The Trump administration has continued the trajectory established by former President Joe Biden by requesting that a conservative federal judge in Texas dismiss a lawsuit regarding access to a popular abortion medication.

As previously noted by Law&Crime, the states of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri joined a lawsuit filed in the Northern U.S. District of Texas, presided over by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who is the sole federal judge in that district. The lawsuit attempted to restrict access to mifepristone. It was originally initiated in November 2022 by a group of anti-abortion physicians. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), during the leadership of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, opposed the lawsuit.

In 2023, Kacsmaryk issued an unprecedented decision that ordered the FDA to revoke its decades-old approval of the drug. The Supreme Court overturned Kacsmaryk in June 2024 on narrow grounds, finding that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) — the group of doctors who originally brought the case — didn’t have standing. In January, Kacsmaryk let the states file an amended complaint, signaling a potential intention to allow the case to proceed under his jurisdiction.

On Jan. 18, just days before Biden left office, the Biden administration filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that the three states “have no plausible connection to the Northern District of Texas” and therefore could not properly bring the claim in the Lone Star State. On Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS re-upped that argument in its reply to the states’ opposition to the Biden administration’s initial motion to dismiss.

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“Essentially, the States argue that they can piggyback on the original Alliance plaintiffs’ venue, notwithstanding that those plaintiffs were held to lack standing and have now voluntarily dismissed their claims,” the filing says, adding that this argument goes against “binding precedent.”

The states’ argument for jurisdiction — that “venue was valid when the States intervened” — doesn’t stand up under scrutiny, the Trump administration says.

“For one thing, the original plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims — effectively making it as if this case, and the States’ prior intervention, never occurred,” the administration says. “Because the original plaintiffs’ suit was effectively never filed, the States cannot rely on any purported jurisdiction in the original suit to justify adjudication of the States’ claim in this forum.”

Alleging that the states’ argument “confuses standing with mootness,” the government believes that the Supreme Court ruling “necessarily means that the original plaintiffs never had standing to pursue their claims.”

The FDA criticized the circular and self-fulfilling standard argued by the states, which said that venue is proper because of “past litigation proceedings” before Kacsmaryk and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The venue statute requires that a party’s claims have substantial connection to the chosen forum,” the filing says. “The litigation itself cannot serve as the requisite link to the forum, because then a plaintiff would always satisfy venue based solely on the act of filing their claims in a particular court.”

“Aside from this litigation,” the filing adds, “the States do not dispute that their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas.”

Ultimately, the Trump administration says that the case “should be dismissed or transferred for lack of venue.”

Trump, despite appointing Supreme Court justices who ultimately agreed in 2022 to roll back decades of abortion rights, has said that he would not restrict access to abortion medication.