Ruben Castillo, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, is ready to operate a “triage system” if the shutdown extends beyond Jan. 11.
“I will have to have a meeting with our court personnel and tell them I won’t be able to pay them. Then we’ll have to shut down civil trials,’’ Castillo said. Criminal trials will get priority, he said, because defendants, who are presumed innocent, have been waiting for the resolution of their cases. In the end, he predicted, he will lose some veteran employees eligible for retirement.
“This is not the way to run a court system,’’ he said.
The courts will need to coordinate independently with local offices of the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which are part of the executive branch’s Justice Department rather than the judiciary, Sellers said. For the cases deemed crucial, it’s up to the Marshals and the U.S. Attorneys to ensure defendants are delivered to their hearings and government lawyers appear to prosecute them, he said.
For now, many courts are taking a wait-and-see approach. Daniel Spohr-Grimes, a spokesman for the court in the Eastern District of California, said the chief judge will issue an order detailing the scope of operations under lapsed appropriations if the shutdown continues past Jan. 11.
The Justice Department has already won court orders putting some of the cases it’s involved in on pause. In the busy Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, the chief judge on Dec. 27 put a hold on all civil cases in which the government is a party. In Washington, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan halted a challenge to restrictions the Trump administration imposed on immigrants seeking asylum. Sullivan, who has declared the policy unlawful, ordered the U.S. to alert him when funding is restored.
Some judges have declined to delay trials scheduled for January, including a California case challenging the administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.