After a slew of high-profile successes in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration found key parts of its agenda blocked in federal court this week, with judges criticizing its actions as “unlawful” and “unconstitutional.”
Judges issued orders blocking the president’s use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act to speed deportations, the federal deployment of the National Guard for law enforcement purposes in California, and the freezing of $2 billion in federal funds to Harvard.
It was the worst week in the courts in months for President Donald Trump and his administration — and came after another major loss last week, when an appeals court struck down some of his tariffs. Trump is already appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court and has said it would be a “disaster” if it’s not overturned.
The high court has granted the Trump administration’s emergency requests in 17 of 22 cases to date, a recent NBC News analysis found.
The flurry of appeals comes as the president has issued an unprecedented number of executive orders aimed at transforming the federal government.
“The courts aren’t going to strike down all that they’re doing, and, at the end of the day, they’ll end up accomplishing more by flooding the zone,” a lawyer who is close to the White House said in May in reference to the administration’s strategy.
Asked to comment on the rulings, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement Friday that “Fake News NBC is trying to push the left’s narrative in a new way.”
“Here’s the reality: with almost 20 Supreme Court victories, the Trump Administration’s policies have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court as lawful despite an unprecedented number of legal challenges and unlawful lower court rulings. And the winning will continue,” she said.
Here’s a look at the string of legal losses:
Judge calls Harvard funding cuts an ideologically motivated ‘assault’
The judge presiding over Harvard’s lawsuit on the government’s gutting of its federal funding found the administration’s actions were “violative of the First Amendment” and “unconstitutional coercion.”
The administration had said it was freezing over $2 billion in funds because of Harvard’s failure to combat antisemitism. U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs said in her Wednesday ruling that the claim “reeks of pretext.”
She said that while the school has been “plagued by antisemitism” in recent years, it’s taken several steps since early 2024 to combat the problem. Burroughs also said the majority of the changes the White House was seeking to make at the school had nothing to do with the issue, and neither did the grants it was canceling.
“The terminated grants related to all manner of medical, scientific, technological, and other projects,” she wrote, pointing to research on breast cancer, antibiotic resistance and veterans’ health.
The judge accused the administration of using “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI,” referring to the Administrative Procedure Act and a Civil Rights Act statute that prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.
The White House said it will appeal Burroughs’ ruling.
Judge says National Guard deployment to Los Angeles was unlawful
On Tuesday, a federal judge in California found the administration was violating a 19th-century law barring the domestic use of the military for civilian law enforcement activities.
The administration activated the National Guard and sent hundreds of Marines to the Los Angeles area in June, after thousands of protesters took to the streets to rally against Trump’s immigration policies.
The administration said the move was necessary because some of the protests had turned violent and the troops were needed to protect federal property and personnel.
In his 52-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said the troops did more than that — a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The 1878 statute prohibits the president from using the military as a domestic police force without approval from Congress.
The government “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles,” the judge wrote.
Breyer’s order blocks the administration “from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, (or) interrogation.”
He stayed his order until Sept. 12 to give the White House time to appeal, which it said it will do.
Court blocks Alien Enemies Act deportations
Also on Tuesday, an appeals court in Louisiana issued an order blocking the administration from deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Trump invoked the rarely used wartime power in an executive order in March to deport alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, an organization he said was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been tasked with reviewing the issue by the Supreme Court, found the government had not shown there was a warlike invasion going on.
“Our analysis leads us to GRANT a preliminary injunction to prevent removal because we find no invasion or predatory incursion,” the panel’s majority wrote.
The judges also noted that TdA has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization and “there are other provisions that would allow the Government to promptly remove precisely those individuals whom it seeks to remove under the President’s Proclamation.”
Jackson, the White House spokesperson, in a statement following the ruling, defended the president’s actions and said administration officials “expect to be vindicated.”
“The authority to conduct national security operations in defense of the United States and to remove terrorists from the United States rests solely with the President,” she said. “President Trump exercised this lawful authority and employed the Alien Enemies Act to remove enemies of the United States, including vicious TdA gang members, from the country.”
Trump takes tariff fight to the Supreme Court
The ruling the president has expressed the most concern about was handed down on Aug. 29, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found he had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs using an emergency powers statute.
“Tariffs are a core Congressional power,” it said, upholding a lower court’s finding that Trump’s orders are “invalid as contrary to law.”
The ruling affects two sets of tariffs Trump has sought to impose, but not others imposed under other laws.
The tariffs are still in effect and will remain in place until at least Oct. 14 to give the government time for further appeals.
The administration asked the Supreme Court to hear the case in an emergency filing on Wednesday.
“Swift review of that decision is necessary to avoid derailing critical ongoing negotiations with our foreign trading partners and threatening broader U.S. strategic interests internationally,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a declaration supporting the appeal.
