President Donald Trump attends the 157th National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery, Monday, May 26, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
The Trump administration is imploring a federal judge to make quick work of his colleagues” standing orders that automatically grant injunctions against the government in response to petitions for writs of habeas corpus filed by immigrants facing deportation.
In a 26-page motion for a preliminary injunction filed Thursday, the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Judge Thomas T. Cullen, who was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, to block the standing order while the underlying litigation plays out.
“Like other government officials, judges sometimes violate the law,” the motion begins. “When a judge or court does so in a standing order that harms the federal government’s sovereign interests on a repeated and ongoing basis, the government—like any other litigant—may and often does seek relief from that order through the judicial process.”
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The underlying lawsuit in the case, which was re-assigned to the Western District of Virginia judge this week, was filed on June 24, several weeks after Chief U.S. District Judge for Maryland George L. Russell III, a Barack Obama appointee, cited a recent deluge of emergency immigration proceedings to justify the preemptive, though time-limited, ban on deportations in the Old Line State.
The original two-page order – which also applies to any government effort to change an immigrant’s legal status – purports to alleviate administrative headaches caused by the influx of habeas proceedings. One week later, an amended standing order impose additional obligations – to provide notice – on the government.
The government initially characterized Russell’s standing orders as “a particularly egregious example of judicial overreach interfering with Executive Branch prerogatives—and thus undermining the democratic process.”
Now, the DOJ has reiterated their opposition in the hopes of obtaining quick relief.
“This action seeks judicial resolution of a pure legal question: the facial validity of standing orders that issue automatically to bar the federal government from removing an alien, whether or not the District of Maryland has jurisdiction over the case and whether or not the alien has a colorable claim to relief,” the motion goes on. “The government now seeks immediate preliminary relief from further issuance of the challenged standing orders.”
While using substantially similar language to the original petition, the motion also frames the matter as an affront to the nation’s high court.
From the motion, at length:
This case involves an extraordinary form of judicial interference in Executive prerogatives. Defendants have crafted a novel means of issuing avowedly automatic injunctions against the federal government. They entered a Standing Order and Amended Standing Order requiring these automatic injunctions despite the Supreme Court’s express instruction that, in immigration cases and otherwise, a “stay is not a matter of right, even if irreparable injury might otherwise result.” The Orders thus do precisely what the Supreme Court has forbidden.
“Indeed, the Orders are invalid on multiple levels,” the motion continues. “They defy the requirements for issuing a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order. They violate congressional limits on district courts’ jurisdiction over immigration matters. And they disregard the procedural and substantive requirements for issuing a local rule.”
To hear the government tell it, the standing orders are having a negative “impact on federal immigration enforcement,” particularly on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
“Implementation of the Orders interferes with ICE’s mission to administer and enforce the immigration laws, protect public safety, and promote national security,” the motion reads. “The Orders threaten to adversely impact the operational planning necessary to coordinate a removal, especially a removal of an alien to a country that may be recalcitrant about accepting the alien.”
The motion elaborates, at length:
Removals can take months of sensitive diplomacy to arrange and often do not completely come together until the last minute. A delay can undo all of those arrangements and require months of additional work before removal can be attempted again. Similarly, aliens often have travel documents with expiration dates. A judicially imposed delay can halt removals until after those travel documents have expired and removal is thus no longer possible without securing new travel documents.
…
The Orders even bar immigration judges from proceeding in the alien’s immigration proceedings, including by entering a removal order or adjudicating any applications for relief, such as asylum, withholding of removal, protection under the Convention Against Torture, and voluntary departure. The Orders also bar the alien from receiving other immigration-related benefits that would change the alien’s legal status, including temporary protected status, discretionary parole, work authorization, and the like.
So far, the plaintiffs complain, the standing orders have been applied to at least 12 different cases – and extended in at least one.
The motion goes on to argue the orders violate both procedural and substantive law – including the recent landmark ruling that ended nationwide injunctions as we know them. The government also cites that same Supreme Court case to argue it suffers irreparable harm from the orders.
Though the court’s standing orders are, self-evidently, not nationwide injunctions, the Trump administration argues they are effectively a form of injunction that “likely exceed” the court’s authority.
“Plaintiffs have already suffered irreparable harm, as the Orders intrude on core Executive enforcement prerogatives,” the DOJ argues. “They will continue to suffer irreparable harm absent a preliminary injunction.”
And, as is typical of many DOJ efforts to undo unfavorable conditions imposed by district courts as of late, the motion rings a loud bell in favor of strong executive authority.
Again, the motion, at length:
The Executive Branch takes a preeminent role in immigration enforcement largely because it implicates foreign-policy concerns. “Because decisions in these matters may implicate ‘relations with foreign powers,’ or involve ‘classifications . . . defined in the light of changing political and economic circumstances,’ such judgments ‘are frequently of a character more appropriate to either the Legislature or the Executive.'” Removal to a foreign country necessarily involves relations with that foreign power. An automatic injunction that undermines the Executive Branch’s constitutional and statutory authority over immigration thus constitutes “unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy.” By disregarding congressional bars on judicial review of immigration decision, the Orders encroach on the Legislative Branch’s prerogatives as well.
Even more fundamentally, every unlawful order entered by a district court robs the Executive Branch of time to enforce its policies. The Executive cannot get that time back. Moreover, because the President is “a representative of the people” and holds “the mandate of the people to exercise his executive power,” the Orders also diminish the votes of the citizens who elected him.
