The Trump administration’s repeated disregard of lower-court orders marks a sharp departure from decades of executive-branch practice, an Associated Press investigation found. In at least 31 lawsuits in the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term, federal judges ruled that administration officials had violated their orders — covering policies from the deportation of alleged gang members to El Salvador to the withholding of billions of dollars in foreign aid. The violations, drawn from hundreds of pages of court records, represent about one out of every eight lawsuits in which courts temporarily blocked the administration’s actions, and come alongside more than 250 instances of noncompliance in individual immigration cases.
The findings illustrate what legal scholars describe as an unprecedented power struggle between the Republican administration and the judiciary. “What the court system is experiencing in the last year and a half is just qualitatively completely different from anything that’s preceded it,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who is tracking the litigation.
Judges, too, have been scathing. In February, U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes, a Biden appointee, accused Trump officials of seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” adding that they could “only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.” Sykes had blocked a policy of holding immigrants without bond hearings, but the administration continued the practice, insisting the ruling was not binding.
The noncompliance extends across a wide range of areas. In October, U.S. District Judge William Smith, a George W. Bush nominee, said Homeland Security officials were trying to “bully the states” after they kept immigration-related conditions on disaster relief grants despite his injunction. Last May, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Biden nominee, accused the Justice Department of “hallucinating new text” in an appellate order and “rewriting” it to reach the government’s preferred outcome.
Of the judges who confirmed violations, 22 were appointed by Democratic presidents and seven by Republicans, the AP review found. Former federal judges Jeremy Fogel and Liam O’Grady said their colleagues are losing trust in the Justice Department. That is making judges “more aggressive in accusing the government of bad faith,” O’Grady said.
The administration has pushed back forcefully. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson dismissed the lower-court rulings as “unlawful” and said the administration would “continue to comply with lawful court rulings.” She added that “President Trump’s entire Administration is lawfully implementing the America First agenda he was elected to enact.” In court, Justice Department attorneys have argued that the administration was acting outside the scope of the orders or that higher courts had undercut district judges’ authority.
Those higher courts have often come to the administration’s aid. In 15 of the 31 lawsuits, an appellate court or the Supreme Court either allowed the underlying policy, limited the district court’s corrective efforts, or both. The outcome has prompted alarm among legal-watchdog groups. “The danger is that this gets normalized,” said JoAnna Suriani, counsel with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced the pattern last June in a dissent joined by the court’s other liberal justices. “This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last,” she wrote. “Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”
Some conservative legal scholars dispute the narrative of defiance. Will Chamberlain, senior counsel with the Article III Project, argued that Trump officials are “generally complying, appealing and winning.” He said that “if they were defying orders left and right, they’d be losing them.”
But for communities affected by the funding and policy disruptions, the stakes are concrete. In Eureka, California, school administrator Lisa Claussen said grant money halted by the Education Department had allowed her district to hire more than a dozen psychologists and social workers to help students grappling with drug use and suicidal thoughts. After a judge blocked the grant cut, the department imposed new restrictions, including six-month funding increments. The district has already sent layoff notices. “We have many kids who don’t trust adults for very good reason,” Claussen said in a phone interview. “To be able to just swipe this grant like they’re doing … We didn’t do anything wrong.”
David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University, summed up the broader concern. “The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” he said. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.”