Politics
Defying courts in deportation case, Trump risks a tipping point, experts say
WASHINGTON — It was just the latest example of President Trump, still in the infancy of his second term, appearing to plow through direct orders from a U.S. court. But it was the sharpest moment yet of a federal judge losing patience.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had asked what the administration had done, if anything, to follow a ruling from the highest court in the land, and reached a stark conclusion.
“To date, nothing has been done,” Xinis told the Justice Department lawyer before her Tuesday. “Nothing.”
The Supreme Court had ordered the administration last week to “facilitate” the return of a Maryland resident named Armando Abrego Garcia, whom it had deported to a notorious El Salvador prison despite an earlier court order barring such a move.
The administration had defied that order and made no secret of it. On cable TV, through social media and from the Oval Office, the president and his allies were clear they had no intention to work toward Abrego Garcia’s return.
Still, Xinis’ concluding as much in court added fresh weight to a profound question swirling with increasing intensity in recent days among government officials and watchdogs, constitutional scholars, legal experts and worried members of the public: If the president refuses to abide by court rulings, then is the United States in a constitutional crisis?
If Trump won’t listen to the Supreme Court, is the entire U.S. system of governance — the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, due process under the law — at risk of faltering?
For some, the answer is an affirmative yes — the actions of the administration in the Abrego Garcia case a clear tipping point.
“There is no guarantee that President Trump will abide by his legal and constitutional obligations, and he has already shown a willingness to violate those obligations many times over,” said Jamal Greene, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University.
Others said that the risk is certainly there, but that legal nuance remains in the maneuverings of the Trump administration — enough to imagine a less fraught future in which the administration falls back in line as the courts make their directives in the Abrego Garcia case less ambiguous and harder to skirt using dubious but still barely defensible legal arguments.
Robert Weisberg, a professor at Stanford Law School, said the judiciary also still has tools at its disposal to enforce its rulings should Trump and his team continue defying court orders, and especially the Supreme Court.
For example, if a court issues an injunction “saying, ‘You can’t do this,’ ” and the administration does it anyway, the court can hold the administration in contempt. And, the U.S. Marshals Service, the law enforcement arm of the judicial branch, can be called upon to enforce the court’s orders, Weisberg said.
“So there are ways,” he said. “The Supreme Court has tools.”
A deportation with consequences for Trump
Either way, the case raises stark questions for a country already exhausted by a steady stream of unprecedented moves by the Trump administration and a mountain of lawsuits challenging them — on immigration enforcement, federal funding streams to the states, LGBTQ+ rights and school funding, among many issues.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office has already sued the Trump administration more than a dozen times and expressed support for litigants suing the administration in at least half a dozen other cases. Other Democratic-led states have joined California in its cases.
Time and time again, courts have blasted the administration for violating the law — sometimes in flagrant ways. And in multiple instances, the administration has defied court instructions to reverse course, judges and litigants against the administration have said.
California has alleged that the administration has failed to unfreeze funding, including under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, despite court orders for it to do so. Associated Press journalists continued to be barred from White House functions after a judge ordered they be allowed back in. The Trump administration balked at another court order that it return immigrants who had been loaded onto a plane for deportation, arguing that the plane was already in the air and out of the judge’s jurisdiction.
Still, the Abrego Garcia case and an Oval Office meeting partially about it between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday have ratcheted up fears of a recalcitrant Trump unafraid of defying the courts when they attempt to check him or his policies.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen and sheet metal worker living in Maryland, had been arrested years ago while looking for work outside of a Home Depot in Maryland. A judge had determined in 2019 that he should not be deported to El Salvador because he would be in danger there from a local gang, allowing him to remain in the country.
However, Abrego Garcia was detained last month on claims by the administration that he is a member of the MS-13 gang, and then deported along with other detainees to a notorious prison in El Salvador. His family, denying the gang allegations, sued in response, alleging that his rights had been violated and that the administration had broken the law and the previous judge’s decision allowing him to remain in the country.
The case moved swiftly up through the courts.
‘Facilitate’ vs. ‘effectuate’?
When it was first before Xinis, she found that the evidence of Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang affiliation was slim — amounting to a tip from an informant that he’d worn Chicago Bulls apparel associated with the gang — and that the government had wrongfully removed him from the country. Xinis then ordered the Trump administration to both “facilitate” and “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.
The Trump administration appealed that ruling, resulting in a terse unsigned decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday that required the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, but not “effectuate” it.
The high court said the “intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’” was unclear and may exceed the district court’s authority in the matter, and called on Xinis to clarify her directive “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers claimed the ruling as a victory and a clear directive to that administration that it have him returned to the U.S. The Trump administration, however, claimed a victory as well.
“As the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs,” a Department of Justice spokesperson said. “By directly noting the deference owed to the executive branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”
Xinis followed the Supreme Court’s ruling by issuing another of her own, calling again on the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. That set up the Oval Office meeting Monday, where Trump and Bukele insisted they were not going to bring Abrego Garcia home.
In what some legal observers saw as an absurd twist of logic, Trump administration officials said they would supply the plane to return Abrego Garcia if only El Salvador would allow it, while Bukele said El Salvador could not possibly return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. because doing so would amount to smuggling a terrorist into an allied territory.
“Of course, I’m not going to do it,” he said. “The question is preposterous.”
In the same meeting, Trump said “the homegrowns are next” — a clear insinuation that he wants to send American citizens to Salvadoran prisons next, in clear violation of American law.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, speaks at an April 4 news conference.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
During Tuesday’s hearing before Xinis, the Trump administration made it clear that it took an extremely narrow view of what facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return requires.
“If Abrego Garcia presents himself at a port of entry, we will facilitate his entry to the United States,” said Drew Ensign, an attorney for the Justice Department. Ensign also submitted a transcript of the Oval Office meeting, suggesting the case had clearly been “raised at the highest level.”
Xinis was unmoved, demanding documentation of the administration’s actions in recent days. Legal experts said the order could set the stage for Xinis to find the Trump administration in contempt of court. And that could raise new questions about the power of the court to hold the administration to account — and whether it has any teeth in the event the administration pushes back.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law, said it’s questionable whether the Justice Department or the U.S. marshals would help to enforce any criminal or civil contempt orders against the administration or any of its actors.
“The question is, do we have the guardrails for our Constitution to survive?” Chemerinsky said. “‘We don’t know’ is the only answer anyone can give. You can play it out, and it’s very frightening.”
If Trump was given a very clear, unambiguous order from the courts and openly declared that the administration would not comply, the country would be in an extremely dangerous position, Chemerinsky said.
And if he won out in that scenario — wasn’t stopped by Congress or the courts or anyone else — “then the president can do anything,” Chemerinsky added. He could violate other constitutional laws and court orders and “literally lock up anybody, any dissident,” without fear of repercussions.
“Of course then the reality is this is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship,” Chemerinsky said.
‘Crisis is here’
Democrats in Congress have been sounding similar alarms, with some arguing that Trump has already crossed the line into authoritarian behavior — and thrust the country into a constitutional crisis.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote in a post to X late Monday: “The constitutional crisis is here.”
The post also included a nearly six-minute video in which Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, attempted to explain the complicated Abrego Garcia case, the administration’s actions in it, and why they put the country in crisis.
“It’s a constitutional crisis because the administration is under a court order to return this wrongfully deported man to the United States. To facilitate his return,” Schiff said. “And far from taking any step to facilitate his return, in that meeting in the White House, Donald Trump essentially told the Supreme Court to pound sand.
“Nowhere in that entire meeting does the president of the United States ask the president of El Salvador to return the man wrongly sent to a maximum security prison in his country,” Schiff said. “It just never happens.”
Schiff said the president, through his actions, had “taken a very determined step toward dictatorship.”
Chemerinsky agreed that the days of wondering whether the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis were over.
He said the U.S. is “clearly in a constitutional crisis” both because of the “quantity of unconstitutional things that have been done” by the Trump administration that show Trump “has no respect for constitutional law,” and because of the extreme actions and recalcitrance of the administration in the Abrego Garcia case in particular.
“It could get worse, but that doesn’t minimize that we’re in one now,” he said.
Chemerinsky said it was clearly illegal under U.S. law for the administration to defy a court order and send a person to a notorious El Salvador prison without due process. And the administration’s claim now that it cannot bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. because he is under the control of a foreign government simply “has to be wrong” in a land of laws, he said.
“It’s nothing less than a claim of the power to put any human being in a foreign prison,” he said. “That’s the authority to create a gulag.”
Politics
Nearly 20 states sue HHS over declaration to restrict gender transition treatment for minors
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A group of 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a declaration that aims to restrict gender transition treatment for minors.
The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and its inspector general comes after the declaration issued last week described treatments such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender surgeries as unsafe and ineffective for children experiencing gender dysphoria.
The declaration also warned doctors they could be excluded from federal health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, if they provide these treatments to minors.
The move seeks to build on President Donald Trump’s executive order in January calling on HHS to protect children from “chemical and surgical mutilation.”
HHS UNLEASHES SWEEPING CRACKDOWN ON CHILD ‘SEX-REJECTING PROCEDURES,’ THREATENS HOSPITAL, MEDICAID FUNDING
The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and its inspector general. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
“We are taking six decisive actions guided by gold standard science and the week one executive order from President Trump to protect children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” Kennedy said during a press conference last week.
HHS has also proposed new rules designed to further block gender transition treatment for minors, although the lawsuit does not address the rules, which have yet to be finalized.
The states’ lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Eugene, Oregon, argues that the declaration is inaccurate and unlawful and urges the court to prevent it from being enforced.
“Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online, and no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors’ offices,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the lawsuit, said in a statement.
The lawsuit claims the declaration attempts to pressure providers into ending gender transition treatment for young people and circumvent legal requirements for policy changes. The complaint said federal law requires the public be given notice and an opportunity to comment before substantively amending health policy and that neither of these were done before the declaration was released.
HHS’ move seeks to build on President Donald Trump’s executive order in January calling on HHS to protect children from “chemical and surgical mutilation.” (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The declaration based its conclusions on a peer-reviewed report that the department conducted earlier this year that called for more reliance on behavioral therapy rather than broad gender transition treatment for minors with gender dysphoria.
The report raised questions about standards for the treatment of transgender children issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and brought concerns that youths may be too young to give consent to life-changing treatments that could result in future infertility.
Major medical groups and physicians who treat transgender children have criticized the report as inaccurate.
HHS also announced last week two proposed federal rules — one to cut off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that offer gender transition treatment to children and another to block federal Medicaid money from being used for these procedures.
HOUSE APPROVES MTG-SPONSORED BILL TO CRIMINALIZE GENDER TRANSITION TREATMENT FOR MINORS
New York Attorney General Letitia James led the lawsuit against the Trump administration. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The proposals have not yet been made final and are not legally binding because they must go through a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment before they can be enforced.
Several major medical providers have already pulled back on gender transition treatment for youths since Trump returned to office, even those in Democrat-led states where the procedures are legal under state law.
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Medicaid programs in just under half of states currently cover gender transition treatment. At least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the treatment, and the Supreme Court’s decision this year upholding Tennessee’s ban likely means other state laws will remain in place.
Democrat attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Washington state and Washington, D.C., as well as Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor, joined James in the lawsuit.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Tips provided to federal investigators about Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s schemes with young women and girls are “sensationalist” and “untrue,” the Justice Department said on Tuesday, after a new tranche of files released from the probe featured multiple references to the president.
The documents include a limousine driver reportedly overhearing Trump discussing a man named Jeffrey “abusing” a girl, and an alleged victim accusing Trump and Epstein of rape. It is unclear whether the FBI followed up on the tips. The alleged rape victim died from a gunshot wound to the head after reporting the incident.
Nowhere in the newly released files do federal law enforcement agents or prosecutors indicate that Trump was suspected of wrongdoing, or that Trump — whose friendship with Epstein lasted through the mid-2000s — was investigated himself.
But one unidentified federal prosecutor noted in a 2020 email that Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported,” including over a time period when Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s top confidante who would ultimately be convicted on five federal counts of sex trafficking and abuse, was being investigated for criminal activity.
The Justice Department released an unusual statement unequivocally defending the president.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the Justice Department statement read. “To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
“Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims,” the department added.
The Justice Department files were released with heavy redactions after bipartisan lawmakers in Congress passed a new law compelling it to do so, despite Trump lobbying Republicans aggressively over the summer and fall to oppose the bill. The president ultimately signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law after the legislation passed with veto-proof majorities in both chambers.
One newly released file containing a letter purportedly from Epstein — a notorious child sex offender who died in jail while awaiting federal trial on sex-trafficking charges — drew widespread attention online, but was held up by the Justice Department as an example of faulty or misleading information contained in the files.
The letter appeared to be sent by Epstein to Larry Nassar, another convicted sex offender, shortly before Epstein’s death. The letter’s author suggested that Nassar would learn after receiving the note that Epstein had “taken the ‘short route’ home,” possibly referring to his suicide. It was postmarked from Virginia on Aug. 13, 2019, despite Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail three days prior.
“Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls,” the letter reads. “When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”
The Justice Department said that the FBI had confirmed that the letter is “FAKE” after it made the rounds on Tuesday.
“This fake letter serves as a reminder that just because a document is released by the Department of Justice does not make the allegations or claims within the document factual,” the department posted on social media. “Nevertheless, the DOJ will continue to release all material required by law.”
The department has faced bipartisan scrutiny since failing to release all of the Epstein files in its possession by Dec. 19, the legal deadline for it to do so, and for redacting material on the vast majority of the documents.
Justice Department officials said they were following the law by protecting victims with the redactions. The Epstein Files Transparency Act also directs the department not to redact images or references to prominent or political figures, and to provide an explanation for each and every redaction in writing.
The latest release, just days before the Christmas holiday, includes roughly 30,000 documents, the department said. Hundreds of thousands more are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a statement in response to the Tuesday release accusing the Justice Department of a “cover-up,” writing on social media, “the new DOJ documents raise serious questions about the relationship between Epstein and Donald Trump.”
Documents from Epstein’s private estate released by the oversight committee earlier this fall had already cast a spotlight on that relationship, revealing Epstein had written in emails to associates that Trump “knew about the girls.”
The latest documents release also includes an email from an individual identified as “A,” claiming to stay at Balmoral Castle, a royal residence in Scotland, asking Maxwell if she had found him “some new inappropriate friends.” Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, has come under intense scrutiny over his ties to Epstein in recent years.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, Trump said the continuing Epstein scandal amounts to a “distraction” from Republican successes, and expressed disapproval over the release of images in the files that reveal associates of Epstein.
“I believe they gave over 100,000 pages of documents, and there’s tremendous backlash,” Trump told reporters. “It’s an interesting question, because a lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein. But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruin a reputation of somebody. So a lot of people are very angry that this continues.”
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White nationalist Nick Fuentes vowed to campaign against Vivek Ramaswamy in a slur-laced rant denouncing the Republican’s Ohio governor bid.
The declaration came just days after Ramaswamy called out Fuentes during a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in which he criticized Fuentes over some of his inflammatory remarks.
“I think I’m going to go to Ohio and the word that we are looking for is denial. We have to deny Vivek Ramaswamy the governorship. This is the only race I care about in ‘26. It’s the only one I care about,” Fuentes said during a Tuesday livestream. He also used a slur to describe Ramaswamy and said he does not care if a Democrat defeats him in the governor’s race.
When asked by Fox News Digital for a response, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy’s campaign said on Wednesday, “We’re focused on the issues that matter most to Ohioans, not fringe voices that prefer a far-left Democrat to the Trump-endorsed conservative.”
VIVEK RAMASWAMY TURNS TO CONSERVATIVE YOUTH TO SHAPE THE MOVEMENT’S NEXT PHASE, ANALYZES 2026 RACES
Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. At right is White nationalist Nick Fuentes outside a Turning Point event on June 15, 2024, in Detroit. (Cheney Orr/Reuters; Dominic Gwinn/Getty Images)
Ramaswamy laid out his vision for what it means to be an American during remarks Friday at AmericaFest.
“What does it mean to be an American in the year 2026? It means we believe in those ideals of 1776,” he said at the Turning Point USA event. “It means we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color.”
“It means we believe in free speech and open debate,” he added. “Even for those who disagree with us, from Nick Fuentes to Jimmy Kimmel, you get to speak your mind in the open without the government censoring you.”
RAMASWAMY REVEALS MAIN LESSON LEARNED BY REPUBLICANS AFTER DEMOCRATS’ BIG WINS ON ELECTION DAY
Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025, on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Phoenix. (Jon Cherry/AP)
Ramaswamy then said, “If you believe in normalizing hatred toward any ethnic group, toward Whites, toward Blacks, toward Hispanics, toward Jews, toward Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement, period.”
“And I will not apologize for that. I will not hedge when I say it,” Ramaswamy continued. “If you believe, and you will forgive me for giving you an exact quote from our online commentator, Nick Fuentes. If you believe that Hitler was pretty f—— cool, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement. You can debate foreign aid, Israel all you want. That’s fine. That’s fair. But you have no place with that level of hatred.”
Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Ohio governorship in late February.
Ramaswamy is running to replace Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, shown here in the Old Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 21, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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Current Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is also a Republican, is term-limited and will be departing office in January 2027.
Fox News Digital’s David Rutz contributed to this report.
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