The judge who will immediately weigh President Donald Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook has already pushed back against one of his other signature efforts to expand presidential power: mass deportation.

Cook’s lawsuit Thursday was randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington, D.C., by Joe Biden in 2021. Cobb, a former public defender, was Biden’s first appointment to Washington’s district court, which has 15 full-time judges.

In a ruling earlier this month, Cobb blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to rapidly deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had fled violence or oppression in their home countries. The immigrants had previously been permitted to enter or remain temporarily in the U.S. under a program known as parole.

“Will they be summarily removed from a country that — as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges — may look to them more and more like the countries from which they tried to escape?” Cobb wrote in an 84-page decision against the deportation effort.....

Cobb, 45, is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School. After working at the D.C. Public Defender Service early in her career, she joined a Washington-area firm that primarily handles employment-related litigation.