Lisa Cook has filed her lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove her from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In her federal court complaint, Cook’s lawyers called Trump’s move “unprecedented and illegal,” arguing that his “unsubstantiated allegation” of mortgage fraud doesn’t meet the legal requirement of showing cause to remove her.

In the complaint filed Thursday in Washington, D.C., they cite the Federal Reserve Act’s mandate that presidents can only remove board members “for cause” prior to the expiration of their term. Cook’s term expires in 2038. She was nominated by then-President Joe Biden......

Her complaint highlights the significance of how that test is resolved. “The operational independence of the Federal Reserve is vital to its ability to make sound economic decisions, free from the political pressures of an election cycle,” her lawyers wrote, warning that “f markets and the public believe that the central bank is making decisions based on political pressure rather than sound economic data, that confidence erodes.”

The next step in Cook’s case could come quickly. Her lawyers moved for a temporary restraining order and requested an emergency hearing. “Without emergency relief,” they wrote, “[federal government] Defendants are now likely to allow an unexpired vacancy to occur for which President Trump has indicated he is ready to fill.”

The judge who will immediately weigh President Donald Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook has already pushed back against one of his other signature efforts to expand presidential power: mass deportation.

Cook’s lawsuit Thursday was randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington, D.C., by Joe Biden in 2021. Cobb, a former public defender, was Biden’s first appointment to Washington’s district court, which has 15 full-time judges.

In a ruling earlier this month, Cobb blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to rapidly deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had fled violence or oppression in their home countries. The immigrants had previously been permitted to enter or remain temporarily in the U.S. under a program known as parole.

“Will they be summarily removed from a country that — as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges — may look to them more and more like the countries from which they tried to escape?” Cobb wrote in an 84-page decision against the deportation effort.....

Cobb, 45, is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School. After working at the D.C. Public Defender Service early in her career, she joined a Washington-area firm that primarily handles employment-related litigation.