Trump Officials Are Openly Defying Judges’ Orders
How many strikes before you’re out(laws)?
"Defend the Rule of Law" by Geoff Livingston is licensed under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
“We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”
These were the words of Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan after the Trump administration violated multiple court orders and deported people without due process. Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? (Yes, and this is not the first time Trump officials have refused to obey the courts; we are tracking these violations here.)
On Friday, Judge Leo Sorokin blocked the deportation of Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen with a valid visa who had been detained upon her return to the United States from visiting family in Lebanon. The administration ignored the judge’s order and deported her. Brown University is now advising all international members of its community, even legal permanent residents, not to travel internationally or even domestically within the United States because of fears of what ICE will do. (To put a finer point on it—because of the lawlessness of “law enforcement.”)
On Saturday, Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around a plane full of Venezuelan nationals alleged to be gang members being deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador. He aimed to stay their deportation until he could rule on the legality of Trump’s use of an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport them without due process. The administration also ignored this order. The president of El Salvador, who has called himself the world’s “coolest dictator,” tweeted, “Oopsie … Too late,” which Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted. Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely claimed the judge’s order was an “intrusion on the president’s authority,” and is seeking to replace him.
The Alien Enemies Act has only ever been invoked during wartime, the last time during World War II. It was used to arrest and intern tens of thousands of people of German, Italian, and Japanese descent. (Many more Japanese Americans were interned under an executive order.) The National Archives website acknowledges that “Few, if any, of those deported received any sort of a hearing so many did not know the specific reasons for their deportation. Often these individuals were deported based on hearsay or for other political reasons.”
It is imperative that we do not downplay the severity of these violations of due process and the separation of powers. There are no inbuilt limits to lawlessness. There is no reasonable expectation that Trump’s violent disregard for people’s rights and legal protections will stop before it reaches your doorstep—or that it will stop, period, without significant and sustained pushback.
Last Week, Sixty-Two Senators Voted For A Bill That*:
Cuts $280 million in funding for scientific research into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, heart disease, and many other health conditions.
Evicts 32,000 households.
Increases energy costs and power disruptions for more than 60 million people across 34 states.
Takes away hundreds of millions in funding for affordable housing construction, disaster recovery, homelessness response, and investigation of disability discrimination.
Fails to fully allocate money to the disaster recovery fund ahead of tornado, hurricane, and wildfire season.
Provides a $4 billion blank check for Elon Musk’s companies Starlink and SpaceX, because the man isn’t rich enough already.
Funnels $10 billion to ICE.
These and many other forms of forced austerity take away public services while redirecting profits towards exploitative corporations, from polluters to private prisons.
*As we’ve previously written, not only are the terms of this spending deal harmful, but the fact that the Trump administration has already been defying the spending levels set by Congress and plans to continue to defy them cracks the whole situation wide open. Yes, the language of the bill is horrible, and it doesn’t limit further horrors, since the executive branch remains committed to ignoring the law.
“The People Making The Decisions Probably Know The Least”
An important story that demonstrates the extraordinary stakes of the Trump-Musk slash-and-burn approach to government spending: as ProPublica reported on Monday, the Trump administration abruptly halted the clean up of Agent Orange in Vietnam earlier this year, leaving huge swaths of toxic soil exposed and endangering hundreds of thousands if not millions of people as rainy season approaches.
“Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place,” the authors wrote. “‘The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,’ a State Department official told ProPublica, ‘a country that should by all rights hate us.’”
Trump’s State Department ordered this work to stop. Then they froze payments for work already completed. Then they canceled the agreements with contractors altogether, only to reverse that decision. As of last week, the companies had still not been paid. The companies are now "scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa site before it starts raining," ProPublica reported, before the toxic run-off reaches the hundreds of thousands of people who live around the air force base. Only half a mile away, a major river flows into a city of nine million.
“The people making the decisions probably know the least,” Tim Rieser, who led a bipartisan delegation to the site in 2019, told ProPublica. That is more or less the running theme of DOGE’s wanton destruction of government capacity.
Along a related line, last week Richard Stengel wrote in “Americans Overestimate the Value of Business Skills in Government” for Bloomberg about the lessons we should learn from what happened a previous time a businessman was tapped by the president to slash government spending and red tape. Between 1961 and 1968, Robert McNamara, CEO of Ford, served as Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson. What did his private sector expertise bring to the federal government? The disaster of the Vietnam War.
“McNamara proved to be a catastrophic failure at the Pentagon, as the qualities that helped him at Ford — above all, a relentless focus on placing data at the center of decision-making — prevented him from seeing what was happening on the ground in Vietnam,” Stengel wrote. “‘McNamara’s War,’ as one senator caustically termed it, would last another decade, take the lives of tens of thousands of US servicemen and cost American taxpayers many billions of dollars. The carnage wrought on Vietnam and Cambodia was many times greater.”
If McNamara brought us the horrors of Vietnam, we can only imagine what Musk, his unhinged Nazi-saluting successor, will do. (We should take seriously the Silicon Valley billionaire techno-fascists dreaming of unregulated, undemocratic cities run by CEOs, and meeting with Trump officials to push for them.) The saga of Agent Orange draws a straight line between the callous failures of these two businessmen, mucking about in government with deadly consequence.
Stay tuned next week for a book review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkleman, which argues that these books fail to meet the moment as a way forward for Democrats facing authoritarianism. In the meantime, we’ve highlighted some useful critiques from other reviewers in a social media thread on Bluesky and X.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Privatization Report 3/18/2025
Lock them up this is what we need to chant