A federal judge who first blocked broad student-loan forgiveness just gave Biden a win by agreeing to pass on a case challenging a debt relief rule

• A federal judge that blocked student-debt relief agreed to transfer a related case to a different court.
• The case was challenging a rule to help borrowers who say they were defrauded by their schools.

One of President Joe Biden's student-debt relief policies just got handed a win.

As Politico first reported on Monday, Federal Judge Mark Pittman — a Trump-appointed judge based in the Northern District of Texas who has ruled against Biden's broad student-debt relief — transferred a lawsuit challenging a student-debt rule from his court to another court in the Western District of Texas.

Specifically, according to the court order, the Career Colleges and Schools of Texas filed a lawsuit in Pittman's court challenging a new rule by the Education Department that would make it easier for borrowers who believe they were defrauded by the school they attended to get their debt wiped out, known as the borrower defense to repayment.

Notably, Pittman was the first judge to block Biden's broad plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers, and Biden's Justice Department argued the CSST lawsuit was improperly filed in Pittman's court, as the institutions mentioned in the suit are not based in his district.

Pittman and Biden's administration came to a rare agreement in this case, with Pittman explaining in his order why he is agreeing to transfer the lawsuit to a different jurisdiction. He wrote that the plaintiffs in the case claimed that the borrower defense rule would impact many institutions in the court's jurisdiction, but "Plaintiff has a major problem," Pittman said: "none of the 'burdened' schools or institutions that reside in this division are parties here."

"Put simply, if a plaintiff cannot defend its choice of venue, the case does not belong there in the first place," Pittman wrote in his opinion.

On February 28, CCST filed an 87 page complaint against the Education Department, saying that the department's latest reforms to the borrower defense process creates a "framework with new federal standards, adjudicatory schemes, and evidentiary presumptions."

"The apparent goals of this new framework are to accomplish massive loan forgiveness for borrowers and to reallocate the correspondingly massive financial liability to institutions of higher education," it said. "The Final Rule will cause financial and reputational harm to schools, educational harm to students, and budgetary harm to the public."

For example, the group referenced the department's ability to approve borrower defense claims for certain groups, rather than individually processing claims, which the complaint said is an overreach of authority.

On March 17, the Education Department requested the case be dismissed or transferred to either the Austin or DC court, with the department saying in a supporting brief that "because the Final Rule is not directed in any meaningful way at the Northern District of Texas or any CCST members here, CCST's claims about it also have no substantial factual relationship to this District."

While Pittman's decision favored the Biden administration's request, it's the latest sign of challenges a Democratic White House has with conservative courts. Judge Reed O'Connor, who is in the same district as Pittman, ruled the Affordable Care Act invalid in 2018. And as Insider previously reported, Pittman himself has a history of conservative rulings aside from student-debt relief, like prohibiting the Biden administration from exempting migrant children traveling without their parents from a Trump-era policy that expelled thousands of migrants during the pandemic.