The Daily Fuckup

The Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation is still trying to fill a trial attorney slot, with a vacancy notice that remained open through July 10 and says the office expects its workload to increase dramatically across most of its core categories. The posting, dated May 29, 2026, is for a permanent Civil Division lawyer and set a July 10 application deadline. DOJ’s attorney-employment page and the job notice both frame the opening as part of the department’s immigration litigation shop.

The notice sketches the office’s docket in unusually broad terms. It says the office handles civil litigation under the Immigration and Nationality Act and related statutes, including programmatic immigration challenges, petitions for review of removal orders, habeas cases involving civil immigration detention, mandamus actions seeking agency action, and affirmative denaturalization cases. It also says the office works with U.S. attorneys and advises federal agencies involved in immigration, border enforcement, and national security.

DOJ goes beyond a generic help-wanted notice by listing examples of current and anticipated work. Those include challenges to expedited removal procedures, petitions tied to a large backlog of immigration court cases, litigation over agency efforts inside the country, habeas petitions challenging custody and detainers, disputes over temporary work authorization and foreign-worker programs, denaturalization cases, and claims that agencies have delayed action. The notice says mandamus litigation has increased dramatically over the last several years.

The hiring pitch does not prove DOJ cannot manage the docket it already has. It does show that the department is staffing up for more immigration litigation across several tracks at once, and it links that expectation to recent executive orders and the administration’s enforcement focus.

The vacancy comes as DOJ continues to file immigration-related cases. On July 9, the department sued Maryland over sanctuary policies, underscoring how the same legal office can be pulled into fights over state and local cooperation, federal enforcement policy, detention, and removal all at once.