Since President Donald Trump returned to office less than three weeks ago, pro-democracy organizations, unions, individuals and Democratic states have mounted at least 24 different legal challenges to his administration’s flurry of brazenly unlawful executive actions, according to Democracy Docket’s tracking.
Over the past four days alone, the pro-democracy coalition brought seven new cases to hold the Trump administration accountable. This week’s legal accountability efforts began Monday when advocacy groups and unions sued the U.S. Department of the Treasury for sharing confidential financial and personal data with the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
And in the following days, anonymous current and former FBI agents — along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association — filed a duo of lawsuits seeking to stop Trump’s Justice Department from effectuating a directive to expose and purge bureau personnel involved in the Jan. 6 and classified documents criminal investigations into Trump.
Among the many other newly filed actions this week, one from Democracy Forward challenges an Office of Personnel Management email supposedly offering career federal employees the chance to resign from their jobs in return for paid leave until Sept. 30, 2025. Still another contests Trump’s unlawful removal of Gwynne A. Wilcox from her position as a duly confirmed member of the National Labor Relations Board.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the administration’s deluge of illegal and anti-democratic activity — all of which is wreaking veritable havoc on individual lives and severely undermining the integrity of democratic institutions. But the good news is that courts have already stepped in to immediately halt some of Trump’s most egregious executive orders and will continue to do so.
Indeed, Trump has not prevailed even once in court over the last 18 days since he took office.
As of last week, two separate judges in Rhode Island and Washington D.C. issued temporary restraining orders blocking administration guidance that effectively instituted a government-wide freeze on all federal agency grants and loans. The judges said the freeze — which caused entities like emergency shelters and healthcare providers to be shut out of funding portals or denied mission critical resources — likely violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution.
On Wednesday and Thursday, federal judges in Maryland and Washington State issued nationwide preliminary injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order purporting to severely restrict birthright citizenship. The courts sided with immigration advocacy groups, affected individuals and Democratic attorneys general who alleged the order likely runs afoul of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. At a hearing, the judge in Washington — an 84-year-old Reagan appointee — said “the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow… I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”
Courts handed down even more rulings against the administration Thursday, including in the aforementioned DOGE and deferred resignation cases as well as in other ongoing lawsuits. Read more about this week’s Trump accountability efforts here.
