirmation fills one of five judicial vacancies in the Southern District of Texas. The district covers 43 counties stretching from the Rio Grande Valley to the Houston area.
It is among the busiest federal court districts in the nation, largely due to criminal cases tied to arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Southern District of Texas currently has more vacancies than any other federal court district.
Since 2023, four judges in the district have taken senior status, a form of semi-retirement. The most recent judge appointed to the district before Ganjei was John Kazen in 2024.
Democratic presidents appointed eight of the district’s 14 full-time judges, while Republicans appointed six.
In January, the Senate confirmed a former clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and the late Antonin Scalia to be a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Republican-controlled Senate voted 52 to 45 in favor of Eric Tung, a partner at Jones Day. This made him the first judge President Donald Trump selected for the San Francisco-based appeals court during his second administration.
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His confirmation brought the total number of judges Trump appointed to the 9th Circuit from 2017 to 2020 during his first term to 10. This weakens the power of Democratic appointees, who have long held sway on a court that was previously thought to be the most liberal of all the federal appellate courts.
There are currently 16 Democratic appointees and 13 Republican appointees on the 9th Circuit, including Tung. In July, Trump nominated Tung to fill the seat that U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Segal Ikuta had held. She stated in March that she would step down when a successor was named.
When Trump announced Tung’s nomination, he called him a “Tough Patriot” on social media and said he would preserve the Rule of Law in the “most RADICAL, Leftist States” like California, Oregon, and Washington. These are three of the nine states that the 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over.
Tung is a partner at the law firm Jones Day in Los Angeles. Before that, he was a federal prosecutor and worked for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Tung worked as a clerk for Gorsuch twice: once when he was on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and again after Trump confirmed him to the Supreme Court in 2017. He had also worked for Scalia, who passed away in 2016.
