Paxton, the DOJ, and a Friendly Judge Took Five Hours to Box in Future Presidents

On Monday, the Trump administration scored a quiet win in court. It did so in complete control of the circumstances: it got to pick the judge. Its opponent wasn’t opposed. The result — encompassing the entire case — came in a matter of hours.

It was the case of Texas v. DOJ, an obscure administrative lawsuit filed in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas. Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden Texas attorney general who is running for Senate, sued to invalidate a Biden-era rule allowing immigration court judges to shelve deportation cases indefinitely without deciding them.

Normally, the kind of lawsuit that Paxton brought against the DOJ drags on for weeks or months as the government defends a given policy or, in some cases, elects to abandon it.

Within four hours, this case was decided.

That’s a wild level of speed in a decision that saw no adversary. No person or entity opposed the lawsuit or had the chance to do so. The case was filed in a single-judge division, where Judge Reed O’Connor, a reliable administration ally, sits. In less than five hours, he issued a ruling that purported to permanently block the DOJ — under any future administration — from issuing the rule while also annulling it.

Timestamps show that the complaint was filed against the DOJ at 1:51 p.m. At 2:59 p.m., the DOJ and Texas filed a motion jointly asking the court to order what Paxton’s complaint sought. At 6:29 p.m., 278 minutes from the time the case was filed, Judge O’Connor, chief judge in the Northern District of Texas, gave the DOJ and Paxton much of what they asked for.

The practical result of the ruling may be less severe than it might have been, immigration attorneys told TPM, in part because the Trump administration has largely already curtailed immigration judges’ ability to administratively close cases. The issue has been a flashpoint in the arcana of immigration court procedure since the first Trump administration, with anti-immigration conservatives seeing it as a means to create a backdoor to allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. Others argue that it’s a simple question of case management for immigration judges, who face large backlogs and, though they are DOJ employees, have leeway under the law in how to handle and resolve immigration cases.

Paxton and the DOJ had sought a ruling declaring that “no statute authorizes immigration judges to administratively close or suspend adjudication of a case.” O’Connor ruled that future administrations are banned from issuing rules allowing that practice absent an “express statutory basis” to do so. A DOJ official told TPM that judges would still be able to administratively close cases, but would do so under a different authority. The person said the department settled because it believed Paxton’s argument was correct.

Monica Haymond, a professor at Northwestern’s Pritzker Law School, told TPM that settlements between the federal government and a party fundamentally friendly to the administration have been going on since the Carter administration, but that the speed with which the court decided the case and the breadth of the judge’s ruling marked it as different. That’s in part, Haymond said because the court ruled without “adverse argument or presentation.”

“It seems very wrong-headed for a court to do this kind of thing, and one would hope that the Fifth Circuit would correct it, but when you don’t have an adverse party to appeal the judgment, then these kinds of decisions can stand,” she said.

Paxton brought the case with assistance from a lawyer at the America First Legal Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller in 2021 that has worked closely with the Trump administration on its immigration agenda.

The result may be that it’s far more difficult for future administrations to undo the rule.

“The administration can easily reverse a rule with which it disagrees, evade notice-and-comment rulemaking, and tie the hands of the future administration by conceding the agency lacks statutory authority to promulgate the rule in the first place,” Nick Bednar, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, told TPM. “This is a win-win for a presidential administration that has defined its agenda around deregulation.”

It’s not the first time that Paxton and the Trump administration have engaged in a similar approach before the same judge. Last year, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in the division where O’Connor is the sole judge seeking to block Texas from providing in-state tuition to undocumented college students. Paxton immediately filed a notice declining to defend the state’s in-state tuition policy; O’Connor ordered the policy ended that afternoon.

Court cases require real conflict between at least two sides, seeking an impartial judge to decide. To Haymond, it’s far from clear that the case this week met that bar.

“It’s a little unclear whether or not there are adverse interests in that same way,” she said. “The state of Texas would need to show that it has some harm that it’s suffering from this particular rule, and I’m not sure what that is.”