The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas stretches across forty-three counties, from the Red River down to the Gulf, and it punches far above its size: more than a thousand federal defendants are sentenced here in a typical year, nearly half of them in drug-trafficking cases, while the Sherman and Plano courthouses on the edge of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex anchor one of the country’s more active financial-crime dockets. Anyone charged in this district is facing a court that moves quickly and prosecutors who are used to winning — the defense has to be ready for both.
Here we break the Eastern District of Texas down the way defense counsel actually thinks about it: six divisions and their courthouses, the bench and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the drug, healthcare-fraud, and cryptocurrency enforcement that defines the docket, and the appellate and post-conviction paths that follow a conviction. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. represents federal defendants here through pro hac vice admission as part of a nationwide practice — one recognized by a Chambers USA 2026 ranking in Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations and by Elizabeth Franklin-Best’s selection to Best Lawyers in America 2026 in Appellate Practice. This page is part of the firm’s federal courts directory.
From a Sherman grand jury subpoena to a Beaumont indictment to a Tyler sentence worth appealing, the starting point with our firm is a paid, one-hour initial consultation — a focused working session on your East Texas federal matter.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: Eastern District of Texas
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does the Eastern District of Texas cover? | Forty-three counties from the Red River to the Gulf, organized into six divisions seated in Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman (with a second courthouse in Plano), Texarkana, and Tyler. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas, led as of mid-2026 by U.S. Attorney Jay R. Combs, with staffed offices across all six divisions. |
| How heavy is the criminal docket? | Heavy — 1,134 federal defendants were sentenced in FY2024 per the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 48.9% of them in drug-trafficking cases. |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | The Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, reviews every conviction and sentence from the federal courts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. |
| Where are post-conviction motions filed? | In this district. A Section 2255 motion attacking an EDTX judgment is filed in the Eastern District of Texas, usually before the original sentencing judge. |
| Can the firm appear in this court? | Yes — we handle Eastern District of Texas matters through pro hac vice admission, beginning with a paid, one-hour initial consultation. |
Key Takeaways
- The Eastern District of Texas spans 43 counties and six divisions — Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman/Plano, Texarkana, and Tyler — with eight district judgeships authorized by 28 U.S.C. § 133.
- Chief Judge Amos L. Mazzant, III leads the court as of mid-2026, supported by senior judges and eight full-time magistrate judges, including a rotating warrant-duty bench in the Sherman Division.
- U.S. Attorney Jay R. Combs heads the prosecuting office, which staffs every division of the district.
- USSC FY2024 data count 1,134 defendants sentenced — 48.9% drug trafficking, 16.8% firearms, 11.9% fraud, and a money-laundering share (4.6%) well above the national norm.
- Operation Crypto Runner, the OCDETF crackdown on transnational cryptocurrency money laundering, was built and is still being prosecuted out of this district.
- Healthcare-fraud and kickback enforcement runs through the Sherman/Plano corridor on the edge of the DFW metroplex, while I-30 and I-20 feed the drug docket.
- Appeals go to the Fifth Circuit on the 14-day criminal notice-of-appeal deadline, and Section 2255 motions come back to the sentencing court in this district.
- Our firm appears in the Eastern District of Texas pro hac vice, with its core strength in the appeals and post-conviction litigation that follow conviction.
The Eastern District of Texas at a Glance
One of four federal districts in Texas, the Eastern District occupies a distinctive corner of the state’s legal map. Its territory is mostly small-city and rural East Texas — the Piney Woods, the Louisiana and Arkansas borders, the refinery country around Beaumont — but its Sherman Division reaches into Collin County and the booming suburbs northeast of Dallas, which is where much of the district’s white-collar and financial-crime work originates. The court is famous nationally for fast-moving patent litigation in Marshall; criminal practitioners know it as a high-volume, no-nonsense docket.
The district sits in the Fifth Circuit with the rest of the Texas federal courts, including its much larger neighbor, the Northern District of Texas, and with the Western District of Louisiana just across the Sabine River. Cases here proceed under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the court’s own local rules and standing orders, and division-specific practices — the kind of operational detail that separates counsel who know the district from counsel who are just admitted to it.
Divisions and Courthouses Across East Texas
The court’s own locations directory lists six divisions, and where a case is charged determines the courtroom, the assigned judges, and the jury pool:
- Sherman Division — the district’s financial-crime center, with three courthouse locations: the Paul Brown United States Courthouse and a courthouse annex in Sherman, plus a full courthouse and clerk’s office in Plano serving the Collin County corridor.
- Tyler Division — the geographic heart of the district and the venue where major multi-defendant cases, including the Operation Crypto Runner prosecutions, have been announced and tried.
- Beaumont Division — the Gulf-side docket, shaped by the port, the refineries, and Jefferson County’s federal caseload.
- Marshall and Texarkana Divisions — the eastern border courthouses; Texarkana’s federal building famously sits on the Texas–Arkansas line.
- Lufkin Division — the deep East Texas seat, covering the Angelina County region.
Judges and Prosecutors
Congress authorizes eight district judgeships for the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. § 133. As of mid-2026, the court’s roster is headed by Chief Judge Amos L. Mazzant, III, with district judges resident across the divisions, senior judges still carrying cases, and eight full-time magistrate judges handling initial appearances, detention hearings, and pretrial matters — the Sherman Division even publishes a rotating bi-weekly warrant-duty schedule. Assignments are divisional, so the judge a case draws is largely a function of where in East Texas it was charged.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas — led as of mid-2026 by U.S. Attorney Jay R. Combs — staffs offices in every division and has long described itself as the federal hub of the East Texas law-enforcement community. Its recent public dockets emphasize methamphetamine and fentanyl conspiracies developed through task-force investigations, immigration enforcement, child-exploitation cases, and the financial-fraud and money-laundering work that has become the office’s national signature.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
The Eastern District of Texas handles the full range of federal criminal matters — white-collar offenses and fraud, drug and firearms cases, and other federal prosecutions. A federal case in the district generally moves through a recognizable sequence.
Most cases begin with an investigation by a federal agency, sometimes signaled by a target letter or a grand jury subpoena. Formal charges follow, typically by indictment. After an initial appearance and arraignment, the case proceeds through pretrial litigation and discovery, and is then resolved either by a negotiated plea agreement or by trial. A conviction is followed by sentencing under the federal framework. The firm’s federal criminal process hub walks through each stage in detail.
At each of those stages the defense has work to do, and in a docket this fast it has to be done early: challenging the search and the wiretap before the plea posture hardens, attacking drug quantity and conspiracy scope before the presentence report locks them in, and identifying the trial-worthy case before the cooperation market closes around it. Volume is the government’s advantage in East Texas; preparation is the defendant’s.
Applied Insight: In the Sherman Division especially, financial investigations often begin with a civil-looking knock — a Secret Service interview about wire transfers, a subpoena for exchange records, an HHS-OIG data request to a medical practice. By the time charges are filed in this district, the paper case is usually years deep. The moment a federal agency shows interest in your money flows is the moment to retain counsel, while the narrative is still open.
What Gets Prosecuted in the Eastern District
The Sentencing Commission’s FY2024 packet for the district records 1,134 defendants sentenced — one of the heavier criminal dockets in the Fifth Circuit. Drug trafficking dominated at 48.9%, with firearms at 16.8%, fraud, theft, and embezzlement at 11.9%, immigration at 7.2%, and money laundering at 4.6% — several times the typical district’s share, and no accident. Three enforcement lines explain the numbers:
- Drug corridors. I-30 and I-20 carry methamphetamine and fentanyl east out of the metroplex, and task-force cases — many under the Homeland Security Task Force and OCDETF banners — produce the multi-defendant conspiracies that fill the drug docket, with twenty-year-plus sentences announced routinely.
- Cryptocurrency and financial fraud. Operation Crypto Runner, announced in Tyler in 2022, charged twenty-one defendants in transnational money-laundering networks that converted romance-scam and business-email-compromise proceeds into cryptocurrency — disrupting, by the government’s account, over $300 million a year in transactions — and its spin-off prosecutions, including pig-butchering cases, were still producing sentencings into 2026.
- Healthcare fraud and kickbacks. The Sherman/Plano corridor’s hospital systems, labs, and physician networks keep healthcare-fraud and Anti-Kickback Statute prosecutions steady; in one recent example, a hospital chief executive received a 36-month sentence in early 2025 in a kickback conspiracy alongside a multimillion-dollar civil resolution.
Current Law That Matters Here
For the medical side of this docket, Ruan v. United States, 597 U.S. 450 (2022), is the controlling guardrail: a physician charged with unlawful prescribing under § 841 cannot be convicted unless the government proves the doctor knowingly or intentionally acted without authorization — subjective good faith matters, which reframes every pill-mill and prescribing prosecution. Pair it with Dubin v. United States, 599 U.S. 110 (2023), which held that aggravated identity theft’s mandatory two-year add-on applies only when the misuse of another person’s identity is at the crux of the offense, not merely incidental to billing — an argument that comes up constantly in healthcare-fraud indictments stacked with § 1028A counts.
On the money-laundering side that distinguishes this district, Cuellar v. United States, 553 U.S. 550 (2008), still sets the boundary: moving money secretly is not enough — the government must prove the transportation was designed to conceal the nature, source, or ownership of the funds. In crypto cases where the government equates blockchain transfers with concealment, that distinction is a live defense, and the loss and volume figures driving the Guidelines in these cases deserve the same scrutiny we give loss calculations in any fraud matter.
The district’s firearms docket is moving too. It was an Eastern District of Texas case, decided by this court’s own Chief Judge Amos L. Mazzant, III, that became United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234 (U.S. June 18, 2026): the Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal and held that prosecuting a regular marijuana user under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) violated the Second Amendment as applied to him. The Court took pains to call the ruling “a narrow one” and did not disturb the felon-in-possession ban that the Fifth Circuit upheld in United States v. Diaz, 116 F.4th 458 (5th Cir. 2024). For East Texas defendants, the lesson is concrete: an as-applied Second Amendment challenge is a live option worth raising and preserving, even where the broader § 922(g)(1) question remains open.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
Long sentences make appellate and post-conviction review matter more in this district, not less. The clock is brutal: Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) gives a convicted defendant 14 days from entry of judgment to notice the appeal to the Fifth Circuit. In drug-quantity, Guidelines, and suppression appeals — the bread and butter of East Texas appellate work — the issues preserved below are the issues that win.
When the appeal ends, the fight returns to the trial court: 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motions attacking an Eastern District of Texas conviction or sentence are filed in this district, and compassionate release requests go to the sentencing judge as well. For the many EDTX defendants serving decades-long drug sentences, post-conviction strategy — retroactive Guidelines amendments, § 2255 claims, sentence-reduction motions — is often the most realistic route to fewer years, and it is precisely the work our firm was built around. None of it is easy — the Sentencing Commission reported a national compassionate-release grant rate of just 14.1% in fiscal year 2025 — but a decades-long drug sentence is exactly the setting where a rigorously built motion can change the math. Distance is no obstacle; this litigation is national law practiced on paper.
How the Firm Practices in This Court
When we take an Eastern District of Texas case, the path in is pro hac vice admission under the court’s attorney-admission rules — a case-specific admission for qualified counsel from outside the district, used every day in a court that attracts lawyers from around the country. Elizabeth Franklin-Best holds admissions to the United States Supreme Court and every one of the twelve federal circuits, the Fifth included, and has appeared pro hac vice in federal courts nationwide. Her record runs deep in the work this district generates: more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals across the circuits.
Nothing about that arrangement dilutes the defense. The statutes, the Guidelines, and the circuit precedent that decide an East Texas case are the same federal authorities we work with daily, and the recurring battlegrounds in this district — drug quantity, conspiracy scope, laundering intent, identity-theft enhancements, suppression — are exactly the kind of legal issues that reward rigorous, appellate-grade briefing at the trial level.
That appellate-grade rigor is documented, not asserted: Best Lawyers in America selected Elizabeth Franklin-Best for Appellate Practice in 2026, Chambers USA ranks the firm in 2026 for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations, and her book Reversing Your Criminal Conviction is a working manual for the post-conviction litigation this district’s long sentences so often demand.
Frequently Asked Questions
What area does the Eastern District of Texas cover?
Forty-three counties of East Texas, running from the Red River on the Oklahoma border south to the Gulf. The district holds court in Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman, Plano, Texarkana, and Tyler, with every county assigned to one of six divisions.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the Eastern District of Texas?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas, which staffs offices in all six divisions. As of mid-2026 the office is led by U.S. Attorney Jay R. Combs, and its public docket emphasizes drug-trafficking conspiracies, financial fraud and money laundering, immigration cases, and child-exploitation prosecutions.
Which appeals court covers the Eastern District of Texas?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reviews convictions and sentences from this district. A criminal notice of appeal is due 14 days after entry of judgment, and the issues preserved in the district court largely determine what the appeal can accomplish.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the Eastern District of Texas?
A federal case in the Eastern District of Texas follows the standard federal sequence. It usually opens with a task-force or agency investigation — the DEA, FBI, Secret Service, Postal Inspection Service, and HHS-OIG are all active in East Texas — then moves to a grand jury indictment, arraignment and detention decisions before a magistrate judge, pretrial motions, and a plea or trial, with sentencing under the federal Guidelines.
Can an out-of-state lawyer represent me in the Eastern District of Texas?
Yes. The district admits qualified out-of-state attorneys pro hac vice for specific cases under its attorney-admission rules — routine practice in a court that draws counsel from across the country. Federal criminal law is national, so the substance of the defense does not change with the lawyer’s mailing address.
What is Operation Crypto Runner?
It is an OCDETF investigation announced in Tyler in 2022 targeting transnational money-laundering networks that converted fraud proceeds — from romance scams, business email compromises, and tech-support schemes — into cryptocurrency. Twenty-one defendants were charged at the announcement, the government reported disrupting more than 300 million dollars a year in transactions, and related prosecutions have continued since.
Does the Eastern District of Texas handle healthcare fraud cases?
Yes, steadily. The Sherman and Plano courthouses sit beside the metroplex’s hospital systems, laboratories, and physician networks, and the district charges billing-fraud, kickback, and aggravated-identity-theft cases arising from them. Recent Supreme Court decisions such as Ruan and Dubin give the defense genuine tools in these prosecutions.
Is there a federal courthouse in Plano, Texas?
Yes. The Sherman Division operates a United States courthouse with a clerk’s office in Plano, alongside the Paul Brown United States Courthouse in Sherman. Much of the district’s financial-crime and healthcare-fraud docket runs through this corridor.
Does the firm handle federal cases in the Eastern District of Texas?
Yes. We represent clients in EDTX investigations and prosecutions, take their appeals to the Fifth Circuit, and litigate Section 2255, sentence-reduction, and compassionate-release matters arising from this district. The first step is a paid, one-hour initial consultation.
Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer
East Texas federal cases move on the government’s schedule until the defense changes the tempo. If you or someone you love is under investigation, indicted, or already sentenced in the Eastern District of Texas, schedule the paid, one-hour initial consultation — we will assess the case, the deadlines, and every realistic avenue, trial-level and post-conviction alike.