As of mid-March 2026, 233 court challenges have contested the legality of President Donald J. Trump’s unprecedented reach for broad powers to close government agencies, deport immigrants, restrict the news media, prosecute political enemies, rewrite American history, wipe out DEI, gain control of federal elections, relitigate the 2020 election, free Jan. 6 rioters convicted in the biggest criminal investigation in history and send masked immigration agents into schools, churches and private homes without judicial warrants.
233 is the number pulled together by Lawfare, a highly reputable source of legal information from long-time, bipartisan experts on federal law.
What had seemed a few months ago like a raw and uncontested power grab has now resulted in President Trump facing a pushback challenging far-fetched claims of vast authority.
Many of Trump’s actions this term have been directed at the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment’s freedom of speech, freedom of the press, right of public assembly, freedom of religion and the Fourth Amendment’s right to be safe from unreasonable searches in homes and on hometown streets.
Excesses during the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis that included the killing of two American citizen protesters appear to have been a tipping point. The claims by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that two citizens killed were involved in “domestic terrorism” were so obviously untrue that backlash led to the drawdown of the ICE surge and eventually contributed to Noem losing her job.
Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz wrote in January that “ICE is not a law unto itself,” citing 96 orders ICE has ignored in more than 70 cases. “This list should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law,” wrote the judge. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Ryan Goodman, an NYU law professor and co-editor of the nonpartisan publication Just Security, documented an increasing number of cases in which federal judges have criticized the Justice Department as unreliable — 34 cases of failing to comply with judicial orders and 90 cases of court distrust of Justice Department lawyers’ statements and assurances in court.
But the most important judicial statement about Trump’s immigration actions came last December from the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard to Chicago was based on a faulty interpretation of the law.
Most Americans were looking for last-minute holiday presents on Dec. 23 when the court issued a three-page opinion stating that “the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”
The decision was based in part on the Posse Comitatus law that prevents the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement without specific congressional authorization. The point of the law is to protect the civil liberties of citizens.
Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court reporter, pointed out the importance of the court’s slim opinion. “This was a very big deal,” she wrote. “The president promptly acceded to the order, removing the federalized Guard from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., as well as Chicago. Yet the court’s action, coming on the day before Christmas Eve, received far less attention than the tariff case. In discussions about the court today, few people even seem to remember it. It is as if the view of the court as the administration’s lackey was so entrenched that evidence to the contrary was too discordant to be fully absorbed.”
Trump berated the Supreme Court a few months later after its February decision overturned his tariffs. On March 15, he attacked the court again, bringing up an old grievance that appears central to his plans for future elections. He wrote: “They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020 … This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” the president added. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”
On March 25 Trump went so far as to tell a National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington that Congress needs to pass a new crime law that “cracks down on rogue judges.” He added, “We got rogue judges that are criminals. They are criminals, what they do to our country. The decisions that they hand down and hurt our country.” Trump’s comments came a week after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at Rice University warned that personal attacks aimed at judges are “dangerous.” He added, “It has to stop,” although he made clear he was not directing his comment at any particular person.
Trump’s feelings about the Supreme Court could continue to sour if the court rules later this term against his attempt to take away birthright citizenship and blocks his attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve governing board. Many legal experts expect Trump to lose those cases.
233 and counting
The 233 lawsuits on the Lawfare list don’t include recent Trump administration threats that haven’t yet reached court. Recently, Trump, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and FCC Chair Brendan Carr have threatened to punish media outlets for what they perceive as overly critical coverage of the war in Iran, even though legal analysts say the government doesn’t have the authority to do what it is threatening.
Trump, in a Truth Social post March 15, wrote, “I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.” Trump also raised the possibility of news organizations being brought up on “TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”
Nor does the 233 figure include the Pentagon’s attempt to undermine the independence of Stars and Stripes, the much-heralded news organization that has covered wars as far back as the Civil War and that has deep roots in Missouri, with its national museum in Bloomfield.
Nor do the 233 court actions include the cases where big law and big media capitulated to threats from Trump and failed to take winning First Amendment arguments to court.
ABC’s new owner, Disney, refused to back George Stephanopoulos’ characterization of Trump’s loss of the E. Jean Carroll case, in which a jury found Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll in a New York Department store in the mid-1990s. Instead, Disney paid at least $15 million to Trump. ABC also removed Jimmy Kimmel from the air last September after the Charlie Kirk assassination, and under pressure from Carr, the FCC chair. A rebellion of Kimmel viewers and First Amendment advocates led to a quick Disney turnaround.
Paramount’s Ellison family, friends of the Trumps, paid $15 million plus attorneys’ fees instead of defending 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. Ellison has also reshuffled CBS, bringing in more conservative voices. Hegseth said last week he looks forward to Ellison taking over CNN because of CNN’s war coverage.
Also not included in the 233 suits are the settlements that big New York law firms made with the White House to avoid losing security clearances and being banned from federal courthouses. The firms agreed to provide almost $1 billion in pro bono services to the administration, a party clearly able to pay its bills.
Washington D.C. law firms — including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and Wilmer, Cutler — refused to settle and took their First Amendment case to court, where they won.
In a strange series of developments earlier this month, the Justice Department told the court it would not appeal the loss to the D.C.law firms, but changed its decision overnight.
Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, put it this way in a podcast: “I think we saw something in the law firm cases that I at least have never seen, which is, to summarize, the government announced to the court that it was dropping the appeals of the law firm decisions. And then about-faced and said, no, we’re not. I have seen the government drop appeals before, usually, but not exclusively when administrations change. But I’ve never seen the government drop an appeal and then drop the dropping of the appeal.”
The First Amendment is front and center in the law firm cases because it prevents the government from disadvantaging people, firms or associations on the basis of disagreement with their political beliefs. There is also an attack on the rule of law when the president punishes law firms for the cases they handle.
Duncan Hosie, a legal scholar at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, cautioned, however, against “placing too much faith in the courts.” Even though Trump is losing the law firm cases in court and looking disorganized in the process, he has won the war to intimidate Big Law, Hosie wrote. He noted that during the first eight months of Trump’s first administration, 75% of the litigation against the government had been filed by big law firms, contrasted to 15% during the same period of the current administration.
Retribution campaign losing more than winning
Trump’s campaign to pay back political enemies has suffered more losses than wins in recent months.
For a while, St. Louis’ own Ed Martin was riding high as the head of Trump’s Weaponization Working Group. But the weak cases filed against Trump’s prime enemies began to collapse due to their own lack of substance.
In early March, Judge James Boasberg, chief judge of the federal courts in the District of Columbia, quashed a pair of subpoenas in U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The problem was that the government hadn’t presented any evidence of a criminal case.
Pirro reacted with an angry press conference and a slim legal brief. Lawfare’s editor Wittes wrote that the brief was “scarcely less of a temper tantrum than Pirro’s press conference. It clocks in at a scant nine pages long … And Judge Boasberg is not exaggerating when he says that it contains ‘essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime.’ Indeed, it contains hardly more indication of what the government is even investigating. The document notes that there have been cost overruns in the Fed’s renovations. And it claims there are unspecified discrepancies in a congressional testimony given by Powell. But it doesn’t remotely suggest a basis for thinking that Powell might have lied in his testimony or that criminal conduct led to the cost overruns. It actually doesn’t even try.”
Wittes added that neither Pirro’s brief nor the press conference “shows any awareness that investigative agencies aren’t supposed to initiate criminal investigations at all without an appropriate evidentiary predicate.” Wittes said the likelihood of the appeals court overturning Boasberg was small.
Trump expressed a different opinion of the judge in a late-night social media post March 15 calling Boasberg “Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control.”
Trump’s insistence that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James has also failed so far, thrown out because the poorly qualified Trump prosecutor was illegally appointed.
In February, a federal judge ruled that Hegseth and the War Department could not punish U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly for stating, along with other Democratic military veterans, “Our laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders.” Kelly is a retired Navy captain, former astronaut and member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Presidential advisor Stephen Miller had characterized the Democrats’ video as a call for “insurrection” and as a “general call for rebellion.” Trump had referred to it as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” called for jailing the members of Congress and suggested that their offenses were “punishable by DEATH.” Secretary Hegseth had referred to the six members of Congress as the “Seditious Six.” In a letter of reprimand, Hegseth said Kelly’s comments “undermined the chain of command; counseled disobedience; created confusion about duty; brought discredit upon the armed forces; and engaged in conduct unbecoming an officer.”
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon stopped the punishment, writing he was particularly concerned it amounted to “First Amendment Retaliation.” Leon observed that Kelly’s speech was “unquestionably protected speech” involving “matters of public concern” that are at the heart of the First Amendment.
Hegseth, a former Fox contributor, has been hostile to the press. He changed Pentagon press rules last fall to try to keep unofficial accounts from coming out of the Pentagon. That resulted in most veteran Pentagon correspondents refusing to agree to the rules and their replacement by MAGA partisan media, such as influencer Laura Loomer and the Gateway Pundit, who have virtually no experience covering military affairs. This month, the Pentagon restricted press photography as well.
The New York Times challenged the new press policy and on March 20 won in court when Judge Paul Friedman from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Hegseth’s rules violated the First Amendment because they rewarded those who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by Department leadership.” The judge ordered the Pentagon to return press passes to Times reporters who had refused to obey the policy. Other news outlets that had surrendered their passes are also asking for them to be returned.
Friedman wrote: “In light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing.”
Another First Amendment case developed in early March when Hegseth barred the booming AI firm Anthropic from obtaining government contracts because it refused to give the Pentagon a blank check that would allow it to use its powerful Claude system to track Americans and to control high-powered weapons without human control.
President Trump added on Truth Social that the firm was a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” and “Left-wing nut jobs.”
Initially, Hegseth essentially threatened to put Anthropic out of business, saying on X he would ban any company doing business with DoD from having any commercial relationship with Anthropic. That would have prohibited companies such as Amazon and Google, themselves large defense contractors, from selling cloud computing to Anthropic, which Alan Rosenshtein, a senior editor at Lawfare, said, “would be a death sentence for Anthropic.”
Hegseth seemed to pull back somewhat in a letter to Anthropic, designating them as a supply chain risk, but not barring other defense firms from dealing with Anthropic.
Lawfare asked Claude, Anthropic’s genius machine, what it thought: It replied:
“I think the question of whether an AI company should be able to set limits on how its models are used in warfare is genuinely important and not easy. Anthropic’s position that it won’t allow Claude to be used for fully autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance reflects concerns that many AI researchers and ethicists take seriously.
“The DOD’s counter position that it needs flexibility across all lawful uses also has a logic to it, from an operational perspective. What strikes me as most troubling about the government’s response is the use of the supply chain risk designation, a tool for foreign adversaries against an American company seemingly as retaliation for a contract dispute.”
Hegseth is also bordering on a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom when he calls on all Americans to pray for victory in the war with Iran and for the safety of the U.S. troops. Speaking from the Pentagon, he called for Americans to pray “Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.” Hegseth has a First Amendment right to ask Americans to pray for the troops, but he would be at odds with the separation of church and state if he were to pressure troops or public school children to pray to Jesus Christ.
Voice of America wins in court
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Arizona’s Kari Lake, a prominent election denier, had not been properly appointed to be acting CEO of the Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America.
For that reason, actions she took while her appointment was invalid were also invalid.
Lake issued mass layoff notices in June 2025 to 639 employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which owns the Voice of America and directs money for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.
Lake maintained that the permanent layoffs were “part of a long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.” 85% of jobs, or 1,400 positions, had been eliminated to comply with an executive order from President Trump in mid-March.
Lamberth ordered more than 1,000 full-time journalists and staff to return to work by March 23 and to resume broadcasting.
Investigating the 2020 election
The Justice Department has made multiple efforts to obtain voter rolls, especially in swing states, as part of Trump’s continuing claim that he won the 2020 election and his vow to change federal election laws to make sure he wins the 2026 midterms.
Last month, it sent FBI agents to Fulton County, Ga., to serve a search warrant allowing them to seize ballots in that county where Trump has always claimed he had been cheated in the 2020 presidential election — even though Republican election officials recounted the ballots and certified the election.
The raid was unusual because the election had been certified in 2020 by Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, because the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, Thomas Albus, rather than Atlanta, signed the search warrant for the raid, and because Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey and U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were present. Bailey, former Missouri attorney general, is also an election denier.
After the raid, Gabbard dialed up Trump, who briefly talked with her and the agents. Trump followed up by calling twice for nationalization of the elections and for the Republican Party to take action to prevent fraud in blue states.
Then, earlier this month, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post that he complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to a controversial audit of Maricopa County election results in 2020 that had been ordered by legislative Republicans.
Efforts to obtain election records in courts in Michigan, Oregon and California have lost in court. Federal judges have ruled that the Justice Department is not entitled to obtain voter rolls with private voter information, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Phone numbers, party registrations, email addresses and voter participation histories have also been requested.
In the midst of immigration protests in Minneapolis, Bondi had suggested ICE agents could be withdrawn if state officials turned over Minnesota voting records — an offer shunned by state officials who called it blackmail.
Trump critics believe that the Trump administration is trying to compile nationwide voter roll data, essentially establish a national voting database, before the November midterm elections. Trump has also put on a full-court press to get the Save America Act passed. The bill would require voters to present proof of citizenship, such as a passport, to vote, possibly leading to a cutback in the number of people who would vote.
Trump told Republicans at a political gathering in Florida earlier this month that passage of the bill, “will guarantee the midterms. If you don’t get it, big trouble.”
All of these White House efforts have occurred as Trump has personally orchestrated a massive gerrymandering effort in states such as Texas, Florida, Missouri and Indiana to redraw congressional districts even though there has not been a new census. Democrats have countered with their own gerrymandering campaigns in California, Virginia and other states.
Reporters facing possible rights violations
Early on Jan. 14, the FBI conducted a search of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home as part of an investigation of a government systems administrator, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who had been indicted for allegedly leaking the documents about the Venezuelan invasion to Natanson. The agents took Natanson’s cellphone, a recording device, a Garmin watch and two laptops, but told her she was not the focus of the investigation.
Natanson has said that she used those devices to connect with more than 1,200 confidential government sources and searching them could chill future government sources who may want to speak with the press. She had written stories about how government employees’ lives were affected by the Trump firings of government workers.
Magistrate Judge William Porter ruled last month that the government could not be trusted to search Natanson’s devices because they might try to identify her sources on stories unrelated to the classified documents. Porter said he, instead, would be responsible for conducting a narrow search of the electronic devices.
Prosecutors appealed, saying reporters should not receive that degree of special treatment. “As a reporter, Ms. Natanson is subject like any other citizen to a legitimate use of criminal legal process in a criminal investigation, such as this search warrant,” the appeal said.
In Zurcher v. the Stanford Daily, the U.S Supreme Court approved a police search of college photo files to locate photos of demonstrators who had hurt officers at a campus protest.
Objecting to the decision and recognizing the importance of reporters’ confidential files, Congress passed the Privacy Protection Act that, in most cases, does not permit police to use a search warrant. Instead, police must use a subpoena.
The intent underlying the law’s subpoena-first rule: it affords journalists the chance to go to court and fight the government’s request for their unpublished work and documents. Often, the news organization and the law enforcement officials can work things out in the time between the subpoena and the court hearing.
Two other journalists in court are former CNN anchor Don Lemon and freelance journalist Georgia Fort, who were charged with conspiracy and interfering with religious freedom, after covering a protest at a Minnesota church where an ICE agent was a pastor. Lemon pleaded not guilty, maintaining he was reporting, not protesting.
An ironic note is that the former acting U.S. Attorney for Minneapolis, Joseph H. Thompson, is now his lawyer. Thompson left his job as a federal prosecutor because he objected that the Justice Department had not started an investigation of the killing of Renee Good, as it normally would under such circumstances.
William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR, the only journalism review left in the country that still produces a quarterly print magazine.
