Mass departures from the
The department’s public court filings, along with interviews with current and former attorneys reveal challenges facing the government as it fights hundreds of cases against President
The department has handled more than 450 court challenges — an unprecedented number for a new administration. In roughly one out of every seven cases, at least one of the government’s lawyers was reassigned, left the department or withdrew without stating their reasons, according to a Bloomberg News review of the filings.
In the Federal Programs Branch, which plays a lead role defending executive branch policies, more than half of the hundred-plus lawyers have left, according to a current Justice Department lawyer who requested anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Those have included litigators involved in cases about Trump’s ban on transgender military servicemembers, the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and termination of federal grants.
Government lawyers have withdrawn in more than 30 of the cases challenging Trump’s immigration policies since January, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg. That includes departures from the teams defending Trump’s efforts to cancel birthright citizenship, stop the flow of refugees into the US, and use of a wartime powers law to send alleged Venezuelan gang members to a Salvadoran prison.
Requests by lawyers for deadline extensions filed on public court dockets offer a rare window into the upheaval in offices tasked with trying to keep Trump’s policies intact in the face of the departures and the deluge of lawsuits.
One attorney focused on immigration cases cited the difficulties in “balancing competing litigation obligations” following the departures of “multiple” colleagues. A lawyer in a different office alluded to problems keeping up with a “substantial current workload.” An assistant US attorney in Washington put it more bluntly, saying his office is “overwhelmed” by the “continued surge” of cases.
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement that, “our attorneys in the Federal Programs Branch and elsewhere across the Civil Division are working tirelessly to fight the unprecedented number of lawsuits filed against the President’s executive orders, policies, and actions. The Department has defeated many of these lawsuits all the way up to the Supreme Court and will continue to defend the President’s agenda to keep Americans safe.”
Hundreds of Justice Department lawyers have resigned or been removed since Trump took office, an exodus that’s coincided with a rapidly rising caseload. Attorney General
During a Feb. 28 hearing in a fight over Trump shuttering the US Agency for International Development, a Federal Programs Branch lawyer cited his office’s understaffing and fast-moving caseload when the judge questioned why the government hadn’t offered more evidence. The lawyer said they hadn’t had a break since the inauguration and that he and his colleagues were “working day and night.”
The current Justice Department attorney said that a number of longtime Programs Branch lawyers had left because the job had simply become untenable, pointing to the workload, lack of resources, the administration’s persistent attacks on federal employees, and policy changes like getting rid of remote work and DOGE’s demands for weekly emails about how they spent their time.
For others, the nature of the work was a factor, said Stacey Young, an 18-year veteran of the Justice Department who left in January and founded a network of alumni called Justice Connection. “They were asked to take positions they believed were illegal or unethical, including in the Civil Division,” she said. “This number is considerably higher than most people realize.”
In the Office of Immigration Litigation, a specialized division once home to more than 300 lawyers, the government litigators coordinate with local US attorney offices to defend against a swath of actions, from individual deportation orders to sweeping executive orders.
The immigration litigation office’s district court section is at capacity, said one former attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. The office has also lost people with valuable expertise, the former attorney added.
David McConnell resigned as director of the immigration office’s appeals division in February after more than 30 years at the Justice Department. He said in a written statement to Bloomberg that he left because of his “abrupt reassignment” to a Trump administration task force focused on so-called sanctuary cities.
“I feel badly for leaving people behind, particularly at a time when they are being asked to handle a tremendous workload and make challenging and new arguments without the same level of institutional support or knowledge that I and others who have since left the office had traditionally provided,” McConnell said.
Another public flashpoint came in April, when Erez Reuveni, a DOJ attorney known for defending immigration policies during Trump’s first term, was suspended – and eventually dismissed – after he admitted that the government had sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador by mistake.
Reuveni later submitted a whistleblower complaint accusing senior administration officials of scheming to defy court orders and withhold information from a judge. The Justice Department has denied the allegations.
Justice Connection’s Young said the sequence of events leading to Reuveni’s firing sent a chilling message: even some attorneys with a history of defending Trump’s hard-line immigration policies were vulnerable to internal purges.
“Attorneys in the civil division know that Erez Reuveni was fired because he refused to violate his duty of candor to the court, and many are rightly concerned that they could be next,” Young said.
To deal with the workload, the immigration litigation office has increasingly delegated a significant portion of new cases to lawyers in US attorney offices around the country, at least some of whom don’t have the same amount of expertise handling immigration policy challenges with national consequences, according to a former trial attorney in that section.
The same is true for the Federal Program Branch, with a larger proportion of cases going to US attorney offices that Main Justice lawyers would normally keep or at least lead, the current Justice Department lawyer said.
Civil Division leadership is working to recruit more lawyers, the current attorney said, but new hires aren’t bringing the same level of expertise and years of government experience to make up for what the litigating offices have lost.
(Updates with DOJ comment in eighth paragraph.)
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Janet Paskin, Elizabeth Wasserman
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