Can the president's administration sue an entire federal court? That was the real question argued on October 30 in Richmond, Virginia, where a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard the Justice Department's appeal in its unprecedented lawsuit against all 15 federal judges of the U.S. District Court for Maryland. The suit attacks a Maryland standing order that pauses the deportation of a detained immigrant for two business days after that person files a habeas corpus petition — a short window meant to let a judge read the petition before the person is flown out of the court's reach. No ruling came from the bench, Reuters and Courthouse News Service reported, and for detainees in Maryland nothing changes in the meantime.
Source: Baltimore Chronicle, summarising Reuters and Courthouse News Service
The hearing took place at the Lewis F. Powell Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Richmond. The panel — Judge Marvin Quattlebaum, a Trump appointee; Judge Stephanie Thacker, an Obama appointee; and Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin, a Biden appointee — pressed the government hardest on where its theory stops. Justice Department attorney Sarah Welch argued the government has a legitimate cause of action under In re Debs, an 1895 Supreme Court decision from a railway strike, which in the government's reading lets Washington seek an injunction against practices that infringe a sovereign interest. Welch told the panel the suit targets a procedural rule, not an adverse ruling in a particular case.
Source: Baltimore Chronicle
“What's to stop the executive branch from suing the Fourth Circuit?”
Judge Thacker put the panel's central worry to Welch directly: “What's to stop the executive branch from suing the Fourth Circuit?” In a separate account of the argument, Law&Crime reported Thacker telling the government lawyer, “I don't see a limiting principle to your position,” and noting that the case is “against an entire court” — and that the Fourth Circuit itself has a standing order similar to Maryland's. Judge Quattlebaum said a case being unprecedented does not make it wrong, but he also pressed Welch on whether her reading of Debs had any limits, and asked whether that line of cases reaches beyond the government's property and similar interests.
Source: Immigration Analytics, summarising Law&Crime's account of the hearing
Paul Clement of Clement & Murphy, the former U.S. solicitor general representing the Maryland judges, called suing a whole judicial district a grave threat to the separation of powers. He argued the judges are protected by judicial immunity, that letting one district judge review another district's rules would turn the court system sideways, and — on the government's fallback request to declare the case moot and erase the dismissal — that “if something has never been tried before, that is kind of prima facie evidence that the power doesn't exist,” warning that vacating the lower opinion would “create very perverse incentives.”
Source: Immigration Analytics
The two-day order at the centre of the fight
The current rule is the Second Amended Standing Order 2025-01, signed by Chief Judge George L. Russell III on December 1, 2025. A detainee held in Maryland who files a habeas petition can ask for an automatic stay by certifying that he or she is detained in Maryland, that emergency relief is necessary and that the court has jurisdiction. Once the clerk notifies federal prosecutors, the government may not remove the person from the continental United States until 4 p.m. on the second business day after that notice. The assigned judge can lengthen or shorten the window, or dissolve the stay if the government shows good cause. The order does not decide whether anyone is released or allowed to stay in the country — it only buys the court time to look.
Source: Immigration Analytics, summarising Standing Order 2025-01
The order grew out of the spring of 2025, when habeas petitions from immigrants facing rapid removal piled up in Baltimore and Greenbelt and the court said it needed time to review a flood of emergency filings, NPR reported. The period included the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man whose deportation to El Salvador became one of the most closely watched immigration cases in the country. The government's objection, as the Maryland Daily Record reported it, is also about time — from the other side: a government filing argued the order “robbed the Executive Branch of its most scarce resource: time to put its policies into effect.” Defenders answer that the pause is shorter than what appellate courts routinely grant themselves: Courthouse News reported in 2025 that the Fourth Circuit's own procedure freezes removal efforts for 14 days.
Source: Baltimore Chronicle
How the case got to Richmond
The timeline is short and stark. On May 21, 2025, Chief Judge Russell issued the amended standing order. On June 24, 2025, the United States and the Department of Homeland Security sued the Maryland court, its clerk and all its judges, calling the order “lawless,” CBS News and the Associated Press reported. Because every Maryland judge was a defendant, the case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen of the Western District of Virginia, a Trump appointee, who dismissed it on August 26, 2025, finding that judicial immunity barred the claims and that the executive branch had no right to bring this kind of suit. After Russell reissued the order with its certification and good-cause provisions, the Justice Department argued in January 2026 that the appeal was moot and asked the Fourth Circuit to wipe Cullen's opinion off the books; the court refused on February 10, the Maryland Daily Record reported.
Source: Immigration Analytics
The standing order's protection starts only once a habeas petition is actually filed in the District of Maryland — it is not automatic on arrest. For Maryland's immigrant communities, including Punjabi families across the Baltimore–Washington corridor, the practical lesson from lawyers in the case is speed: contact an immigration attorney immediately after a detention, because the two-business-day clock runs from the filing and the clerk's notice, not from the arrest.
What happens next: the panel will issue a written opinion, with no deadline. If it affirms the dismissal, Judge Cullen's reasoning becomes precedent across the Fourth Circuit's five states and future administrations would struggle to sue a court there over its procedures. If it dismisses the appeal as moot and vacates the opinion, the government loses nothing beyond this case and the legal question stays open. A ruling for the government on the merits would go furthest, letting the executive branch attack a court's case-management order in a standalone lawsuit instead of appealing individual cases. Whichever side loses can seek rehearing by the full Fourth Circuit or ask the Supreme Court to step in — and the same court heard Virginia's appeal over its ICE mask-identification law earlier the same week, on October 27.