According to a new report, the husband of the Biden-appointed judge who decided earlier this week that federal immigration agents must get individual arrest warrants for every suspected illegal alien before detaining them has a financial stake in stopping President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
The husband of U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston, who recently ruled that the Trump administration cannot detain more undocumented immigrants without a warrant, is a multifamily real estate dealer in California, according to independent journalist Laura Loomer’s extensive X post. She claimed that Marc A. Thurston mostly works with “the illegal alien and immigrant community” and has made Instagram posts denouncing Trump’s immigration and mass deportation policies as detrimental to investors and multifamily real estate agents.
Judge Thurston’s April 29, 2025, granting of a preliminary injunction prohibiting the US Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops across a large section of California is called into question by this enormous CONFLICT OF INTEREST, according to Loomer’s letter.
In her letter, she said, “This injunction applies to Kern County, California, including Bakersfield, CA, where Judge Thurston’s husband operates as a multi-family real estate broker.”
Judge Thurston’s spouse, Marc A. Thurston, is Senior Vice President of ASU Commercial and an expert in the multifamily real estate market in Bakersfield. Marc Thurston claimed on his Instagram account in several videos he took since President Trump took office that deporting “undocumented immigrants” would hurt the local rental market in Bakersfield. His company depends on immigration enforcement results because more than 15,000 “undocumented workers,” as he refers to them, work in the Central Valley of California, and many of these illegals live in multi-family housing where he and his wife, Judge Jennifer Thurston, reside. This information was exclusively obtained by @LoomerUnleashed @CcpSkipTracer.
Due to her partiality and the fact that her decision benefited her husband’s company, Judge Jennifer L. Thurston ought to have withdrawn from the Trump administration lawsuit.
A judge must withdraw themself from a case if they find themselves in conflict with any of the following regulations, which are part of the “Federal Judiciary and Judicial Procedure” requirements that all US Federal Judges must adhere to:
If a reasonable person, knowing all the facts, could doubt the judge’s impartiality, they must recuse themselves, according to 28 U.S.C. § 455(a).
28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(4): Requires recusal in cases when the judge’s spouse has a financial stake that could be significantly impacted by the verdict.
Additionally, Loomer supplied video recordings of Marc Thurston talking about the problem and cautioning landlords that there may be a lot of vacancies coming up soon. According to a later post by Loomer, Marc Thurston removed the videos from his social media accounts.
According to Newsweek, Judge Thurston’s decision only applies to federal immigration officials working in her jurisdiction.
Thurston restricted the power of U.S. Border Patrol officers in her district, preventing them from making an arrest without a warrant of anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant unless they had a reasonable suspicion that the suspect would run away before a warrant could be obtained.
She decided that Border Patrol officers cannot force someone to “voluntary depart” unless they have been made aware of their rights and given their free assent, and that they must have a reasonable suspicion before halting someone.
Thurston’s decision follows an immigration enforcement campaign in January called “Operation Return to Sender,” which resulted in the detention of scores of people, many of whom were day laborers or farmworkers, according to Newsweek.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU claimed that Border Patrol officers had violated the Constitution by holding people who “appeared to be farmworkers or day laborers, regardless of their actual immigration status or individual circumstances.”
