Trump’s DOJ Sues the Entire Maryland Federal Bench After its Judges Stopped His Lawless Deportations
Facing a series of losses in the courts, Donald Trump is putting the judges themselves on trial. His Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit personally against every federal judge in Maryland—and is demanding they recuse themselves and allow the case to be tried elsewhere. It’s a lawless gambit to rob Maryland courts of jurisdiction.
CBS News reports:
It’s rare for anyone—especially the federal government—to sue the entire federal bench in a state. The action ratchets up a fight with the federal judiciary over President Trump’s immigration policies, and underscores the administration’s growing exasperation with federal judges who have turned aside executive branch actions. …
Among the judges named in the Trump administration’s lawsuit is U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who has called the administration’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador illegal. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia have asked Xinis to impose fines against the administration for contempt, arguing that it ignored court orders for weeks to return him to the U.S. …
The Trump administration has asked the Maryland judges to recuse themselves from the case. It wants a clerk to have a federal judge from another state hear it. …
James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, described the lawsuit as further part of the erosion of legal norms by the administration. Normally when parties are on the losing side of an injunction, they appeal the order—not sue the court or judges, he said.
On one hand, he said, the Justice Department has a point that injunctions should be considered extraordinary relief; it’s unusual for them to be granted automatically in an entire class of cases. But, he added, it’s the administration’s own actions in repeatedly moving detainees to prevent them from obtaining writs of habeas corpus that prompted the court to issue the order.
Trump cannot win a fight against the judiciary on their own turf, in the courts. But the administration’s heated rhetoric about judicial “lawlessness”—even as Trump systematically defies the basic legal rule of habeas corpus—shows that its goal is to discredit judges with the public, giving Trump political cover to defy the courts.
Trump had launched a war against Big Law and other law firms to stop them from representing political opponents and also punish them for their past representation. But now he is going against judges themselves in a way that undermines their independence. In other words, Trump is systematically trying to intimidate everyone in our legal system who does not do his bidding. Every aspect of our judicial system that stands in his way is a potential target.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.