The Dictatorship

Trump keeps losing in court. But the relief isn’t always what it seems and might not last.

Published

1 year ago

April 30, 2025

Trump keeps losing in court. But the relief isn’t always what it seems and might not last.

Looking back on President Donald Trump’s first 100 daysNBC News has reported that his administration has faced more than 200 civil lawsuits to date — and that these lawsuits have been largely successful, with judges across the country ordering more than 100 injunctions or pauses.

Usually, I am a glass half-full kind of girl. But lately, there have been signs that many of these injunctions are not actually stopping or preventing the actions at issue.

First, even putting aside perhaps the two most glaring examples of the Trump administration’s failure to follow court orders — the cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and those Venezuelan men deported and imprisoned in El Salvador pursuant to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — there are multiple other litigations in which the administration has skirted, if not outright flouted, compliance.

In late March, for example, a Massachusetts federal judge issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the Department of Homeland Security from deporting any immigrant with a final removal order to a third country (meaning a destination other than the country designated during immigration proceedings) “UNLESS and UNTIL Defendants [the administration] provide that individual, and their respective immigration counsel, if any, with written notice of the third country to where they may be” deported and a “meaningful opportunity” to seek protection against torture. Yet through a sworn declarationa regional immigration official has now admitted, after lawyers for individual men reported that their Venezuelan clients were nonetheless deported to El Salvador, that at least four Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador after the temporary restraining order was entered. Stillthe administration insisted that it hadn’t violated the orderbecause all four were first transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then flown to El Salvador on flights operated by the Defense Department, which is not a defendant in the lawsuit, and without any Homeland Security personnel on board.

And it isn’t just the immigration context in which the administration is giving court orders a wink and a nod.

And it isn’t just the immigration context in which the administration is giving court orders a wink and a nod. Consider the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through massive reductions in force, among other maneuvers, which a federal district court judge in Washington broadly forbid in late March. But then, an appeals court added an exception: The administration could terminate employees if, after a “particularized assessment,” such employees were determined to be “unnecessary to the performance of defendants’ [the CFPB’s] statutory duties.” Within a week, and without any proof that such assessments had taken place, the agency issued “reduction in force” notices to more than 1,400 employees, or more than 80% of its workforce.

To the original district court judge, the CFPB’s action triggered “significant grounds for concern” that the administration had not complied with court orders, and by Monday night, the appeals court all but agreedreinstating the entire injunction while the administration appeals. But can the damage be reversed? After all, internal documents and communications filed in the litigation reflect the panic and chaos that has ruled the agency for months.

But the Trump administration’s noncompliance isn’t the only barrier to meaningful courtroom victories — and for some litigants, it’s not even the most significant one.

One lawyer involved in states’ lawsuits against Trump policy initiatives and funding freezes, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, explained that in the cases they are litigating, the administration has largely complied with court orders. And while there have been occasional hiccups along the way, as when a funding stream that a court ordered to be restored was not turned back on, the lawyer said the Justice Department has helped resolve those issues.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court itself has become an obstacle for litigating states.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court itself has become an obstacle for litigating states. Specifically, that lawyer noted that since the high court ruled that challenges to grant terminations are essentially contract disputes over money damages between the U.S. and grant recipients, such cases must be brought in a specialized federal court, the Court of Federal Claims, where relief — much less immediate reinstatement of federal grants — could be harder to come by.

Further, the lawyer reminded me that in May, the justices will hear oral arguments on the administration’s bid to limit the impact of nationwide injunctions against Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship to the three judicial districts where those court orders were issued. Put another way, if those injunctions are effective only in those three districts, the birthright citizenship case would not only restore Trump’s executive order across most of the country, but it could also effectively end district courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. That would mean plaintiffs seeking to prevent any of Trump’s executive orders from fully taking effect would have to file and win lawsuits in each and every one of the 94 federal district courts in the country to obtain the kind of relief a single court can render now.

And finally, the nature of the federal budgeting and appropriations process means that court challenges to funding freezes and revocations might soon present diminishing returns. After all, if a presidential administration suddenly cuts off congressionally appropriated funding or guts an agency created and maintained by statute, that arguably is an unconstitutional act as well as a violation of multiple statutes, both specific to that agency and governing administrative procedures generally. But what if, for the coming fiscal year, Congress implements Trump’s priorities by zeroing out funding for agency-run grant programs, medical and scientific research, and even federal employee compensation? That would likely fall into the category of what one law professor I know calls “awful but lawful.”

None of this means courts have been or will be useless in upholding the rule of law. But increasingly, my friend Steve Vladeck’s warning has become my mantra: “The courts alone can’t save us.”

Lisa Rubin

Lisa Rubin is an BLN legal correspondent and a former litigator. Previously, she was the off-air legal analyst for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Alex Wagner Tonight.”

The Dictatorship

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Published

5 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Jun. 27, 2026, 9:51 PM EDT

Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.

Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.

Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.

Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.

In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.

Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)

Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.

Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.

Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.

The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

The Dictatorship

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Published

5 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Jun. 28, 2026, 1:36 PM EDT

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.

“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”

Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”

The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.

The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.

“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”

Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.

“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Published

5 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Jun. 27, 2026, 4:07 PM EDT

Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.

More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.

“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.

“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.

In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.

“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.

Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.

“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.

Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.

“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.

The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.

“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.

That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.

Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”

Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”

Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.

But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.

Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.

“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”

Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.