In February, Michael Kaufman was sworn in as a magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He presides over matters in Los Angeles in the court’s Western Division. Previously, Kaufman served as a deputy federal public defender for the Central District of California, where he represented indigent criminal defendants on appeal and assisted with complex motion practice and trials. From 2010 to 2024, he was a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, where he engaged in advocacy and litigation on civil rights issues in the immigration and criminal legal systems.