President Donald Trump was dealt a brutal hand last month by federal district courts across the country as they struck down—or at least temporarily paused—a number of the administration’s directives on some of its top priorities.
Why It Matters
Trump sailed into office on the pledge that he would carry out mass deportations on “day one,” impose sweeping tariffs on countries he claims have taken advantage of the U.S., root out government workers deemed insufficiently loyal, eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and more.
But the administration has run up against judicial pushback on virtually every major agenda item that Trump championed on the campaign trail and since he took office. In May, according to one recent analysis, the Trump administration suffered more than two dozen defeats at the district court level.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment via email.
District Court Rulings in May
Cracking Down on Universities
May 23: A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students.
Trump has zeroed in on Ivy League universities like Harvard and Columbia over pro-Palestinian student activism on campus. Harvard, in particular, has drawn Trump’s ire over its refusal to comply with the president’s demands to change its hiring and admission policies, eliminate DEI initiatives and screen international students who, in the administration’s words, may be “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. The university quickly sued the DHS over what the school described as a “campaign of retribution.” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with Harvard in her May 23 ruling blocking the DHS’ order. The administration is appealing the ruling.
Firing Federal Workers
May 19: A federal judge threw a wrench into Trump’s gutting of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), ruling that the administration’s efforts were “unlawful” and declaring its actions “null and void.”
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell’s ruling marked another twist in the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, which resulted in a dramatic standoff between USIP executives and staffers working for Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as DOGE took over USIP’s headquarters.
The Trump administration appealed Howell’s decision after she rejected its request to suspend her ruling.
May 22: U.S. District Judge Susan Illston blocked the Trump administration’s plan to carry out large-scale layoffs at about 20 federal agencies, siding with a group of unions, nonprofits and municipalities who argued that the president needs congressional authorization to implement the cuts.
A U.S. appeals court upheld Illston’s ruling and, on Monday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the case.
Detaining International Students
May 9: Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was freed from detention in Louisiana after a federal district judge in Burlington, Vermont, ruled that the government had presented “no evidence” justifying her detention by ICE. U.S. District Judge William Sessions ordered that she be allowed to return to Massachusetts and continue her studies while the case proceeds.
Ozturk was detained by ICE agents and accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda. Ozturk’s detention appeared related to an op-ed she wrote in the student newspaper criticizing the Israeli government’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. She has not been accused of a crime.
May 14: Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University, was freed from ICE detention in Louisiana after a Virginia judge ruled that he was detained by the Trump administration for “punitive reasons” in violation of the Constitution. He was allowed to return to his home in Virginia while the legal challenge to his detention continues in court.
Deportations
May 23: Brian Murphy, a federal judge in Boston, ordered the Trump administration to “take all immediate steps” to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan national who was wrongly deported from the U.S. The man, identified only as O.C.G. in court filings, is a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people to countries where they aren’t citizens without giving them due process.
The Trump administration initially indicated that it would appeal Murphy’s ruling. But lawyers for the government said on May 28 that they’re taking steps to bring the man back, one of the first times the administration has indicated compliance with a court order to return a deportee to the U.S.
Energy and Climate Policy
May 20: A federal judge sided with 11 nonprofit groups and six cities in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s freeze on 32 grants totaling $176 million that were meant to go toward sustainable housing and farm aid. The grants were approved via the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“These grants were funded by legislation that mandated that the funds be expended for a specific purpose and left no discretion to agency heads to disregard the legislative mandates because current officials did not approve of the purposes of the previously appropriated programs,” U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling.
Targeting Law Firms
May 2: Howell—who ruled against Trump in the USIP case—struck down the president’s March executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which has represented Democratic clients and causes that Trump has expressed opposition to.
“No American president has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue,” she wrote, adding, “In purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”
May 23: U.S. District Judge John Bates blocked Trump’s executive order punishing Jenner & Block because the firm had previously associated with Andrew Weissmann, a longtime former federal prosecutor who investigated Trump’s 2016 campaign as part of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s work on the Russia investigation. Weissmann has since become a prominent anti-Trump voice.
“Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution,” Bates ruled. He added: “This order, like others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers. It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.”
May 27: U.S. District Judge Richard Leon didn’t spare any exclamation points in a blistering ruling striking down Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm WilmerHale.
“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting,” Leon, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote. “The Founding Fathers knew this!”
“The Order shouts through a bullhorn: If you take on causes disfavored by President Trump, you will be punished!” Leon wrote. He added: “I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!”
Scrubbing Government Databases
May 23: U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin granted, in part, a preliminary injunction requiring articles to be restored to patient-safety resource services. The articles were initially removed in response to a January 20 executive order from Trump targeting “gender ideology.”
Sorokin said when granting the injunction that “the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in proving that the removal of their articles was a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination by the defendants in violation of the First Amendment.”
A Silver Lining for Trump
Despite some setbacks, May wasn’t all bad legal news for the president and his agenda. Despite the pushback at the district court level, Trump was granted reprieve by appellate courts, as well as the Supreme Court, on two issues that make up the backbone of his political agenda: tariffs and deportations.
In two major rulings, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants in the U.S.
On May 19, the high court cleared the way for the administration to end a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program protecting about 350,000 Venezuelan nationals while litigation over the program continues making its way through the courts.
The justices did not explain their reasoning in favor of the Trump administration, as is typical when the Supreme Court rules on emergency requests. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one to say that she would not have overturned a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked the administration from revoking TPS.
On May 30, the Supreme Court handed Trump another victory when it allowed the administration to end a Biden-era parole program and start revoking legal protections for roughly 500,000 migrants.
The administration also got a partial victory in the high-profile case involving Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate whom the U.S. is trying to deport over his pro-Palestinian activism.
On May 28, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “likely” violated the Constitution when he revoked Khalil’s green card and ordered him to be deported because of his pro-Palestinian activism.
But U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz declined to release Khalil from detention in Louisiana—for now—and gave him more time to show evidence that his detention has caused him “irreparable harm.”
Even if Khalil does prove that, however, the judge said he may still remain in detention over the government’s allegation that he committed fraud by failing to disclose some details on his green card application.
The same day as the Khalil ruling, the U.S. Court of International Trade (USCIT) blocked most of the sweeping global tariffs that Trump announced in April, ruling that the president didn’t have “unbounded authority” to impose the duties by invoking an economic emergency-powers statute.
But less than 24 hours later, a U.S. appeals court stayed USCIT’s ruling, reinstating Trump’s tariffs while it awaits arguments from the plaintiffs and defendants.
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