Cory Booker

Two senators — one Republican and one Democrat — have filed court papers urging a federal judge to maintain her block on the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion fund to pay people claiming to have been unfairly prosecuted, arguing that its creation last month amounted to an illegal “end-run” around Congress.

The move by the two senators — Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey — was the latest bipartisan effort to stop the fund, which is also facing legislative headwinds on the Senate floor amid accusations that it would be a slush fund for President Trump’s allies. It was another indication that even some Republican lawmakers appeared not to trust assurances by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, that the fund was dead.

On Tuesday, Mr. Blanche told a House subcommittee that the Justice Department was withdrawing the proposal. But one day later, Mr. Trump appeared to backtrack, saying that he still loved the idea of using taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been politically persecuted.

The court papers filed by Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Booker, known as an amicus brief, were submitted on Wednesday evening to Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who temporarily blocked the fund last week so that she could consider the legal issues surrounding it more deeply. Judge Brinkema has scheduled a June 12 hearing to discuss those issues in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The judge’s decision to put the fund on hold came in response to a lawsuit filed by Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Justice Department after working on scores of cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Floyd and two other plaintiffs who claimed to have suffered harms from the Trump administration argued that the fund had been unfairly set up to benefit only purported victims of Democratic administrations.

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