Trump team blames lost email for ignoring court halt in mind-boggling stunt

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately stop running the Department of Homeland Security’s taxpayer-funded love-letters to Donald Trump — but then there was more, reports Above the Law.

On Sunday evening, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order and a stay under the Administrative Procedure Act in the Common Cause-led challenge to a $20 million taxpayer-funded campaign ad blitz containing ads like “God Made Trump.” The money funding the ads was issued by Congress to DHS for border security.

Rochon halted DHS’s purchase order with its ad vendor, LMD Agency, stayed the Office of Management and Budget’s $20 million apportionment, and barred the department from spending Congressionally-appropriated funds on the ads.

“And because she could read a calendar, she ordered the government to ‘cancel or cause to be cancelled any slot, placement, reservation, or arrangement for the airing or dissemination of the challenged advertisements, including those placements for the evening of October 11, 2026.’ The order was effective as of 6:45 p.m. Sunday,” reports Above the Law Senior Editor Katheryn Rubino.

But the administration then managed to violate that order within hours because, according to its own lawyers, “nobody at DHS checked their email,” reports Rubino.

On Monday, plaintiffs in the case ratted out the federal government’s seeming indifference to court orders, telling the court the ads kept running into Sunday night, and they even aired early Monday.

Rubino offered no mercy for the DOJ’s excuse they tried to use in their subsequent court status report, which they filed Monday evening:

“As Your Honor is aware, the Court emailed the TRO to the parties yesterday at 6:46 p.m. Counsel for the Government emailed the TRO to agency counsel at 7:58 p.m. Agency counsel did not become aware of Government counsel’s email until this morning. The undersigned apologizes to the Court and the plaintiffs,” the DOJ argued.

“Sorry, just seeing this!” said Rubino, summarizing the Trump federal government’s reasoning.

The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, which set in motion the $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.”

NBC News later reported that federal sources said Trump did not even alert administrators that their budgets would be footing the bill for the ads

“They didn’t sign off on it,” an official said of CBP leaders. “They were thinking, ‘There’s no way they’re going to try to take the funding from CBP for those ads.’”