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After the borrowers’ lawyers complained, Judge William Alsup rejected the settlement in October. His ruling strongly criticized the department for “issuing perfunctory denial notices utterly devoid of meaningful explanation at a blistering pace,” and he ordered the department to turn over records — a rare step in lawsuits involving federal agencies’ decisions.

The Education Department declined to comment on the newly filed documents. Ms. Nevin, who still heads the borrower defense team, did not respond to a request for comment. A message left for a representative for Ms. DeVos was not returned.

Lawyers for the department said in an earlier court filing that the agency’s effort to quickly clear its backlog “has meant, to a large extent, focusing on claims that can be denied based on a lack of relevant evidence.”

Ms. DeVos’s successor, Miguel Cardona, took office this month, and on Thursday began dismantling the department’s approach to claims from defrauded borrowers. Mr. Cardona ended and retroactively reversed Ms. DeVos’s policy of granting partial relief, instructing the agency to forgive $1 billion in debt owed by 72,000 people with successful claims — all of them on grounds established during the Obama administration.

“Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” Mr. Cardona said.

But that action did nothing to help people like Theresa Sweet, the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, whose forgiveness application was denied last year after a four-year wait. She graduated in 2006 from the Brooks Institute of Photography, a for-profit school that closed a decade later, after its accreditor accused it of “willfully misleading” prospective students.