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The Trump Justice Department has experienced a string of embarrassing legal blunders, raising questions about the department’s capacity to handle its swelling caseload while simultaneously defending the administration’s aggressive policy agenda in federal courts.
Among the most glaring missteps: federal lawyers filed a voting-roll lawsuit against Washington state, issued a press release about it — then failed to serve notice of the lawsuit on the secretary of state. A judge gave the department a second chance. The same mistake happened in Georgia, where a separate voting-roll lawsuit was also filed in the wrong federal court and dismissed. The department had to refile in the correct court 80 miles away.
Those procedural failures are part of a broader pattern. In Minnesota, a DOJ lawyer on loan from Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked a judge to hold her in contempt and jail her for 24 hours, citing the prospect of her first full night’s sleep in weeks. In Maryland, an assistant U.S. attorney admitted she had confused one case with another, letting a fee-recovery demand go unanswered — she said she was juggling 440 cases over a 32-day stretch. In Massachusetts, government lawyers failed to respond to a challenge against a Homeland Security refugee-rearrest policy, and the judge halted the policy by default. In Manhattan, the U.S. attorney had to acknowledge that his office was misled by ICE about the justification for courthouse immigration arrests.
A former department lawyer, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, attributed the dysfunction to the Trump administration’s aggressive housecleaning of experienced career attorneys and their replacement with lawyers trained primarily in state court — a significantly different procedural environment than the federal courts where these cases are being litigated.
A senior department official pushed back, blaming an unprecedented volume of immigration litigation and what he characterized as “lawless judges” issuing adverse rulings that have compounded workload pressures across U.S. attorney’s offices nationwide.
The botches all occurred under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Trump fired earlier this month. No replacement has been named.
Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way, a longtime DOJ observer, said the department had “deteriorated drastically” in Trump’s second term, citing the loss of experienced career attorneys and a leadership vacuum in key positions.
A separate ethics complaint has also been filed with the D.C. bar targeting a senior immigration official over alleged misconduct in high-profile deportation cases.
Read more: Justice Department repeatedly making unforced errors under Trump
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