Frustrated judges aren’t letting Trump allies get away with ignoring orders

President Donald Trump and his allies, including Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, have been accusing federal judges of failing to respect the powers of the government's executive branch by blocking his executive orders. But Trump's critics are countering that under the U.S. Constitution, the government's judicial branch, like its legislative branch, is supposed to play a proactive role in the United States' system of checks and balances

In an article published on February 23, New York Times reporters Mattathias Schwartz, Zach Montague and Ernesto Londoño take a look at judges who are frustrated with Trump for blatantly disobeying their orders.

One of those judges is Minnesota's Laura M. Provinzino, who held a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, Matthew Isihara, in civil contempt. Although Provinzino ordered a detained immigrant to be released in Minnesota, he was released in El Paso instead.

"The anger Judge Provinzino flashed at Mr. Isihara has been repeated in courtrooms across the country amid Mr. Trump's drive to deport large numbers of immigrants," Schwartz, Montague and Londoño report. "A New York Times review of federal dockets found at least 35 instances since August in which federal district court or magistrate judges issued an order requiring the government to explain why it should not be similarly punished for violating court orders, essentially giving officials one last chance to explain themselves…. Judges have castigated administration officials for testifying dishonestly, representing the law inaccurately, and above all, failing to comply promptly with their orders."

The Times reporters note that "in New Jersey alone," the Trump DOJ has "admitted" to violating 52 judicial orders.

"In court, Justice Department lawyers have generally responded like Mr. Isihara, with respectful apologies and beleaguered references to their workloads," according to Schwartz, Montague and Londoño. "But in some of their internal communications, the Justice Department's leadership in Washington has taken a different posture, people familiar with them have said. During a call late last month with representatives from many of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys' offices, Aakash Singh, an associate deputy attorney general, complained that judges' filing deadlines in detention cases were 'unrealistic,' and that some of their rulings were 'crazy,' said a person familiar with the call who was granted anonymity to provide an account of an internal communication. And while Mr. Singh mentioned that the department planned to appeal some rulings, he also sounded a defiant note."

The Times journalists quotes Singh as saying, "I want to just stress that an adverse decision from a judge is not a reason to stop doing what you know to be right. We are the ones charged with keeping America safe."

Schwartz, Montague and Londoño quote Daniel N. Rosen, a federal prosecutor for the Trump DOJ in Minnesota, as saying, "Judge Provinzino's order is a lawless abuse of judicial power."

However, Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts outside Boston, told the Times, "We're at a moment where the courts are trying to figure out whether the Trump administration is systematically ignoring court orders, or whether it's a function of overload plus incompetence plus an attitude of disrespect."