A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against all Maryland federal judges on August 26, 2025, ruling that the Justice Department cannot sue an entire district bench as a substitute for appealing the orders it dislikes. The case, United States v. Russell et al., was the first time the DOJ had sued every judge on a federal court, and Judge Thomas T. Cullen’s 37-page opinion held that judicial immunity, sovereign immunity, and the separation of powers all blocked the suit from moving forward. The government has appealed to the Fourth Circuit, where the case remains active.
The Standing Order Behind the Suit
On May 21, 2025, Chief U.S. District Judge George L. Russell III of the District of Maryland issued an amended standing order responding to a surge of after-hours habeas corpus petitions from immigrants facing deportation. The order paused removal automatically until 4:00 p.m. on the second business day after a petition was filed. Russell described it as a docket-management tool: an “influx of habeas petitions” filed outside business hours had left judges unable to locate detainees or assess their claims before they were removed from the country.1
The two-day pause was narrower than automatic stay policies already in place elsewhere. The Fourth Circuit itself grants a 14-day stay in comparable immigration cases, and similar practices exist in the First, Second, Third, and Ninth Circuits.
Who the DOJ Sued and What It Claimed
On June 24, 2025, the Department of Justice filed a complaint naming all 15 Maryland district judges, the court’s chief clerk, and the court itself as defendants. Attorney General Pamela Bondi called Russell’s order “an egregious example of unlawful judicial overreach” and said it impeded the president’s authority to enforce immigration laws.
The complaint advanced three main theories:
- The standing order defied the procedural requirements for issuing preliminary injunctions.
- It violated Supreme Court precedent requiring case-by-case rulings.
- It intruded on core executive branch powers over immigration enforcement.
Bondi pointed to a broader trend, saying district courts had entered more nationwide injunctions in the first 100 days of the administration’s second term than in the century between 1900 and 2000.
Because every Maryland district judge was a defendant, none could preside. The Fourth Circuit assigned Judge Cullen of the Western District of Virginia, himself a Trump appointee, to hear the case. The administration also asked to move the litigation out of Maryland entirely.
The Maryland judges retained former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to represent them. On July 21, 2025, they moved to dismiss, calling the suit “neither justiciable nor meritorious” and “fundamentally incompatible with the separation of powers.” Their brief argued that the judges and clerk were protected by judicial immunity for official acts, that the DOJ had no cause of action to sue an entire district instead of appealing individual cases, and that a two-day pause was too modest to constitute the extraordinary interference the government alleged. As Clement put it in the brief, “A lawsuit captioned Congress v. Executive or vice-versa would be dismissed in a heartbeat. A suit effectively captioned Executive v. Judiciary fares no better.”
Why the Case Was Dismissed
Judge Cullen heard oral arguments on August 13, 2025, and issued his opinion 13 days later. He dismissed the case on several independent grounds.
On immunity, he held that the defendant judges had broad protection for their judicial acts and that the court itself was shielded by sovereign immunity. The standing order, in his view, was a judicial act at its core, not the kind of administrative conduct that might fall outside those doctrines.
On justiciability, he found the dispute was the sort of inter-branch conflict federal courts lack authority to resolve through ordinary litigation. Letting the suit proceed, he wrote, would produce a “calamitous” and “dangerous legal standoff,” likely forcing senior executive officials and federal judges alike to sit for depositions and turn over internal communications.
On process, Cullen ruled that the administration had bypassed the “tried-and-true” channels available to it. The government could have appealed specific habeas rulings to the Fourth Circuit. It could have petitioned the Judicial Council of the Fourth Circuit, which has statutory authority to rescind or modify local court rules. Instead it chose an approach that would “run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”
In a footnote, Cullen addressed the administration’s public criticism of individual judges, calling it “unprecedented and unfortunate” and describing a “concerted effort by the executive to smear and impugn individual judges.”
The Appeal
The DOJ said it would appeal Cullen’s ruling. Then, in January 2026, the government tried to drop the appeal and asked the Fourth Circuit to vacate Cullen’s dismissal outright. Its argument: the case was moot because Chief Judge Russell had issued a new standing order in December 2025 that replaced the one the DOJ had challenged.
The Maryland judges opposed the move, treating it as an attempt to erase Cullen’s reasoning without engaging with it. On February 10, 2026, Fourth Circuit Clerk Nwamaka Anowi ruled the case was not moot and reinstated the briefing schedule. The government’s opening brief was due March 23, 2026, and as of early 2026 the appeal remained pending.
How the Case Fits the Broader Picture
The Maryland suit was one piece of a much wider set of confrontations between the administration and the federal courts. By mid-2026, more than 750 lawsuits had been filed challenging administration actions, with courts blocking government policies in hundreds of them. Separately, on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. CASA, in an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, that federal courts lack authority to issue universal injunctions covering non-parties, which reshaped how challengers to administration policies could seek relief.
What set the Maryland case apart was its target. It was not a challenge to a statute or a policy. It was a suit by the executive branch against judges for issuing an order in the course of judging. Cullen’s dismissal, and the Fourth Circuit’s refusal to let it disappear without an appellate ruling, made the case a reference point for how far the executive branch can go in taking its disputes with the judiciary directly to court.