The US Justice Department is seeking to dismiss its lawsuit against Maryland’s federal trial judges, after the court adopted a new standing order on temporarily blocking some deportations.
In a motion to dismiss filed Jan. 16, DOJ said that the case is now moot because the US District Court for the District of Maryland’s new order overrides the ones that were the subject of the litigation. The federal government had sued over the automatic blocks on deporting detained persons who filed habeas petitions.
The new standing order—adopted on Dec. 1—is “materially different” from the earlier ones, DOJ said. The district court had posted a proposed version of the order and the Department of Homeland Security submitted a comment against it, according to the filing.
The Justice Department is also asking the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to vacate the lower court opinion that dismissed their lawsuit. The government lawyers said it’s in the “public interest” to do so, and that it’s in line with the circuit’s typical practices.
The Fourth Circuit on Tuesday asked the federal judges to respond by Jan. 30 to DOJ’s motion to dismiss and to vacate the lower court opinion.
US District Judge Thomas Cullen of the Western District of Virginia, an appointee of President Donald Trump tapped to hear the case, in August dismissed the unprecedented lawsuit in a strongly worded opinion.
Cullen said the administration “chose a different, and more confrontational, path” in handling the dispute with the judiciary, which came after escalated attacks on federal judges by Trump, federal officials, and their allies.
Cullen also took issue with those attacks in his opinion, saying the “concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”
The case isUS v. Matthew Maddox, 4th Cir., No. 25-02004
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