In his first weeks as a federal judge in Washington last December, Amir Ali was surprised to learn that the job didn’t come with a robe. Where was he supposed to get one? He had to order his own, and it would take months to arrive.
There was much that Ali, as a brand-new member of the federal bench, did not yet know. A lot of it would be covered at a five-day orientation program for new appointees hosted by the Federal Judicial Center and affectionately referred to as “baby judges school,” but that takes place only a few times a year, and the next session was months away. Ali would have to learn the job by doing it and from senior judges on his court, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. When word got around that he was waiting for his robe, he found one on his desk with a note from a former chief judge: “Yours as long as you need it.”
The D.D.C., as the court that Ali joined is called, has one of the highest profiles of the 94 federal District Courts across the country. Its location makes the D.D.C. the frequent starting place for suits against the federal government and thus the site of numerous historic showdowns. It was D.D.C. judges, in the 1970s, who ruled that the Pentagon Papers could be published and ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes.
Ali, whom the Senate confirmed shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, was one of Joe Biden’s last judicial nominees. In his first couple of weeks, Ali met his three law clerks in person for the first time (he hired them over Zoom) and started sorting through the 226 cases he inherited from other judges. It was a whirlwind. But he had the guidance of some of the D.D.C.’s senior judges, who like many of their counterparts in other federal courts see themselves as stewards of a tradition of nonpartisan collegiality and decision-making. “They have the perspective that comes with having been through other complicated historical times,” says James Boasberg, the D.D.C.’s chief judge.
Once Trump became president, Ali and his colleagues faced a level of pressure unlike any in the modern era.
One senior judge who helped get Ali situated was Royce Lamberth, an 81-year-old Reagan appointee from Texas who was chief judge of the D.D.C. from 2008 to 2013. “One reason I keep hanging on is that I love working with new judges,” Lamberth explained. “I don’t care how liberal they are, and they don’t care how conservative I am.” Many afternoons during his first months in the job, Ali would stop by Lamberth’s chambers, which were on the same floor as his, passing under a pair of cattle horns mounted above an inner doorway.
But even the senior judges soon found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Once Trump became president, Ali and his colleagues faced a level of pressure unlike any in the modern era. As the incoming administration issued a blizzard of executive orders, those who were affected raced to court to block them. Over the next four months, the 24 district judges of the D.D.C. would handle at least 115 requests for emergency relief from government action, more than three times the number for all of 2024. With the House and Senate largely abdicating their role as a check on the executive branch, judges like Ali found themselves in a position that the founders never envisioned: as the lone constitutional check on presidential power. And they had to assess the legality of Trump’s orders, as impartially as possible, even as the president and his allies launched a volley of personal attacks on them for rulings they didn’t like.
To understand what it was like for a new judge to navigate these complex currents, we closely followed Ali’s first seven months on the bench. Ali himself declined to comment for this article. But we interviewed four dozen people, including his friends, colleagues and fellow judges who observed him during this time, and examined the public record. (A spokeswoman from the D.D.C. says that Ali refers anyone interested in his work to his judicial opinions.) The picture that emerged is of a judiciary under threat of intimidation that’s at once scrambling to adapt and resolute about preserving its independence and authority.
Ten weeks into the job, Ali learned he would be presiding over a momentous clash involving presidential power. The D.D.C. once randomly distributed cases on weekdays by using a deck of 3-by-5 cards labeled with the judges’ names. Now the random assignments are made by computer software, and judges receive them via automated emails, which can land at any time of day or night.
On Feb. 11, Ali received one of these messages informing him that his docket now included a petition for emergency relief from a host of nonprofit groups and businesses that partnered with the government to deliver foreign aid. They were asking him to block the executive order Trump signed freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding approved by Congress and allocated through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake. Halting spending on foreign aid meant ending programs to provide food in war-torn regions and prevent the spread of malaria, tuberculosis and H.I.V./AIDS throughout the world.
The dire consequences of the U.S.A.I.D. case turned on both a big constitutional question and the details of administrative law: Ali would have to define the point at which the president’s exercise of legitimate authority over foreign affairs crossed the line into unlawfully interfering with Congress’s power of the purse. And he would have to make this difficult call right away. The plaintiffs in the U.S.A.I.D. case were asking him to block Trump’s executive order immediately and in its entirety. Those early months, Lamberth says, were a “baptism by fire.”
Federal judgeships are perhaps the most coveted positions in the legal profession. Lawyers routinely leave behind far more lucrative careers in private practice or, as in Ali’s case, a job in public-interest law, for the prestige and life tenure of the federal bench. The power of District Court judges, who sit just two rungs down from the Supreme Court, is considerable. They decide what evidence from each side to admit, which determines the record in a case. They preside over trials. To a degree unusual in any workplace, they rule their own domains; only a small fraction of their decisions are reviewed on appeal.
The president and the Senate choose and confirm federal judges through the political process. The idea, however, is that once they take the bench, the judges move into a separate and nonpartisan sphere, drawing their legitimacy from making decisions based on rules and codes and the precedents set by past courts, not their personal or policy preferences.
In our hyper-polarized era, that premise is no longer widely shared outside the courts themselves. In 2022, when the Supreme Court abruptly reversed itself on abortion rights, many liberals denounced the ruling as an act of partisan policymaking. Trump’s return to office has ramped up conservative attacks on lower-court judges. Trump officials and their allies have publicly insulted judges who ruled against the administration and in some cases have shared information about members of their families. Judges no longer just have critics — they have enemies, for whom eviscerating the idea of judicial impartiality is a way to gain political advantage and destroy the public’s trust in the courts.
For decades, starting in the 1960s, civil rights advocates like Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were nominated to appellate courts and the Supreme Court. But that tradition faded. More recently, most of the nation’s approximately 850 District and Appeals Court judges have come from big law firms or prosecutors’ offices.
At the outset of Biden’s presidency, his White House set out to broaden the professional experience of the judiciary and publicly called for recommendations of civil rights lawyers and public defenders for court vacancies. One reason Democrats made this shift was Trump’s success, during his first term, in confirming nominees who were unbridled champions of conservative causes. Justin Walker, for example, made more than 100 television appearances to defend Brett Kavanaugh, for whom he had clerked, during the fight over his Supreme Court nomination. (“Justice Kavanaugh — what can I say that I haven’t already said on Fox News?” Walker said at his investiture for the D.C. Court of Appeals.)
Fiery punditry was never Ali’s style. Before he went to law school, he was a Google engineer. He is an analyst by temperament, the kind of person who thinks about the means as much as the ends, process as well as substance. He likes solving problems within a defined frame — he has a woodworking shop in his garage — while recognizing a difference between problems that are complicated (lots of moving parts) and complex (laden with nuances and unknowns).
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2011 and clerking for two years, Ali went to the corporate firm Jenner & Block in Washington. As a 30-year-old junior associate, he argued a pro bono case at the Supreme Court challenging the length of his client’s sentence and won 7 to 1 across ideological lines. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.) Ali moved to the MacArthur Justice Center, a civil rights litigation firm, in 2017, taking a significant pay cut in the process. The following year, he persuaded a former federal prosecutor to look into the case of an intellectually disabled man in prison in Louisiana for murder. The prosecutor brought together a bipartisan group of more than 40 other former high-level Justice Department and law-enforcement officials to help secure his release.
Ali also won two more Supreme Court cases, 6 to 3, with conservative justices voting in his favor. The first, in 2019, expanded the constitutional right to a lawyer, and the second, in 2022, established that prosecutors and police officers can be held liable for bringing false charges.
Ali’s interest in accountability partly reflected his experience with U.S. border control. Ali was raised in Canada (his parents immigrated there from Egypt before he was born), and in his 20s, when he was working for Google in California, he was regularly pulled out of line when he crossed the border to wait hours for extensive screenings. Every time, the officer would say, often sympathetically, that there had been a glitch in the system and that now it was fixed — but it never was.
A fascination with the gap between the values of the system and those of its participants, Ali often told his friends, was one reason he decided to apply to law school. He became a U.S. citizen in 2019, and he is the first federal judge who is both Muslim and Arab American. (His wife is Jewish and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.)
Some lawyers on the left recoil at the idea of wielding the power of a judge, which necessitates enforcing laws whether or not you believe they’re just. “Some people say, ‘I can’t send someone to prison,’” says Devi Rao, who worked with Ali at Jenner & Block as well as MacArthur and at Harvard, where they ran a criminal justice appellate clinic together. “That’s not him.” Ali saw himself as simply shifting roles in a system he could work within. “He has this seriousness about the law,” Rao says.
In the past, the liberal ideal of a judge might have been an action hero in a robe, determined to reshape the law around his or her vision of social good. But given the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Ali’s supporters appreciated that he was trained to think ahead to how a case might fare on appeal. “I thought, Put Amir on the bench, and he’ll understand how to elicit the evidence on both sides and hold everyone to the rules,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, who worked with Ali to prepare other lawyers to argue cases. “That’s the coin of our realm.”
Ali also had letters of support from a group of prosecutors, a lawyer at the libertarian Cato Institute and former law school classmates who belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. Still, the Biden team told Ali’s supporters that his confirmation was an open question. At MacArthur, Ali denounced Trump’s 2017 ban on travel from majority Muslim countries. He filed an amicus brief arguing that the ban was driven by hatred of Muslims and, at his most outspoken, called it “shameful” in an opinion column in The Guardian.
At Ali’s confirmation hearing that February, the travel ban didn’t come up. Instead, the Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Josh Hawley pressed Ali on remarks another staff member at MacArthur made on a podcast about “making police departments obsolete.” Ali disavowed the statement, noting that he wasn’t executive director at the time. Still, Republican senators unified against him.
While other Democratic nominees with powerful senators supporting them won confirmation in the closely divided Senate, Ali stalled. He had help from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey but no home-state advocate (because Washington has no senators). Then, on Nov. 20, two weeks after Trump won re-election, the Democrats saw an opening. A couple of Republican senators were out of town. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, put Ali up for a vote.
But the absent Republicans came back and voted no. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, also refused to support Ali. That meant he needed Senator Joe Manchin’s vote. But the West Virginia Democrat announced the previous March that he would support only judicial nominees who had some Republican backing. (“If you’ve got a decent person, you can at least get one,” Manchin told Politico.) When Manchin came into the chamber during the vote for Ali, he walked to the front and voted no. Ali’s nomination was about to go down. But about 30 seconds later, Manchin returned and changed his vote. (Through a spokesman, Manchin declined to comment.)
Despite endorsements from conservative colleagues, Ali had barely squeaked through, 50 to 49. It was a warning of how polarizing becoming a judge could be.
‘I’ve never seen a time like this, when a judge had to join the bench and find that we’re under constant attack.’
Royce Lamberth
Ali held the first hearing in the U.S.A.I.D. case on Feb. 12, the day after it was assigned to him. Because of the emergency nature of the aid groups’ request, the lawyers made their arguments over the phone, with Ali asking questions from his chambers, sitting behind a temporary desk among mostly empty bookshelves. “I know that the plaintiffs in each case have alleged they’re suffering harm, which may be irrevocable,” Ali said, with reporters from around the world listening in. “I also understand that the administration has identified the subject matter here as a priority.”
Stephen Wirth, a lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter representing some of the plaintiffs, said his clients were devastated. “Their businesses are shuttering, they are terminating or furloughing their employees,” he said.
Eric Hamilton, a lawyer in the Justice Department representing the government, granted that “there might be some hiccups” as Trump reset foreign-policy priorities for his new administration by pausing spending, pending the review he ordered of the existing humanitarian programs. But Ali should reject the plaintiffs’ request for emergency intervention, Hamilton said, because “it is the president, of course, who is responsible for setting policies.”
Ali turned to the plaintiffs’ lawyers and, in a mild tone, asked a penetrating question: “The blunt or not-so-blunt approach — why isn’t that just a decision for the president?”
The question cut to the core of the American system of separation of powers. Of the Constitution’s checks on the presidency, the power that Congress has to decide whether to spend money is perhaps the most important. Could Trump simply remake policy unilaterally, despite Congress’s spending directive, based on the theory that the president controls foreign relations?
The following day, Feb. 13, Ali issued a temporary restraining order (a form of emergency relief), which gave the plaintiffs in the U.S.A.I.D. case much of what they asked for. Ali wrote that the Trump administration provided no explanation for why its blanket suspension of aid, “which set off a shock wave,” was necessary.
Ali ordered the government not to terminate grants and contracts, issue stop-work orders or suspend the funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid before Trump took office. But he allowed the review of aid-spending that Trump ordered. Around the same time as Ali’s ruling, another judge on the D.D.C. blocked Trump from freezing as much as $3 trillion in federal grants and loans. Trump pinned a defiant message to the top of his social media account: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The president was signaling that he saw himself, not the courts, as the final word.
Then, on Feb. 18, Pete Marocco, the Trump official in the State Department who was now in charge of U.S.A.I.D., told Ali that the agencies were continuing to cancel the grants and contracts of aid partners “for convenience,” as the terms of the agreements allowed, or because the Trump administration — not Congress — determined they were not in the national interest. Anyone who wanted to be paid for past work would have to go through a lengthy process for resolving disputes.
Over the next couple of days, the plaintiffs asked Ali to order immediate payment of all the money they and other foreign-aid partners were owed. They also asked for an emergency order holding the government in contempt. This was a major escalation. A contempt finding could entail sanctions against a government official, including a fine or even jail time. But such a result is rare: No federal judge had found the government in contempt of a court order in more than a decade.
Ali was in a tricky position. Health clinics and soup kitchens were closing all over the world, seemingly based on provisions of an order the judge already found to be unlawful. But in court, the government argued that it was complying with his order by analyzing thousands of foreign-aid contracts and canceling them according to their terms. And out of court, Vice President JD Vance and the Trump aide Stephen Miller suggested that the executive branch didn’t necessarily have to obey all court orders, potentially abandoning the approach other presidents have taken, almost without exception, since the nation’s founding. The administration’s actions and rhetoric were creating a sense of emergency. But if Ali penalized the government and got caught in a battle over compliance, he would be doing so before he knew whether the higher courts thought he’d gotten the law right in blocking the president in the first place. District Court judges, after all, take the first crack at a case but don’t have the last word.
Ali denied the plaintiffs’ request to hold the government in contempt. He also ruled on Feb. 20 that the executive branch had the discretion to undertake a “good-faith individualized assessment” of any particular contract or grant. The tug of war over unfreezing the foreign-aid funds continued. At the next hearing five days later, the plaintiffs, who still hadn’t been paid, pointed to an email from the State Department, which was absorbing what was left of U.S.A.I.D., that continued to cite Trump’s executive orders as the basis for the suspension of $15.9 billion in foreign-aid grants. Ali asked the lawyer from the Justice Department if the government had other authority to continue suspending all the aid. He received no clear answer. Ali took a 30-minute recess. When he came back, he ordered the government — by 11:59 p.m. the next day — to pay all the invoices on work completed by Feb. 13, the date of his first ruling.
In a sense, Ali was aiming for middle ground, requiring the government only to cover past debts rather than fulfill the foreign-aid contracts going forward. But Trump’s allies responded with an all-out attack. Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, announced that day on X that he was drafting articles to impeach Ali. Elon Musk quickly shared Ogles’s post, which included Ali’s picture, adding his own call to fire the judge. Some of Musk’s followers on X called for Ali to be deported or arrested for treason and posted images of a noose.
Ali’s friends say he never talked about the impeachment resolution and kept his head in his work. He was hardly the only judge whom Trump and his allies were going after. Ogles was calling himself a “woke judge hunter” and staging an “impeachathon,” with resolutions to unseat three other judges, including John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee on the D.D.C. who worked on the Whitewater investigation that played a part in Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Republican cause of his day. Judges at the D.D.C. joked that if Bates wasn’t safe, no one was.
Lamberth also received death threats after sentencing a couple of Jan. 6 defendants to prison last year and objecting when Trump called the rioters facing charges “hostages.” But like many judges, Lamberth thought what was happening to Ali and Bates crossed a different line. They were being treated not as members of a branch set apart from the political fray but as targets in a partisan battle. “I’ve never seen a time like this, when a judge had to join the bench and find that we’re under constant attack,” Lamberth says.
Hours before the deadline Ali set for the government to pay its foreign-aid debts, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The Justice Department accused Ali of creating an “arbitrary timeline.” The government said it would have to pay nearly $2 billion to comply.
At about 10 p.m., Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency petitions for the D.C. circuit, gave the government a bit of breathing room, pausing Ali’s order while the nine justices reviewed the matter. At a moment when judges were wondering whether the country was on the verge of a constitutional crisis because of the administration’s recalcitrance in the face of court orders, Ali’s case would be one of the first suits to come before the Supreme Court in Trump’s second term. Lamberth and others were nervous on Ali’s behalf. Would the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority come down on the side of executive power? Or would they side with a 40-year-old Biden appointee?
On March 5, the court denied the government’s request to block Ali’s order. Many judges on the D.D.C. and elsewhere were heartened: The Supreme Court would not simply roll over for the president’s arrogation of power.
But the justices added a note of caution. Ali should set a feasible timeline for the government to fulfill the payment obligations he had ordered — no more next-day deadlines, in other words. District Court judges took note, too, that the court upheld Ali’s order by only a 5-to-4 majority, with Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices. If Ali had reined in the president more sharply, his order might well have been overturned. In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by the remaining three conservatives, gave him a public thrashing. Alito said Ali had engaged in “an act of judicial hubris.” A single District Court judge, he went on, should not have the “unchecked power” to issue a preliminary $2 billion order that applied not only to the named plaintiffs but to all the aid groups the government owed.
Alito’s critique — judges were getting in the president’s way — was gaining ground on the right as Trump issued more executive orders and judges issued more orders blocking them. But as Ali and other District Court judges saw it, letting Trump freeze the appropriations Congress had specified would cede too much power to the executive branch. The American government was a three-legged stool. The role of the courts was to ascertain and apply the laws the elected branches enacted even if Congress wasn’t defending those laws or its institutional prerogatives.
Lamberth made this point in a case he was assigned in March challenging a Trump order that froze U.S. funding for the pro-democracy media outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “It is, after all, Congress that makes the laws in this country,” he wrote. “The role of the courts is something far more circumscribed: We interpret the laws and the Constitution and declare what the law is, and we do so only when the people or the government call upon us to do so.”
On March 10, Ali issued a new order that suggested he had received the Supreme Court’s message and was still trying to hold a middle ground. The Trump administration was advancing “an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected,” he wrote. “At the same time, however, the Court is mindful of limitations on its own authority.” Ali revised his previous order so the government could spread out the more than 2,000 payments it said were owed at a rate of 300 a day (a far smaller number than U.S.A.I.D. made before Trump took office).
‘Whatever respect we enjoy is because we’ve created a sense of public trust.’
J. Harvie Wilkinson III
The Trump administration quickly lagged behind the new payment schedule and then admitted that the outstanding number of payments actually exceeded 10,000, not 2,000. The government also continued canceling grants and contracts by claiming that the terms gave it the authority to do so. The plaintiffs, however, said the government’s stated rationale was merely a pretext for carrying out the initial Trump order that Ali had blocked. Their organizations remained debilitated, the work suspended as local employees and partners went unpaid. Ali ordered weekly status reports. The government proposed making the payments for past work by the last week of April.
The underlying question, however, was too big for one judge to answer: Could the judiciary on its own restrain an executive that doesn’t necessarily act in good faith? “We labor under a unique sense of fragility and vulnerability,” says J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative who has served on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for more than four decades. “We rely on the executive branch to enforce our orders. We can’t go out and do it ourselves. And we rely on Congress to appropriate the funds that keep us afloat. Whatever respect we enjoy is because we’ve created a sense of public trust.”
For several decades, the judges of the D.D.C. have gathered for lunch, and for the last 20 years or so, the spot for that has been a small courthouse dining room overlooking Third Street, where they sit at one long table. The pandemic interrupted the lunch routine; afterward Chief Judge Boasberg pushed to restore it for the sake of camaraderie and cohesion.
After Trump took office, judges increasingly talked with one another, at lunch and one-on-one, about what they thought was one of the biggest disruptions: the Justice Department’s changed behavior in court. Government lawyers could no longer be relied on to answer direct questions or even to present the facts accurately. “I don’t know whether they’re sending people who don’t know or if those people are professing ignorance, but the inability of the people in front of us to give us answers, or their refusal to do so, is very different than in the past, and we talk about it a lot,” says one D.D.C. judge, who asked not to be named to avoid identifying specific lawyers.
On March 15, a Saturday, a crisis over the government’s recalcitrance erupted in a case assigned to Boasberg. He received an urgent request from lawyers representing five Venezuelan migrants to block Trump if he invoked a wartime authority, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport them and others without notice or a hearing, which past presidential administrations regularly provided. When Boasberg convened a hearing at 5 p.m., the government was in the process of loading more than 200 other Venezuelans onto planes. At 6:48 p.m., Boasberg verbally ordered the government not to deport anyone under the Alien Enemies Act and to bring back any planes that had taken off. Shortly after, he put his order in writing, leaving out the explicit requirement for airborne planes to turn around.
Despite Boasberg’s order, the planes flew to El Salvador, where the Venezuelans were taken to a maximum-security prison. When Boasberg asked why on March 17, the government argued it had complied with his written order, which they claimed superseded the verbal one. The next day, Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment, denouncing him as a “Radical Left Lunatic.” Representative Brandon Gill, Republican of Texas, introduced articles of impeachment against Boasberg that day, charging him with “an abuse of judicial power.”
Judges on the D.D.C. and elsewhere were aghast. The impeachment resolutions against Ali and Bates had been unwelcome, but they hadn’t come directly from the president. Now Trump was showing an unprecedented level of disregard for the judicial branch. Making a distinction between written and oral orders was for many judges an astonishing and galling break with past practice. And Boasberg was widely respected. He was first appointed to the District of Columbia Superior Court by George W. Bush, before Barack Obama nominated him for the D.D.C., and had strong ties to the conservative legal establishment.
With the rhetoric from the right came a rise in security threats. Dozens of pizzas had been anonymously sent to judges and their family members at their homes, signaling that their enemies knew where they lived. Some received false reports of bombs in their mailboxes. Some judges hired private security.
Many judges also redoubled their resolve to avoid creating any appearance of partiality. If they pushed back too aggressively against the administration’s agenda — even those parts that were most likely illegal — they risked sacrificing their own legitimacy. After all, the White House’s attacks on the judiciary were bait, an inducement for the judiciary to go too far in response. “My motto would be ‘Steady as she goes,’” Wilkinson said. “In this environment, there is much to be said for law as a force of stability that the public can look to when so much else is changing.”
Hours after Trump lashed out at Boasberg, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement, reasserting the separation between the judiciary and politics. “For more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreements concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
By speaking as the head of one of the federal government’s coequal branches, Roberts gave judges a way to unify in support of their basic values and collective identity. There were exceptions — judges who appeared to be auditioning for Trump’s next Supreme Court nomination. But on the whole, Trump’s efforts to politicize the judiciary was having the opposite effect. Republican and Democratic appointees were ruling against the president at close to the same rates: 72 percent and 80 percent, respectively.
Over the course of the spring, however, the Supreme Court’s record in responding to Trump became muddled. It started with Boasberg’s case. On April 7, the justices agreed with him that the president couldn’t deport people before they received notice and an opportunity for a hearing, but a majority of five conservatives ruled that the D.D.C. was the wrong court for the case because the Venezuelans should have instead sued in the place where they were being held.
The Trump administration kept deporting people without giving them a real chance for a hearing, and on April 19, the Supreme Court stepped in again, issuing an extraordinary order directing the government to halt temporarily all deportations based on the Alien Enemies Act. It was a sign that the justices could see the government could not be trusted to show restraint.
In spite of that, however, the justices gave Trump a series of temporary victories. Without fully explaining their reasoning, they paused District Court orders in almost all of the 14 rulings on their emergency docket, also called the shadow docket, with one or more of the liberal justices dissenting each time. One decision allowed the president to fire the heads of most federal agencies without cause, upending the independence Congress gave those agencies (the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission and others) a century ago. Another let the Trump administration deport people to countries they didn’t come from even though the government had twice defied a District Court order. “For judges on the front lines, the fact that the court keeps backing the administration in these brief orders on the shadow docket is deeply frustrating,” says one District Court judge, who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of discussing Supreme Court rulings. “What distinguishes us from the political branches, to quote the Federalist Papers, is that we give reasons for what we’re doing. Too often, the Supreme Court isn’t doing that.”
The justices also decided a case in late June that sharply limited a power that District Court judges have long exercised. In the context of Trump’s order purporting to end birthright citizenship, the administration argued for taking away the courts’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions — the kind of order that Ali issued in the U.S.A.I.D. case. In a 6-to-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the court ruled that nationwide injunctions probably exceed the authority Congress has given federal courts. Courts can issue injunctions that are broad enough to provide complete relief to each plaintiff, Justice Barrett’s majority opinion said, but it sharply curtailed the tools available for lower courts to move swiftly to stop policies that affect people across the country. In essence, the ruling lowers yet another guardrail on presidential power.
The new model for a Trump judge was Emil Bove, a former member of Trump’s criminal-defense team who helped lead his second-term overhaul of the Justice Department.
In the late afternoon on June 6, the judges of the D.D.C. took the bench in their ceremonial courtroom for Ali’s investiture. The ceremony was like a bar mitzvah for adults, friends said, with people from different parts of a new judge’s life — family, mentors, old and new colleagues — gathering to praise him.
Boasberg presided, flanked by four white marble sculptures of historic lawgivers mounted on the wall behind them. With Lamberth sitting nearby in a lower row, Boasberg opened the ceremony by noting that Ali had been on the job since early December. “And all of you know that, because you’ve been reading about it in the newspaper,” he said. “As they say, welcome to the N.F.L.”
Installing a new judge, to serve for life, signified continuity and normalcy. The institution was standing, weathering the hits from outside without varying its practices or, presumably, its values.
And yet it seemed less than clear that the authority of the judiciary to be the final arbiter of law would continue to be taken for granted. The three-legged stool of American government was tipping as Congress continued to subordinate itself to the president. And Trump and his deputies had taken to calling into question whether they saw any role for judicial independence at all. In mid-May, the White House aide Stephen Miller said Trump could suspend the fundamental right of habeas corpus depending on “whether the courts do the right thing or not.” The Constitution’s design required judges to be “extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president,” Vance said a couple of weeks later in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
In court, the Trump administration was claiming that it had the unilateral power to redefine citizenship, deport people without due process, impose tariffs worldwide and, in June, deploy soldiers on domestic soil to quell protests. When his tariffs were blocked by a panel of three judges, one of whom he had appointed, Trump made it clear that he no longer shared the traditional conservative vision of the courts, if he ever had, that animated Reagan appointees like Lamberth and Wilkinson. (The tariffs were provisionally restored on appeal.) On social media, Trump lit into Leonard Leo, a founder of the arch-conservative Federalist Society and a successful strategist for Trump’s first-term judicial appointments, calling him a “sleazebag.”
The new model for a Trump judge was Emil Bove, a former member of Trump’s criminal-defense team who helped lead his second-term overhaul of the Justice Department. Bove, Trump wrote in announcing his nomination to an open seat on the court of appeals, would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” And in fact, in the Venezuelan deportation case, Bove proposed defying court orders, according to a recent whistle-blower report by a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on the case. (Bove denied this at his Senate confirmation hearing in late June.)
In Ali’s U.S.A.I.D. case, the administration unfurled a new strategy. The White House asked Congress to follow the established process for rescinding appropriations it has already approved. Six days after Ali’s investiture, the House approved clawing back $8.3 billion in foreign aid by a vote of 214 to 212.
The House vote was an ominous development for people going without food and medicine all over the world. But the White House seemed to be trying to provide a potential off-ramp in Ali’s courtroom on the dispute over presidential power at the center of the U.S.A.I.D. case. The Trump administration was belatedly conceding that in this context, at least, the president shouldn’t go it alone. Maybe this was the best a judge could hope for — stability of a rudimentary kind at an unstable moment.
At the investiture, Ali’s parents stepped forward, took the robe that Ali had ordered off a hanger and slipped it over their son’s shoulders. Ali took the lectern and told the story of how one of the retired judges lent him a robe in his first frenzied weeks. He said that when he first put one on, he asked himself, “How do I make sure this robe never makes me forget the things I learned before?” He had found the D.D.C. to be a collegial place; the judges were steadfast about investing in one another’s success, and the success of the judiciary, while also exercising their individual judgment about how the law applied in the cases before them.
Ali had also arranged for a group of small children, including his children and their cousins, to read a Maya Angelou poem during the ceremony.
Tough guys fight
All alone at night
Life doesn’t frighten me at all.
It was hard not to hear in those words a call out to the assembled judges. They were alone, presiding over their cases, but also together, part of a common enterprise. To keep doing their jobs, they might need more courage than ever before.
“If you would kindly escort Judge Ali to his place on the bench with us, where he belongs,” Boasberg said to a clerk of the court. Ali made the short walk from the lectern in the well to the rows where his colleagues sat. A chair was waiting for him.
Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
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