Trump ignores court orders against him   while small law firms challenge him in court

• Trump has flouted one-out-of-three legal rulings against him, the first time a president is widely ignoring court orders. Plaintiffs say that Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.

• While the judges ruling against Trump were appointed by presidents of both parties, none of them have taken punitive action to try to force compliance. The administration’s defiance of orders has been able go on for weeks or even months in some instances.

• Lawyers at small firms are stepping into challenge a range of Trump’s orders as big law firms are scared of losing business if they take on Trump in court. Lawyers at small firms have joined groups that organize their legal work against Trump actions on immigration, the environment and even denying business to big firms. 

Trump directs federal agencies to attack his political opponents

• Trump targets ActBlue, the major fundraising platform used by Democratic candidates and many liberal organizations. Trump’s DOJ will investigate made up allegations of straw donations and foreign contributions. An investigation could severely limit political speech by crippling the party’s financial infrastructure and grassroots operations.

• Trump is invading the privacy of Americans by assembling a database of personal information taken illegally from a myriad of federal agencies. As a writer summarized about Trump building the foundation for a surveillance state, “Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security.”  These actions violate the Federal Privacy Act of 1974.

Trump moves to deport protestors and activists 

• Trump has moved to deport  international university students who have protested U.S. policies in Gaza. A Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in his university housing despite being a legal permanent resident,  over his peaceful protests against Israel's war in Gaza.

• A Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk was detained by masked agents in plainclothes as she walked to meet friends for dinner, over an op-ed about Gaza that she wrote in the Tufts University student newspaper. After several weeks being held by ICE, a federal judge ordered her immediate release, saying that  Ozturk had made significant claims of due process violations and that “Her continued detention cannot stand.”

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he has revoked more than 300 visas and has defended the decisions to international students who participated in protests of U.S. policy.  But in a major reversal, Trump reversed the order after a wave of court challenges. 

• A federal judge ordered the release of another Columbia student, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested by immigration authorities because he participated in protesting around Gaza. 

• Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is screening immigrants’ social media accounts for antisemitic content as grounds to deny visa and green-card applications.  This will allow the government to target political speech it dislikes.

Trump freezes billions of dollars from universities over free speech policies

• Four days after Trump demanded that UCLA pay a $1,000,000,000 (billion) fine for allegedly allowing  anti-semitic activity, a federal judge ordered Trump to restore funding for hundreds of research grants at the University. However the judge’s order restores only about $81 million of $584 million in frozen funds because it was based on a class-action complaint by UCLA professors around NSF grants, which only are a portion of the frozen funds. Other lawsuits by professors at other University of California campuses are still being decided and the UC Regents have not decided how to respond to Trump’s aggression. 

• Columbia, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania all agreed to settlements with Trump to unfreeze federal funding. Columbia agreed to a $200 million settlement to unfreeze $400 million. 

• Columbia will  pay $200 million to settle claims related to discriminatory practices and an additional $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.. In return, it unfreezes $400 million in research grants. Previously, Columbia agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department.  The new agreement stipulates that the government will not have authority to dictate Columbia’s admissions decisions, hiring or the content of academic speech. 

• Brown University will make $50 million in payments to Rhode Island work force development programs over a decade and requires Brown to comply with the Trump administration’s policies on transgender athletes, blocks gender affirming surgery and conforms with Trump on “merit-based” admissions policies. The University, secured a pledge that the deal would not be used “to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.” The Trump administration is also required to restore millions of dollars in federal research funding that it had blocked in recent months, and - unlike Columbia - Brown avoided the naming of an independent monitor to oversee the deal.

• Both Brown and Columbia also agreed to disclose data on the test scores, grade point averages and race of applicants, which opponents of application processes that encourage a diverse student body are likely to use to try to further suppress campus diversity. 

• The University of Pennsylvania’s deal will limit how transgender people may participate in its athletic programs, bowing to the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the law that bans sex discrimination in education.However, it was not clear whether that will enough for Trump to release $175 million in frozen federal funding to Penn.

• Trump has frozen or threatened to freeze several billion dollars in federal grants and funding to universities based on his disagreement with their handling of protests on campus around U.S. policy in Gaza. This includes $1billion at Cornell, $790 million at Northwestern. Other universities whose funds have been frozen or threatened include  Other schools that have had funds threatened include Brown, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.

• Trump warned 60 universities of potential enforcement actions over investigations into allegations of antisemitism. Each school also has investigations pending into accusations of racial discrimination.

• Trump’s Education Secretary explicitly said that the administration is focusing on elite universities, which Trump has criticized as bastions of left-wing thought.

• But other universities are resisting. Trump froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard after the University refused to go along with Trump’s demands. And then Trump asked the IRS to revoke Harvard’s charitable status, an action that is clearly illegal. The President of Princeton said “Academic freedom is a fundamental principle of universities — it has to be protected. And so I have concerns if universities make concessions about that. And I think that once you make concessions once, it’s hard not to make them again.”

• Trump’s move to ban international students from Harvard was blocked by a federal judge. Harvard sued the morning after the Department of Homeland Security revoked the school’s certification to enroll international students. Trump also threatened to have the IRS take away Harvard’s tax exempt status, a move that would be clearly illegal.

Trump attacks law firms that challenged him in court

• The American Bar Association is suing Trump for violating free speech with his executive orders going after law firms. Trump is losing the cases in court but still succeeding in cowing law firms into agreeing to spend more than $1billion on his favorite causes. 

• Trump has issued executive orders denying security clearances and ending federal contracts with law firms  that challenged him in court.  These include firms that represented Hillary Clinton, firms who have employed lawyers who participated in government investigations of Trump and law firms who provide free representation to groups that Trump disagrees with. 

• Some law firms are going to court to resist Trump’s orders. One federal judge blocked an order calling the portion of the executive order that criticizes the pro bono legal work the firm does for organizations “disturbing” and “troubling.” They have challenged the orders as violating constitutional rights, including the rights to speech, to freely associate, to petition the government, to have a lawyer, and to get due process. A federal judge permanently blocked Trump’s executive order against the firm Perkins Coie. Another judge blocked his executive order against WilmerHale calling it absurd and  unconstitutional in a scathing opinion. And key lawyers have fled firms that made deals with Trump to firms that stood up to him. 

• Two other big law firms gave into Trump’s demands, agreeing to provide $140 million in pro bono representation to causes Trump supports. 

Trump moves to end funding for public NPR and PBS

• Trump asked Congress to take back $1.1 billion of federal funding for public broadcasting that it had already approved, directly attacking protections against political interference in the funding of PBS and NPR, almost all of which goes to local stations. The House voted to take back the funding in June. 

Trump denies White House Access to Associated Press over Gulf of Mexico name and goes after press freedom on other fronts 

• Trump denied the Associated Press access from being among the small group of journalists to cover Trump in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One, with sporadic ability to cover him at events in the East Room. Trump’s action, on February 11,  came after AP refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as Trump ordered. 

• Trump was ordered by a federal judge on April 8 to grant the AP full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. Trump appealed the decision and the appeals court ruled that AP could be blocked from smaller press events, while given access to larger ones as their appeal goes forward. 

• Trump is attacking freedom of the press on other fronts, as the AP reports: “The Federal Communications Commission has open lawsuits against  ABC, CBS and NBC News. The administration has sought to cut off funding for government-run news services like Voice of America. 

• Trump ordered the Voice of America to carry news from right-wing One America News. Trump fired some 600 VoA employees and put up the building that houses the news agency for sale, flouting  a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network. After Israel attacked Iran, Trump ordered the VOA to rehire the 75 employees of the Persian language service whom had been been on leave. 

• But Trump also called for the shuttering of VOA, which is left with just 200 employees, down from 1,400 at the beginning of 2025. 

• Trump cut funding for Sesame Street and other children’s programs, ordering the Department of Education to terminate a grant program that provides PBS and NPR with money for children’s programming. Trump wants Congress to take back more than $billion in funding for NPR and PBS. 

Trump's Escalating War on Free Expression

• Trump suppresses scientific, educational, and political discourse—silencing voices across government, academia, and the private sector.

• Trump ordered federal health agencies to halt public messaging, leading the CDC to withhold a critical flu-season morbidity and mortality report—the first such blackout since 1952—leaving Americans uninformed during a deadly health season.

• Trump buried key studies on bird flu transmission, endangering both national and international public health.

• Trump barred the Energy Department and other scientific agencies from sharing research data, even internally, crippling coordination and transparency.

• Trump directed federal employees to report colleagues who endorse DEI initiatives, creating a culture of surveillance and fear within public institutions.

• Trump pressured companies like Costco to drop their DEI commitments, threatening business autonomy and workforce inclusion.

• Trump prohibited federal contractors from allowing employees to include pronouns in email signatures, suppressing LGBTQ+ visibility and inclusion in the workplace.

• Trump forced major news and tech companies—including ABC News, Meta, and Paramount—to settle defamation-related cases, sending a chilling message to journalists and editors nationwide.

Trump targets the Smithsonian

• Trump issued an executive order aimed at reshaping US Smithsonian Institution for “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” at the world’s largest set of museums, educational and research entities grouped under one institutional umbrella.

• Trump called for Vice President Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”

Trump aims to let disinformation flourish

• Trump’s first day executive order pretended to be about free speech but it turns out to be a green light for hate and disinformation online. 

• As the New York Times reported, Trump canceled “ scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country. The grants funded research into topics like ways to evade censors in China. One grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence. Another, at Kent State University in Ohio, studied how malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media.”