Trump Ramps Up Effort to Intimidate Judges Amid Their Growing Pushback

Over the past two weeks, even as Democratic Party leaders have opted for capitulation rather than forceful efforts to slow the Trump juggernaut, the judiciary has stirred to life. In the fight to protect basic constitutional norms such as the right to due process from the chainsaw massacres being unleashed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), judges are now very much on the front line.

Judges have pressed the pause button on DOGE’s efforts to indiscriminately fire all probationary employees in agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Park Service. They have questioned the legality of, and rationale for, Trump’s efforts to ban transgender enlistees from the U.S. military — leading to a furious, mocking tirade by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. They have temporarily stopped an enforcement of the cap on the amount of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funds that can be used by research institutions to cover indirect costs such as support staff for labs, cleaning supplies and electricity bills.

Judge Theodore Chuang, in a scathing ruling, pushed back against DOGE’s unilateral dismantling of USAID without input from Congress. Other judges have ruled against efforts to defund medical institutions that offer gender-affirming care; attempts to use an executive order to roll back the constitutionally guaranteed right of birthright citizenship; and the sending detention of Venezuelan migrants at to be detained in Guantánamo Bay.

Perhaps most enraging to the MAGA leadership and base, Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked the administration’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump activated in a late night executive order earlier this month (and then, in the face of criticism, subsequently denied activating) to fast-track deportations of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) — a vast, and notoriously brutal super-maximum security prison complex in El Salvador.

It is likely no coincidence that Trump and the Department of Justice have been escalating their attacks against law firms they view as opposing their agenda — revoking their security clearances and attempting to scare off their client base — in the same week they encountered judicial pushback against sending the Venezuelans to El Salvador. In a memo to the Department of Justice and to Homeland Security, Trump accused these firms of playing fast and loose with U.S. national security.

Trump and his team are deliberately waging so many varied political, cultural and economic battles that it is easy to look at the chaos and assume they are entirely getting their way. In reality, it’s more complicated than that. While it is true that in many instances the administration is steamrolling any and all opposition, because of judicial rulings a goodly number of the most controversial policies are currently meant to be on hold.

Yet, as seen in the administration’s contemptuous response to Judge Boasberg’s ruling that placed a hold on the deportation of Venezuelans, in reality that’s no guarantee of fair play.

Despite a written order prohibiting deportation flights to CECOT, and an oral order demanding that flights already in the air turn around, three flights, holding hundreds of Venezuelans, landed in El Salvador. There, the men were humiliated in front of the cameras, were manhandled, had their heads forcibly shaved and were dumped into overcrowded cell blocks in the prison that the El Salvadoran government, led by right-wing President Nayib Bukele, opened after declaring a controversial state of emergency in its so-called “war on gangs.”

On social media, Bukele posted “oopsie… too late” punctuated with a laughing emoji in response to Judge Boasberg’s orders. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung shared Bukele’s response with a gif of actor Denzel Washington saying “boom.” In D.C., White House and Department of Justice teams argued that the judge had no authority to intervene in what they claimed was a “national security” issue. They have continually stonewalled Boasberg’s requests for documents and timelines around the flights, refusing to even release the names of those men deported and imprisoned in CECOT, or to say whether or not they have been convicted of any crimes.

Meanwhile, Trump took to Truth Social to denounce Boasberg as a “radical left lunatic,” as a troublemaker and an agitator. He called for him to be impeached. So did Musk, who also donated to Republicans who supported the call to impeach judges And, in Congress, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas introduced articles of impeachment against Boasberg, accusing him of an abuse of power. On X, House Speaker Johnson has threatened to hold public hearings against judges and to introduce legislation to end nationwide injunctions.

So egregious are these attacks that last week they prompted Chief Justice John Roberts — yes, the same Roberts who presided over the scandalous majority vote last year that set the stage for this current catastrophe by providing such sweeping immunity guarantees for a president that essentially made the role one of a king in all but name — to issue a mild intervention critiquing the notion of politically motivated attacks on judges who issue rulings that politicians don’t like.

But Roberts trod oh so softly around the issue. He never once mentioned Trump or Musk by name, didn’t defend Boasberg by name, and clearly wanted nothing more than to retreat to a calmer environment in which the judicial system, its top echelon now stacked with Trump-appointed judges, could be left to do its job and issue its often deeply conservative rulings, out of both the spotlight and the political maelstrom.

The chief justice is desperate to avoid the much-ballyhooed constitutional crisis that the United States will spiral into if courts start issuing orders bottling up key parts of Trump’s agenda and Trump responds by simply ignoring them — as many of the sycophants surrounding the president, including Vice President J.D. Vance, have suggested he do — and ordering federal officials to proceed apace.

Roberts is, therefore, desperate to avoid saying the obvious: that the United States has already spiraled into just that crisis, and that large numbers of court orders are already being ignored in whole or in part, with the federal government now behaving like segregationist state governments refusing to abide by desegregation orders in the 1950s and 1960s.

Vance has tweeted that judges “aren’t allowed” to constrain presidential power. Border czar Tom Homan said “we’re not stopping,” in response to court rulings that attempt to rein in the deportation machine. “I don’t care what the judges think,” he added. And senior White House aide Stephen Miller has stated that the courts have “no authority” when the president designates an action as being part of “national security operations” — a trick Trump has tried to use when it comes to deportation cases.

The judicial orders that the administration is either flouting or coming perilously close to flouting range from the one mandating they turn back on the financial spigot for federal grants — both domestic and also USAID ones overseas — to the deportation of migrants to the CECOT prison and elsewhere in the face of orders to not carry out these deportations. The administration is still finding ways to eke out its violent policy priorities in the face of judicial pushback by weaponizing the details of bureaucracy. Take the order to restore the NIH grant-making process: the process was, technically, restored, but the committee meetings to approve grants, which have to be announced in advance in the Federal Register, aren’t taking place and the Federal Register announcements aren’t being published, so in reality the grants are still stuck in limbo. Even the rehiring of federal workers at agencies such as NOAA is taking place in a cockamamie way — workers are being rehired, as the courts mandated, but then immediately placed on “administrative leave;” in other words, they are being paid to do nothing, and the congressionally created and funded agencies in which they are employed are being slowly strangled even in the face of court orders to keep them alive.

Like so much else about this administration, the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against judges is designed for its chill factor effect at least as much as for the outcome. It takes a simple majority vote in the House to impeach a judge, but, as with convictions of presidents who have been impeached, as Trump knows all too well, it takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict. In reality, therefore, neither Boasberg nor any of the other judges in Trump, Vance and Musk’s crosshairs are likely to be removed from office by the Senate. But the mere fact that those demands are now being made sends a chill through the federal judiciary. At the same time, the threats also fuel the MAGA base’s rage against these judges. Threats against judges and their families are now commonplace.

It’s hard to see how this constitutional crisis doesn’t worsen in the coming months. The courts are going to continue to issue rulings against the Trump administration’s flagrant disregard of the Constitution; and the administration is going to continue to find ways to ignore those rulings. As the crisis deepens, the rights and protections that Americans have taken for granted for centuries will increasingly be on the line. And how to respond to that unsettling reality is a political question at least as much as it is a judicial one.