President Trump’s Justice Department had a problem. Judge after judge was rejecting its demands that hospitals across the country turn over internal records of transgender care provided to children.
By the end of April, federal judges in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Seattle had either quashed or substantially pared back the administration’s demands that hospitals send patient records to the federal government.
But the administration did not give up. Instead, in April, it went to the Northern District of Texas’ Fort Worth courthouse, where nearly all cases go directly to the district’s chief judge, Reed O’Connor, or a second judge, Mark T. Pittman, who was appointed by Mr. Trump.
There were no hospitals in Texas that offered the transgender care at issue — state lawmakers banned gender-affirming care for minors in Texas in 2023. But the Justice Department asked the Texas court to enforce a subpoena to the Rhode Island Hospital, arguing that its nationwide investigation of such medical care was “being carried out in the Northern District of Texas.”
That was enough for Judge O’Connor, an appointee of President George W. Bush who has built a reputation as a conservative stalwart and became the district’s chief judge last August.
He granted the motion, clearing the way for the hospital to turn over a variety of personal data, including the names and Social Security numbers of minors who had received treatment.
“The subpoena’s demands are reasonable,” he wrote.
Most of the country’s 94 district courts assign cases randomly across all of their judges.
Northern Texas, where Judge O’Connor sits, does things its own way. It assigns cases to judges based on the courthouse within the district where the lawsuit is initially filed. Some courthouses are staffed by just one or two judges, meaning litigants can easily engage in “judge shopping” — filing their case in a particular courthouse and knowing to a certainty or near-certainty which judge will decide it.
In four of Northern Texas’ seven courthouses, one judge appointed by Mr. Trump hears all of the cases. In a fifth courthouse, all the cases go to Judge O’Connor. In a sixth — Fort Worth — 90 percent of the caseload is split between Judge O’Connor and Judge Pittman.
Of the district’s nine active-status judges, eight were appointed by Republican presidents — six of them by Mr. Trump. There are other districts in the country where more of the judges are Trump appointees, but very few assign cases the way Northern Texas does. And most fall outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, widely considered to be the country’s most conservative appellate court, which hears appeals from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
For years, conservative interest groups and the Texas attorney general’s office have filed lawsuits in Northern Texas, taking advantage of the district’s unusual case-assignment rules. Now, with Mr. Trump back in office, Judge O’Connor’s district has emerged as a destination for the Justice Department, as well.
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment about the practice. Judge O’Connor did not respond to requests for comment.
In quick succession this year, Judge O’Connor has struck down Biden-era rules regarding ghost guns and immigration courts. He has also issued several rapid-fire orders allowing the Trump administration to reach sweeping legal settlements with opponents who appeared to actually share the federal government’s ideological goals.
Legal scholars have stressed for years that Democratic administrations and states have also availed themselves of districts with a high concentration of judges seen as more liberal. But many draw a distinction between the more prevalent practice of “forum shopping” — that is, filing in a region where groups of judges have been generally considered friendly — and that of effectively filing directly to an individual judge.
Kevin Wagner, a political science professor at Florida Atlantic University, said the precision of venue shopping in Texas was unusual, having reached the point where litigants could achieve not just a “favorable” venue but even a “predictable” one.
The administration’s efforts to get major cases with nationwide consequences in front of Judge O’Connor come even as it condemns other judges for going beyond their remit.
Justice Department officials and Republicans in Congress have taken to calling trial court judges who exercise too much unilateral power “rogue judges.” But those criticisms from Mr. Trump’s supporters about judicial overreach are seldom aimed at judges who issue sweeping rulings that support his agenda.
Assigning major cases by geography as opposed to a random draw “undermines the appearance of impartiality,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, who has been critical of the Trump administration. She said the recent attacks on the judiciary’s credibility by the political branches made it “all the more important that the standards for case assignment are fair.”
Balls and Strikes
Judge O’Connor, a 61-year-old former federal prosecutor who spent time as a congressional aide before he was nominated to the bench in 2007, has emerged as a reliable skeptic of federal actions that cut against conservative orthodoxy. In 2015, he issued orders blocking paid family leave for gay couples and striking down a 1960s-era ban on interstate handgun sales.
In 2016, he struck down guidance crafted by the Obama administration directing schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. In a ruling blocking the rule nationwide, he found any government guidance that included that “the definition of sex includes gender identity” to be illegal.
Born in Texas, Judge O’Connor graduated from the University of Houston and received a law degree from the South Texas College of Law Houston in 1989.
He served nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Texas, and was detailed by the Justice Department to serve as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2003, advising Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and the panel’s chairman. In 2005, he was sent to assist an immigration-related subcommittee, this time working under Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
“Throughout his legal career and time on the federal bench, Judge O’Connor has called balls and strikes to help preserve our independent judiciary and uphold our Constitution, and Texas is better off for it,” Senator Cornyn said in a statement.
During Judge O’Connor’s 2007 confirmation hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island voiced concern about judicial nominees who he perceived to be feigning independence, only to hand down rulings in line with what he called their “political orthodoxy.”
In response, Judge O’Connor said he would follow in the path of judges who are “loyal only to the Constitution” and “call the cases as they see them.”
A Familiar Bench
Judge O’Connor’s recent prominence is tied to how the Northern District of Texas assigns its cases.
Judge O’Connor now serves as the sole federal judge in Wichita Falls, Texas, hearing every case brought in that division. He also covers cases in the Fort Worth division, where for a time he was the only judge.
All cases filed in the Abilene, Lubbock and San Angelo divisions are heard by Judge James Wesley Hendrix, another Trump appointee. And yet another Trump appointee — Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk — handles every case in the Amarillo division. In 2023, Judge Kacsmaryk issued a well-known ruling against the legality of mifepristone, an abortion drug, after an anti-abortion group incorporated in his district a few months before filing the suit there.
Miles T. Armaly, an associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi who coauthored a study on judge shopping in May, said the district’s power and popularity were linked to its position under the Fifth Circuit, which has upheld several of Judge O’Connor’s most contested rulings.
Even so, the circuit has jumped ahead of the Supreme Court in scrutinizing others, including rulings on Biden-era pistol brace regulations and a dispute between Elon Musk’s social media platform X and the liberal watchdog organization Media Matters.
Even after the Supreme Court’s decision last year curtailing the power of individual judges to block federal policies nationwide, Mr. Armaly said, single-judge divisions remain an important tool for litigants with political goals that extend outside the district.
The new limitations on nationwide injunctions took “one of the tools out of the tool kit,” he said, “but the construction project is still the same.”
Particularly under the second Trump administration, the Fifth Circuit has also emerged as a pipeline of contested decisions that the Supreme Court has increasingly been forced to untangle. It also stands out as the most reversed appeals court.
Alexander Gouzoules, an associate professor at the at the University of Missouri School of Law, said the combination of factors in Texas that allows litigants to choose a judge with known views and survive an appeal has increasingly encouraged people seeking an “outlier result” to file there over the past decade.
“Any one of these problems might be solvable on its own,” he said. “But when they’re combined with each other, there is a sort of exponential effect on the kind of destabilizing outcomes it produces.”
Single-judge divisions have sparked bipartisan complaints.
In 2021, a report on patent filings noted that litigants were funneling 20 percent of all patent lawsuits nationwide to a single judge in the Western District of Texas. The study prompted Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to write a letter demanding a review; their concerns were later cited by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Complaints grew so loud that in March 2024, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the administrative and policy-making arm of the federal judiciary, adopted new, nonbinding policy guidance advising judicial districts to randomly assign cases when major federal policies with nationwide implications were at stake.
“The random case-assignment policy deters judge shopping,” said Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., who heads the federal courts’ Administrative Office, in an announcement. “It promotes the impartiality of proceedings and bolsters public confidence in the federal judiciary.”
The proposed changes were not well received in Texas.
Two weeks later, the Northern District’s chief judge at the time, David C. Godbey, announced that the judges of the district had met and decided not to adopt the change.
Judge O’Connor added his voice later that year, denouncing the Judicial Conference’s recommendation as an attack on his district, in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society.
He complained that the conference’s comments were hypocritical, criticizing the Justice Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “a frequent forum shopper.” And he lamented the Judicial Conference’s decision as bowing to “external political criticism” from “so-called commentators and elected political officials” that he said were intent on “undermining the judiciary.”
“Make no mistake about it: This pressure remains,” he said. “It remains a constant source of pressure and will not ease up any time soon.”
One-Day Orders
With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the administration has repeatedly filed crucial matters in Judge O’Connor’s divisions.
Last summer, the Justice Department sued Texas in Wichita Falls, where Judge O’Connor handles every case. The lawsuit challenged a first-of-its-kind Texas law that granted in-state tuition to undocumented students. Texas lawmakers had in recent years tried unsuccessfully to repeal the statute, which was adopted on a bipartisan basis in 2011.
Instead, Ken Paxton, the Republican Texas attorney general and a close ally of Mr. Trump, made no effort to defend the law, instead working with the Justice Department to draw up a hasty legal agreement to strike it down. Outside groups argued that the proposed agreement was an abuse of the court system because the federal government and the state of Texas were on the same side.
But Judge O’Connor approved the settlement the same day, accepting a contested view that the two-decade-old law was “invalid.” The Fifth Circuit last year declined to block the settlement, but has not yet issued a final ruling on an appeal filed by a group of individuals and nonprofits.
The two sides swapped roles this year when Mr. Paxton, who is running for Senate in Texas with Mr. Trump’s endorsement, sued the federal government in Wichita Falls in June over a 2024 Biden-era rule that allows immigration judges to suspend some deportation proceedings. America First Legal, a group co-founded by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser and the architect of much of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, helped represent Texas.
Again, the two sides were ideologically aligned but formally on opposite sides in a lawsuit. Together, they presented an agreement that removed immigration judges’ discretion to block deportations under certain circumstances. On the same day the lawsuit was filed, Judge O’Connor signed off on the settlement with a brief order.
“Dirty Pool”
In the case of the hospital subpoena, a Rhode Island state agency filed a new suit asking the federal court in Rhode Island to halt the out-of-state demands from Texas.
After considering the chain of events, Judge Mary McElroy, a Federal District Court judge in Rhode Island, upbraided the Justice Department, accusing its lawyers of a “crusade to obtain transgender children’s medical records,” and of fleeing her court “in favor of a distant forum that D.O.J. deems friendly to its political positions.”
During a hearing, she described the tactic of “shopping” the case to Texas as “dirty pool” and granted a motion to quash the subpoenas.
The Justice Department told her it had good reason to base the investigation in North Texas. In May, Judge O’Connor ruled it was “necessary and prudent” for Rhode Island Hospital to turn over the documents to him personally, in case the Justice Department ultimately prevails at the conclusion of the complicated litigation.
An appeals court for Rhode Island has deferred to Judge O’Connor, for now. Oral arguments in the appellate case are scheduled for October. In the meantime, the hospital has begun turning over records, which it noted would take “a period of months.”
Engineering that outcome, in Judge McElroy’s view, is why the Justice Department took the case to Northern Texas in the first place.
“You chose Judge O’Connor in Texas,” she told a Justice Department attorney in court in May. “Let’s just admit that.”
