As President Donald Trump opens his presidency with a barrage of actions that critics say defy or ignore existing laws, his opponents, after a brief period of shocked paralysis, have ramped up dozens of lawsuits that now form the leading edge of the liberal pushback against his second-term agenda.
This time, the resistance is unfolding in the courts rather than the streets.
FBI agents are suing over Trump’s plans to target agents who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol rioters. Unions have asked a judge to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Americans’ personal information. A coalition of educators has challenged the president’s move to kill diversity programs.
And it’s working, at least in some cases: Courts have blocked Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship and to impose a freeze on federal grants. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth halted an administration plan to transfer three transgender women to a men’s prison, part of Trump’s attack on what he calls the “woke” transgender movement.
“There is a very sophisticated litigation strategy to go after these unlawful actions,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) said in an interview, adding that Trump is essentially challenging the courts to stop him. “That is what is happening. ‘We will do whatever we want regardless of a legal rationale, and then folks can sue us.’ I think the Trump administration believes it will generally prevail in the court system the country now has. He may be wrong about that.”
Kaine acknowledged that some federal courts, including a U.S. Supreme Court reshaped by Trump in his first term, may favor the president on some issues. “We can’t go into it feeling like, ‘I know we are going to win all these cases,’” the senator said. “But we are going to win some of them. And the more extreme the actions of the Trump administration, the more we will win.”
The White House argued that the lawsuits are a misuse of the courts by people who object to Trump’s policies.
“Every action taken by the Trump-Vance administration is fully legal and compliant with federal law,” said White House spokesman Harrison Fields. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people, who overwhelming elected President Trump to secure the border, revitalize the economy, and restore common-sense policies.”
[Trump’s and Musk’s actions spark protests in downtown Anchorage]
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Constitution gives Trump the power to run the executive branch the way he wants - regardless of Congress’s efforts to limit him.
“I don’t believe many of the lawsuits will ultimately survive,” von Spakovsky said. “If you look at these executive orders, all of them have to do with the federal government and telling agencies and federal employees what they can and can’t do in enforcing the law and complying with the law. That is within the power of the president.”
Still, Trump is arguably giving his opponents an opening by pursuing so many actions that are contrary to the text of various laws, from firing people without required notice to freezing spending allocated by Congress to seeking to shutter agencies created by statute.
But there is another reason for the explosion of lawsuits. In the second Trump era, many activists, gripped by a sense of exhaustion and futility, are shying away from the raucous street demonstrations that characterized Trump’s first term. The congressional arena has also proved frustrating for Democrats, since they are in the minority in both chambers.
That leaves the courts. And a variety of groups, representing an assortment of plaintiffs, are scrambling to challenge the edicts announced by the White House on a near-daily basis.
“It’s hard to keep track of what everyone is doing,” said Nandan Joshi, a lawyer with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, one of the organizations involved. “Ideally you could imagine a very efficient operation that is top-down and does everything with precision and efficiency. But as a practical matter, there are too many different issues and too many different groups to have a platonic ideal of efficiency.”
Joshi’s group has filed a suit arguing that Musk’s DOGE, created as a federal advisory committee, is required by law to be more transparent. It also represents unions and retired people in a privacy action against the Treasury Department, asserting that Treasury has illegally given DOGE access to the personal data of millions of Americans who have financial transactions with the U.S. government, which the department denies.
California attorney general Rob Bonta (D) said he and his counterparts have been preparing for months, monitoring Trump’s campaign promises and poring over Project 2025, a conservative blueprint created before the election and now reflected in many Trump administration policies. He cited a recent judicial decision blocking Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, the doctrine that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants are American citizens.
“That’s why we were able to file our birthright citizenship brief so quickly, because we knew it was coming,” Bonta said. “We were ready. We already had the brief written - just had to dot the i’s, cross the t’s, press print and file it.”
One ruling this week showed how quick and effective a legal filing can be. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order rejecting the notion of gender change and, among other things, forbidding officials from housing female transgender inmates in women’s prisons. Three inmates sued, arguing at a hearing in D.C. on Tuesday that transferring them to a men’s facility would cause “irreparable harm.”
A few hours later, Lamberth agreed, temporarily blocking the transfer. Concluding that “transgender persons are at a significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence relative to other inmates when housed in a facility corresponding to their biological sex,” Lamberth said depositing them in a men’s penitentiary would violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Such cases, and the general eruption of legal warfare, highlight the unprecedented nature of Trump’s second term.
Presidents in recent years have taken to announcing attention-grabbing moves in their first hours in office, seeking to show that they are responding decisively to voters’ demands for change.
On President Joe Biden’s first day in 2021, he decreed that anyone on federal property must wear a mask to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Trump, on his own first day in 2017, halted all new regulations and created new exemptions to the Affordable Care Act in an effort to weaken it.
But Trump’s current salvo is unprecedented in its ferocity and scope, with a focus on attacking, dismantling and shrinking the federal workforce. The president has issued any number of orders that openly disregard statutes, such as firing at least 18 inspectors general without a nod to the 30-day notice that Congress explicitly wrote into law in 2008.
Some Democrats say they are unsure whether the White House is knowingly courting lawsuits - hoping the litigation will reach a friendly Supreme Court that may rule in Trump’s favor and expand his authority - or if it is simply lashing out, seeking to disorient its adversaries and see what works.
“On some issues they have telegraphed that they are pushing the envelope to get the judges and justices to make new law on executive power,” Joshi said. But “some of the other things don’t seem to raise constitutional issues - they are more throwing things against the wall, seeing what they can get away with and hoping people are too exhausted to sue.”
There is little evidence of that exhaustion on either side. The Just Security website has compiled a list of more than two dozen lawsuits filed against Trump’s actions so far.
On Wednesday, Gwynne Wilcox, whom Trump abruptly removed as chair of the National Labor Relations Board, added to the total, suing for reinstatement. “The President’s firing of Ms. Wilcox by late-night email was a blatant violation” of the law, the lawsuit says, citing the National Labor Relations Act, which specifies that the president can dismiss a board member only for malfeasance and only after a hearing.
“The President’s action against Ms. Wilcox is part of a string of openly illegal firings in the early days of the second Trump administration that are apparently designed to test Congress’s power to create independent agencies like the Board,” the lawsuit says.
On the other side, the administration shows no sign of slowing down on moves that are likely to attract lawsuits.
Among its most striking actions has been an all-out assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides foreign aid and development assistance. Musk, Trump’s close adviser and ally, has for unclear reasons declared USAID a “criminal organization,” adding, “Time for it to die.”
But USAID was enshrined in law by Congress and experts say only Congress can shut it down, so Trump’s team has been doing all it can to eviscerate the agency and render it lifeless. On Tuesday, the administration put much of USAID’s workforce on leave and told its overseas employees they must return home.
In another unorthodox move, acting attorney general James McHenry fired more than a dozen Justice Department officials who worked on legal cases against Trump. Democrats say such retaliation against federal employees clearly violates civil service protections.
“He has decided in Trump II that ‘I will do what I want until a court tells me that I can’t do it - and even if a court tells me if I can’t, I might still do it,’” Kaine said.
Von Spakovsky said that even if lower courts initially rule against Trump, the Supreme Court may ultimately take a different view. “The executive branch under the Constitution is under the authority of the president, and when Congress passes laws limiting authority of the executive branch, they are violating the Constitution,” he said. “That hasn’t been brought up before the Supreme Court in a long time.”
Outside the courthouse, Democrats are groping for anything they can do to slow the president’s onslaught. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) has announced that in response to the efforts to shut down USAID, he will place a hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees. Kaine has joined Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) in offering a bill to terminate Trump’s declaration of a “national energy emergency,” which enables him to skirt certain regulations.
Still, Trump’s critics acknowledge that such gestures go only so far, and some say privately that their best hope may be to wait for Trump to make a damaging political mistake, as many presidents do in the months following a heady victory.
In the meantime, they can go to court.
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Maeve Reston contributed to this report.