The Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to enact major elements of its agenda have led to a series of courtroom clashes between increasingly skeptical judges and the beleaguered lawyers responsible for defending the government’s positions, which some have come to see as indefensible.
The Justice Department’s thinned-out civil division has borne the brunt of the growing conflict. Inside the division, the strains of pushing the legal limits on topics as varied as mass deportations, spending power and punishing law firms are taking a major toll. Government litigators, their ranks increasingly depleted, often find themselves in court with few facts to defend policies they cannot explain, according to current and former officials.
Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.
The most prominent example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador.
A day earlier, Mr. Reuveni appeared in a federal courtroom in Maryland, where, under pressure from a judge, he alternated between exasperation and concern, conceding that the deportation last month of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should never have happened. He asked for 24 hours to persuade his client, the Trump administration, to begin efforts to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.
Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”
A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.
“Justice Department attorneys are being put in an impossible position: Obey the president, or uphold their ethical duty to the court and the Constitution,” said Stacey Young, a former department lawyer who is now the executive director of Justice Connection, an organization of former department officials.
The loss of the two immigration lawyers in the middle of the litigation hits a division that had already been shadowed by retirements and transfers. Thus far, Mr. Trump’s political hires have proved more adept at firing those officials than hiring to make up for the losses, though the pace of recruiting at conservative law schools has been increasing, according to officials.
Yet Mr. Reuveni was hardly a member of a liberal resistance. He had litigated dozens of cases for administrations under both parties. He worked on a crucial part of the Trump agenda, going after localities that sheltered undocumented immigrants — which helped earn him a recent promotion and praise.
In several other high-profile cases, career prosecutors were punished for refusing to take actions they deemed unprofessional, improper or unethical, most notably the resignation and suspensions of federal prosecutors who refused to dismiss the case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
The exodus has forced three top Trump-appointed staff members — Mr. Blanche, his top aide Emil Bove III and Chad Mizelle, the department’s chief of staff — to sign motions or make court appearances that typically would have been handled by career officials.
While dismaying to Justice Department veterans, the actions were in keeping with a directive from Attorney General Pam Bondi that lawyers must not deviate from the decisions made by their superiors. She went so far as to release a statement saying the suspension was a message to anyone who prioritized decisions of conscience over her orders.
The practice of strong-arming career officials who question the legal or ethical basis of directives from the Trump team comes directly from Mr. Trump and his top advisers, who see the department, created as an independent arbiter of impartial justice, as an executor of their political will.
Even before Ms. Bondi took over in February, Trump appointees — led by a former member of his criminal defense team — presided over a wave of forced transfers, demotions and dismissals in the department’s criminal division.
Those tactics have now spread to the civil division, which is straining under the weight of defending dozens of lawsuits filed against Mr. Trump’s rapid-fire executive actions.
Current and former Justice Department litigators say they have never seen anything like it.
“I think the velocity and ferocity of the work is just unprecedented, in the number and kinds of cases and the speed with which they have been challenged,” said Jennifer Ricketts, who retired as the head of the Justice Department’s federal programs branch last year. Despite the blistering pace of litigation, Ms. Ricketts added that at her former office, the staff of lawyers had shrunk from roughly 100 to about half that number.
In rushing to govern by decree, the president has sought to punish law firms that once employed prosecutors who targeted him; end or limit other practices he dislikes at those firms, like providing free legal representation to immigrants seeking asylum in the United States; deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible; fire tens of thousands of federal workers; and slash the federal budget, which was once a congressional prerogative.
One immediate consequence is that many of those moves are being challenged in court, leading to dozens of emergency hearings around the country.
At times, the lawyers representing the Trump administration seem to have little understanding of what the White House is doing, or why.
During a recent hearing over an executive order seeking to bar the law firm Jenner & Block from engaging with the federal government, Judge John Bates of Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., pressed a government lawyer, Richard Lawson, to explain why the White House considered the firm a national security threat.
The concern, Mr. Lawson argued, was that a lawyer who left Jenner & Block years earlier, Andrew Weissmann, had been a longtime deputy to Robert S. Mueller III, who as the special counsel investigated Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia.
“But he’s a former employee,” the judge said. “You’re not really going to tell me that having someone employed four years ago poses some kind of national security threat?”
After a pregnant pause, Mr. Lawson answered, “not per se, no,” prompting laughter from some in the courtroom. Questioned further by the judge, Mr. Lawson changed course, declaring that “the national security interests are not critical.”
There were other oddities to the hearing. A recent hire to the department, he had previously worked for Ms. Bondi in Florida on consumer protection issues. And as he rushed from one courtroom to another for two emergency hearings concerning Mr. Trump’s bid to undercut the work of law firms, he sat alone, with no career lawyer by his side to assist.
To Judge Bates, who once worked in the local U.S. attorney’s office as a chief of civil litigation, the entire approach was jarring.
“The Department of Justice has a lot of lawyers,” he asked. “Why is this all on you, Mr. Lawson?”
Straightening his glasses, he replied that none of his colleagues were available. “I, frankly, was supposed to be in Florida, but here I am,” Mr. Lawson said.
“I don’t find that much of an answer,” the judge replied. Shortly after, he ruled against the Trump administration.
Despite the significant victory the Supreme Court handed to the White House last week in upholding the administration’s plan to cut off teacher training grants, federal judges have, in many cases, expressed a growing sense of disbelief to some of the administration’s answers.
Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington, who is considering whether the administration violated his explicit orders to stop deportation flights to El Salvador invoked under a wartime statute, suggested Friday that he may hold contempt hearings. The move, he indicated, may be necessary given how little the government has been willing to tell him about the flights themselves.
When a lawyer for the Justice Department, Drew Ensign, said the government had complied with the orders, the judge pushed back sharply.
“If you really believed everything you did that day was legal and could survive a court challenge, I can’t believe you ever would have operated in the way you did,” Judge Boasberg said.
The judge then suggested the administration had intentionally acted so that it could ship Venezuelan deportees to a prison in a third country “before it was possible to challenge it legally.”
Mr. Ensign said, “I don’t have any information on that.”
Some judges have expressed anger with the answers they are getting.
Last week, Judge Edward M. Chen of Federal District Court for the Northern District of California called it “disingenuous” for the Department of Homeland Security to claim that ending a temporary protected status for over 350,000 Venezuelans would not lead to deportations.
In late March, Judge Amy Berman Jackson was even more pointed as she considered the government’s plans to shut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The administration, she wrote, “was so disingenuous that the court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
