October 2, 2025 — Morning Report

This episode covered the October 2025 government shutdown and its ripple effects on federal civil litigation. The courts themselves are funded through October 17 via court fees. Criminal and immigration courts are still running. The DOJ civil division, however, is shut down — its attorneys were told they cannot work on civil cases, even voluntarily. The DOJ filed nearly identical copy-paste stay requests across all civil cases it was litigating, citing the funding lapse. Bryan used the Pacito refugee case (a case about refugees stuck outside the US since a Trump EO blocked their admission) as the example because the plaintiffs pushed back. Unlike many co-plaintiffs in other cases who agreed to the stay, the Pacito plaintiffs opposed it: their clients are stuck in legal limbo as refugees outside the US, with each additional day of delay translating into additional time spent in that limbo. They offered a 14-day extension but said longer delays would require further court consultation. The court had not responded to the specific Pacito filing by airtime.

Unlike the Pacito plaintiffs who pushed back, the Haitian Americans United plaintiffs largely agreed to the DOJ's shutdown stay request, requesting only that individual deadlines be extended rather than the entire case be stayed. The court issued an order that Bryan read as the likely model for how shutdown-related stay requests will be handled across the federal court system: all filing deadlines are paused until Congress appropriates funds for the DOJ; upon restoration of funding, deadlines automatically extend by the exact duration of the funding lapse. If a deadline was October 10 and the shutdown lasted two days, it becomes October 12. The design is automatic and self-executing — no further court action needed to restore the schedule once funding is restored.

Chief Judge Boasberg of the DC Circuit issued a blanket order staying all civil proceedings in the district rather than waiting for individual case-by-case DOJ stay requests to work through the system. The order includes a built-in recovery period — 5 extra days after funding is restored for DOJ to catch up on its backlog, extended to 10 days if the shutdown lasts longer than a week. The critical exception: deadlines for responding to TRO and preliminary injunction motions are not stayed. Bryan's analysis: this exception tells us two things. First, the DC court will not let the shutdown become a tool for the executive to keep behaving badly while litigation is frozen — if someone is being actively harmed by ongoing government action, that harm doesn't pause because the government shut itself down. Second, it implies the court would order DOJ to keep working on those matters even if DOJ insists its civil attorneys are prohibited from voluntary work, since the court's authority to issue orders supersedes the funding lapse in that context. Bryan's overall summary of the episode: courts are funded through October 17; criminal and immigration courts are running (including immigration courts, which Bryan noted pointedly are "still open, go figure"); DOJ civil is shut down; the cases are being handled piecemeal by individual courts with varying approaches, though they're following a recognizable pattern.