Trump v. the courts

The Trump administration’s standoff with the federal judiciary has reached new heights.
 
The president decried the judges who have delivered legal setbacks to his agenda in recent weeks. Trump-related cases involving federal workers, migrants, transgender troops and efforts from the Department of Government Efficiency were slowed in the courts.
 
The most recent target of Trump’s fury is U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who halted the administration’s efforts to employ an 18th-century wartime power to deport migrants. A federal appeals court has refused to lift the order barring the deportations, though several hundred Venezuelans, who were already in custody and on their way to a prison in El Salvador when the judge ruled, are still being held. 
 
Trump fired back, saying Boasberg should be impeached. That same judge was also randomly assigned to oversee the “Signalgate” case, which also drew the president’s ire. Republican allies have raised ways — hearings, bills — to curtail judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. These are extraordinary measures, experts say, that could lead to a constitutional crisis.
 
Trump’s escalating attacks on judges prompted a rare response from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” But the president’s attacks haven’t stopped. 
 
In the meantime, people whose lives are directly affected by these cases, wait with the uncertainty of what happens next. 
 
This newsletter was compiled by Joshua Barajas.
 

By Joshua Barajas
Senior Editor, Digital

President Donald Trump’s executive order singling out transgender service members wasn’t a shock to Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan and her family. Nor was the Pentagon’s accompanying policy to remove trans troops from the force, released about a month after Trump’s order.
 
“The first feelings I had really were just, concerned for my fellow transgender service members, concerned for their families, concerned for the service members that service under them,” she said. 
 
Morgan has spent 14 years moving up the ranks in the U.S. Navy. Long-serving trans service members, like Morgan, are now plaintiffs in legal challenges against Trump’s ban. To the trans troops suing the government — among them, an Air Force staff sergeant with 16 years of service, a Navy commander with 19, an Army sergeant first class with 20 — the ban is poised not only to harm them, but also drain experience and expertise from the military.
 
Trump’s latest attempt at a trans military ban hit additional roadblocks this week. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected the government’s request to dissolve the injunction she issued to block enforcement of the ban. Then another federal judge in Washington state issued the second nationwide injunction against the ban, saying the government failed to provide evidence that trans troops harm military readiness.
 
“The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record,” U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle wrote in his 65-page ruling. “The government’s unrelenting reliance on deference to military judgment is unjustified in the absence of any evidence supporting ‘the military’s’ new judgment reflected in the Military Ban.”
 
When the government's policy was first blocked, a Justice Department spokesperson said in an email to PBS News that the ruling “is the latest example of an activist judge attempting to seize power at the expense of the American people who overwhelmingly voted to elect President Trump.”
 
Trans service members who spoke with PBS News weeks before the latest rulings, and shared their views in a personal capacity and not on behalf of the Defense Department, said they worry about the uncertainty of what’s next.
 
“I hope there isn't a perception from anyone that we're going to be voluntarily separated from service and then sort of just go on and live our best lives right now, because that's becoming more and more difficult for a trans person in America,” Morgan said.

Trump made targeting trans people one of the cornerstones of his re-election campaign, crescendoing to a multi-million dollar campaign ad blitz weeks before November’s vote. There were ads with anti-trans rhetoric against a group of people that makes up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population.
 
In remarks from the Oval Office on March 13, Trump said he told Republicans to focus on trans rights in the ramp-up to Election Day.
 
"I said, ‘Don't bring that subject up because there is no election right now. But about a week before the election, bring it up,’” he said.
 
A majority of Americans, 58 percent, favor trans people openly serving the military, according to a Gallup poll conducted in January as Trump began his second term. But that support has fallen in recent years. In 2019, 71 percent of Americans supported trans troops. The decline is largely driven by Republicans, the poll found. Some seven in 10 Republicans now oppose the idea.
 
Against that backdrop, Trump picked Pete Hegseth, who once said being trans “creates complications and differences” in the military, to lead the Defense Department. Once confirmed, the former Fox News Channel host put the president’s “anti-woke” agenda at the center of his reorganization of the armed forces.

Civil rights and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have rebuked the ban in court, saying it violates trans people’s equal protection rights under the Fifth Amendment.

The language in the Trump administration’s policy rollout also demeans trans people as “dishonest and selfish and undisciplined,” said Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law.
 
“It’s a character assassination based on nothing,” said Levi, who’s a lead attorney in one of the cases against the ban. “And animus alone can never justify targeting a group and punishing them without justification other than hostility.”
 
As the Trump administration seeks to lift the courts’ rulings, Morgan is trying to figure out where her next assignment will be.
 
She had orders to report to a duty station in Maryland but they were canceled on March 11, about two weeks after the Pentagon policy was released, her attorney confirmed to PBS News.
 
“We are just focused on putting our uniforms on, going to work every day, doing our jobs the best that we can do until we can’t do them anymore,” she said.
 
Right now, her uniform waits in her closet at home.

‘UNCHARTED WATERS’

Trump and his Cabinet’s criticism of the judiciary has grown louder.
 
Talking with Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi said many judges “need to be removed.” She then called out three judges by name, including those presiding over the trans military ban and deportations cases, saying they cannot be impartial or objective.
 
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, a judge who temporarily blocked a Trump executive order from being enforced against law firm Perkins Coie, defended herself this week from the attacks. The Trump administration made a request to move the case to another judge, saying Howell had “a pattern of hostility” toward the president.
 
Howell denied the government’s request, writing that when the Justice Department “engages in this rhetorical strategy of ad hominem attack, the stakes become much larger than only the reputation of the targeted federal judge.”
 
This kind of strategy, the judge added, is “designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system.”
 
“We’re in uncharted waters,” Kim Wehle, a constitutional scholar with the University of Baltimore, told PBS News’ Laura Barrón-López. “Presidents up until now did not take this kind of open defiance stance against the rule of law.”
 
Wehle said she doesn’t think there is a way, if the president is intent on ignoring court orders, for the judicial branch to do anything about it.
 
“It really would require the United States Congress to step in with impeachment,” she said.

Feeling the pressure from Trump and hard-right Republicans in his chamber, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered another suggestion forward: Eliminate the federal courts.

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