By raw caseload, the Western District of Texas is the busiest criminal trial court in the federal system’s busiest region: 8,035 people were sentenced here in fiscal year 2024 — more than in any other district in the Fifth Circuit and among the most in the nation. The district runs from the tech corridors of Austin and the San Antonio metro west through Waco, Del Rio, and the Permian Basin to El Paso — taking in Fort Hood and Fort Bliss, two of the Army’s largest posts, along the way. A court that covers that much ground, at that velocity, punishes unfamiliarity — which is precisely why the choice of federal counsel matters here.
What follows is a working map of the district: who sits on its bench, what its prosecutors actually file, the procedural rhythms that distinguish its border divisions from Austin and San Antonio, and where appeals and post-conviction motions go. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. takes federal criminal, appellate, and post-conviction matters nationwide and appears in the Western District of Texas pro hac vice. Leading that work is Elizabeth Franklin-Best, whose 2026 honors include selection by Best Lawyers in America as a “Best Lawyer” in Appellate Practice together with a Chambers USA ranking in Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations. The page sits within our federal courts directory.
Cases in this district do not wait — detention hearings, plea offers, and trial settings come fast. A paid, one-hour initial consultation with our firm puts experienced federal eyes on your situation before those deadlines harden into outcomes.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: Western District of Texas
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does the Western District of Texas cover? | Central and West Texas across seven divisions — Austin, San Antonio, Waco, Del Rio, El Paso, Pecos, and Midland-Odessa — serving more than seven million residents, with clerk’s offices in eight cities including Alpine. |
| How heavy is the caseload? | The heaviest in the Fifth Circuit: 8,035 people sentenced in FY2024, 81% of them in immigration cases, with a 99.5% guilty-plea rate. |
| Who leads the court? | Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses, who sits in Del Rio, as of mid-2026; Congress has authorized thirteen district judgeships. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas under Acting U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons (as of mid-2026), headquartered in San Antonio with seven staffed division offices. |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | The Fifth Circuit in New Orleans — the appellate court for all four Texas districts plus Louisiana and Mississippi. |
| Where are post-conviction motions filed? | Back in this court: Section 2255 and compassionate-release motions are decided by the district that entered the judgment. |
| Can out-of-district lawyers appear here? | Yes, by motion for admission pro hac vice filed in the case with a fee — and note the Austin Division uses its own separate form. |
| How do you engage the firm? | Book a paid, one-hour initial consultation; we review the charges, the division, and the assigned judge before recommending a course. |
Key Takeaways
- With 8,035 individuals sentenced in FY2024, the Western District of Texas carries the largest criminal docket in the Fifth Circuit and one of the largest in the country.
- Immigration prosecutions made up 81 percent of those sentencings, driven by the El Paso and Del Rio border divisions; in one recent week the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed 297 new immigration cases.
- Seven divisions hold court under 28 U.S.C. § 124(d) — Austin, San Antonio, Waco, El Paso, Del Rio, Pecos, and Midland-Odessa — and since a 2024 amendment, the Pecos Division also holds court in Alpine.
- Thirteen district judgeships are authorized; Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses leads the court from Del Rio as of mid-2026, with seventeen magistrate judges across the district.
- White-collar enforcement is real on the district’s eastern flank: a San Antonio CEO pleaded guilty in February 2026 to a $69.5 million investment fraud against roughly 345 investors.
- The district’s pace shows up in procedure — 99.5 percent of FY2024 sentenced cases ended in pleas, and the court has used Speedy Trial Act general orders to manage disruptions in its western detention facilities.
- An appeal to the Fifth Circuit starts with a notice filed inside Rule 4(b)’s 14-day window — measured from entry of judgment, not from sentencing day rhetoric.
- Section 2255 motions, compassionate-release requests, and similar post-judgment filings come back to the Western District itself.
- Our firm appears here pro hac vice, pairing trial-level defense with the appellate and post-conviction work that is our core practice.
The Western District of Texas at a Glance
The Western District is the largest of Texas’s four federal districts by geography and criminal volume alike, sweeping from the Hill Country through the Trans-Pecos to the border. 28 U.S.C. § 124(d) organizes it into seven divisions — Austin, Waco, El Paso, San Antonio, Del Rio, Pecos, and Midland-Odessa — and a 2024 amendment added Alpine as a statutory place of holding court for the Pecos Division. The court’s own directory lists staffed clerk’s offices in eight cities, from Austin’s Fifth Street courthouse to the office in Alpine, plus a Fort Hood operation run through Waco.
Charging decisions across that expanse belong to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, while review of the court’s judgments belongs to the Fifth Circuit. For a defendant, that pairing has a practical meaning: trial strategy in Del Rio or Austin must always be built with one eye on how the record will read in New Orleans.
More than seven million people live within the district’s boundaries, concentrated in Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso but scattered across border towns and West Texas ranch country as well. The result is a court with two distinct temperaments: high-volume border divisions where calendars move at industrial speed, and metropolitan divisions where complex fraud, firearms, and trafficking cases are litigated at full depth under the district’s local court rules.
The Bench: A Chief Judge on the Border
Thirteen district judgeships are authorized for the Western District of Texas by 28 U.S.C. § 133, and the court’s leadership sits not in a metropolitan center but on the border itself: as of mid-2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses presides from Del Rio. The court’s own directory lists district judges resident in every division — among them Fred Biery, Orlando L. Garcia, Xavier Rodriguez, and Jason Pulliam in San Antonio; Robert Pitman and Andrew B. Davis in Austin; Kathleen Cardone and Leon Schydlower in El Paso; Alan Albright and Christopher R. Wolfe in Waco; David Counts in Midland; and Ernest Gonzalez in Del Rio — supported by five senior district judges.
Seventeen magistrate judges keep the district’s volume moving, with duty stations that map its geography — from multiple magistrate judges in El Paso, San Antonio, and Austin to a resident magistrate judge in Alpine, two hundred miles from the next federal courthouse. In the border divisions, the magistrate calendar is where most defendants first meet the court, and detention decisions made there in the first seventy-two hours often matter as much as anything that follows.
Because divisions are assigned by geography, where the alleged conduct occurred effectively selects the courtroom. We research the assigned judge’s sentencing patterns, published opinions, and standing orders before our first appearance in any Western District of Texas case — informed preparation, never prediction.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
The FY2024 numbers define the district’s shape: of 8,035 people sentenced, 6,512 — 81 percent, against a 30 percent national share — were immigration cases. Drug-trafficking sentencings added 782 more, firearms cases 256, and fraud 116. The percentages understate the absolute scale: even at 1.4 percent of the docket, this district’s fraud caseload rivals that of mid-sized districts where white-collar work is the headline.
Every case still travels the same legal road — and knowing each milestone protects rights at all of them. Investigations may surface through a target letter or subpoena before any arrest; charging comes by indictment in felony cases; the initial appearance and arraignment set bail and counsel; and pretrial litigation determines whether the endgame is a negotiated plea, a trial, or a dismissal, with sentencing closing the trial-court chapter. Stage-by-stage detail lives in our federal criminal process hub.
With 99.5 percent of FY2024 sentenced cases resolved by plea and just 42 trial convictions, the meaningful defense battles in this district are usually fought over charge selection, quantity and role findings, criminal-history scoring, and safety-valve eligibility under Pulsifer v. United States, 601 U.S. 124 (2024), which settled how the § 3553(f) criteria are counted. Those Guidelines and statutory fights routinely swing years — they deserve the same intensity a trial would get.
Applied Insight: In the Western District of Texas, velocity is the prosecution’s quiet ally. When a court sentences eight thousand people a year, the system’s default is the fast plea — and a defendant who accepts the default timeline often surrenders defenses no one ever evaluated. Slowing a case down enough to actually test the stop, the search, the quantity, and the Guidelines math is itself a defense strategy here.
Enforcement Priorities from San Antonio to the Border
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas serves more than seven million residents from its San Antonio headquarters and seven staffed division offices, under Acting U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons as of mid-2026. Its output on the border is staggering by any standard: in the single week of May 29 to June 4, 2026, the office announced 297 new immigration and immigration-related criminal filings. Homeland Security Task Force investigations feed the drug docket as well — a June 2026 Del Rio sentencing put an Oklahoma trafficker in federal prison for 360 months on cocaine-importation charges.
The district’s eastern divisions generate a quieter but substantial white-collar docket. In February 2026, the CEO of a San Antonio real-estate investment firm, Devin Ward Elder, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a $69.5 million scheme that drew in roughly 345 investors — an FBI-investigated case carrying up to 20 years. Austin’s investor-fraud and money-laundering prosecutions track the capital’s tech-and-startup economy, and the office regularly announces elder-fraud and Ponzi-scheme convictions out of the Austin Division. Defendants on this side of the docket face the same agencies and statutes as in Dallas or Houston, with one twist: their cases are tried in a court whose daily rhythms are set by the border calendar.
Firearms enforcement adds a third current. With Fort Hood and Fort Bliss inside the district and a constant flow of weapons cases tied to trafficking corridors, Second Amendment litigation is unusually consequential here — from Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024), where the Supreme Court held that ATF exceeded its authority in classifying bump stocks as machineguns, to United States v. Connelly, 117 F.4th 269 (5th Cir. 2024), an El Paso prosecution out of this district in which the Fifth Circuit held 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) unconstitutional as applied to a sober, non-violent marijuana user while sustaining the statute on its face. That question has now reached the top: on June 18, 2026, in United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Fifth Circuit and held that prosecuting a marijuana user under § 922(g)(3) violated the Second Amendment as applied to him, aligning the nation’s high court with the as-applied approach this circuit charted in Connelly. The doctrine is still developing, though — Hemani resolved the drug-user provision without settling the many other firearm prohibitors — so a firearms charge in this district warrants a Second Amendment audit as a matter of course.
How the Border Shapes Procedure
Practice in this district has textures found almost nowhere else. In the spring of 2026, a measles outbreak at a West Texas detention facility prompted the court to issue successive general orders excluding time under the Speedy Trial Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3161, for the Midland-Odessa, Pecos, and El Paso divisions — a reminder that in the border divisions, even public-health events become criminal-procedure events. The Fifth Circuit has approved this mechanism — in United States v. Gordon, 93 F.4th 294 (5th Cir. 2024), it upheld Speedy Trial Act exclusions resting on this district’s pandemic-era general orders — but only where the judge incorporates the general order’s findings into the individual case. That qualifier is a defense opportunity: exclusions are checked, not assumed.
Localism runs deep in other ways. Each division maintains its own jury instructions and its own Criminal Justice Act panel; the El Paso Division operates the Sendero re-entry court and the Waco Division runs a Fort Hood re-entry and diversion program; and admission pro hac vice is by motion filed in the case with a $100 fee, an original handwritten signature — electronic signatures are not accepted — and, in the Austin Division, a separate division-specific form. None of these details decides a case alone; together, they decide how smoothly a defense runs.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
For all the district’s speed, the appellate door closes fastest of all: Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) sets a 14-day deadline, running from entry of judgment, for the notice of appeal that brings a case before the Fifth Circuit. In a court where pleas dominate, appellate strategy starts earlier still — with what the plea agreement waives, what objections survive into the record, and whether the Guidelines calculation was preserved for review.
Post-judgment remedies stay anchored to this court. A motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 attacking a Western District of Texas conviction or sentence is filed in the division that entered judgment, as are compassionate release motions and other forms of post-conviction relief. Given the volume of drug and immigration sentences this district produces, it generates a correspondingly large population of people with viable Guidelines-amendment, resentencing, and § 2255 claims. Compassionate release, though, is a harder road than the raw number of filings suggests: the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported a national grant rate of 14.1 percent for fiscal year 2025 (394 of 2,795 motions decided on the merits), and the Fifth Circuit has trended below that average, so a Western District motion succeeds on the strength of its record, not its length. This is the center of our firm’s practice and fully portable to any district in the country.
How the Firm Practices in This Court
Our firm appears in the Western District of Texas through admission pro hac vice, following the court’s published procedure: a motion to appear filed in the case itself — on the Austin Division’s dedicated form when the case sits there — accompanied by the $100 fee and an original handwritten signature, which the court requires in place of an electronic one. An attorney already admitted to the district and associated with the case may e-file the motion, and once it is granted, electronic-filing credentials follow through PACER.
Cross-district practice is the norm, not the exception, at the federal bar — the substantive law is identical in El Paso and in Charleston, and the procedural variations are exactly the kind of detail a national practice learns as a matter of course. What a client should evaluate is not the lawyer’s mailing address but whether the lawyer has handled the specific kind of federal fight the case presents: a contested Guidelines calculation, a suppression motion on a border stop, a Fifth Circuit brief, a § 2255 petition.
That is the experience we bring. Elizabeth Franklin-Best practices before the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuits — the Fifth among them — and literally wrote the book on post-judgment litigation, Reversing Your Criminal Conviction. That book grows out of a substantial record: she has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, across all twelve regional circuits and the U.S. Supreme Court, and she keeps a nationwide federal post-conviction practice going through pro hac vice admission from one coast to the other. For Western District of Texas clients, we take trial-level engagements, Fifth Circuit appeals, and § 2255 and compassionate-release matters; we handle the same work next door in the Northern District and, under standing bar admission, in the Southern District of Texas.
Frequently Asked Questions
What area does the Western District of Texas cover?
The district spans Central and West Texas — Austin, San Antonio, Waco, Del Rio, El Paso, Pecos, and Midland-Odessa form its seven divisions, serving more than seven million residents. Clerk’s offices operate in eight cities, including Alpine, which a 2024 statute added as a place of holding court for the Pecos Division.
Who are the judges of the Western District of Texas?
Thirteen district judgeships are authorized. As of mid-2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses presides from Del Rio, with district judges resident in San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Waco, Midland, and Del Rio, five senior district judges, and seventeen magistrate judges — including one stationed in Alpine. Geography determines the division, and the division largely determines the judge.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the Western District of Texas?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, headquartered in San Antonio with seven staffed division offices. As of mid-2026 the office is led by Acting U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons. Its filings run from hundreds of border cases a week to multimillion-dollar investment-fraud prosecutions in Austin and San Antonio.
Why is the Western District of Texas caseload so large?
Two of its divisions, El Paso and Del Rio, sit on the busiest stretches of the border, and federal prosecutions are filed where the offense occurs. In fiscal year 2024 the district sentenced 8,035 people — 81 percent in immigration cases — the most of any district in the Fifth Circuit. In one week of mid-2026, prosecutors filed 297 new immigration-related cases.
Which appeals court covers the Western District of Texas?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, sitting in New Orleans, reviews judgments from this district along with the rest of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Under Rule 4(b) the notice of appeal is generally due 14 days after entry of judgment.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the Western District of Texas?
Border cases move fast — arrest, initial appearance before a magistrate judge, detention decision, and plea discussions can compress into days. Cases in Austin, San Antonio, and Waco follow the fuller arc of investigation, indictment, pretrial motions, and plea or trial. With 99.5 percent of fiscal year 2024 sentenced cases ending in pleas, the fights that matter most are usually over suppression, drug quantity, role, and safety-valve eligibility.
Can an out-of-state lawyer represent me in the Western District of Texas?
Yes. The court admits outside counsel pro hac vice on a motion filed in the case with a 100 dollar fee and an original handwritten signature — the Austin Division uses its own form. An attorney already admitted to the district who is associated with the case may file the motion electronically.
Does the Western District of Texas see major white-collar cases?
Yes, particularly on its eastern side. In February 2026 the CEO of a San Antonio investment firm pleaded guilty to a 69.5 million dollar wire-fraud scheme involving roughly 345 investors, and the Austin Division regularly produces investor-fraud, elder-fraud, and money-laundering prosecutions tied to the capital’s growing tech economy.
Does your firm handle federal cases in the Western District of Texas?
We do — trial-level defense, Fifth Circuit appeals, and Section 2255 and compassionate-release litigation throughout the district, appearing pro hac vice under the court’s published procedure. Every engagement starts with a paid, one-hour initial consultation that examines the charges, the division, the judge, and the timeline you are facing.
Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer
In the busiest criminal district in the Fifth Circuit, hesitation is expensive. If your matter sits anywhere from an Austin grand jury to an El Paso detention hearing — or if a Western District of Texas judgment needs appellate or § 2255 attention — reserve a paid, one-hour initial consultation and get a clear-eyed evaluation while your options are still open.