The Trump administration’s Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week against all 15 federal district court judges in Maryland, challenging an order that imposes a 48-hour pause on any deportations under legal challenge within the state.
The lawsuit marks an extraordinary and unprecedented move, though numerous legal challenges to the Trump administration’s policies have been filed in Maryland federal courts.
“The complaint alleges that Chief Judge George L. Russell III of the U.S. District Court in Maryland issued an ‘unlawful, antidemocratic’ order in May that grants a two-day stay of deportation to any detainee in immigration custody who files a petition for habeas corpus, which is a lawsuit alleging wrongful detention,” the Washington Post reported.
In his standing order, Chief Judge George Russell III explained that the surge in habeas petitions filed on behalf of detained migrants had resulted in hurried judicial decisions.
“The recent influx of habeas petitions concerning alien detainees … that have been filed after normal court hours and on weekends and holidays has created scheduling difficulties and resulted in hurried and frustrating hearings in that obtaining clear and concrete information about the location and status of the petitioners is elusive,” the chief judge wrote, according to the Post.
The Justice Department said that a “sense of frustration and a desire for greater convenience do not give Defendants license to flout the law.”
“This is just the latest action by @AGPamBondi’s DOJ to rein in unlawful judicial overreach,” a spokesman for Attorney General Pam Bondi noted in a post on X Wednesday.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, described the lawsuit as a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s ongoing conflict with the judiciary, though he acknowledged that it raised legitimate legal arguments.
“I think they’re trying to claw back their jurisdiction,” Tobias told the Post. “There’s a performative aspect to all this stuff. It’s mind-boggling. … The American people don’t need to be manipulated, and certainly the federal courts don’t need that.”
Earlier this week, Bondi stated that the federal judge tasked with deciding the case involving the Signal group chat “cannot be objective,” adding that “many judges need to be removed.”
Bondi described the appointment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to hear the Signal case, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President Vance, and other officials discussed a military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, as a “wild coincidence against Donald Trump and our administration.”
The case stems from The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, accidentally being included on the chat. He then publicly disclosed portions of what was discussed. The incident led to the dismissal of Mike Walz as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
Boasberg has frequently ruled against the Trump administration in different cases, including one involving deported Venezuelan migrants who were said to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In one early case, Boasberg ordered planes carrying the deportees that were already in the air and in international airspace to return to the U.S.
When the planes failed to do so, Boasberg sought to hold Trump administration officials in contempt of court, but that ruling has been put on hold for now by an appeals court.
“He shouldn’t be on any of these cases. He cannot be objective. He’s made that crystal clear,” Bondi said of Boasberg.
The judge is now overseeing four lawsuits about the second Trump administration; federal judges are supposed to be assigned cases at random, leaving several Trump administration officials to question how it was possible for Boasberg to have been assigned so many in such a short period of time.
Regarding the exposed Signal chat, American Oversight, a watchdog group, filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump officials violated the Federal Records Act by neglecting to preserve Signal messages about the recent attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
