USA TODAY: A Trump-appointed judge threw out a rare case in which the Trump administration sued all 15 judges in a Maryland federal court to block judicial orders that slowed deportations.
The administration was challenging two orders by Judge George L. Russell III, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, that blocked federal immigration officials from removing or altering the legal status of certain detainees for two business days. The orders were designed to give the Maryland federal court time to address court petitions before the detainees were transferred outside of the court’s jurisdiction.
The administration argued that the orders exceeded the court’s authority and violated the proper procedures for issuing new rules.
“Every unlawful order entered by the district courts robs the Executive Branch of its most scarce resource: time to put its policies into effect,” the Justice Department wrote in the lawsuit. “In the process, such orders diminish the votes of the citizens who elected the head of the Executive Branch.”
However, Judge Thomas T. Cullen, who joined the federal bench in 2020, ruled that the Justice Department didn’t bring an appropriate challenge by suing judges. The department could, instead, have appealed, challenging the orders as they were applied in specific cases.
“If these arguments were made in the proper forum, they might well get some traction,” Cullen wrote in his Aug. 26 opinion.
“It’s no surprise that the Executive chose a different, and more confrontational, path entirely,” Cullen added.
The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cullen, a Virginia-based federal judge, was assigned to handle the lawsuit against the Maryland federal judges by the chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which handles appeals from both the Maryland and Virginia federal trial courts.
