Tag: Federal judges

Federal judge upholds temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants

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A federal judge on Thursday upheld her order postponing the termination of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the United States.

The Justice Department appealed U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes’ stay to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit but simultaneously requested that she rescind her order. Judge Reyes heard arguments from both sides on Thursday and said that she is denying the government’s motion and would issue a written order before Feb. 19, which is the next deadline in the appellate court case.

Reyes’ order pauses Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BLOCKED FROM ENDING TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS FOR HAITIANS

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes upheld her order postponing termination of temporary protected status for Haitians, denying the Justice Department’s motion. (David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters)

“During the stay, the Termination shall be null, void, and of no legal effect … The Termination therefore does not affect the protections and benefits previously conferred by the TPS designation, including work authorization and protection from detention and deportation, and the valid period of work authorization extends during the stay.”

At the end of Thursday’s hearing, Reyes said she had something “important” to put on the record.

“People are entitled to their views,” said Reyes, who is both the first Latina and openly LGBTQ person to serve in Washington, D.C., as a district court judge.

LEFT-WING COURT HANDS KRISTI NOEM BIG WIN IN ‘UNVETTED IMMIGRATION’ CASE

“I am an immigrant. I did not hide that from the president of the United States … or from the U.S. Senate,” Reyes said, adding that she has heard questions about “how someone like me, an immigrant and a lesbian could get this job.”

Judge Ana Reyes says Thursday she will issue a written order before Feb. 19 after denying the Justice Department’s motion to lift her stay pausing the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians living in the United States. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Reyes remarked that she doesn’t hear anyone talking about how she was magna cum laude at Harvard Law and practiced law at a top firm for 22 years.

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Reyes then went on to read threats that have been emailed to her chambers. “I don’t mind being called the C-word,” Reyes said, before quoting from various threats she said she has received.

“I hope you lose your life by lunchtime … God d*** you. I hope you die today … The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet,” Reyes quoted. Judge Reyes also quoted from social media posts about her, including one which read, “Hang the b****.”

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes on Thursday denied the Justice Department’s request to rescind her order delaying the termination of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians. (Reuters)

“Many of my colleagues have received threats,” she said, adding there have been threats to the families of judges as well. “To those who would threaten judges … we will act without fear or favor. … We will continue to do our jobs. … We will not be intimidated.”

Jake Gibson is the Fox News Department of Justice and Federal Law Enforcement Producer.

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February 12, 2026
Federal appeals court upholds Trump mass detention policy for illegal immigrants

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A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the Trump administration’s mass detention policy, allowing illegal immigrants to be detained without bond.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can lawfully deny bond hearings to immigrants arrested nationwide under the Constitution and federal immigration law.

Attorney General Pam Bondi reacted to the ruling, saying the Department of Justice (DOJ) “secured yet another crucial legal victory” in support of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.

“The Fifth Circuit just held illegal aliens can rightfully be detained without bond — a significant blow against activist judges who have been undermining our efforts to make America safe again at every turn,” she wrote on X. “Thank you to Ben Hayes who argued this case, Brett Shumate and the @DOJCivil Division. We will continue vindicating President Trump’s law and order agenda in courtrooms across the country.”

BOASBERG ORDERS TRUMP TO BRING BACK CECOT MIGRANT CLASS DEPORTED IN MARCH

A federal appeals court upheld the Department of Homeland Security’s authority to detain illegal aliens without bond hearings, a ruling Attorney General Pam Bondi called a major legal victory for the Trump administration. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Circuit judge Edith H. Jones wrote in the majority opinion that “unadmitted aliens apprehended anywhere in the United States are ineligible for release on bond, regardless of how long they have resided inside the United States.”

Many illegal immigrants who were not detained at the border previously had the opportunity to request a bond hearing as their cases progressed, and those without a criminal history who were not deemed flight risks were often granted bond.

“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority under” the law “does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Jones wrote.

SUPREME COURT ALLOWS TRUMP ICE RAIDS TO RESUME IN CALIFORNIA

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law allows illegal immigrants to be detained without bond, a decision praised by Attorney General Pam Bondi. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

Writing in dissent, Circuit Judge Dana M. Douglas said that the members of Congress who passed the Immigration and Nationality Act roughly 30 years ago “would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people.”

Douglas noted that some of the people detained are “the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”

The ruling stems from two separate cases filed last year against the Trump administration, both involving Mexican nationals who had lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and were not considered flight risks, according to their attorneys.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law permits the Department of Homeland Security to deny bond hearings to illegal immigrants arrested across the country, siding with the Trump administration’s enforcement policy. (@ICE via X)

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Although they did not have criminal records, both were jailed for months last year before a lower court in Texas granted them bond last October.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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February 7, 2026
Court rulings protect millions’ SNAP benefits amid shutdown

BOSTON, Massachusetts: Two federal judges ruled on October 31 that President Donald Trump’s administration cannot halt food assistance for millions of Americans during the ongoing government shutdown. They ordered the government to rely on existing contingency funds to keep benefits flowing.

The rulings, issued in federal courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, came in response to separate lawsuits challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan that stopped Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on November 1. SNAP, also known as food stamps, helps low-income households afford groceries. For weeks, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have blamed each other for the shutdown, which has put SNAP payments at risk.

It remains uncertain whether the decisions guarantee that benefits will be issued. Both judges asked the administration to update them on November 3 on how it will follow the orders.

Trump posted on social media that the federal government may lack legal authority to distribute SNAP funds during a shutdown. He said administration lawyers are asking courts for guidance on how to restore payments quickly. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding,” he wrote.

SNAP benefits go to households earning less than 130 percent of the federal poverty level. In many states, that currently means about US$1,632 per month for a single person or $2,215 for two people. While the federal government funds the program, states handle daily operations and distribute monthly payments.

According to the USDA, it costs between $8.5 and $9 billion per month to fully fund SNAP for the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on it. The administration has argued that the agency has no authority to spend that money during the shutdown, which began on October 1, until Congress approves new funding.

However, U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Providence said the administration’s refusal to use $5.25 billion in available contingency funds was arbitrary and would cause real harm to families worried about access to food. He ordered that those funds be distributed as soon as possible and said the agency should also consider tapping a separate account that holds about $23 billion if needed.

Minutes earlier, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston reached a similar conclusion. Her ruling came in a case brought by 25 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. She said the suspension of benefits was based on a mistaken belief that the contingency funds could not legally be used during a shutdown.

The USDA had previously stated that contingency money could keep benefits going if Congress failed to pass a budget. But last week, the agency changed its position and warned that “the well has run dry,” triggering the legal challenges.

Despite administration claims that the payment systems might struggle or that partial benefits would be too difficult to distribute, both judges stressed that the government has the authority and responsibility to fully fund SNAP during the shutdown.

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November 3, 2025
Federal appeals court cancels daily Border Patrol chief check-ins

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The Department of Homeland Security is celebrating a victory after an “act of judicial overreach has been paused.”

On Wednesday, an appeals court blocked an order issued on Tuesday that required a senior Border Patrol official to give unprecedented daily briefings to a judge about immigration sweeps in Chicago.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis had ordered the meetings after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by government agents working on Operation Midway Blitz, which has resulted in more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.

While Bovino told Fox News earlier Wednesday that he was eager to talk to Ellis, government lawyers were appealing her decision at the same time, calling it “extraordinarily disruptive.”

ICE AGENTS BREAK CAR WINDOW TO ARREST RESISTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IN EXCLUSIVE FOX NEWS RIDE-ALONG

Protesters yell toward U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Gregory Bovino when he leaves federal court in Chicago, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (Nam Y. Huh)

“The order significantly interferes with the quintessentially executive function of ensuring the Nation’s immigration laws are properly enforced by waylaying a senior executive official critical to that mission on a daily basis,” the Justice Department argued.

“We are thrilled this act of judicial overreach has been paused,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to The Associated Press.

OBAMA-APPOINTED JUDGE SAYS SHE WANTS BODY CAMERAS FOR FEDERAL AGENTS AMID CHICAGO ANTI-ICE CLASHES

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents arrive to escort U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Gregory Bovino from federal court in Chicago, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (Nam Y. Huh)

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), released footage on X that appears to show Border Patrol agents under siege during an immigration raid in Chicago’s Little Village, a Southwest Side neighborhood often referred to as “La Villita” and home to one of the largest Mexican-American communities in the Midwest.

Protesters yell towards U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Gregory Bovino when he leaves federal court in Chicago, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (Nam Y. Huh)

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“VIDEO EVIDENCE,” DHS wrote in the post with the video attached.

Last week, on Oct. 22, three illegal immigrants and six U.S. citizens were arrested on charges on what DHS dubbed “one of the most violent days” of Operation Midway Blitz.”

Fox News Digital’s Rachel Wolf and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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October 30, 2025
Trump’s presidency faces crucial tests as Supreme Court begins pivotal term
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The Supreme Court will launch its new term Monday with a focus on controversial prior rulings and a review of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive agenda.

After a three-month recess, the nine justices met together for the first time this week to reset their docket, and discuss appeals that have piled up over the summer. The high court will resume oral arguments to confront issues like gender identity, election redistricting, and free speech.

But looming over the federal judiciary is the return of Trump-era legal battles. The administration has been winning most of the emergency appeals at the Supreme Court since January, that dealt only with whether challenged policies could go into effect temporarily, while the issues play out in the lower courts — including immigration, federal spending cuts, workforce reductions and transgender people in the military.

In doing so, the 6-3 conservative majority has reversed about two dozen preliminary nationwide injunctions imposed by lower federal courts, leading to frustration and confusion among many judges.

FEDERAL JUDGES ANONYMOUSLY CRITICIZE SUPREME COURT FOR OVERTURNING DECISIONS WITH EMERGENCY RULINGS

The nine Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait inside the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 7, 2022. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images )

Now those percolating petitions are starting to reach the Supreme Court for final review — and legal analysts say the bench may be poised to grant broad unilateral powers to the president.

The justices fast-tracked the administration’s appeal over tariffs on dozens of countries that were blocked by lower courts. Oral arguments will be held in November.

In December, the justices will decide whether to overturn a 90-year precedent dealing with the president’s ability to fire members of some federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission.

And in January, the power of President Trump to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors will be tested in a major constitutional showdown. For now, the Biden-appointed Cook will remain on the job.

“A big fraction of the Supreme Court’s docket will present the question: ‘can President Trump do?’— then fill in the blank. And that could be imposing tariffs; firing independent board members; removing illegal aliens; sending the military into cities like Los Angeles,” said Thomas Dupree, a prominent appellate attorney and constitutional law expert. “So, much of what the Supreme Court is deciding this term is whether the president has acted within or has exceeded his authority.”

The tariffs dispute will be the court’s first major constitutional test on the merits over how broadly the conservative majority high court views Trump’s muscular view of presidential power, a template for almost certain future appeals of his executive agenda.

Presidential prerogative or power push?

In earlier disputes over temporary enforcement of those policies, the court’s left-leaning justices warned against the judiciary becoming a rubber stamp, ceding its power in favor of this president.

After a late August high court order granting the government the power to temporarily terminate nearly $800 million in already-approved health research grants, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said her conservative colleagues had “ben[t] over backward to accommodate” the Trump administration. “Right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints, the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

But some of Jackson’s colleagues have denied they are paving the way for Trump’s aggressive efforts to redo the federal government.

FEDERAL APPEALS COURT WEIGHS TRUMP BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP ORDER AS ADMIN OUTLINES ENFORCEMENT DETAILS

Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stands as she and members of the Supreme Court pose for a new group portrait following her addition, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Oct. 7, 2022. (J. Scott Applewhite, File/AP Photo)

“The framers recognized, in a way that I think is brilliant, that preserving liberty requires separating the power,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh earlier this month at a Texas event. “No one person or group of people should have too much power in our system.”

And Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Fox News’ Bret Baier three weeks ago that she and her colleagues “don’t wear red and blue, we all wear black because judges are nonpartisan … We’re all trying to get it right. We’re not playing for a team.”

Barrett, who is promoting her new book, “Listening to the Law,” said her court takes a long-term view, and is not reflexively on Trump’s side.

“We’re not deciding cases just for today. And we’re not deciding cases based on the president, as in the current occupant of the office,” Barrett told Fox News. “I think the judiciary needs to stay in its lane … we’re taking each case and we’re looking at the question of presidential power as it comes. And the cases that we decide today are going to matter, four presidencies from now, six presidencies from now.”

KAVANAUGH CITES 3 PRESIDENTS IN EXPLAINING SUPREME COURT’S BALLOONING EMERGENCY DOCKET

Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Seventh Circuit Judicial Conference in Chicago on Aug. 18, 2025. (Getty Images)

These sharp court fractures between competing ideologies will likely escalate, as the justices begin a more robust look at a president’s power, and by dint, their own.

Divisive decisions

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump cryptically posted on social media a month after retaking office.

Federal courts have since been trying to navigate and articulate the limits of the executive branch, while managing their own powers.

Yet several federal judges — appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents — have expressed concern that the Supreme Court has been regularly overturning rulings by lower courts dealing with challenges to Trump administration policies — mostly with little or no explanation in its decisions.

Those judges — who all requested anonymity to speak candidly — tell Fox News those orders blocking enforcement have left the impression they are not doing their jobs or are biased against the President.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TORPEDOES SCOTUS WITH EMERGENCY REQUESTS AND SEES SURPRISING SUCCESS

President Donald Trump speaks during a White House press conference on Supreme Court rulings in Washington, D.C. on June 27, 2025. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Those frustrations have spilled into open court.

“They’re leaving the circuit courts, the district courts out in limbo,” said federal appeals Judge James Wynn about the high court, during oral arguments this month over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to Social Security data.

“We’re out here flailing,” said Wynn, an Obama bench appointee. “I’m not criticizing the justices. They’re using a vehicle that’s there, but they are telling us nothing. They could easily just give us direction, and we would follow it.”

Courting controversy

The president may be winning short-term victories in a court where he has appointed a third of its members, but that has not stopped him or his associates from criticizing federal judges, even calling for their removal from office when preliminary rulings have gone against the administration.

“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump posted on social media, after a March court ruling temporarily halting the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

The target of the attack was DC-based Chief Judge James Boasberg, appointed to the bench by President Obama.

Top Trump White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, in interviews, has warned against some unaccountable and “communist crazy judges” “trying to subvert the presidency.”

TRUMP TURNS TO SUPREME COURT IN FIGHT TO OUST BIDEN-ERA CONSUMER SAFETY OFFICIALS

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

According to an analysis by Stanford University’s Adam Bonica, federal district judges ruled against the administration 94.3% of the time between May and June.

But the Supreme Court has in turn reversed those injunctions more than 90% of the time, giving the president temporary authority to move ahead with his sweeping reform agenda.

As for the rhetoric, the high court has walked a delicate path, reluctant to criticize Trump directly, at least for now.

“The fact that some of our public leaders are lawyers advocating or making statements challenging the rule of law tells me that, fundamentally, our law schools are failing,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor at a recent Georgetown University Law Center event, without naming Trump by name. “Once we lose our common norms, we’ve lost the rule of law completely.”

Chief Justice John Roberts in March offered a rare public statement criticizing impeachment calls from the right.

But several federal judges who spoke to Fox News also wish Roberts would do more to assert his authority and to temper what one judge called “disturbing” rhetoric.

The U.S. Marshals Service — responsible for court security — reports more than 500 threats against federal judges since last October, more than in previous years. Law enforcement sources say that includes Boasberg, who, along with his family, has received physical threats and intimidating social media posts.

TURLEY: JUSTICE JACKSON SHOWS ‘JUDICIAL ABANDON’ IN LONE DISSENT ON TRUMP LAYOFF RULING

Charlie Kirk was a conservative activist who led Turning Point USA. (Alex Brandon/The Associated Press)

“I think it is a sign of a culture that has, where political discourse has soured beyond control,” said Justice Barrett in recent days.

“The attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity,” said Justice Jackson in May. “The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government.”

The administration in recent days asked Congress for $58 million more in security for executive branch officials and judges, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who led Turning Point USA.

Testy term awaits

A Fox News poll from this summer found 47% of voters approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, a 9-point jump since last year when a record low 38% approved.

“Over the past decade, public confidence in our major institutions has declined,” says Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who helps conduct the Fox News survey with Democrat Chris Anderson. “The Court’s rebound could reflect its attempts to steer a middle course on politically polarizing questions or indicate an uptick in positive attitudes toward our more venerable institutions.”

Still, by more than 2-to-1, more voters think the court is too conservative (43%) than too liberal in its decisions (18%, a low), while 36% think the court’s rulings are about right. That continues a seven-year trend.

FEDERAL JUDGES ANONYMOUSLY CRITICIZE SUPREME COURT FOR OVERTURNING DECISIONS WITH EMERGENCY RULINGS

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on June 20, 2024. ( Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The public’s views of the court’s ability to steer clear of politics will be tested this term.

Besides the two Trump-related appeals, the justices are already scheduled to decide:
- At least two appeals involving LGBTQ+ rights: which public school sports teams transgender students can join; and state laws banning so-called “conversion therapy” for minors who may have gender identity or sexual orientation issues.
- Two election-related disputes involving partisan gerrymandering and federal campaign spending coordination that each could have major impacts on the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Precedent on a precipice

But court watchers are pointing to several hot-button pending appeals where “stare decisis” or respect for established landmark court rulings will be tested: same-sex marriage and communal school prayer.

The high court is expected to decide in coming weeks whether to put those petitions on its argument calendar, with possible rulings on the merits by June 2026.

But other cases are already awaiting a final ruling: the use of race in redistricting under the Voting Rights Act; and independent government boards.

“I think the likeliest candidates for being revisited are the ones that involve the power of the president to fire the heads of federal agencies,” said attorney Dupree. “This is an old precedent that’s been on the books really back since the New Deal, and it’s come into question in recent years. There’s been a long shadow hanging over these decisions, and I think the Supreme Court is poised to revisit those this term and in all likelihood overrule that.”

The court may have already set the stage, by using the emergency docket in recent weeks to allow Trump to temporarily fire members of several other independent federal agencies without cause. The court’s liberal wing complained that giving the president that power without explanation effectively unravels the 1935 precedent known as “Humphrey’s Executor.”

KAVANAUGH CITES 3 PRESIDENTS IN EXPLAINING SUPREME COURT’S BALLOONING EMERGENCY DOCKET

“Today’s order favors the president over our precedent,” said Justice Elena Kagan in a blistering dissent against Trump’s removal of Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board.

The court’s “impatience to get on with things — to now hand the President the most unitary, meaning also the most subservient, administration since Herbert Hoover (and maybe ever) — must reveal how that eventual decision will go” on the merits, added Kagan.

Sotomayor said recent overturned precedents were “really bad” for certain groups of people.

“And that’s what’s at risk, is in each time we change precedent, we are changing the contours of a right that people thought they had,” she said this month. “Once you take that away, think of how much more is at risk later. Not just in this situation.”

The conservative justices in recent years have not been shy about revisiting cases that had been settled for decades but now have been overturned: the nationwide right to abortion, affirmative action in education and the discretionary power of federal agencies.

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Other pending issues the justices may soon be forced to confront which could upset longstanding precedent include libel lawsuits from public officials, flag burning and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.

One justice who has been more willing than his benchmates to overrule precedents may be its most influential: Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I don’t think that any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel,” Thomas said last week at a Catholic University event. If it is “totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided” already.
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October 5, 2025
Federal judge blocks Trump’s expanded deportation plan over due process concerns for illegal immigrants

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A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from expanding the expedited removal of illegal immigrants, saying the risk of applying fast-track deportations in the interior of the United States is too great and could impact foreigners who aren’t eligible.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, D.C., prevents the Trump administration from using expedited removal for immigrants granted parole status.

“The Court does not cast doubt on the constitutionality of the expedited removal statute, nor on its longstanding application at the border,” Cobb wrote in a 48-page opinion.

BOASBERG CLEARED TO RULE ON CECOT MIGRANT DEPORTATIONS AFTER APPEALS COURT DECISION

An image of a deportation flight. (White House)

“It merely holds that in applying the statute to a huge group of people living in the interior of the country who have not previously been subject to expedited removal, the Government must afford them due process. The procedures currently in place fall short.”

Earlier this month, Cobb temporarily blocked the Trump administration from efforts to expand fast-track deportations of immigrants who legally entered the U.S. under humanitarian parole.

US APPEALS COURT BLOCKS TRUMP CONTEMPT PROCEEDINGS ORDERED BY BOASBERG

President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters. On Friday, a federal judge blocked the administration from applying fast-track deportations in the interior of the United States. (AP)

Fast-track deportations allow federal authorities to remove someone from the country without seeing a judge first.

Expedited removal has been used by the Trump administration to quickly remove illegal immigrants, a major hallmark of President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Meanwhile, the administration has pressured immigration authorities to ramp up deportations.

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Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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August 29, 2025
Justice Jackson accuses Supreme Court of ensuring Trump ‘always wins’ in scathing dissent

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Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson criticized on Thursday what she said were the “recent tendencies” of the Supreme Court to side with the Trump administration, providing her remarks in a bitter dissent in a case related to National Institutes of Health grants.

Jackson, a Biden appointee, rebuked her colleagues for “lawmaking” on the shadow docket, where an unusual volume of fast, preliminary decisionmaking has taken place related to the hundreds of lawsuits President Donald Trump’s administration has faced.

“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins,” Jackson wrote.

The liberal justice pointed to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of Calvinball, which describes it as the practice of applying rules inconsistently for self-serving purposes.

WHY JUSTICE JACKSON IS A FISH OUT OF WATER ON THE SUPREME COURT

Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks onstage at the 2025 ESSENCE Festival of Culture on July 05, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for ESSENCE)

Jackson, the high court’s most junior justice, said the majority “[bent] over backwards to accommodate” the Trump administration by allowing the NIH to cancel about $783 million in grants that did not align with the administration’s priorities.

Some of the grants were geared toward research on diversity, equity and inclusion; COVID-19; and gender identity. Jackson argued the grants went far beyond that and that “life-saving biomedical research” was at stake.

“So, unfortunately, this newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch has real consequences, for the law and for the public,” Jackson wrote.

The Supreme Court’s decision was fractured and only a partial victory for the Trump administration.

TRUMP-APPOINTED JUDGE STRIKES DOWN ANTI-DEI MEASURES FROM EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

The facade of the Supreme Court building at dusk is shown in this file photo. In a 5-4 ruling Thursday, the NIH was cleared to cut nearly $800M in health grants that did not align with Trump’s priorities. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In a 5-4 decision greenlighting, for now, the NIH’s existing grant cancellations, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberal justices. In a second 5-4 decision that keeps a lower court’s block on the NIH’s directives about the grants intact, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, sided with Roberts and the three liberals. The latter portion of the ruling could hinder the NIH’s ability to cancel future grants.

The varying opinions by the justices came out to 36 pages total, which is lengthy relative to other emergency rulings. Jackson’s dissent made up more than half of that.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observed in an op-ed last month a rise in “rhetoric” from Jackson, who garnered a reputation as the most vocal justice during oral arguments upon her ascension to the high court.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a blistering dissent in a ruling temporarily upholding NIH grant cancellations. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“The histrionic and hyperbolic rhetoric has increased in Jackson’s opinions, which at times portray her colleagues as abandoning not just the Constitution but democracy itself,” Turley said.

Barrett had sharp words for Jackson in a recent highly anticipated decision in which the Supreme Court blocked lower courts from imposing universal injunctions on the government. Barrett accused Jackson of subscribing to an “imperial judiciary” and instructed people not to “dwell” on her colleague’s dissent.

Barrett, the lone justice to issue the split decision in the NIH case, said challenges to the grants should be brought by the grant recipients in the Court of Federal Claims.

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But Barrett said “both law and logic” support that the federal court in Massachusetts does have the authority to review challenges to the guidance the NIH issued about grant money. Barrett joined Jackson and the other three in denying that portion of the Trump administration’s request, though she said she would not weigh in at this early stage on the merits of the case as it proceeds through the lower courts.

Jackson was dissatisfied with this partial denial of the Trump administration’s request, saying it was the high court’s way of preserving the “mirage of judicial review while eliminating its purpose: to remedy harms.”

Ashley Oliver is a reporter for Fox News Digital and FOX Business, covering the Justice Department and legal affairs. Email story tips to ashley.oliver@fox.com.

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August 22, 2025
Federal judge blocks Florida from further expansion of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration detention facility

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A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday blocking Florida from further expanding the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center built in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ injunction formalized the temporary halt she had ordered two weeks ago.

Witnesses continued to testify over multiple days in a hearing to determine whether construction of the facility should stop until the case is decided.

Advocates have argued that the expansion of the facility violated environmental laws.

LAWSUITS THREATEN TO UPEND ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ OPERATIONS

In an aerial view from a helicopter, the migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is seen located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport on July 4, 2025 in Ochopee, Florida. (Alon Skuy/Getty Images)

Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe said that further construction and operations at the facility should be stopped until state and federal officials complied with environmental laws. Their lawsuit argued that the detention center threatens environmentally sensitive wetlands that have protected plants and animals and that it would reverse billions of dollars in environmental restoration.

Attorneys for the state and federal governments claimed that the construction and operation of the facility was under the state of Florida despite its use for holding federal detainees, meaning the federal environmental law would not apply.

The judge found that the detention center was at least a joint partnership between the state and federal government.

Williams said she expected the number of detainees in the facility to dip within 60 days through transfers to other facilities, and that fencing, lighting and generators should be removed. She said the state and federal defendants cannot bring anyone other than current detainees at the facility onto the property.

The order does not halt modifications or repairs to existing facilities, which the judge said are “solely for the purpose of increasing safety or mitigating environmental or other risks at the site.”

FLORIDA TO OPEN ‘DEPORTATION DEPOT’ AT SHUTTERED PRISON WEEKS AFTER LAUNCHING ‘ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ’ FACILITY

An aerial view of a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is seen located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida on July 7, 2025. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)

The preliminary injunction includes “those who are in active concert or participation with” the state of Florida or federal defendants or their officers, agents or employees, she wrote.

State officials failed to sufficiently explain why the facility needed to be in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

“What is apparent, however, is that in their haste to construct the detention camp, the State did not consider alternative locations,” Williams said.

Florida officials criticized the ruling on Thursday.

“Just this week, a judge in the same district as Judge Williams refused to hear a case because the Southern District of Florida was the improper venue for suits about Alligator Alcatraz,” Jeremy Redfern, a spokesperson for the Florida attorney general’s office, said in a statement to Fox News. “Once again, she oversteps her authority, and we will appeal this unlawful decision.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the “fix was in” and “we knew this judge was not giving us a fair shake.”

“We totally expected an adverse ruling,” he told Fox News. “And we also knew we were going to immediately appeal and get that decision stayed. So we will ultimately be successful in this. It’s not going to stop our resolve. We’re going to continue to do what we need to do to help the Trump administration remove illegal aliens from our country. You know, that’s the mandate that they have. So we anticipated this, but I don’t think it’s going to be insurmountable in the end.”

US President Donald Trump tours a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump toured the facility last month and suggested it could be used as a model for future facilities across the country to support his efforts to detain and deport migrants.

The detention center was quickly built about two months ago at a single-runway training airport in the middle of the Everglades. It now holds nearly 500 detainees but was designed to eventually hold up to 3,000 in temporary tents.

The facility’s large white tents feature rows of bunkbeds surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees complained of worms in the food, toilets not flushing, floors flooded with fecal waste and insects everywhere. The air conditioners also sometimes abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.

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Detainees also reportedly go days without showers or receiving their prescription medicine, and they are only permitted to speak to lawyers and loved ones by phone.

Fox News’ Danamarie McNicholl-Carter and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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August 21, 2025
A MAGA Judiciary

Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.

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The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.

The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”

Read: Trump’s most lasting legacy could be his judges

The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.

One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”

The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)

The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.

The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.

Harry Litman: Originalism, divided

“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”

In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”

“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”

Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.

Adam Serwer: The most baffling argument a Supreme Court justice has ever made

In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.

Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.

It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.

It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the appointment of far-right ideologues has meant a series of extreme rulings that have upheld speech restrictions and book bans; forced the administration to pursue the right’s preferred restrictive immigration policies; narrowed the fundamental rights of women, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities; blessed law-enforcement misconduct; restricted voting rights; limited the ability of federal agencies to regulate corporations; and helped businesses exploit their workers.

Read: Red states are rolling back the civil-rights revolution

All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.

Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A MAGA Judiciary.”

Adam Serwer

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December 5, 2023
‘She’s Going to Be Famous for a Long Time’

For many judicial nominees, a Senate confirmation hearing is one of life’s most grueling experiences—an hours-long job interview led by lawmakers who are trying to get them to face-plant on national television.

Not for Aileen Cannon. When the federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial testified in 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go easy on her so much as they ignored her.

Cannon, then a 39-year-old prosecutor, appeared on Zoom alongside four other nominees, her face framed by a wall of diplomas on one side and an American flag on the other. Her opening statement lasted all of three minutes and sounded like an Oscar winner’s speech—lots of thank-yous and little else. She didn’t say a word about her legal philosophy or how she would approach the job of a judge. The senators didn’t seem to mind: None of them addressed a question specifically to Cannon for the rest of the hearing. The committee’s chair at the time, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, skipped the proceeding entirely, as did each of the five most senior Republicans on the panel. The hearing was over after barely an hour. Three months later, while Trump was beginning his effort to overturn his defeat in the presidential election, a bipartisan Senate majority (including a dozen Democrats) voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination as a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida.

For low-profile nominations like Cannon’s, perfunctory hearings aren’t unusual. But the scrutiny she was spared in the Senate is coming her way now. After just two and a half years as a judge, Cannon will soon preside over a trial with no precedent in American history. The defendant is the former president who appointed her, and her rulings during the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment have already prompted many legal experts to fear that she will tilt the trial in his favor.

But some of the Democratic lawyers who have appeared in Cannon’s courtroom don’t share those worries. They say that she is a smarter, more deliberate, and more even-handed judge than the early criticism of her would suggest. “I think the government should be very happy that they have Judge Cannon,” says Richard Klugh, a longtime defense attorney in Miami who has dealt with Cannon both as a judge and when she served as a federal prosecutor there. Klugh, a lifelong Democrat, told me that aside from her “narrow” rulings on Trump’s case last summer, he had heard no complaints about Cannon from either prosecutors or defense attorneys. “She’s very confident, very honest … and very thorough,” he told me. “She’s confident enough to go through things independently.”

Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

That may be, but she’s extremely inexperienced. Since taking her seat on the bench, Cannon has worked mostly out of a courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive from Miami and a town that one local lawyer described to me as “a backwater.” She has presided over just four trials as a judge, none of which covered crimes remotely similar to the willful retention of classified documents that the government has accused Trump of committing. (She is set to oversee a far more complex trial involving alleged Medicare fraud in the coming months.)

Cannon was born in Colombia and is the daughter of Cuban refugees. In her brief statement to the Judiciary Committee, she described how her mother, at the age of 7, “had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security.” Cannon graduated from Duke University, and by the time she earned her law degree from the University of Michigan, she had already joined the conservative Federalist Society. After law school, she embarked on a fairly conventional legal career: She clerked for an appellate judge, spent several years at a large law firm, and then became an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. In written responses to the Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote that she considered herself both an “originalist” and a “textualist”—two approaches long identified with conservative judges—but that she would follow all precedents set by the Supreme Court and other appellate rulings.

Two South Florida lawyers told me that they were struck by Cannon’s overt religiosity, which has seeped into her pronouncements in court. She routinely tells defendants “God bless you” after they enter guilty pleas, said Valentin Rodriguez, a lawyer who has appeared before Cannon. “In my entire 30-year career I’ve never had a judge mention God to a client ever,” Rodriguez told me. “She does that as a matter of course.”

Although presidents formally nominate all federal judges, they frequently appoint district-court judges at the recommendation of home-state senators. Cannon told the Judiciary Committee that she was first approached about filling a judicial vacancy by the office of Senator Marco Rubio in 2019, nearly a year before Trump sent her nomination to the Senate. Her appointment came at a moment when Trump and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to reshape the federal courts by filling as many open judgeships as possible with young conservatives in their 30s and 40s. Three previous nominations for judgeships in Florida’s Southern District had gone to men in their 40s. “It made sense that Trump would select a woman with good credentials who also happens to be Hispanic,” a South Florida defense lawyer who knows Cannon told me. (The lawyer requested anonymity to speak candidly about a judge in their jurisdiction.)

At the time of her nomination, Cannon had virtually no public profile outside of the courtroom. On her Senate questionnaire, she said she had never given a speech, served on a panel discussion, or testified before a legislative body. She had never held public office and told the Senate she had never participated in a political campaign, although she and her husband each contributed $100 to Ron DeSantis’s bid for governor in 2018. The only interview Cannon said she had ever given for publication was for a photo feature on TheKnot.com about her wedding. Her relative anonymity has caused headaches for publications that have searched in vain for a public photo of Cannon that hasn’t already been used repeatedly; almost every story features the same Zoom screenshot from her Senate testimony in 2020.

Like most Republican-appointed judges in Florida’s Southern District, Cannon is known as a tough sentencer. But there have been notable exceptions when she has handed down a shorter prison term than she could have, Rodriguez told me. He mentioned a case in which a 21-year-old defendant, Artavis Spivey, who had been incarcerated on and off since he was 11, pleaded guilty to armed carjacking. He and another defendant committed the crime just 18 days after Spivey had been released from prison. Cannon sentenced Spivey to 15 years, but Rodriguez said she could have added many more years to his term. “She could have thrown the book at him, and I think she saw redeeming qualities in the young man,” Rodriguez said. Spivey had grown up in a troubled home without a father, “kind of given up by his parents,” Rodriguez added. “That experience tended to make me appreciate the fact that she could look beyond just the retribution and vengeance of a sentence and look at the person.”

Andrew Weissmann: A ruling untethered to the law

Cannon also handed down a lighter-than-expected sentence to a 34-year-old man, Christopher Wilkins, who threw a chair at and threatened to kill a federal prosecutor after receiving a 17.5-year sentence on gun and witness-tampering charges. Cannon added six and a half years to his prison term, which was less than the sentencing guidelines called for. “I’ve heard stuff about tough sentencing. I can’t report that. I can report fair sentencing,” Wilkins’s lawyer, Jeffrey Garland, a Republican, told me.

Yet none of the decisions that Cannon has made in her young judicial career have stirred as much controversy as her rulings in the lawsuit that Trump filed after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for unreturned classified documents last summer. Cannon initially appointed a special master to review the documents that federal investigators had collected, and barred the government from accessing some of them. The rulings were a gift to Trump at the time and delayed the FBI’s investigation. But in a sharp rebuke of Cannon, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her decisions and said she should not have even heard the case.

Some legal experts have cited those rulings and the fact that Trump appointed Cannon as reasons for her to recuse herself or be taken off the case. A few of the Florida defense lawyers I interviewed—who, it should be noted, routinely argue against the government’s position—characterized Cannon’s orders as understandable considering how unprecedented the case was. The defense lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, however, was more critical. “That ruling was totally out of bounds,” the lawyer told me.

One of the most significant decisions Cannon now faces is whether to attempt to hold the trial in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Should Trump win the White House, he could quash the government’s prosecution of him. South Florida lawyers were dubious that Cannon could try the case before the election, noting the complexities surrounding classified documents that frequently slow down prosecutions at the federal level. Howard Srebnick, a Democratic defense lawyer on the Medicare-fraud case before Cannon, also praised her early performance on the bench. But he said that it still took 18 months for the Medicare case to get to trial even though it does not involve government secrets. “The notion that this case could go quickly? That’s absurd,” Klugh told me.

Still, Cannon has already issued her first order—one that could indicate she wants to move swiftly. On Thursday, she instructed lawyers who want to take part in the case to get security clearances by next week. That was the first of many decisions Cannon will make that, in ways big and small, will shape the first-ever federal criminal prosecution of a former president. They will change Cannon’s life, creating a reputation for favoritism or fairness where none existed. A young judge whose photograph had never appeared in a newspaper until last year is set to become a household name. As Rodriguez observed with a slightly nervous laugh: “She’s going to be famous for a long time.”

Russell Berman

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June 17, 2023
Will Trump Get a Speedy Trial?

Settle in, America: This could take a while.

When Special Counsel Jack Smith announced last week that a federal grand jury had indicted former President Donald Trump, he made a point of saying that the government would “seek a speedy trial in this matter, consistent with the public interest.” Whether Trump gets one could determine whether he goes to prison for his alleged crimes.

In just over 18 months, Trump could be serving as president again, at which point he’d be in a position to attempt to pardon himself or instruct the Department of Justice to dismiss its case against him. That might seem like a long way away, but for the nation’s tortoiselike federal-court system, it’s not. Complex, high-profile cases sometimes take years to get to trial, and former federal prosecutors told me that, even under the fastest scenarios, Trump’s trial won’t begin for several months and potentially for more than a year. Trump may well be waiting for a trial when voters cast their presidential ballots next fall. Although Smith will do all he can to hurry up the prosecution, the former president’s legal team could move to dismiss the charges—though that would almost certainly be futile—and file other pretrial motions in order to bog down the process.

“There’s a pretty obvious incentive from [Trump’s] point of view for delaying this,” Kristy Parker, a lawyer at the advocacy group Protect Democracy who tried cases for 15 years at the Justice Department, told me. “That is especially true if he understands that the evidence against him is significant and that the chances of him being convicted of these offenses are pretty high.”

David A. Graham: This indictment is different

Different federal courts operate at different speeds. The Eastern District of Virginia, for example, has long been known as “the rocket docket”; it’s raced through even high-profile cases such as the 2018 trial of Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort. Trump’s trial will occur in the Southern District of Florida and will reportedly be overseen by one of his own appointees, Judge Aileen Cannon. “Federal judges have enormous control over their courtrooms and over the schedule and timing of their cases,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia and Texas, told me. “Some are very good at docket management, and some are not.” Having served as a judge for less than three years, Cannon hasn’t developed much of a reputation either way.

Cannon presided over a lawsuit Trump filed last year after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate. She issued a series of rulings favorable to him. Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat and a former federal prosecutor who served as a top counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, told me it was “concerning” that Cannon would apparently run the former president’s trial. “It was pretty clear that her initial rulings did not follow the law but followed some preconceived personal and political viewpoints, and there’s no place for that in the judiciary,” Goldman said. Indeed, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a pair of Cannon’s decisions, including one that barred the government from accessing some of the documents that the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

Another former Democratic co-counsel during the Trump impeachment, Norm Eisen, has called for Cannon to recuse herself or be taken off the case.

If Cannon stays on the case, she will have fairly wide latitude to set its tempo. She will be responsible for scheduling any pretrial motions and hearings, determining what evidence is admissible, and ruling on potentially time-intensive challenges that Trump’s lawyers could bring.

In their indictment, the prosecutors estimated that a trial would take 21 days in court—not an especially long trial for a case of such magnitude. The timeline suggests the government believes it has a pretty “straightforward” argument, Parker said.

The fact that this case centers on documents Trump had in his possession—illegally, the government argues—means that he may have already seen a significant portion of the evidence the Justice Department has on him. Theoretically, that could speed up the discovery process that occurs before any trial. But cases that involve classified documents tend to take longer, former prosecutors told me, because the court will have to determine who can access sensitive materials and how to protect government secrets before and during a trial. Most of the pretrial rulings that Cannon could make are subject to appeal, and those delays can quickly add up.

Another scheduling complication is that Trump is facing another criminal trial, in New York, on charges that he falsified business records, and he could face yet another indictment and trial in Georgia related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s Manhattan trial is scheduled for March, which would be about 10 months after his indictment in that case and right in the middle of the Republican primary season. (Although the cases are in different jurisdictions, the 10-month lag could be a rough guide for how long Trump’s federal trial will take to get under way.)

David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable

One of the biggest questions Cannon may face is whether the election should factor into her decisions about how soon to schedule a trial and whether to agree to delays that Trump might seek. Parker argued that the election is a legitimate consideration. “We are in uncharted territory,” she said, “and quite frankly, I would think that a court would want to try to get this matter resolved ahead of that point.” Even if Trump’s trial concludes before the 2024 election, however, it’s unlikely that (if he’s convicted) his appeals will be exhausted by then.

The former prosecutors I spoke with could only guess at what would happen if Trump were elected president while awaiting trial or sentencing. The case would likely proceed after the election, and the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bar convicted felons from taking office. Whether Trump could pardon himself is a matter of debate; no president has ever tried, but in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that a presidential self-pardon would be unconstitutional. Even if Trump did not attempt to pardon himself, though, he could lean on or simply direct his appointees in the Justice Department to drop the case against him. He’d surely argue that, by electing him, voters had rendered a verdict more legitimate than any jury’s.

For all the legal wrangling to come, Trump’s ultimate fate may yet rest with the voters. If he is the Republican nominee, they will have what amounts to the final word on his future, political and otherwise. “These cases are important, but they are not magic wands,” Parker said. “They will not relieve the voting public of its problems.”

Russell Berman

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June 13, 2023