Politics
Trump Grows Increasingly Combative in Showdowns With the Courts
The Trump administration’s compliance with court orders started with foot-dragging, moved to semantic gymnastics and has now arrived at the cusp of outright defiance.
Large swaths of President Trump’s agenda have been tied up in court, challenged in scores of lawsuits. The administration has frozen money that the courts have ordered it to spend. It has blocked The Associated Press from the White House press pool despite a court order saying that the news organization be allowed to participate. And it ignored a judge’s instruction to return planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants bound for a notorious prison in El Salvador.
But Exhibit A in what legal scholars say is a deeply worrisome and escalating trend is the administration’s combative response to the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in the case of a Salvadoran immigrant. The administration deported the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge specifically and directly prohibiting that very thing.
Until recently, none of this was in dispute. “The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal,” the Supreme Court said on Thursday in an unsigned and to all appearances unanimous order.
The justices upheld a part of an order from Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland that had required the government to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. He had by then been held for almost a month in one of the most squalid and dangerous prisons on earth.
The administration’s response has been to quibble, stall and ignore requests for information from Judge Xinis. In an Oval Office meeting on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, both men made plain that they had no intention of returning Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States.
In remarks in the Oval Office and on television, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, said the administration’s earlier concessions, made by several officials and in a Supreme Court filing, were themselves mistaken, the work of a rogue lawyer. He added that the Supreme Court had unanimously endorsed the administration’s position that judges may not meddle in foreign policy.
Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator, said that was a misreading of the ruling.
“The administration is clearly acting in bad faith,” he said. “The Supreme Court and the district court have properly given it the freedom to select the means by which it will undertake to ensure Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration is abusing that freedom by doing basically nothing.”
White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The administration has also responded to court orders blocking its programs in other ways, speaking to audiences outside the courtroom. Mr. Trump and his allies have waged relentless rhetorical attacks on several judges who have ruled against the president, at times calling for their impeachment and at others suggesting that Mr. Trump is not bound by the law.
Assessing whether, when and how much the administration is defying the courts is complicated by a new phenomenon, legal scholars said, pointing to what they called a collapse in the credibility of representations by the Justice Department. These days, its lawyers are sometimes sent to court with no information, sometimes instructed to make arguments that are factually or legally baseless and sometimes punished for being honest.
Defiance, then, may not be a straightforward declaration that the government will not comply with a ruling. It may be an appearance by a hapless lawyer who has or claims to have no information. Or it may be a legal argument so outlandish as to amount to insolence.
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the Trump administration had exposed dual fault lines, in the constitutional structure and in the limits of permissible advocacy.
“I would like to think that at least some of the Trump administration’s arguments have crossed that line,” Professor Levinson said, “but, frankly, I don’t really know where the line is.”
Courts generally give government lawyers the benefit of the doubt, presuming that they are acting in good faith even when they make ambitious arguments for a broad conception of executive power.
“We are beyond that point,” said Marin Levy, a law professor at Duke. “It is alarming that we are even having to ask whether the government is failing to comply with court orders.”
Just hours after the Supreme Court ruled in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, Judge Xinis asked the government three questions on Thursday night: Where was Mr. Abrego Garcia being held? What steps had the government taken to get him home? And what additional steps did it plan to take?
At first, the administration’s lawyers refused to respond, saying in a court filing on Friday that they needed more time and at a hearing that day that they had no answers to the judge’s questions.
Judge Xinis wrote that they had “failed to comply with this court’s order,” and she called for daily updates, at 5 p.m., a deadline the administration has treated as a suggestion.
On Saturday, an administration official grudgingly acknowledged that “Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” The official said nothing about what the government was doing to facilitate the prisoner’s return.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have urged Judge Xinis to consider holding the government in contempt, a question she may consider at a hearing on Tuesday.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, said the administration was “certainly close to defiance in the Abrego Garcia case.”
“At the very least,” he said, “they are taking maximal advantage of possible ambiguity in the meaning of ‘facilitate.’ It is not plausible to interpret that term as meaning they need make no real effort.”
In a brief filed on Sunday, the administration argued that the Supreme Court’s requirement that it “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return meant only that it must “remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.”
That argument, Michael Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, wrote in a blog post, “does not pass the laugh test.”
Still, last week’s Supreme Court decision gave the administration some room to maneuver, notably in instructing Judge Xinis to clarify her initial ruling “with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” The decision added: “For its part, the government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
The dispute seems certain to return to the justices if the administration sticks to its hard-line approach. Should lower courts order Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return or hold officials in contempt, the administration will surely again ask the Supreme Court to intervene. And if Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers cannot secure his return, they too will seek further help from the justices.
Other disputes have also raised questions about whether the administration is defying the courts. A district court judge in Washington, for instance, ordered the White House to back off from its stated policy of barring The Associated Press from its press pool. But the administration showed no signs of budging.
Last week, Judge Trevor McFadden ruled that the White House had discriminated against the wire service by using access to the president as leverage to compel its journalists to adopt the term “Gulf of America” in their coverage. When the outlet refused, the White House began to turn its reporters away from the pool of journalists who cover the president daily.
Until February, The A.P. and its competitors, such as Reuters and Bloomberg, reliably sent reporters to travel with the president on Air Force One and to cover exclusive events in the Oval Office and the East Room every day a president had scheduled public events.
Recognizing that the administration would most likely challenge his ruling, Judge McFadden put his decision on hold until Sunday, and the government promptly filed its appeal on Thursday. But the stay expired on Monday, and the appeals court did not intervene to keep it in place.
Even so, the administration did not allow either a print journalist or a photographer from The A.P. to be included in the pool to cover Monday’s events, including the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele. The White House’s only acknowledgment of the deadline appeared to be in a filing on Monday asking the appeals court to restore the temporary stay.
The Trump administration has seemingly capitalized on confusion in other cases.
Long after judges ordered the administration to unfreeze funding from contracts and grants disbursed by U.S.A.I.D. and FEMA, contractors and states led by Democrats repeatedly reported that payments were still being held up. Twice in February, judges granted motions to enforce their orders, finding that the administration was dragging its feet.
The gap between lawyerly obstinacy and flat-out defiance seems to shrink by the day, at least in the lower courts. For now, neither the president nor the justices seem eager for the ultimate constitutional confrontation.
“If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “I respect the Supreme Court.”
Zach Montague contributed reporting
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Some of the top rumored Democratic potential candidates for president in 2028 are showing a united front in opposing U.S. strikes on Iran, with several high-profile figures accusing President Donald Trump of launching an unnecessary and unconstitutional war.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump was “dragging the United States into a war the American people do not want.”
“Let me be clear: I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran, and our troops are being put in harm’s way for the sake of Trump’s war of choice,” Harris said in a statement Saturday following the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes throughout Iran.
“This is a dangerous and unnecessary gamble with American lives that also jeopardizes stability in the region and our standing in the world,” she continued. “What we are witnessing is not strength. It is recklessness dressed up as resolve.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are leading Democratic 2028 hopefuls who spoke out against U.S. strikes on Iran. (Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference; Reuters/Liesa Johannssen; Mario Tama/Getty Images)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered some of his sharpest criticism during a book tour stop Saturday night in San Francisco, accusing Trump of manufacturing a crisis.
“It stems from weakness masquerading as strength,” Newsom said. “He lied to you. So reckless is the only way to describe this.”
“He didn’t describe to the American people what the endgame is here,” Newsom added. “There wasn’t one. He manufactured it.”
Newsom is currently promoting his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” with recent and upcoming stops in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada — three key early voting states in the Democratic presidential calendar.
Earlier in the day, Newsom said Iran’s “corrupt and repressive” regime must never obtain nuclear weapons and that the “leadership of Iran must go.”
“But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people,” Newsom wrote on X.
California is home to more than half of the roughly 400,000 Iranian immigrants in the United States, including a large community in West Los Angeles often referred to as “Tehrangeles.”
DEMOCRATS BUCK PARTY LEADERS TO DEFEND TRUMP’S ‘DECISIVE ACTION’ ON IRAN
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a leading progressive voice and “Squad” member, accused Trump of dragging Americans into a conflict they did not support.
“The American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions. This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Just this week, Iran and the United States were negotiating key measures that could have staved off war. The President walked away from these discussions and chose war instead,” she continued.
“In moments of war, our Constitution is unambiguous: Congress authorizes war. The President does not,” she said, pledging to vote “YES on Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s War Powers Resolution.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker criticized the strikes and accused Trump of ignoring Congress. (Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for Vox Media)
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat often mentioned as a potential 2028 contender, also criticized the strikes and accused Trump of ignoring Congress.
“No justification, no authorization from Congress, and no clear objective,” Pritzker wrote on X.
“Donald Trump is once again sidestepping the Constitution and once again failing to explain why he’s taking us into another war,” he continued. “Americans asked for affordable housing and health care, not another potentially endless conflict.”
“God protect our troops,” Pritzker added.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro focused his criticism on war powers, arguing Trump acted outside constitutional guardrails.
“In our democracy, the American people — through our elected representatives — decide when our nation goes to war,” Shapiro said, adding that Trump “acted unilaterally — without Congressional approval.”
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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro focused his criticism on war powers, arguing Trump acted outside constitutional guardrails. (Rachel Wisniewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Make no mistake, the Iranian regime represses its own people… they must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons,” he said. “But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war.”
Shapiro added that “Congress must use all available power” to prevent further escalation.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also accused Trump of launching a “war of choice.”
“The President has launched our nation and our great military into a war of choice, risking American lives and resources, ignoring American law, and endangering our allies and partners,” Buttigieg wrote on X. “This nation learned the hard way that an unnecessary war, with no plan for what comes next, can lead to years of chaos and put America in still greater danger.”
Buttigieg has been hitting early voting states, stopping in New Hampshire and Nevada in recent weeks to campaign for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who has been floated as a rising national figure within the party, said he lost friends in Iraq to an illegal war and opposed the strikes.
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“Young working-class kids should not pay the ultimate price for regime change and a war that hasn’t been explained or justified to the American people. We can support the democracy movement and the Iranian people without sending our troops to die,” Gallego wrote on X.
Fox News’ Daniel Scully and Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.
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Politics
Commentary: With midterm vote starting, here’s where things stand in national redistricting fight
Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.
Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?
Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.
With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.
So he effectively broke the rules.
Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.
The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.
In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.
Then came the deluge.
In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.
Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.
But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.
The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”
Well.
That was a lot of wasted time and energy.
Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.
In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.
But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.
Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.
That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.
(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)
In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.
But that’s not necessarily so.
The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.
In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.
But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.
By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.
In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.
Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?
Politics
Mamdani’s response to Trump’s Iran strike sparks conservative backlash: ‘Rooting for the ayatollah’
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New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing blowback from conservatives on social media over his post condemning the U.S. attack on Iran that led to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On Saturday, as a joint strike on Iran by the United States and Israel was developing, Mamdani blasted the Trump administration’s decision in a post on X that has been viewed roughly 20 million times.
“Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” Mamdani wrote.
“Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Mamdani said Americans prefer “relief from the affordability crisis” before speaking directly to Iranians in New York City.
“You are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders,” Mamdani said. “You will be safe here.”
The post was quickly slammed by conservatives on social media making the case that Mamdani’s response appeared sympathetic to Iran’s brutal regime and pointing to his lack of public reaction to the Iranian protesters killed in recent years.
“Comrade Mayor is rooting for the Ayatollah,” GOP Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “They can chant together.”
OBAMA OFFICIAL WHO BACKED IRAN DEAL SPARKS ONLINE OUTRAGE WITH REACTION TO TRUMP’S STRIKE: ‘SIT THIS ONE OUT’
“Do u say anything pro American ?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade posted on X. “do u know any Iranians – ? they hate @fr_Khamenei they celebrate his death, you should be celebrating his death ! hes killed thousands of American’s and just killed 30k Iranians, did u even say a word about that? You are an embarrassment !! Please quit.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Hart building Jan. 15, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours,” Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad posted on X.
“We Iranians do not allow you to lecture us about war while you had nothing to say when the Islamic Republic shot schoolgirls and blinded more than 10,000 innocent people in the streets. You were busy celebrating the hijab while women of my beloved country Iran were jailed and raped by Islamic Security forces for removing it.
“And NOW you find your voice to defend the regime? No. I will not let you claim the moral high ground. The people of Iran want to be free. Where were you when they needed solidarity?”
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“How is it that you can’t differentiate between good and evil?” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X. “Why is this so hard for you?”
“It takes a particular kind of audacity, or ignorance, for a city mayor to appoint himself the conscience of American foreign policy while his constituents step over garbage on their way to work,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace posted on X. “History will not remember his bravery. It will not remember him at all.”
“Iranian New Yorkers are thrilled today and see right through you,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino posted on X.
Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, speaks during the WSJ D.Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., Oct. 17, 2017. (Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“When Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Bahrain all support today’s operation eliminating world’s #1 sponsor of terror, but New York City’s Mayor @ZohranMamdani is shilling for Iran,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office for comment.
Shortly after Mamdani’s post, it was announced by President Trump and Israeli officials that the military operation resulted in Khamenei’s death.
Israeli leaders confirmed Khamenei’s compound and offices were reduced to rubble early Saturday after a targeted strike in downtown Tehran.
“Khamenei was the contemporary Middle East’s longest-serving autocrat. He did not get to be that way by being a gambler. Khamenei was an ideologue, but one who ruthlessly pursued the preservation and protection of his ideology, often taking two steps forward and one step back,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of FDD’s Iran program, told Fox News Digital.
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