Donald Trump is trying to show the world what he wants it to see: a president wielding unlimited and uncheckable power.
Trump’s challenge to the authority of Congress and the courts has increased in velocity and intensity in recent days. It reached a crescendo this weekend, when Trump invoked wartime powers to summarily deport Venezuelan nationals he deems to be terrorists, and his White House amplified a foreign strongman’s mockery of the judge who tried to pause the deportations.
That skirmish was only the latest in an increasingly ominous confrontation between Trump’s White House and the other two constitutional branches. In short, the most significant test of America’s system of checks and balances in Trump’s second term has arrived. And the outcome is less certain than ever.
This latest collision between Trump and the judicial branch — in which the White House and its allies are openly assailing the judge weighing the validity of Trump’s orders — is a more intense version of the clashes that have stymied his administration since Inauguration Day. Judges have sought to slow or stop some of Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and workforce, saying they have run afoul of Congress’ spending authority and laws governing hiring and firing of federal workers.
Judges have also in recent weeks blocked Trump’s effort to limit the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship for the children of some immigrants; his efforts to strip federal funding from medical institutions that provide care for transgender youth; his attempt to fire members of the federal boards that handle workplace grievances and labor disputes; his attempt to freeze refugee admissions; and his effort to strip funding from institutions that his administration says participate in impermissible “DEI” practices.
The White House has brushed off its critics as partisan doomsayers who, if they had their way, would see dangerous criminals returned to the country. Officials argue the administration has scrupulously adhered to court orders even as they have publicly attacked the judges who rule against them.
But the administration’s legal tangles underscore its make-decisions-first, figure-out-a-legal-defense-later approach to policy making. And the frustration over the rulings highlights how sensitive the White House is about efforts to thwart its agenda after they spent four years during Trump’s first term battling not just Democrats but the courts, Congress and even some within the administration to implement their policy proposals. Now, this administration is primed to see any pushback as illegitimate.
Each order has led to a wave of fury among Trump’s Cabinet loyalists, supporters in Congress and the always-online MAGA faithful. On Monday, Trump labeled as “dangerous” a judge’s order requiring his administration to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers over a ruling that the administration broke the law by failing to give state governments enough notice about the mass terminations.
Trump has also sought to expand his power in other ways, declaring in a late night Truth Social post over the weekend that some of his predecessor Joe Biden’s pardons are void. Trump suggested he may have his administration prosecute the recipients — members of the committee that investigated his supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
But it was the fight over Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — the 1798 law granting the president power to deport nationals of a wartime enemy nation — that seemed to push the conflict closest to a crisis.
On Saturday evening, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an emergency order to pause those deportations, raising questions about Trump’s authority to order them in the first place. But Trump sent plane loads of Venezuelans out of the country anyway, delivering them to El Salvador, whose strongman president Nayib Bukele openly mocked the judge’s effort to intervene in the matter.
“Oopsie, too late,” Bukele posted on X.
The White House and Trump’s supporters quickly cheered Bukele on, and Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama, of supporting terrorists over Americans. By Sunday, Trump’s uber-adviser and megadonor, Musk, had revived his call for Congress to impeach judges who rule against Trump and his claim that the left had “captured” the judiciary.
“We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming,” said Thomas Homan, Trump’s border czar, in a Monday appearance on Fox News.
On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department urged Boasberg to call off his scrutiny of Trump’s decision to label some Venezuelan migrants as terrorists in order to “de-escalate the grave incursions on Executive Branch authority that have already arisen.”
When Boasberg refused to cancel a Monday afternoon hearing, DOJ asked a federal appellate court to remove him from the case altogether, an extraordinary step to circumvent judicial scrutiny.
The White House, for its part, is dismissing arguments that the president’s actions are pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. Officials agree the nation is in one, but they blame it on the courts, framing recent rulings as the moves of “radical leftist judges” — though some of those judges were appointed by Republican presidents.
“The constitutional crisis is not in the executive branch. It’s in the judiciary branch,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, adding that the pushback to the administration’s weekend deportations “speaks more of [Democrats’] loyalty, or lack thereof, to this nation than anything else.”
It was a point that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed during a Monday press conference, saying that the administration “acted within the confines of the law” and “the president’s constitutional authority.”
Perhaps most significantly: The administration firmly believes that it has popular opinion on its side, at least in the fight over deportations of alleged gang members. An analysis from Gallup of six recent polls found that support for deportations reaches high majority levels when voters are asked specifically about deporting people with criminal records, while support for deporting people whose only crime was entering the country illegally is more mixed.
And the Hollywood-style video the El Salvadoran president released — and Trump approvingly republished on his Truth Social account — conveys a get-tough approach to potentially-threatening migrants that could resonate with some Americans. That’s probably the case even as immigrant rights advocates warn the administration has provided little insight into how it determined that those sent to El Salvador under Trump’s declaration, seen being forcibly shaved and restrained in the video, were members of Tren de Aragua.
Leavitt, during the briefing, said that the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are “sure about the identities of the individuals that were on these planes” and the threat they posed. She added that the administration is determining gang affiliation based on “intelligence and the men and women on the ground in the interior of the country.”
Still, it’s a political playing field on which Republicans are happy to be.
“If this is the hill that Democrats, Democrat lawyers and judges, want to die on — keeping MS-13 and TdA in our country, the American people will have something to say about that come the midterms,” Fields said.
The line between deliberate defiance and bureaucratic indifference can often be hard to discern. And even when lawyers and courts move quickly, the judicial system can have trouble matching the agility with which the executive branch can carry out a presidential order.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated when U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his emergency order.
