Sunita Doddamani sued the Justice Department on Monday, turning her April firing into a court fight over whether she was punished for doing her job. Her lawsuit says the former federal prosecutor was removed after work on a FACE Act case involving activists accused of blocking an entrance to an abortion clinic.
Doddamani’s filing lands now because it challenges a personnel move tied to a prosecution the Trump administration has sought to unwind. It also raises a sharper question than the firing itself: whether career lawyers who worked on abortion-clinic access cases can be removed for handling matters assigned by their supervisors.
Doddamani was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan and one of at least three career prosecutors who lost their jobs in April. The lawsuit says that on the day she was fired, she immediately lost access to her DOJ phone and email and was escorted out of the building. It also says Jerome Gorgon announced in an office meeting that Doddamani and another prosecutor had been fired for alleged misconduct, even though, the filing says, he had no prior knowledge of the terminations or the reasons behind them.
Her lawyers say she worked on the prosecution under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act at her superiors’ direction, and that the current administration opposed the case on partisan grounds. The complaint says the firing was politically motivated and retaliatory, and it accuses the department of violating the Civil Service Reform Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the First and Fifth Amendments.
The legal fight sits inside a larger policy shift. The Justice Department said it terminated personnel responsible for weaponizing the FACE Act, a federal law passed by Congress in 1994 that makes it a crime to block access to reproductive health clinics. Nonviolent first-time violations are misdemeanors, while repeat offenses or cases involving bodily injury or death can be treated as felonies.
Doddamani’s filing also tries to separate her from the broader political fight. It says she primarily worked on civil cases during her tenure as a federal prosecutor, though she also handled some criminal work. In 2023, she was assigned to a trial team in United States v. Zastrow, which charged eight defendants in Sterling Heights, Michigan, with FACE Act violations and civil rights conspiracy counts. All eight were convicted at trial.
The Justice Department’s public explanation and Doddamani’s account do not fit neatly together. One says the department was clearing out lawyers tied to what it viewed as abusive enforcement. The other says she was following instructions, working on a case assigned by superiors, and then stripped of her job, her access and, her lawyers say, her reputation.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and names Attorney General Todd Blanche, Jerome Gorgon, Francey Hakes, several federal agencies and several federal offices as defendants. What the court does next will determine whether the case stays focused on one prosecutor’s firing or becomes a wider test of how far the department can go in rethinking FACE Act cases after the fact.
