WASHINGTON — The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court in Richmond on Friday, October 30, 2026, to revive its lawsuit against every federal judge in Maryland, a case that tests whether one branch of government can sue another branch over a court rule that briefly slows deportations. The argument before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did not decide the dispute. It only addressed whether the lawsuit should be allowed to proceed at all, after a trial-level judge dismissed it last year.
Justice Department attorney Sarah Welch told the panel that the earlier dismissal was wrong and that the government has a legitimate way to bring this kind of claim in federal court. Lawyers for the Maryland judges urged the panel to leave the dismissal in place and to send a clear signal against a repeat of the same kind of lawsuit. The judges on the panel pressed both sides, and several appeared doubtful about the government’s theory, according to reporting on the hearing. No ruling was issued from the bench, and the panel will decide the appeal in a written opinion at a later date, with no deadline for that decision.
The stakes are easy to state and hard to overstate. If the administration wins, a lawsuit that names an entire district court as defendants could move forward, with discovery and further proceedings that the judges’ lawyers warn would be deeply disruptive. If the judges win, the dismissal stands, and the administration would need to use the ordinary tools available to litigants who disagree with a court order, such as appealing in individual cases or asking the court system itself to change the rule. Either way, the immediate two-business-day pause at the centre of the case remains in place for now, because the dismissal did not strike down the standing order and the hearing itself changed nothing on the ground.
What the Maryland judges lawsuit is really about
The dispute began with a standing order from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. In general terms, the order automatically paused the removal of a person detained in Maryland for two business days after that person filed a new habeas corpus challenge to detention. A habeas petition is a long-established legal device through which a detained person asks a court to decide whether detention is lawful. The point of the short pause, as the court framed it, was to give the court enough time to look at an emergency filing before the person at the centre of it was removed from the country, which could otherwise make the case difficult or impossible to decide.
The version of the order in force at the time of the hearing had been revised. Reporting on the case describes a second amended standing order signed by Chief Judge George L. Russell III on December 1, 2025, under which a habeas petition certified as needing emergency relief bars removal from the continental United States until 4 p.m. on the second business day, and also suspends any change in status that would remove the court’s jurisdiction. The assigned judge can extend, shorten or dissolve the pause in a particular case. That flexibility matters, because the order is not a blanket ban on removals. It is a short, adjustable window tied to a fresh court filing, designed to preserve the court’s ability to act.
Rather than challenge the order in a single habeas case, the Justice Department, joined by the Department of Homeland Security, sued all of the judges of the Maryland district court in June 2025, along with the court’s clerk. The government argued that the policy unlawfully interfered with the executive branch’s authority over immigration enforcement and with its ability to carry out removals quickly. That choice of target is what makes the case unusual. Ordinarily, a party that believes a judge has made a wrong ruling appeals that ruling. Here, the government instead brought a separate civil lawsuit against the judges themselves, in their roles as the authors of a court-wide rule.
The judges, represented by prominent appellate advocate Paul Clement of Clement and Murphy, have described the lawsuit as an unprecedented overreach and as a threat to the independence of the judiciary. Their argument, in substance, is that judges cannot be sued by the executive branch for the rules they adopt to manage their own court, and that allowing such a suit would open the door to depositions of judges about their reasoning, to intrusive questioning about their motives, and to a cycle of litigation every time the executive branch dislikes a procedural rule. The judges also argue that the proper remedies already exist, and that the government chose the wrong vehicle for its complaint.
How Judge Thomas Cullen dismissed the case
Because every Maryland judge was named as a defendant, no Maryland judge could hear the case. It was assigned to United States District Judge Thomas Cullen of the Western District of Virginia, a judge appointed by President Donald Trump. On August 26, 2025, Cullen dismissed the lawsuit in a lengthy opinion. He held, in substance, that the administration could not sue the judges in this way, that the judges were protected by judicial immunity, and that the executive branch lacked a valid cause of action to bring one branch of government into court against another over a court rule.
Cullen’s opinion was unusually blunt in tone. He described the lawsuit as part of a broader and unfortunate campaign to criticise and undermine judges who rule against the administration’s policies, and he warned that the suit did not respect the judiciary’s constitutional role. He also pointed the government toward the ordinary routes it had not taken, including appealing adverse rulings in individual habeas cases and asking the Fourth Circuit’s Judicial Council, the body that oversees court administration within the circuit, to change the rule. In his framing, those routes were not only available but were the correct ones, and a freestanding lawsuit against the judges was not a substitute for them.
The In re Debs argument at the Fourth Circuit
At the heart of the government’s appeal is an 1895 Supreme Court decision, In re Debs, which grew out of the Pullman railway strike led by union leader Eugene Debs. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s use of a court injunction to stop interference with interstate commerce and the transportation of the mail, reasoning that the national government, entrusted with powers and duties for the general welfare, could apply to its own courts for proper assistance in carrying them out. The Justice Department argues that this line of authority gives the United States a cause of action to seek injunctive relief to protect federal interests, even without a specific statute creating that claim.
Welch argued that the government therefore has a legitimate basis to ask a court to block a rule it says obstructs federal enforcement. The judges on the panel tested that argument carefully, asking whether Debs, a case about a railway strike and the mail, can really be stretched to cover a lawsuit by the executive branch against an entire federal court over its internal procedures. The concern, voiced most sharply by Judge Stephanie Thacker, an appointee of President Barack Obama, was that the government’s characterisation understated what was actually happening: this is the executive branch suing the judicial branch, not an ordinary dispute between a litigant and an opponent.
Judge Thacker pressed Welch to identify a single comparable case, a challenge that goes to the novelty of the government’s position. If no close precedent exists, the court must decide whether to extend an old principle to a new and sensitive setting, or to hold that the absence of precedent is itself a reason for caution. Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., an appointee of President Donald Trump, pushed back at points during the argument, testing the judges’ side of the case as well. The third member of the panel, Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sat with them in Richmond. The mix of appointing presidents on the panel is a reminder that the questions here are institutional, not simply partisan, even though the underlying immigration policies are contested along political lines.
Clement, for the judges, urged the panel to uphold the dismissal and to do so in terms that discourage a future case like it. His argument rests on a practical warning as much as a legal one. If the executive branch can sue judges over a standing order, then every procedural rule that slows enforcement, even briefly, could become the subject of a lawsuit against the judges who adopted it. That, the judges’ side argues, would chill judicial administration, invite political pressure on courts through litigation, and blur the separation of powers that keeps each branch within its own role. The government, by contrast, argues that without a remedy of this kind, a court rule that it believes is unlawful could operate unchecked, because individual appeals are slow, case-specific, and may never squarely address a court-wide policy.
Why the case took a complicated path to the hearing
The appeal reached the Fourth Circuit, case number 25-2004, under the caption United States v. Russell, after the government filed a notice of appeal following Cullen’s dismissal. Its path since then has not been straightforward. Reporting on the appeal’s history notes that the government at one point asked to drop the appeal and to vacate Cullen’s opinion, arguing that the case had become moot after the Maryland judges revised the standing order and changed its conditions. The judges’ side urged the court to press forward and to treat the case as not moot, arguing in part that the administration had threatened to pursue the same arguments in new litigation. The Fourth Circuit denied the government’s motion to dismiss the appeal, according to a university litigation database cited in reporting, which is why the case was argued on its merits in Richmond.
That mootness dispute matters for reasons beyond procedure. If a case is moot, courts generally do not decide it, because there is no longer a live controversy to resolve. If it is not moot, the court must confront the underlying question even though the rule has changed. Here, the revision of the standing order did not end the disagreement about whether the executive branch may sue judges over such rules, and both sides had reasons to want an answer. The government may prefer a ruling that preserves its theory for future use, while the judges may prefer a ruling that closes the door firmly. The panel’s decision on mootness, and on the merits, will therefore shape more than this one order.
What happens next for detained people in Maryland
For people detained in Maryland who file new habeas challenges, the practical position has not changed as a result of the hearing. The standing order remains in place, the dismissal remains the last operative court decision, and the panel has set no date for its written ruling. A person who files a qualifying emergency petition should, under the current order, still benefit from the pause until 4 p.m. on the second business day, unless the assigned judge extends, shortens or dissolves it in that case. That is a short window, not a grant of status or a decision on the merits of detention, and it should not be confused with a ruling that a person may remain in the United States.
What remains uncertain is the scope of any eventual ruling. The panel could affirm the dismissal on narrow grounds, such as immunity or the absence of a cause of action, without addressing every argument the parties raised. It could reverse and send the case back for further proceedings, which would raise new questions about discovery, about how judges defend a rule they adopted collectively, and about what relief a court could grant against its own colleagues in another district. Or it could resolve the case on mootness or on another threshold ground, leaving the larger constitutional questions for another day. Until the opinion arrives, the safest description of the case is the simplest one: the administration has asked to revive an unprecedented lawsuit, the judges have asked the court to reject it, and the court has not yet answered.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, Law.com and Bloomberg Law.