A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump slammed the Trump administration as he threw out a lawsuit from the Department of Justice targeting every single member of the judiciary in Maryland.
Trump’s “concerted effort” to “smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” District Judge Thomas Cullen wrote in his order on Tuesday.
The administration had sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland over an order that blocked the government from immediately deporting immigrants who tried to challenge their removal from the country in court.
Cullen, who was appointed by Trump during his first term in 2019, called the lawsuit against an entire judicial branch “not ordinary.”
He then wrote that the president must find a “proper way” to handle his “grievance” with judges, “whatever the merits” may be.
The Justice Department claimed that the pause impedes Trump’s authority to enforce immigration laws. But the judges fought back, arguing that the administration’s lawsuit amounted to yet another attack against a judiciary that the president has repeatedly tried to undermine.
“Indeed, over the past several months, principal officers of the Executive (and their spokespersons) have described federal district judges across the country as ‘left-wing,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,’ ‘[c]rooked,” and worse,” Cullen wrote.
The judges had implemented an automatic pause in deportation proceedings earlier this year in an effort to maintain status quo in immigrants’ cases and ensure they are still able to participate in proceedings, giving them the “fulsome opportunity to brief and present arguments in its defense,” according to their order.
The Trump administration has sought to rapidly remove people from the country as part of his aggressive anti-immigration agenda, facing an avalanche of lawsuits accusing the government of failing to provide adequate due process.
The administration has stripped legal status from more than 1 million immigrants, ordered thousands of immigration cases to be dismissed, and arrested immigrants at courthouses and at their court-ordered check-in appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — actions that have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to the president’s demands for mass deportations.
One of the 15 judges being sued in the Maryland case, Paula Xinis, is presiding over lawsuits from Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongfully deported Salvadoran immigrant who was re-arrested by ICE and threatened with removal to Uganda.
On Monday, Xinis told Justice Department attorneys that the government is “absolutely forbidden” from deporting him, for now.
Trump and administration officials have launched an expansive war on the courts, which are handling more than 200 lawsuits against his executive orders and other policy decisions. The president has singled out judges by name on his Truth Social platform and elsewhere, fueling more attacks from Republican officials and others that have prompted credible threats to judges and their families.
In a rare public statement earlier this year, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts denounced Trump’s calls to impeach the judge presiding over challenges to the president’s use of the alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang before they’d even had a chance to challenge the allegations.
Impeachment threats are “not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote.
The administration has also fired dozens of immigration court judges in an apparent effort to weed out judges who could derail Trump’s agenda, actions that the union representing the judges called “outrageous” and “nonsensical.”
Last week, attorneys for the Maryland judges called the Trump administration’s lawsuit “a nightmare scenario” and “an extraordinary action that should be dismissed.”
In Monday’s order, Cullen agreed with the judges’ arguments “nearly across the board.”
“Any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by Defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss,” he added. “To hold otherwise would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”
If Trump “truly believes” that the Maryland judges’ order is illegal, then the administration “should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal.”
The Independent has requested comment from the Justice Department.
