Federal Judges Scold DOJ Lawyers Over Courtroom Conduct in 2025

Federal judges rebuked the Justice Department numerous times this year over its conduct, as they field hundreds of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s agenda.

Government lawyers have been scolded for making misrepresentations in court, making legally flawed arguments, and sidestepping typical procedures. Their actions have prompted current and former judges to question if the government should still be entitled to the so-called “presumption of regularity,” the judicial doctrine that assumes the government is acting properly in court.

Criticism from the bench comes amid increasing tension between the federal judiciary and the White House. President Donald Trump and other top officials have at times blasted judges who’ve ruled against the administration.

Here are four examples of judges admonishing Justice Department lawyers in 2025:

‘Shocking’ Position

Justice Department lawyers have drawn scrutiny in multiple courts for their conduct during litigation over the administration’s policy to deport hundreds of migrants to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime law, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a longtime Maryland resident.

In a seven-page opinion in April, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sharply criticized the government’s claim that it may legally detain immigrants in foreign countries and couldn’t return Abrego Garcia as “shocking” to judges and to Americans’ “intuitive sense of liberty.”

The Reagan appointee also lamented growing tensions between the judicial and executive branches, a conflict he said would ultimately “diminish both.”

“The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph,” he wrote.

Chief US District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who is a hearing a challenge to the administration’s use of a wartime authority to justify the deportations, is also looking into whether officials defied his order to turn around the flights to the prison. He wrote in an April decision that the government’s actions “demonstrate a willful disregard” for the court’s order.

Redistricting Errors

Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee to the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, didn’t mince words when he took the Justice Department to task for its involvement in Texas’ redistricting process.

The department’s letter asking Texas state officials to redraw political boundaries to dismantle certain districts “directed Texas to engage in racial gerrymandering,” even though state legislatures are prohibited from considering race in those decisions, Brown wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel.

Brown also wrote that the directive “contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors” that it’s “challenging to unpack.”

His 160-page opinion, issued in November, drew a scathing dissent from another Republican-appointed judge on the panel, who criticized the decision as “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.” The Supreme Court voted in December to lift Brown’s ruling while litigation continued.

‘Smear and Impugn’

A federal judge criticized the Trump administration’s “concerted effort” to “smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it,” referencing officials’ insults of judges as “rogue” and “activists.”

Judge Thomas Cullen, a Trump-appointed Virginia federal district judge, made the remark in a footnote in his August decision that dismissed the administration’s unusual attempt to sue all of the judges on the Maryland federal trial court.

He also joined the chorus of judges raising concerns about the bad blood between the courts and the executive branch: “Regrettably, this lawsuit effectively pits two of those branches against one another. But it is important to remember that, at bottom, all branches—and the public officials who serve in them—share the same core sovereign interest: To support and defend the Constitution.”

Grand Jury ‘Missteps’

Federal magistrate judges have chided the administration for unusual grand jury procedures as part of efforts to bring criminal charges that align with its priorities.

A federal judge in Virginia knocked the Justice Department in November for what he described as a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” that may have undermined the grand jury proceedings in its case against former FBI Director James Comey.

US Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick of the Eastern District of Virginia ordered grand jury materials disclosed to Comey’s defense team, after finding that “irregularities” during the grand jury process “may rise to the level of government misconduct.” The charges were dismissed later that month.

And in Washington federal court, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui rebuked federal prosecutors in September for sidestepping the typical grand jury process during the Justice Department’s crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.

Faruqui described the Justice Department’s attempt to secure an indictment in local court, after failing in federal court, as “unseemly” and breaking with “decades-long norms.” His decision was later reversed by the chief judge of the Washington federal trial court, who found while the question was “challenging,” the magistrate judge must accept the indictment.