Guam sits fifteen hours ahead of Washington, D.C., on the far side of the Pacific — but a federal charge filed there carries the same statutes, the same Sentencing Guidelines, and the same Department of Justice resources as one filed in Manhattan. The United States District Court for the District of Guam, in the federal courthouse in Hagåtña, is where every federal criminal case in the territory begins and, for most defendants, where it ends.
This page is our firm’s working guide to defending a federal case on Guam: the Article IV territorial-court structure Congress built in 48 U.S.C. § 1424, the single-judge bench and the visiting judges who supplement it, the methamphetamine-dominated docket the sentencing data reveal, and the local-rule route by which Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. appears in the court from off-island. It belongs to our federal courts directory, alongside a companion guide to the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam’s sister court 150 miles to the north.
Federal deadlines do not pause for the International Date Line. If you or someone in your family is under federal investigation or indictment on Guam, we offer a paid, one-hour initial consultation to evaluate the case and chart the next move.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: District of Guam
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What court handles federal cases in Guam? | The U.S. District Court for the District of Guam — an Article IV territorial court created by Congress under 48 U.S.C. § 1424 — sitting at 520 West Soledad Avenue in Hagåtña. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | A combined U.S. Attorney’s Office serves both Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands from offices in Hagåtña and Saipan; as of mid-2026 it is led by U.S. Attorney Shawn N. Anderson. |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | The Ninth Circuit — a Guam conviction is reviewed under the same precedent that governs federal cases in California, Hawaii, and Alaska. |
| Where are post-conviction motions filed? | Back in Hagåtña. A motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 or for compassionate release returns to the District of Guam, because federal law sends those challenges to the sentencing court. |
| Can the firm appear in the District of Guam? | Yes. Under General Local Rule 17.1(d), we appear pro hac vice for a particular case, designating Guam-based co-counsel as the local rules require. |
Key Takeaways
- Congress created the District Court of Guam under 48 U.S.C. § 1424 as an Article IV territorial court that nonetheless wields the full criminal jurisdiction of a U.S. district court.
- One judge holds the bench — presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed for a renewable ten-year term rather than life tenure — supplemented by visiting judges designated under 48 U.S.C. § 1424b.
- As of mid-2026, the court’s roster lists Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood and U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael J. Bordallo as its judicial officers.
- Methamphetamine defines the drug docket: U.S. Sentencing Commission data show meth was the primary drug in 100% of the district’s 20 federal drug sentencings in FY2024.
- Fraud, theft, and embezzlement supplied 23.1% of FY2024 sentencings — nearly triple the national share — and the 2026 Hafa Adai Bingo case shows the government will try big fraud cases to a jury.
- All 39 individuals sentenced in the district in FY2024 had pleaded guilty, and 30.8% received substantial-assistance departures, more than triple the Ninth Circuit average.
- Appeals run to the Ninth Circuit on a 14-day notice-of-appeal clock; § 2255 and compassionate-release motions come back to the District of Guam.
- The Bureau of Prisons operates no facility on Guam, so federal sentences from this district are served thousands of miles from home — a fact we press at sentencing and afterward.
The District of Guam at a Glance
The United States District Court for the District of Guam hears every federal criminal case arising in the territory from the U.S. Courthouse at 520 West Soledad Avenue in Hagåtña, Guam’s capital. Under 48 U.S.C. § 1424(b), the court has “the jurisdiction of a district court of the United States” — even though, as explained below, it is not an Article III court. Purely local crimes belong to Guam’s own Superior Court, with review in the Supreme Court of Guam; the federal courthouse handles the cases the United States itself brings.
Prosecution rests with a single U.S. Attorney’s Office that covers two districts at once — Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — out of offices in Hagåtña and Saipan. As of mid-2026, that combined office is led by U.S. Attorney Shawn N. Anderson, who serves under a court appointment made by the district’s chief judge rather than by Senate confirmation, per the Department of Justice’s mid-2026 leadership listing. Convictions are reviewed by the Ninth Circuit, the largest of the federal courts of appeals.
The court’s own roster lists two judicial officers as of mid-2026: Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood and U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael J. Bordallo. A one-judgeship district absorbs recusals, conflicts, and surges through visiting judges designated from across the Ninth Circuit, and it shares probation and pretrial services with the neighboring Marianas district. Day-to-day practice runs on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure plus the court’s General, Criminal, and Civil Local Rules — the General Local Rules were last revised effective April 19, 2022 — and counsel who know those rules cold hold a real advantage.
One Judge, Ten Years: Guam’s Article IV Federal Court
On paper, the District of Guam functions like any federal trial court. Its constitutional foundation is different, though: Congress created it under Article IV of the Constitution — the territorial clause — not Article III. Under 48 U.S.C. § 1424b(a), the President appoints the court’s judge, with Senate confirmation, “for the term of ten years,” and may remove the judge for cause. An Article III district judge, by contrast, serves for life. The Virgin Islands has an Atlantic counterpart to this arrangement; Guam and Saipan are its Pacific expression.
The same statute supplies the court’s staffing valve. The chief judge of the Ninth Circuit may designate a Guam local-court judge, any circuit or district judge of the Ninth Circuit, or a recalled senior judge of the Guam or Northern Mariana Islands district courts to sit temporarily, and the Chief Justice of the United States may assign any other federal judge with consent. The practical consequence for a defendant in Hagåtña: the judge who tries or sentences the case may be a visitor from California, Hawaii, or Washington, and seasoned federal counsel prepares for the bench as it actually convenes, not just the resident chambers.
None of this softens the court’s criminal authority. A federal grand jury returns the indictments, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and Evidence apply in full, the Sentencing Guidelines govern punishment, and the Ninth Circuit reviews a Hagåtña judgment exactly as it would one from Los Angeles or Seattle. The ten-year term changes who holds the gavel over time; it changes nothing about what the government must prove.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
We defend the charge types this district actually produces: methamphetamine-trafficking conspiracies and other federal drug cases, fraud and money-laundering prosecutions, firearms counts, and the white-collar matters that flow from Guam’s role as a Pacific shipping, tourism, and military hub.
The procedural arc will be familiar to any federal practitioner. An investigation — often surfacing as a target letter, a grand jury subpoena, or a parcel seizure at the airport or post office — matures into an indictment; an initial appearance and arraignment follow; the defense then litigates suppression and other pretrial motions before the case resolves through a plea agreement or a trial verdict, with sentencing under the Guidelines closing the trial-court chapter. Our federal criminal process hub walks through each of those stages.
Two features of Guam practice deserve emphasis. First, federal agents work shoulder-to-shoulder with territorial officers — DEA and U.S. Postal Inspection Service personnel operate alongside Guam Customs and the Guam Police Department in a standing interdiction task force — so a seizure that looks local can become a federal indictment in short order. Second, on a small island, cooperation is a constant undercurrent: nearly a third of FY2024 sentencings included a substantial-assistance departure. Both realities shape defense strategy from the first interview.
Applied Insight: In a district whose drug docket rides on mail and cargo parcels, the suppression fight frequently is the case. How a package was flagged, who opened it, when a controlled delivery was authorized — each question carries Fourth Amendment consequences, and each must be run down before a plea decision is made, not after.
What Guam’s Federal Docket Looks Like in the Data
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s FY2024 statistical packet for the district counts 39 sentenced individuals. Drug trafficking supplied 51.3% of them (nationally the figure is 29.5%); fraud, theft, and embezzlement another 23.1% (versus 8.6% nationwide); small numbers of firearms, money-laundering, child-exploitation, and sexual-abuse cases filled out the year. The district recorded zero immigration sentencings — the sharpest possible contrast with its sister court on Saipan, where immigration is two-thirds of the docket.
Within the drug cases, the Commission’s data show one substance: methamphetamine was the primary drug in 100% of Guam’s 20 federal drug sentencings in FY2024, against 45.7% nationally. The prosecutions match the statistics. In June 2026, a territorial prison inmate received a life sentence under 21 U.S.C. §§ 846 and 841(a)(1) for directing a meth-by-mail network from inside the Guam Department of Corrections — a case built on intercepted parcels holding more than fourteen pounds of methamphetamine — and that spring a former Guam customs officer drew 235 months for drug trafficking, both per Department of Justice releases.
The white-collar side is no afterthought. In May 2026 the government concluded the Hafa Adai Bingo prosecution: a District of Guam jury had convicted the operators of illegal-gambling, money-laundering, and wire-fraud conspiracies arising from roughly $34 million in bingo proceeds diverted from a children’s charity, and the lead fugitive was sentenced in absentia to 262 months. Where gambling and laundering counts intersect, definitions matter — United States v. Santos, 553 U.S. 507 (2008), which read “proceeds” narrowly in an illegal-lottery prosecution and prompted Congress to amend the money-laundering statute, still shapes how these counts are charged and defended. Meanwhile, Andersen Air Force Base, Naval Base Guam, and the new Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz anchor an expanding military footprint whose contracting dollars create steady procurement-fraud and false-claims exposure for island businesses.
Sentencing practice carries its own local signature. Guam judges stayed within the Guideline range in 41.0% of FY2024 cases, granted substantial-assistance departures in 30.8% — more than triple the 8.9% Ninth Circuit average — and resolved most of the remainder with downward variances. Every one of the 39 cases ended in a guilty plea, and 94.9% of sentences were prison-only. The practical message for defendants is blunt: in this courthouse, cooperation decisions and Guidelines advocacy do heavy lifting, and they require counsel who can quantify both.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
A judgment entered in Hagåtña is reviewed in the Ninth Circuit under the same briefing rules and body of precedent that govern appeals from the West Coast. The clock is unforgiving: Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) allows a criminal defendant 14 days from entry of judgment to notice the appeal, and our firm treats protecting that deadline as part of every sentencing engagement, whatever the time zone.
Collateral review also runs through the island courtroom. A motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 attacking a Guam conviction is filed in the District of Guam — our federal post-conviction relief hub explains the vehicle — and a compassionate release motion under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) likewise goes to the sentencing court. That forum matters: courts in the Ninth Circuit granted 31.0% of compassionate-release motions in FY2025, the highest rate of any circuit, per the Sentencing Commission’s full-year data. Exhaustion missteps remain a leading way such motions fail — under United States v. Keller, 2 F.4th 1278 (9th Cir. 2021), the district court must enforce the exhaustion requirement whenever the government invokes it. And because the Bureau of Prisons operates no facility on Guam, clients from this district serve their sentences an ocean away from family — a hardship we document at sentencing and wherever the law lets us litigate it afterward.
How the Firm Practices in This Court
Appearing in this court from off-island is governed by General Local Rule 17.1(d), part of the court’s General Local Rules effective April 19, 2022. An attorney in good standing of the bar of any United States court — or of the highest court of any state or territory — may be temporarily admitted for a particular case on a sworn application, in the court’s discretion. The rule exists precisely because qualified federal counsel often must come from across the water.
Two Guam-specific requirements deserve attention before retaining mainland counsel. GNLR 17.1(e) obligates the visiting attorney to designate active local co-counsel who resides and keeps an office in the district, and GNLR 17.1(d)(4) imposes an annual renewal fee on pro hac vice attorneys whose admissions run past January 1 — an unusual wrinkle few mainland lawyers expect. We handle both as a matter of course: Guam co-counsel anchors local procedure while our firm directs the federal defense.
What a Guam federal case most often demands — Guidelines mastery, appellate instincts, white-collar depth — is exactly where our firm concentrates. Our principal attorney, Elizabeth Franklin-Best, has appeared in more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, and takes cases pro hac vice from one coast to the other. She is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuits, including the Ninth; Best Lawyers in America recognized her as a 2026 “Best Lawyer” in Appellate Practice; and the 2026 Chambers USA guide ranks her for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations. She is also the author of Reversing Your Criminal Conviction, and she handles trial-level defense, Ninth Circuit appeals, and post-conviction litigation for clients in the District of Guam.
Frequently Asked Questions
What court handles federal criminal cases in Guam?
Federal charges on Guam are prosecuted in the United States District Court for the District of Guam, an Article IV territorial court that Congress vested with the full jurisdiction of a federal district court. It sits at 520 West Soledad Avenue in Hagåtña. Purely territorial crimes go to Guam’s local Superior Court instead.
Is the District of Guam an Article III court?
No. Congress established it under the territorial clause of Article IV. Its judge is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a renewable ten-year term, removable for cause, rather than for life. The court still applies the same federal statutes, rules of procedure, and Sentencing Guidelines as every other federal district court.
Who are the judges of the District Court of Guam?
As of mid-2026, the court’s own roster lists Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood and U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael J. Bordallo. Because the district has one judgeship, the chief judge of the Ninth Circuit may also designate visiting circuit, district, or recalled senior judges to hear Guam cases when needed.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the District of Guam?
A single United States Attorney’s Office serves both the District of Guam and the District of the Northern Mariana Islands, with offices in Hagåtña and Saipan. As of mid-2026 it is led by U.S. Attorney Shawn N. Anderson, who holds a court appointment made by the district’s chief judge rather than a Senate-confirmed commission.
Why are so many Guam federal cases methamphetamine cases?
U.S. Sentencing Commission data for FY2024 show methamphetamine was the primary drug in 100 percent of the district’s 20 federal drug sentencings, and drug trafficking made up just over half the docket. Guam’s position as a Pacific mail and cargo hub makes parcel interdiction the centerpiece of federal drug enforcement there, with a joint federal-territorial task force screening shipments for meth.
Which appeals court covers the District of Guam?
The Ninth Circuit. A criminal defendant generally has 14 days from entry of judgment to file the notice of appeal, and the appeal is then briefed and decided under the same Ninth Circuit precedent that governs federal cases in California, Hawaii, and Alaska.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the District of Guam?
Typically: investigation — often a parcel seizure or grand jury subpoena — then indictment, arraignment, pretrial and suppression motions, and resolution by plea or trial, followed by Guidelines sentencing. In FY2024 every sentenced case in the district had been resolved by guilty plea, though the government does try cases, as the Hafa Adai Bingo fraud trial showed.
Can an off-island lawyer represent me in the District of Guam?
Yes. Under General Local Rule 17.1(d), an attorney in good standing of any United States court’s bar may be admitted pro hac vice for a specific case. The visiting lawyer must designate local co-counsel with an office in the district, and our firm appears in Guam this way while leading the defense.
Does the firm handle federal cases in the District of Guam?
We do. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. defends federal investigations and prosecutions in the District of Guam, briefs appeals to the Ninth Circuit, and litigates § 2255 and compassionate-release motions in the district. Our appellate and post-conviction focus travels well to a courthouse whose judgments are reviewed thousands of miles away.
Talk With a Federal Defense Lawyer About a Guam Case
A target letter, a parcel-interdiction arrest, a verdict that should not stand, a sentence worth revisiting — in federal court, timing controls which options survive. We offer a paid, one-hour initial consultation for District of Guam matters, and we will tell you candidly what can be done and how we would do it.