A federal judge appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump is not budging in his demand that the government “facilitate” a deported Venezuelan man’s return to the United States.

In the case, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, 20, was “wrongfully” deported to El Salvador in violation of a legal settlement agreement that was meant to keep him in the country while his pending asylum claim was litigated with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Notably, the plaintiff has filed his case under the pseudonym “Cristian,” but Politico reported his full identity on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the court itself, in line with a prior order binding the parties, is continuing to use the pseudonym.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, cited contract law principles in a 19-page opinion directing the government to try and get Lozano-Camargo back stateside “so that he can receive the process he was entitled to under the parties’ binding Settlement Agreement.”

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On Monday, the government filed sealed arguments in an attempt to convince the judge to vacate her order. Along with those mysterious legal arguments, the government publicly filed a heavily redacted “Indicative Asylum Decision.”

The government’s public formal document explains why the Trump administration believes Lozano-Camargo’s underlying asylum claim will fail.

During a hearing on Tuesday, however, the judge said the asylum case is too far removed from the current legal dispute to be dispositive.

“I don’t think that this is a case about whether or not Cristian is going to eventually get asylum,” Gallagher said, according to a courtroom report by Politico. “Whether he ultimately receives asylum is not the issue. The issue is, and has always been, one of process.”

The issue, rather, is a 2024 settlement that limits how people who came to the country as unaccompanied minors can be deported, according to the judge. In Lozano-Camargo’s case, because he came to the U.S. when he was 17, that court-approved agreement means the government must wait until his asylum claim is extinguished.

“It is an axiomatic principle of contract law that when a defendant breaches a contract, that defendant must restore the situation that existed before the breach,” Gallagher wrote. “In the case of Cristian, this requires putting him in the position ‘to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.’ In other words, under contract law principles, Cristian, and any other Class Member who has been removed in violation of the Settlement Agreement, must be returned to the United States to await adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS.”

An accompanying April 23 order explains, in relevant part:

Defendants are hereby ORDERED to facilitate Class Member Cristian’s return to the United States to await the adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS under the terms of the Settlement Agreement. Facilitation includes, but is not limited to, a good faith request by Defendants to the government of El Salvador to release Cristian to U.S. custody for transport back to the United States.

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Prosecutors

Acting US attorney once orchestrated Facebook posts criticizing judge presiding in his case, report says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 28, 2025, 11:12 am CDT

The acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., formerly helped ghostwrite posts criticizing a judge presiding in a civil case in which he was the defendant, according to lawsuit documents cited by ProPublica.

U.S. attorney nominee Edward R. Martin Jr. helped his associate, Priscilla Gray, write the posts that began in 2016 after the Illinois judge “dealt Martin a major setback in the case,” according to the report by ProPublica, noted by Bloomberg Law’s Wake Up Call. Martin is filling the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia position on an acting basis.

Gray’s posts on the judge’s Facebook page called the judge a “politician” with the “lowest rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Martin had urged Gray to call the judge’s actions “unfair and rigged over and over,” according to ProPublica. He also urged Gray to privately message the judge, the article reports.

The judge was presiding in a case seeking to oust Martin from association with a grassroots group that he once headed, the Eagle Forum. The plaintiff was Anne Schlafly Cori, an Eagle Forum board member who was the daughter of the group’s founder, Phyllis Schlafly.

The truth about Martin’s involvement in the criticism “emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit,” according to ProPublica.

President Donald Trump has nominated Martin, who has no prosecution experience, to remain in the U.S. attorney position. Martin did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gray also declined to comment to the publication.

Andy Schlafly, a former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin, told ProPublica that Gray “speaks for herself” and had every right to express her outrage. He also said no court has ever sanctioned Martin for his “First Amendment advocacy.”

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Judiciary

Insurance case is ‘but a speck in the recesses of interstellar space,’ high-profile appeals judge writes

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 28, 2025, 3:07 pm CDT

In a span of less than a week, a conservative federal appeals judge has written two opinions that are getting attention—for taking a tough stand against the mistaken deportation of an immigrant in one case and for waxing philosophical in another case.

In an April 17 opinion, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III took the Trump administration to task for “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.”

Wilkinson wrote the “blistering” opinion for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Richmond, Virginia, in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia of Maryland, according to the New York Times.

Abrego Garcia was deported to a prison in El Salvador in Central America because of an “administrative error.” The case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem.

Now, Wilkinson is getting attention once again for an April 23 opinion in an insurance dispute involving a man on a lawn mower struck and killed by an underinsured motorist, according to Above the Law and the Judicial Notice newsletter at Original Jurisdiction.

The 4th Circuit held that the man’s estate was entitled to $150,000 under the plain terms of the man’s underinsured motorist coverage—and nothing more.

Wilkinson engaged in “existential, metaphysical musings” at the end of his opinion, according to Judicial Notice.

Here is what Wilkinson wrote: “What after all does it matter? A single, seemingly ordinary, rather technical insurance case. One among the many hundreds of rulings judges make each year.

“What does it matter? A case but a speck in the recesses of interstellar space and in the four-plus billion years since our solar system’s birth. What does it matter, this case deserted by both space and time?

“To be human is to live in the here and now. This small case extracts courageous meaning from the vast impersonality in which it resides. Its immediacy confounds infinity; its passions light the dark. We have given it our best; the litigants have given it their best. The trial court has done the same. We do not overlook for a moment the tragic passing of the insured but neither can we ignore the contract under South Carolina law that defines the insurer’s obligation.”

The insurance case is Owners Insurance Co. v. Walsh.

Wilkinson, 80, was appointed to the 4th Circuit by former President Ronald Reagan, the New York Times reports in a story about his background. He is the “son of a patrician Virginia banker,” an Army veteran and a law grad of the University of Virginia.

He delayed his legal education after one year to unsuccessfully run for Congress in 1970 as a Republican. After law school, he worked as a law professor and in the U.S. Department of Justice.

On the bench, the New York Times reports, Wilkinson has “a long track record of conservative rulings under his belt, having criticized rulings establishing abortion rights while writing approvingly of a broad conception of presidential power.”

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A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday expressed severe misgivings about the Trump administration‘s efforts to root out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives, but insisted he had little power to change the current state of play in an ongoing legal battle.

In the underlying litigation, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, a membership organization, won a late February injunction barring the new policies. This initial victory came when U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson, a Joe Biden appointee, found that the directives were both unconstitutionally vague and violative of the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

But the victory was short-lived.

On March 14, Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, along with Circuit Judges Pamela Harris and Allison Rushing, granted the government’s request for a stay pending appeal.

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The plaintiffs, undeterred, then asked Abelson to vacate his original injunction, citing what the court termed “new factual developments.” This effort was in service of a bid for a new preliminary injunction.

“[T]hey believe that ‘evidence related to agencies’ interpretation and implementation of the Executive Orders’ would further support the likelihood of success on the merits of their already-asserted claims, and further that they ‘could amend their complaint to add new facial claims’ challenging the executive order provisions at issue,” the court explains. “The new ‘facial claims’ Plaintiffs state they may add in an amended complaint would be claims under the Administrative Procedures Act.”

Such an injunction would more or less reset the case – and force the Trump administration to spend several weeks requesting and litigating another stay. And, the plaintiffs argued, even the appellate panel that paused the first injunction would be amenable here.

From the plaintiff’s motion, at length:

The concurrences emphasized that their opinions spoke only to the record so far and that future developments might alter the outcome. In his concurrence, for example, Chief Judge Diaz noted he was satisfied “for now” that Defendants had met their stay burden, but explicitly “reserve[d] judgment on the extent to which the government relies on the Orders’ savings clause provisions as it enforces the Orders’ directives ” …

Similarly, in her concurrence, Judge Harris concluded “for now” that Defendants had met their burden, but offered the “caveat” that “[a]gency enforcement actions that go beyond the Orders’ narrow scope may well raise serious First Amendment and Due Process concerns, for the reasons cogently explained by” this Court.

A federal judge in Louisiana known for his rulings that tend to align with causes championed by Donald Trump says that the president’s administration may have deported a 2-year-old girl who is a U.S. citizen, and has ordered the government to explain itself.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, appointed by Trump in 2018, issued a memorandum order Friday setting a hearing to address the apparent deportation of a 2-year-old identified only as V.M.L. According to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, or a request that court determine whether a person’s detention is unlawful, V.M.L. was born in 2023 in Baton Rouge, as indicated on her birth certificate.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Friday halted key sections of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order purporting to unilaterally change the rules regarding how federal elections are run, finding that the plaintiffs in the case were “substantially likely to prevail” on the merits.

In a 120-page order, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a preliminary injunction blocking the president’s measure that would require amending the national voter registration form to require proof of U.S. citizenship as well as a provision ordering federal agencies to “assess the citizenship” of individuals who receive public assistance before they are provided a voter registration form.

Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote that allowing those measures to be implemented would cause “irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs and “would not be in the public interest.”

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” the order states. “Consistent with that allocation of power, Congress is currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the President purports to order. And no statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”

The court noted that the legislation in Congress is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility [SAVE] Act, a Republican-backed measure critics have said could potentially disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. Many provisions of the SAVE Act are encompassed by Trump’s executive order.

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3. Suit is ‘almost a word-for-word carbon copy’…

Ethics

Suit is ‘almost a word-for-word carbon copy’ of prior complaint filed by different lawyers, federal judge says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 15, 2025, 8:53 am CDT

Updated: A federal judge in Puerto Rico has said she is considering sanctions for a San Juan, Puerto Rico, lawyer who filed a lawsuit that is “almost a word-for-word carbon copy” of a suit filed by different lawyers representing different plaintiffs.

In an April 9 order, U.S. District Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colon of the District of Puerto Rico found that the conduct by lawyer David Efron “runs afoul not only of attorney Efron’s duty of competence to his client but also his duty of candor to the court.”

Law 360 has the story.

Efron told the ABA Journal that there was no plagiarism because the plaintiffs in both cases are cooperating.

Efron is representing San Juan in a December 2023 suit alleging that activities by several oil-industry defendants caused damages because of their impact on climate change. Delgado-Colon said Efron’s suit and some of his other case filings are similar to documents in a prior suit filed by about 40 other municipalities.

“Just a review of the first couple of paragraphs of the complaint is enough to warrant suspicion,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

The opening language, footnotes and citations are identical to the corresponding paragraphs in the municipalities’ case, with a few exceptions, Delgado-Colon said. They include “sprinkling some adverbs such as ‘incredibly’ at the beginning of a paragraph,” referring to the correct plaintiff and “breaking a paragraph in two.”

As pointed out by the defendants, Efron’s suit was so “rife with examples of plagiarism” that it refers to documents that were never filed, it sometimes refers to the singular plaintiff as “municipalities,” and it repeats typos in the other suit, Delgado-Colon said in her order. Efron also refers to “this class action,” even though San Juan denied bringing such a case, the judge said.

“Attorney Efron lifted not only the entire theory of San Juan’s case from the municipalities’ case but went so far [as] to use virtually the very same words and ideas, usurping the thought processes and legal theories a client hires an attorney to develop and perform,” Delgado-Colon said.

Delgado-Colon said Efron was also late in filing case documents and ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned $7,000 for “untimely filings and lack of diligence in the management of case deadlines.” Efron had said he was in a federal jury trial at the time.

As for the alleged plagiarism, the judge said a monetary sanction on its own would be “insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstance,” and she would be issuing a separate order to address that issue.

“This opinion and order should serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the bar,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

Efron told the Journal in an email that the judge had “rushed to judgment” without getting the full story.

“There was no plagiarism,” Efron says. The plaintiffs in both cases “are collaborating for the same cause in the interest of controlling climate change. The judge without even conferring with counsel rushed to judgment without knowing that counsel in both cases are collaborating.”

Efron also says the order “is not final and has been referred for further proceedings after we are given an opportunity to respond and show cause.”

Updated April 15 at 11:23 a.m. to add lawyer David Efron’s comments.

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In what might seem like a weeks-removed bout of deja vu, a lawyer representing the Trump administration was harshly quizzed — and seemingly hardly believed — by a judge on Tuesday during oral arguments over the Pentagon’s planned transgender ban on service members.

During the hearing, Circuit Judge Cornelia T.L. Pillard, a Barack Obama appointee, was obviously and audibly askance of arguments advanced by U.S. Department of Justice attorney Jason Manion.

“How can you say that?” the judge asked the DOJ attorney at the outset — scorn apparent — taking issue with the government’s perspective out of the gate.

Manion, for his part, is no stranger to judicial dressing-downs.

A federal judge in Colorado this week appeared skeptical of allowing the Trump administration to resume using an 18th-century wartime authority to fast-track the removal of Venezuelan migrants with limited notice and minimal, if any, due process.

U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney on Monday heard arguments from attorneys representing the Justice Department and immigration rights groups regarding whether she should renew a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the government from invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA) to deport migrants to a notorious work camp in El Salvador.

The hearing came after the U.S. Supreme Court in the early morning hours of Saturday issued an order — the first and only Saturday order issued this term — directing the government “not to remove” any immigrant detainees subject to President Donald Trump’s proclamation invoking the AEA in northern Texas.

The Saturday order follows the justices April 7 order in which they unanimously held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal” under the AEA “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

In light of the high court’s ruling, an incredulous Sweeney questioned how the government could prevail in the instant case, asking the government’s attorney, “How could I not continue the temporary restraining order?” the Daily Camera reported.

Seeking to have the TRO lifted, the DOJ assured the court that any individuals subject to removal under the act would be given 24 hours to challenge their deportation before a judge, Denver CBS affiliate KCNC reported.

Attorneys from the ACLU and the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, the organizations representing the two unnamed petitioners in the case, pushed back on the administration’s position, asserting that affording migrants only one day to file individual habeas corpus petitions could not possibly comply with the Supreme Court’s directive requiring “reasonable time” for court challenges.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has reportedly directed authorities in the Sunshine State to stop immigration arrests from being carried out under a new law, which was signed into effect by Gov. Ron DeSantis in February, after a federal judge ripped local cops in court for ignoring an order she gave blocking such arrests.

“There is no such basis,” proclaimed U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama appointee, in court on Friday, according to the Miami Herald. “Why aren’t these people being released immediately?” she reportedly asked.

Robert Schenck, a lawyer who is representing the Office of the Attorney General, which is being sued over the new state law that was signed into effect by DeSantis — allowing for the arrest and prosecution of undocumented immigrants in Florida — claimed during the hearing that while state officials were blocked from issuing arrest warrants under Williams’ order, the state believed that law enforcement officers did not have to comply because they don’t act “in concert” with one another, per the Herald.