A federal judge has forcefully rejected a highly unusual lawsuit the Trump administration filed against 15 other judges whom the Justice Department accused of hindering the president’s mass deportation agenda.
In tossing out the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen — a Trump appointee — lamented what he described as the White House’s months-long “smear” of the federal judiciary.
Cullen wrote in a 39-page decision Tuesday that the lawsuit was unprecedented, defective and the wrong way for the administration to pursue its grievances against the courts.
The Trump administration filed the lawsuit in June against all 15 judges who sit on the federal district court in Maryland. The lawsuit challenged that court’s policy of automatically pausing any deportation for two business days if the potential deportee files a special legal petition contesting the deportation.
The policy was adopted in May in a “standing order” signed by the chief federal district judge in Maryland, George Russell III, an Obama appointee. The Maryland court described the policy as a way to ensure the judges have time to consider immigration cases amid rapid-fire, mass deportation efforts.
The Justice Department argued that the policy operates as an illegal “automatic injunction” against the administration’s deportation efforts. The policy is “a particularly egregious example of judicial overreach interfering with Executive Branch prerogatives,” the department alleged.
The administration’s lawsuit in Maryland came amid an avalanche of harsh verbal attacks the White House has unleashed against judges across the country who have ruled against Donald Trump’s immigration measures.
Cullen, who is based in Virginia, denounced those attacks in his ruling on Tuesday.
For months, Cullen wrote, top executive branch officials have attacked judges who rule against the administration as “‘left-wing,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,’ ‘[c]rooked,’ and worse.”
“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system,” Cullen continued, “this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”
Cullen served as a Trump-appointed, Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Virginia from 2018 to 2020, before being confirmed to the district court there at the end of Trump’s first term.
Justice Department spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The administration filed its lawsuit in Maryland, but all of the district judges in Maryland were forced to recuse themselves because they were named as defendants. So the case was assigned to Cullen.
Cullen emphasized the extraordinary — and, in his view, improper — nature of the lawsuit.
While Cullen did not rule that the Maryland federal court’s policy is legal, he said suing the court’s judges is the wrong tactic.
“Whatever the merits of its grievance with the judges of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, the Executive must find a proper way to raise those concerns,” Cullen wrote. “All of this isn’t to say that the Executive is without any recourse; far from it. If the Executive truly believes that Defendants’ standing orders violate the law, it should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal.”
Cullen also used his ruling to underscore that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government that is not subservient to the presidency.
All federal district courts routinely adopt “local rules” and other procedural orders governing operations in those courts. Outside of Maryland, several other federal courts and many individual judges have similar practices of quickly entering short-term “stays” of deportations when legal challenges are filed.
The novel nature of the Trump administration’s lawsuit led many legal experts to predict it would be thrown out. More surprising was Cullen’s decision to use the ruling to challenge Trump officials’ vitriol against the judiciary.
“These are not normal times — at least regarding the interplay between the Executive and this coordinate branch of government,” Cullen observed.
