After months of impeding President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda and deportation program, one federal court is now facing legal consequences. The U.S. Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) filed a lawsuit Wednesday against all 15 judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, targeting a “standing order” imposed by the court which automatically blocks the Trump administration from deporting any illegal immigrant who files a habeas corpus petition. “In doing so, the District Court defies procedural and substantive requirements for issuing preliminary injunctions, flouts congressional intent, and violates Supreme Court precedent,” the DOJ wrote in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “President Trump’s executive authority has been undermined since the first hours of his presidency by an endless barrage of injunctions designed to halt his agenda.” She added, “The American people elected President Trump to carry out his policy agenda: this pattern of judicial overreach undermines the democratic process and cannot be allowed to stand.” According to the DOJ, federal district courts have issued more universal injunctions against the second Trump administration “than in the 100 years from 1900 to 2000.”

The lawsuit names Clinton-appointed Judges Deborah Chasanow and Catherine Blake; George W. Bush-appointed Judge Richard Bennett; Obama-appointed Judges George Russell, Theodore Chuang, Paula Xinis, James Bredar, and Ellen Lipton; Biden-appointed Judges Deborah Boardman, Lydia Griggsby, Julie Rubin, Brendan Hurson, Matthew Maddox, and Adam Abelson; and Trump-appointed Judge Stephanie Gallagher as defendants. Previously, Gallagher ordered the Trump administration to un-deport an illegal immigrant who was shielded from deportation by a pre-existing contract, although she admitted that it may not be possible for the U.S. to ultimately bring the illegal immigrant back into the country.

The Trump administration argued in the lawsuit that at least 200 years of American legal history “teach that injunctive relief ‘is an extraordinary equitable remedy that is never awarded as of right,’ even where a plaintiff claims or shows that he will suffer irreparable harm without one…” (Internal quotation marks removed.) The lawsuit added, “And injunctions against the Executive Branch are particularly extraordinary because they interfere with that democratically accountable branch’s exercise of its constitutional powers — including, as relevant here, the core Article II powers to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws and shape and manage its relationships with foreign nations.”

“Despite these elementary principles, in recent months and years, district courts have used and abused their equitable powers to interfere with the prerogatives of the Executive Branch to an unprecedented degree,” the Trump administration continued. The sheer, unprecedented volume of universal injunctions levied against the administration has required “the Supreme Court to intervene again and again in recent weeks to pause the unlawful restraint of the President’s exercise of core Article II powers,” the lawsuit noted.

“The challenged Orders here do precisely what the Supreme Court has forbidden: make equitable relief a ‘matter of right’ in the District of Maryland,” the Trump administration argued, citing the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Nken v. Holder. The administration clarified that the Maryland district court’s “automatic injunction issues whether or not the alien needs or seeks emergency relief, whether or not the court has jurisdiction over the alien’s claims, and no matter how frivolous the alien’s claims may be. And it does so in the immigration context, thus intruding on core Executive Branch powers.”

The “standing order” and subsequent automatic injunctions, the administration stated, “defy the requirements for issuing a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order,” “violate congressional limits on district courts’ jurisdiction over immigration matters,” and “disregard the procedural and substantive requirements for issuing what amounts to a local rule.” The administration added, “They are also fundamentally inconsistent with the judicial role to resolve only concrete and discrete ‘cases’ and ‘controversies,’ and to do so without predetermining a case before it has been brought.”

“Every unlawful order entered by the district courts robs the Executive Branch of its most scarce resource: time to put its policies into effect,” the administration argued, concluding, “In the process, such orders diminish the votes of the citizens who elected the head of the Executive Branch. Defendants’ lawless standing orders are nothing more than a particularly egregious example of judicial overreach interfering with Executive Branch prerogatives — and thus undermining the democratic process.”

Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Stand, “I have no idea why DOJ only just now got around to this.” When the Maryland district court issued its “standing order” over a month ago, Arthur explained that immigration-related habeas petitions are “used by aliens to challenge DHS detention, both before and after the issuance of a removal order.” While some immigrants were able to bring their habeas petitions before a district court in the past, Arthur noted that in 2005 “Congress amended the judicial review provisions … of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to channel aliens’ challenges to final removal orders away from the district court to the U.S. Courts of Appeals.” In other words, district courts lack the jurisdiction to review habeas petitions and, thus, to issue injunctions in habeas proceedings.

The U.S. Supreme Court determined earlier this year that illegal immigrants being deported under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) — as opposed to the INA — can only challenge their removal via habeas proceedings. Arthur observed that, in light of congressional stipulations in the INA “and the fact that no aliens subject to AEA removal appear to be detained by DHS in Maryland, it’s not entirely clear how the District Court in Maryland thinks this order will work.” He added, “Note, though, that this order isn’t limited to AEA removals, so don’t be surprised if aliens facing removal under the INA file habeas actions before the court to slow their removals…”

Arthur posited, “Now, imagine a scenario in which a foreign national who is not only putatively removable from the United States but who also has received his full ‘due process’ rights from immigration judges (IJs) and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) … can assume the mantle of a district court judge and block his or her own deportation from the United States, albeit briefly. That, in essence, is what the district court order purports to do, by allowing aliens who are not only under final orders of removal but facing imminent deportation from the United States to stay their own removals simply by filing petitions for writ of habeas corpus…”

“But the idea that a court could cede its power over such a significant issue as enjoining removal to the subject of that removal is unprecedented,” Arthur pointed out, continuing, “particularly as the Supreme Court has described motions to reopen deportation orders as ‘disfavored’ because ‘in a deportation proceeding … every delay works to the advantage of the deportable alien who wishes merely to remain in the United States.’”

The Trump administration’s lawsuit was filed in the Maryland district court, and asks the judges to block their own standing order and declare “that the Standing Order and Amended Standing Order violate the requirements for issuing injunctions, violate the limitations on district courts’ jurisdiction and remedial authority … and violate the requirements for local rules…”