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Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks to reporters as President Donald Trump listens, Friday, June 27, 2025, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
After the Trump administration attempted to move its sweeping immigration enforcement and deportation agenda forward by suing an entire federal district court, lawyers for the court and all of its judges responded Monday that the DOJ”s complaint is not only “unprecedented” but also threatens to ratchet up “tensions.”
In late May, Chief Judge George Russell III of the U.S. District of Maryland noted that an “influx of habeas petitions” — due to the Trump administration’s own Alien Enemies Act removal choices — “resulted in hurried and frustrated hearings,” making the two-day stay a common-sense tool to manage its calendar and ensure due process in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings.
That was a bridge too far for the administration, which claimed that district judges were instead robbing the executive branch of “time to put its policies into effect” and ignoring the will of the voters.
When the DOJ filed its complaint in June, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the district court’s “standing order” — for administrative two-day stays against the government when potential deportees file habeas corpus petitions — amounted to “judicial overreach” that thwarted President Donald Trump’s “executive authority” and his 2024 election mandate.
The DOJ tactic, reminiscent of Trump’s failed lawsuits against judges in his civil fraud and criminal hush-money cases, is one that should also fail here and for several reasons, said a filing from the firm Clement & Murphy PLLC.
Reminding the administration that a federal court is “not a Denny’s,” attorneys for the judges called the suit “unprecedented,” “fundamentally incompatible with the separation of powers,” and “neither justiciable nor meritorious.”
What the Trump administration frames as an attack on executive power is little more than the court’s way of making sure that it “does not lose all chance of granting meaningful relief before it can make even a preliminary assessment of whether it has a basis to intervene” when an “alien seeks emergency relief from an impending removal,” said the filing in support of dismissal and in opposition to an injunction.
The defendants argued that the administration’s apparent gamesmanship to force the recusals of the entire court and put the case before a judge in another jurisdiction is only turning up the heat between the judicial and executive branches — and there may not be an end to that in sight, unless the suit is tossed.
“It has already profoundly disrupted the operation of an entire judicial district and necessitated the intervention of the Fourth Circuit and the assignment of an out-of-district judge,” the defendants said. “If allowed to proceed, the tensions between the branches produced by such a suit would only escalate, with executive depositions of judicial officers (and vice-versa) and cross-examinations exploring judicial motivations and executive necessities in open court.”
Importantly, the defendants continued, the judges and the court each have immunity from the DOJ’s lawsuit, and so the case should be jettisoned “in its entirety,” even citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s official-acts immunity ruling in Trump v. United States.
“Judicial actions undertaken in federal judges’ official capacities can be (and are) challenged all the time in the context of actual cases and controversies, i.e., on appeal, or via mandamus in extraordinary circumstances. But when a plaintiff attacks the official acts of members of the Judiciary in a standalone lawsuit, judges generally have absolute immunity,” the filing added. “Judicial immunity is exceptionally well pedigreed, so much so that the Supreme Court relied on it to extend official-act immunity to the President.”
