Justices Side With Trump in Immigration Judges Venue Fight (2)

The Supreme Court summarily reversed a lower court order that questioned whether a law routing claims by federal workers to a civil service review board is enforceable due to President Donald Trump’s firings of key administrative officials.

The decision came in a dispute over the proper forum for a lawsuit by an association for immigration judges challenging a policy barring them from speaking publicly without approval.

An unsigned per curiam order released Tuesday by the Supreme Court likely cuts off the immigration judges’ effort to litigate speech restrictions in court, instead channeling them through an internal administrative process. The Justice Department’s immigration office established restrictions in 2021 during Joe Biden’s administration requiring immigration judges to get a supervisor’s approval in advance of any public remarks that touch on their official duties.

The order, which reversed a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, said the Civil Service Reform Act intended to channel federal workforce claims through the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Fourth Circuit had earlier questioned whether the CSRA’s language blocking federal courts from hearing such federal personnel claims was undermined by Trump administration firings.

But that Fourth Circuit decision went far beyond arguments advanced by the National Association for Immigration Judges, the Supreme Court said as it remanded the case for further proceedings.

Immigration judges are housed in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. A district court initially ruled that under the CSRA, they must pursue their lawsuit through the MSPB, an agency within the executive branch that handles claims tied to actions taken against federal employees.

But a three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit vacated that decision last June as it questioned whether the civil service law “has been so undermined that the jurisdiction stripping scheme no longer controls.”

The panel then instructed the district court to reevaluate its prior holding in light of Trump’s termination of MSPB board member Cathy Harris and Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger.

Those firings came as part of a rapid overhaul of the executive branch during Trump’s first months back in office. The upheaval left MSBP without a quorum to review claims for most of 2025.

Bloomberg Law also reported in April that the agency declined to rule on nearly half of the cases involving challenges to administrative actions since its quorum was restored.

US Solicitor General D. John Sauer pushed the court to overturn the Fourth Circuit’s decision, arguing it flouted the consensus that the civil service reform law’s effect “is constant.”

The judges group had countered that the justices didn’t need to consider Sauer’s argument because the group made free speech claims Congress didn’t intend to keep out of federal court. But the justices on Tuesday denied a separate petition asking them to take up that very issue.

“It’s disappointing that the Court failed to take this opportunity to make clear that public servants can go directly to court to challenge broad restrictions on their speech,” Alex Abdo, an attorney for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who is representing the judges association, said in a statement. “Now more than ever, we need the insights of the nation’s immigration judges and other public employees to understand the work of our government.”

In their per curiam order, the justices criticized the Fourth Circuit for a decision it said veered beyond the claims pressed by the immigration judges and floated a theory based on current government conditions.

Federal courts aren’t commissions “licensed to ‘sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right,’” the court said.

Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in which he said “statutes change only when Congress changes them, not when judges decide that they no longer vindicate Congress’s purposes.”

The case is Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, U.S., No. 25-767, 5/26/26.