By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration is escalating its battle with the U.S. judiciary over rulings that have stymied his agenda by filing a lawsuit with an unusual set of defendants: The judges themselves.
The Justice Department in a lawsuit filed late on Tuesday sued the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and all 15 of its judges over an order last month that automatically blocks for two business days the deportation of migrants in the state who file a new lawsuit challenging their detention.
The administration’s lawsuit, filed in Baltimore, argues that the standing order runs afoul of U.S. Supreme Court precedent governing the standards for when and how a court can issue an injunction and that, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, courts lack authority to interfere with deportation proceedings.
The Justice Department is seeking a court ruling declaring the order to be unlawful and an injunction blocking the judges from enforcing it. The department asked that the Maryland federal judges recuse themselves from hearing the case and instead have a federal judge from another state hear it.
A representative for the Maryland court declined to comment.
The order at issue cited a “recent influx of habeas petitions concerning alien detainees purportedly subject to improper and imminent removal from the United States.” A habeas petition is a legal action challenging the legality of a person’s detention.
The two-day automatic pause on deportations being carried out as part of the Republican president’s hardline approach toward immigration was designed to ensure that migrants are not removed from Maryland before their cases could be reviewed.
The order was signed by Chief U.S. District Judge George Russell, who like the majority of the judges in the Maryland court was appointed by a Democratic president.
The court issued the order after months of litigation in Maryland over the Trump administration’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 immigration court ruling that he not be sent there because he could be persecuted by gangs. Abrego is a Salvadoran national who lived in Maryland. His wife and young son are American citizens.
That case led to weeks of questions about whether the administration would abide by an order by a federal judge in Maryland that it help “facilitate” Abrego’s return. He was deported on March 15 and was returned on June 6.
The standing order said cases by detained migrants sometimes were being filed in the evenings or on weekends and holidays, resulting in “hurried and frustrating hearings” in which obtaining clear information about the location and status of the migrant detainees at issue had been “elusive.”
The Justice Department in its lawsuit called the order an “egregious example of judicial overreach, one that would interfere with the Trump administration’s prerogatives and the president’s vast authority over immigration enforcement.
It called the order the latest example of what it said was an unprecedented number of injunctions issued by judges nationally blocking administration policies, which the Justice Department called an “unlawful restraint” on Trump’s powers. The judges issuing these orders have done so after finding various actions by Trump and his administration to be unlawful.
“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 stated in the lawsuit. “In the process, such orders diminish the votes of the citizens who elected the head of the Executive Branch.”
Abrego was brought back only after the Justice Department charged him with migrant smuggling. He has pleaded not guilty and was due back in court on Wednesday for a judge in Tennessee to set the conditions of his release from jail.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Will Dunham)
