Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
It’s been a bad week for President Donald Trump, what with his messy breakup with his former co-president, Elon Musk. But take heart—it was also a bad week for Trump in the courts.
Judge Royce Lamberth is not screwing around
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the administration’s attempt to deny gender-affirming care to incarcerated transgender people. That means the government has to continue providing hormone therapy while the litigation makes its way through the courts.
If you’re wondering how well the right is taking this, just google Lamberth’s name, and you will be met with an unending list of right-wing grievance sites screaming about how your tax dollars shouldn’t be used for this and framing Lamberth as some wild-eyed progressive ramming LGBTQ+ wokeness down everyone’s throat.
Except that Lamberth is an 81-year-old appointed by former President Ronald Reagan. He’s no liberal squish. He’s the judge who blocked then-President Barack Obama from expanding stem cell research.
An 81-year-old Reagan appointee, Royce Lamberth, granted a preliminary injunction barring the administration from implementing its executive order stopping any gender-affirming care or medical procedures in prisons. Lamberth Can’t wait to hear how Lamberth is some sort of liberal squish despite being the judge who blocked President Obama from expanding stem cell research.
Lamberth also oversaw many of the convictions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, which presumably makes him bad forever in the eyes of conservatives. But he’s also the judge who held Washington, D.C., corrections officials in contempt over their treatment of one Jan. 6 defendant and referred the matter to the Department of Justice to determine whether other Jan. 6 defendants faced the same treatment.
If Lamberth has any liberal tendencies, it may be that he doesn’t think the government should be able to treat incarcerated people shabbily. That doesn’t bode well for this administration in this case, but it bodes well for the case’s plaintiffs and for those of us who are looking to grab onto some glimmer of hope.
Magistrate Judge Amelia Helmick is not screwing around
Remember how the Trump administration keeps saying their deal to throw people into a notorious Salvadoran prison, CECOT, is so secret that it can’t possibly be revealed, even to judges overseeing the numerous lawsuits against the administration over these deportations?
Yeah, Magistrate Judge Amelia Helmnick is not going to entertain that nonsense.
In this case, the plaintiff, a Venezuelan citizen going by “E.D.Q.C.,” contends he was not given notice of his removal to El Salvador and therefore couldn’t have challenged it. Helmick just ruled that the administration has to answer the plaintiff’s discovery requests, including whatever deal the administration made with El Salvador’s millennial dictator, Nayib Bukele:
The only reason El Salvador has even entered the conversation in this case is because the Government sent Petitioner to El Salvador. […] For Respondents to now assert that the terms of such relocation and potential detention should be shielded from Petitioner and the Court is disingenuous.
Judge Paula Xinis is not screwing around
U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis’ patience isn’t just wearing thin. It’s gone. The administration has refused to bring Maryland father Kilmer Abrego Garcia home, despite Xinis’ order to do so. Instead, they’ve clogged up this case with spurious filings, leaving Xinis in a position where she is near-constantly having to address whatever nonsense they’ve most recently thrown together.
On Wednesday, Xinis dropped two orders on the administration’s head. The first grants the plaintiffs leave to file a motion for sanctions against the government. This is a long way from actually granting sanctions, but it’s a start.
The other order addressed the administration’s attempts to keep much of what it is filing with the court unavailable from the public by filing it under seal. Again, Xinis isn’t having it, and she ordered many of the documents the administration said were national security treasures, or whatever, to be unsealed.
This administration keeps trying to get away with everything in the shadows, but Xinis is going to keep dragging them into the light.
More good news: Abrego Garcia is reportedly on his way back to the U.S., where he will still face criminal charges for supposedly transporting undocumented immigrants within America.
Judge Boasberg is not only not screwing around, he’s incandescent with rage
It’s been nearly three months since the Trump administration ignored U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order to turn around two planes filled with hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants being disappeared to El Salvador. It’s been a month and a half since Boasberg found there was probable cause to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for their defiance of that order.
On Wednesday, Boasberg’s extremely justified unhappiness with the government manifested itself in a 69-page opinion that kicks off by comparing the government’s treatment of the deported Venezuelans to Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel, “The Trial.” In the book, K. awakens to strange men arresting him, refusing to answer him as to why, informing him instead that “proceedings are underway.” When K. insists there is some mistake, he is told there has been no mistake and that the department detaining him is only “attracted by guilt.”
It does not get better for the government after that. Boasberg reminds them that the Supreme Court has held, in two separate cases, that deportees are entitled to notice that they are subject to removal, done within a reasonable time and manner that would allow them to petition for a writ of habeas corpus before being deported. Boasberg told the administration that if they contend that they won’t bring the deportees home, they must provide them with due process in El Salvador.
Boasberg also reminded the administration that he is fully aware that “many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang [Tren de Aragua] and thus languish in a foreign prison or flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”
Kafkaesque, indeed.
The 4th Circuit is not screwing around
Generally, the Civil Service Reform Act requires federal employees challenging their discipline or termination to exhaust administrative remedies before they can bring a suit in federal court. So federal employees have to first pursue the issue through the independent agencies set up by Congress—the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Office of Special Counsel.
Indeed, that’s what the plaintiffs in National Association of Immigration Judges v. Owen were told back in 2023, when the lower court ruled that the MSPB was the only avenue for immigration judges—who, despite the name, are not part of the judiciary and are not appointed, but rather are part of the executive branch and are hired—to challenge the conditions of their employment.
You may be saying, “Why is this here in my Trump Bad News Update when it looks like an old case that was dismissed back in the Biden administration?”
Well, because in the intervening time, Trump illegally removed members of the MSPB and fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger. Trump recently replaced Dellinger with Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old right-wing podcaster whose previous legal work consists mostly of representing notorious misogynist Andrew Tate.
When the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard this case on appeal, Trump’s dismantling of the protections for federal employees was well underway. If neither the MSPB nor the Office of Special Counsel is functional, employees have nowhere to turn. So the 4th Circuit remanded the case to the lower court to determine whether the Civil Service Reform Act “has been so undermined” that it can no longer bar federal employees from suing directly in federal courts.
Trump shouldn’t be able to trap employees in a futile—one might even say Kafkaesque—scheme where they can never meaningfully challenge employee decisions via the executive branch agencies.