Courts are fed up with Trump’s endless 'emergencies': ex-prosecutor

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters ahed of boarding Marine One to depart for New Jersey, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 1, 2025. REUTERSJonathan Ernst

Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig tells the Intelligencer that there is nothing President Donald Trump “loves more than an emergency.” He turns to emergencies to declare the nation under attack by immigrants, protesters — even economic conditions.

“Fear rarely fails … and, legally, an emergency declaration can unlock fringe-extreme executive powers,” said Honig. “But over the past few weeks, the federal courts have drawn a line. Not everything bad is an emergency, it turns out.”

Honig said Trump’s advisers “plumbed the law books” to come up with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to justify Trump’s tariffs. And he then declared the “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits” to pose an existential threat to the Nation’s “economic sovereignty.”

But the trial-level Court of International Trade rejected Trump’s economic emergency claim in May, as did the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals last week. Honig said the appeals court even pointed out Trump’s love of declaring national emergencies “since taking office.”

“Also last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — one of the nation’s more conservative courts, covering Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas — denied Trump’s facially preposterous effort to invoke the Alien Enemies Act” to deport alleged gang members, said Honig, with the court rejecting Trump’s claim that the gang’s presence in the country constituted an “invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government.”

In June, Trump used another emergency law to install the National Guard in California to assist ICE agents, claiming anti-ICE protests constituted “a form of rebellion.” District court Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump used Guard personnel illegally to perform civilian law-enforcement functions. That case now sits before the Ninth Circuit, but now that anti-ICE protests have essentially ended, it’s unclear how Trump can now justify his emergency.

And while it’s true that Trump’s Republican-majority Supreme Court can reverse these rulings, Honig said the court only “takes a minuscule fraction of all cases presented to it, typically 2 or 3 percent,” so many of these anti-Trump decisions in the lower courts will stand.

A probable Democrat House in January 2027 could curtail the worst of Trump’s behavior, but until then, it’s up to the judiciary to limit the president’s emergency-fueled power grab.

“And, so far, the courts have done that job fairly and effectively,” Honig said.

Read the Intelligencer article at this link.

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