Judge Who Blocked Trump’s Refugee Order Praised for ‘Firm Moral Compass’

The federal judge who blocked part of President Trump’s executive order on immigration on Saturday night worked for years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where she was one of the lead prosecutors on the high-profile Tyco International fraud trial.

Colleagues remembered the judge, Ann M. Donnelly, as an astute lawyer unfazed by the spotlight. She found herself in its glare unexpectedly on Saturday night, when she heard an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the executive order barring refugees. She granted a temporary stay, ordering that refugees and others detained at airports across the United States not be sent back to their home countries.

Enforcing Mr. Trump’s order by sending the travelers home could cause them “irreparable harm,” Judge Donnelly ruled.

The order, just before 9 p.m., capped an intense day of protests across the country by opponents of the order, which suspended the entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely and blocked entry for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries.

“Today, Judge Donnelly stated in unequivocal terms that this administration — one with no apparent historical and constitutional rudder — will not go unchecked or unbalanced,” said Eric M. Arnone, a criminal defense lawyer in Manhattan who worked with her in the prosecutor’s office in the mid-2000s.

Judge Donnelly was nominated to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York by President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the Senate in a 95-2 vote in 2015.

She had a “sterling reputation” when she worked in the Manhattan prosecutor’s office from 1984 to 2009, said another former colleague, Linda A. Fairstein, who retired as chief of the special victims unit.

“I worked with a lot of great lawyers in public service,” Ms. Fairstein said in an interview. “There is a fairness about her to the core that is just extraordinary.”

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