The Justice Department made an unusual move Tuesday evening by filing a lawsuit against every judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland over an order stalling the Trump administration’s ability to deport illegal immigrants.
The lawsuit against the 15 judges, the court clerk, and the court itself challenges a May standing order by the judicial district’s chief judge, George Russell. The order granted an automatic two-day pause on a deportation if the illegal immigrant in question files a habeas corpus petition challenging their detention in court.
The Justice Department claimed in its filing Tuesday evening that Russell’s standing order is an action “forbidden” by Supreme Court precedent and that the court does not have the jurisdiction to interfere in such immigration matters.
“Congress has instead expressly and intentionally channeled challenges to removal proceedings to a specific process in the courts of appeals and imposed various other bars on judicial review,” the DOJ said in its lawsuit. “Defendants’ automatic injunction thus extends relief as of right that district courts entirely lack jurisdiction to issue.”
The DOJ further accused the federal court in Maryland of unlawfully interfering with the executive branch.
“Every unlawful order entered by the district courts robs the Executive Branch of its most scarce resource: time to put its policies into effect. In the process, such orders diminish the votes of the citizens who elected the head of the Executive Branch,” the DOJ said in its lawsuit.
“Defendants’ lawless standing orders are nothing more than a particularly egregious example of judicial overreach interfering with Executive Branch prerogatives—and thus undermining the democratic process,” the filing said.
Because the Justice Department is taking the unusual step of suing the entire bench in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, the department asked in a subsequent motion for all of the judges to recuse themselves from taking the case and assign it to a judge in a different judicial district or move the case entirely to a different district.
Attorney General Pam Bondi called the order by the federal district court in Maryland, which is at the center of the lawsuit, part of “judicial overreach” aimed at undermining President Donald Trump.
“President Trump’s executive authority has been undermined since the first hours of his presidency by an endless barrage of injunctions designed to halt his agenda,” Bondi said Wednesday. “The American people elected President Trump to carry out his policy agenda: this pattern of judicial overreach undermines the democratic process and cannot be allowed to stand.”
TRUMP JUDICIAL NOMINEE EMIL BOVE DENIES WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIM HE TOLD DOJ TO DEFY COURT ORDERS
The federal district court in Maryland has been home to one of the most high-profile deportation battles of the second Trump term: the case involving Salvadoran national Kilmar Ábrego García.
The legal battle over Ábrego García’s deportation to El Salvador entered a new phase earlier this month, when he was returned to the United States to face criminal charges in a federal court in Tennessee for allegedly transporting illegal migrants.