A federal judge moved within hours to stop one of President Donald Trump’s prized projects, scoffing at his administration’s last-minute defense of it.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday granted a temporary restraining order barring the National Park Service from beginning construction or site preparation on Trump’s planned 250-foot arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C. The ruling came the same day the Interior Department issued its final decision approving the project. Chutkan’s order covers two consolidated cases, one brought by three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian and another filed by the District of Columbia and Virginia.
In her 33-page opinion, Chutkan took aim at the Trump administration’s claim that the arch would serve national security purposes. Declarations from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described the structure as a potential platform for “coordinated protective operations,” complete with anti-drone sensors and military communications equipment.
“These recent and unsupported attestations of security aspects of a structure that has been extensively discussed over the last year appear nowhere in the planning documents on which the project was reviewed and approved,” Chutkan wrote. “Indeed, they materialized, for the first time, when Defendants filed their opposition brief last week.”
The judge noted that when pressed at an Oct. 30 hearing, government lawyers said they had no further information beyond what was in the declarations. She added that the administration failed to “explain how a brief delay in starting a project expected to take two to three years to complete would compromise those interests.”
Chutkan also found D.C. and Virginia are likely to succeed in arguing the arch violates the Commemorative Works Act, which requires congressional authorization for monuments on Park Service land in the capital. “Defendants complied with none of these procedures,” she wrote.
She was equally dismissive of the Trump administration’s claim that a 1925 law authorizing Arlington Memorial Bridge already covers the arch. “The sheer improbability that a 100-year-old statute would contain authority, unknown to every previous administration, to erect a 250-foot arch at a principal location in the Nation’s capital indicates how far Defendants must stretch to justify this project,” Chutkan wrote.
She noted the arch would be 50 percent taller than two columns proposed and later scrapped under the law, and that it would “squarely block the view of the Lincoln Memorial from the Lee Mansion.”
The judge deferred ruling on D.C. and Virginia’s request for a stay of agency action, finding the restraining order “fully preserves the status quo while the court considers the merits.”
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