In a significant legal decision, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has blocked the Trump administration from relocating 20 former federal death row inmates to the nation’s most restrictive prison facility. This ruling comes amidst ongoing legal battles over the treatment and placement of these inmates, whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment without parole by President Joe Biden.

The legal dispute was initiated in April 2025 when the inmates filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The plaintiffs challenged the administration’s intent to move them to harsher confinement conditions, a move seen as a response to President Biden’s clemency actions.

The roots of this conflict trace back to December 2024. It was then that President-elect Trump expressed his strong disapproval of Biden’s clemency decisions. In a fiery post on Truth Social, Trump lashed out at the prisoners, telling them to “GO TO HELL.” This set the stage for a contentious clash over where and how these inmates would serve their life sentences.

After Trump assumed office for his second term, he instructed the Department of Justice to ensure these individuals were confined in a manner reflective of their crimes’ severity. Following this directive, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons proposed transferring the inmates to ADX Florence in Colorado, a facility infamous for its strict regimen and moniker as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

However, in a recent 35-page memorandum, U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled against this transfer. Judge Kelly’s decision mandates that the inmates remain at their current facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, preserving the status quo amid ongoing litigation over their future housing conditions.

Now, in a 35-page memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, has ruled the plaintiffs must remain at their current prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

While Kelly mused that “most of” the arguments made by the prisoners are “longshots at best,” the judge said the plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claims were likely to pass muster because “their redesignations were determined before their process even began” and “they had no meaningful opportunity to challenge them.”

“[T]he Constitution requires that whenever the government seeks to deprive a person of a liberty or property interest that the Due Process Clause protects—whether that person is a notorious prisoner or a law-abiding citizen—the process it provides cannot be a sham,” the opinion reads. “In addition, such a deprivation of constitutional due process amounts to irreparable harm.”

The court stressed the fix — maintaining the status quo for the duration of the lawsuit — was temporary and made sure to note the plaintiffs “committed some of the most horrific crimes imaginable.” While ruling in the prisoners’ favor on the major request, Kelly rejected a request to enforce placement designations issued by the BOP prior to the Bondi-penned memo directing the transfers to ADX Florence.

“Thus, the Court will grant their motion to the extent it asks the Court to enjoin their transfers to ADX Florence while this suit proceeds,” the opinion goes on. “At least for now, they will remain serving life sentences for their heinous crimes where they are currently imprisoned.”

Kelly repeatedly refers to how the 45th and 47th president “lashed out against the commutations when they happened” and suggests this attitude all but “predetermined” the decision to send them to ADX Florence with no meaningful way to challenge the decisions.

“[A]fter then-President Biden commuted Plaintiffs’ death sentences in December 2024, BOP was required to redesignate each of them to another facility,” the order explains. “From the start, as Plaintiffs argue, Defendants ‘have never tried to conceal’ their desire to punish the commutees.”

These unchallengeable decisions, the judge noted, eclipsed prior determinations made about each prisoner by the BOP. When BOP officials briefed Trump administration officials on where they planned to send the prisoners, they were overruled. Also, typical BOP criteria were left by the wayside.

“[T]he referral directive ‘was not based on the BOP’s assessment of the prisoners’ security needs or of institutional resources’ but was instead due to ‘President Trump’s Executive Order and a related memorandum issued by Attorney General Bondi,’” the court’s opinion continues, citing evidence which the DOJ did not try to refute.

Then, when the prisoners attempted to vindicate their rights through the internal BOP appeal process, they got nowhere, the judge noted. And, all the while, before those final determinations were issued, Bondi was “transparent about seeking to punish Plaintiffs by sending them to ADX Florence” in a series of public statements and meetings.

The court suggested the writing was on the wall.

“It strains credulity to believe that subordinate BOP officials carrying out this process felt free to disagree with what had been demanded at the start by officials far senior to them, with authority over their careers and livelihoods,” the opinion goes on. “Thus, it is likely that there was no genuine opportunity for Plaintiffs—at their hearings, during their appeals, or at any other time—to oppose their transfers to ADX Florence.”

Kelly also said the “identical outcomes” for all but two of the commuted prisoners — who have medical conditions necessitating different lodging — and the paperwork used to effectuate the ADX Florence decision “suggests a cookie-cutter process that yielded the same predetermined result” and a “a dramatic, uniform about-face in how the redesignations were handled.”

Overall, the opinion suggests the result was an easy call.

“The Court does not reach this conclusion without careful consideration,” Kelly writes. “But Plaintiffs have proffered an unusual array of evidence in support of their claim.”

The judge offers a somewhat cautious upshot (emphasis in original):

Plaintiffs have shown that it is likely their redesignations to ADX Florence were predetermined before they received any process at all, and they had no meaningful opportunity to be heard. Thus, they are likely to…succeed on the merits of their due process claim. The Court emphasizes that this conclusion about their likelihood of success on this claim says nothing about where—including ADX Florence—BOP should have decided to transfer any of them. Nor does it necessarily suggest that there would have been no way for officials with authority over BOP to play a role in the redesignation process.

“The Court concludes only that on the record before it, it is likely that the process provided to Plaintiffs was an empty exercise to approve an outcome that was decided before it even began, thereby contravening their due process rights,” the opinion continues.