Trending Now… Running Out of Lawyers and Poor People – Update for February 13, 2026

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

LEGAL TRENDS YOU SHOULD KNOW

This is where current events affect federal prisoners.

Government Running Out of Troops:  Generally, federal prisoners and defendants would think that the fewer resources the government has to throw against them, the better. Whether that’s true may soon be put to the test.

The ranks of skilled litigators in US Attorneys’ offices (USAOs) nationwide – especially on the criminal side of the office – have been gutted by resignations over what many Assistant United States Attorneys complain is “efforts by senior department leaders to push career prosecutors into doing Mr. Trump’s bidding,” according to The New York Times.

The DOJ’s workforce declined by 8% between November 2024 and November 2025, according to Office of Personnel Management data. At the same time, USAOs have lost 14 pct of their employees, “a staggering one-year reduction unlike anything the department has seen in recent memory,” The Times reported that former officials said. “Worse still, the departures have hit the upper tier of prosecutors in premier offices the hardest, simply because those with the most experience were the most likely to have lucrative job prospects on the outside.”

In a little-noticed 8^th Circuit filing last week, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, says his short-staffed office has been abandoning “pressing and important priorities” to manage the flood of immigration cases stemming from Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities, which is now ending.

Rosen said his office is buckling under the crushing weight of hundreds of emergency lawsuits filed by immigrants detained by ICE in recent weeks. He said 427 had been filed in January alone, and that the pace is expected to continue into February.

In a filing accompanying Rosen’s statement, DOJ attorneys wrote that the “crushing burden” caused by immigration cases had led US attorneys nationwide to “shift resources away from other critical priorities, including criminal matters.”

Rosen said his team of attorneys handling civil litigation is “down 50%” — a reference to a wave of resignations and departures at the start of Operation Metro Surge — and that those who remain “are appearing daily for hearings on contempt motions.”

I have been seeing an increasing number of unusually long-date requests for extension of time from USAOs to respond to prisoner § 2255 motions and compassionate release cases. At the same time (although this is very hard to quantify), it seems to me that the quality of legal scholarship in government filings has fallen.

SCOTUS Running Out of IFP Filers:  The National Law Journal reported last week that “a large pool of cases at the U.S. Supreme Court has been drying up in recent years, and experts aren’t sure why.” Appeals from indigent litigants (“in forma pauperis” or “IFP” filers) have fallen precipitously over the past several Supreme Court terms and are now at their lowest level in the 21st century.

In its most recent term, SCOTUS received around 2,500 appeals from indigent petitioners, fewer than half the number of indigent appeals from six years ago, and about a third of the number filed 20 years ago. Historically, IFP filings have accounted for the majority of annual cases filed in the Supreme Court. In the October 2006 term, for example, 7,132 IFP filings came in compared to 1,723 cases filed by paying petitioners.

“Despite this,” the NLJ said, “the Supreme Court overwhelmingly chooses to take up cases from the paid docket, rejecting all but a handful of IFP appeals each year… In the October 2006 term, for example, the court granted certiorari, or review, of 15 petitions filed by indigent litigants. By contrast, the court accepted just four in forma pauperis petitions during its most recent completed term.”

Politico, Top Minnesota prosecutor says ICE cases are sidelining ‘pressing priorities’ (February 5, 2026)

The New York Times, Demanding Support for Trump, Justice Dept. Struggles to Recruit Prosecutors (February 7, 2026)

National Law Journal, At the Supreme Court, a Stark Drop in Appeals From the Poor (January 29, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root