update - USSC refuses to issue temporary order blocking Trump deportation of Venezuelans pending lower court final decision

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'Unlawful many times over': Judge issues 'big win for Harvard' in Trump lawsuit

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from revoking Harvard University's ability to enroll foreign students, calling the order a "blatant violation" of the U.S. Constitution.

Harvard filed a complaint Friday morning in Boston federal court, and U.S. District judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order hours later freezing the policy.


"Revoking Harvard’s certification is unlawful many times over," the judge wrote in her order. "It is a pillar of our constitutional system that the government cannot 'invok[e] legal sanctions and other means of coercion' to police private speech, especially when the government’s treatment is animated by viewpoint discrimination. The government’s effort to punish the University for its refusal to surrender its academic independence and for its perceived viewpoint is a patent violation of the First Amendment."

Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed Harvard's lawsuit as "frivolous."

"If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn't be in this situation to begin with," Jackson said. "Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment instead of filing frivolous lawsuits."


CNN's Elie Honig said the temporary restraining order was a significant win for the university.

"It is a big win for Harvard, temporary but very significant," Honig said. "What this says is the court is blocking the Trump administration from blocking Harvard from bringing in international students. In other words, as of this moment, it's back to the status quo. Harvard may continue to bring in international students."

 

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Judge throws Trump lawyers' own words back in their faces in angry slap down

A federal judge angrily rejected the Trump administration's request to reverse his order to give due process to migrants deported to South Sudan.

In a scathing 17-page order, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy threw the administration's lawyers' words back into their faces to show they had argued in bad faith that meaningful immigration proceedings could be conducted overseas, and found the administration had violated his preliminary injunction.


"Since that hearing, merely five days ago, Defendants have changed their tune," Murphy wrote. "It turns out that having immigration proceedings on another continent is harder and more logistically cumbersome than Defendants anticipated."

Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.

The Trump administration flew immigrants to war-ravaged South Sudan earlier this month despite a court order requiring ICE to give people being deported to a country that's not their own a chance to argue their concerns in court. Trump administration lawyers claimed that could be done after arrival in the countries.

Murphy made clear the deportees should be given adequate notice and opportunity to raise fears of persecution or torture before they were taken to third countries, and he said the administration had raised red herrings to avoid complying with his order.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"However, the Court never said that Defendants had to convert their foreign military base into an immigration facility; it only left that as an option, again, at Defendants’ request," Murphy wrote. "The other option, of course, has always been to simply return to the status quo of roughly one week ago, or else choose any other location to complete the required process."

Only one of the eight deportees, who are currently being held in Djibouti, is a South Sudanese national. Another was expected to be returned to Myanmar.

"Defendants have mischaracterized this Court’s order, while at the same time manufacturing the very chaos they decry," Murphy wrote. "By racing to get six class members onto a plane to unstable South Sudan, clearly in breach of the law and this Court’s order, Defendants gave this Court no choice but to find that they were in violation of the Preliminary Injunction."

 

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New York won a temporary victory against president Donald Trump in a fight over Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.

The Trump administration has threatened to withhold funding and federal approval for the state's transportation projects as leverage to end New York City's tolls for driving in high-traffic zones.





But U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman granted a request Tuesday by the state's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to block the government's moves, reported Bloomberg.

Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.

"Liman’s ruling means the program — designed to reduce gridlock and pollution and raise money to modernize the city’s transit system — will almost certainly continue as the legal battle proceeds," the outlet reported. "It helps reduce uncertainty over how the nation’s largest public transportation system will pay to modernize a more than 100-year-old network."

The judge found the MTA had demonstrated that its claims would likely succeed, and he said it would suffer “irreparable harm” without a temporary restraining order because the government's attempt to revoke approval for the program had already hurt the value of MTA Bonds.



The MTA sued transportation secretary Sean Duffy when he announced Feb. 19 that he was reversing approval granted under president Joe Biden.

Trump claims the pricing plan will hurt the local economy and Duffy denounced it as “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners," but Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul insists the program is needed and pointed to data to show that it's working as intended.

The tolls raised $159 million in the program's first three months and is on target to raise $500 million this year after expenses, according to MTA officials, and data shows that traffic declined on average by 11 percent daily between January and April.

Support for the tolls grew to 39 percent in mid-May, up from 29 percent in December.

Judge hands New York victory in court battle against Trump

 

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Trump has been dropped from a lawsuit accusing his administration of illegally wielding power to slash government agencies and purge the federal workforce.

But a federal judge won’t let Elon Musk escape the case.

Musk — tapped by the president to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — is facing a lawsuit from a group of 14 states arguing that the world’s wealthiest person lacks any legal authority to carry out mass firings, terminate grants and access sensitive government information and taxpayer data.


Attorneys for the Trump administration claimed Musk is only serving a temporary advisory role as a “special government employee” serving under the president.

But District Judge Tanya Chutkan shot down the White House’s attempt to “minimize” his role as “a mere advisor without any formal authority.”

Musk instead “occupies a continuing position” and “exercises significant authority,” all without “proper appointment” by Congress, Chutkan wrote.

The states suing the administration plausibly allege that Musk “makes decisions about ‘federal expenditures, contracts, government property, and the very existence of federal agencies,’” she added.

DOGE caused “financial harm” to states by slashing federal funding while gaining “unauthorized access” to “private and proprietary information,” according to the lawsuit.

“The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency pursuant to Executive Order and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” Chutkan wrote.



Musk and Trump have characterized DOGE — operating as the U.S. Doge Service, formerly the U.S. Digital Service — as “tech support” to end “waste, fraud and abuse.”

His DOGE agents, or federal workers doing work on its behalf, are deployed across all federal agencies

Musk’s position as a “special government employee” is limited to 130 days within the year, which would mean the tech billionaire could no longer be working at the White House by the end of this month.

But White House officials told The Independent that those working hours don’t fall neatly within the calendar. Musk is expected to remain a fixture within the administration, though he announced he plans to limit his time in Washington, D.C. — and how much money he spends on political campaigns — to focus on his company Tesla, which saw profits drop by 71 percent within the first three months of the year.



The lawsuit is among several accusing the Trump administration of unconstitutionally running roughshod through federal agencies.

That breakneck effort to keep up with DOGE’s actions in court has been met with what appears to be attempts from administration officials to obfuscate the true nature of Musk’s role — or scramble to name someone else in charge.



While he vows to escape Washington to return to Tesla, Musk remains a defendant in several lawsuits accusing the Trump administration of unconstitutionally wielding power to slash federal spending and fire workers (Getty Images)
After weeks of secrecy in court and refusals from the White House to answer who, exactly, was running DOGE, reporters were sent a message on February 25 from an unnamed White House spokesperson naming Amy Gleason as the DOGE administrator.

Administration officials have insisted that Musk is not the administrator for DOGE. Trump, however, has said the exact opposite.


Musk has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” according to a sworn statement from a senior White House official on February 18. The next day, Trump himself said he “signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.”

In a statement, New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who brought the case against DOGE, called Judge Chutkan’s decision “an important milestone for preserving America’s system of checks and balances.”

“We are proud to move this case forward and help bring Elon Musk’s reign of terror to an end,” he added.

The Independent has always had a global perspective. Built on a firm foundation of superb international reporting and analysis, The Independent now enjoys a reach that was inconceivable when it was launched as an upstart player in the British news industry. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, and across the world, pluralism, reason, a progressive and humanitarian agenda, and internationalism – Independent values – are under threat. Yet we, The Independent, continue to grow.

Judge spares Trump from massive DOGE lawsuit — leaving Elon Musk holding the bag for ‘unauthorized role’

 

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge refused Wednesday to temporarily block the Trump administration from removing and replacing the director of the U.S. Copyright Office.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ruled from the bench that the office director, Shira Perlmutter, hasn't met her legal burden to show how removing her from the position would cause her to suffer irreparable harm.



Kelly's refusal to issue a temporary restraining order isn't the final word in the lawsuit that Perlmutter filed last week. If Perlmutter decides to seek a preliminary injunction, the judge is giving her attorneys and government lawyers until Thursday afternoon to present him with a proposed schedule for arguing and deciding the matter.

Perlmutter's attorneys say she is a renowned copyright expert who also has served as Register of Copyrights since the Librarian of Congress appointed her to the job in October 2020.

“As Register, Ms. Perlmutter is a critical advisor to Congress on matters of important legislative interest and administers the Nation’s copyright system,” her lawyers wrote.

Earlier this month, Trump appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to replace Carla Hayden as Librarian of Congress. The White House fired Hayden on May 8 amid criticism from conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.



“The Library of Congress is not an autonomous organization free from political supervision,” government lawyers wrote.

The administration said Blanche replaced Perlmutter with Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general and veteran Justice Department attorney.

Perlmutter's lawyers argued that the president doesn't have the authority to unilaterally remove the Register of Copyrights or appoint an acting Librarian of Congress.

“Defendants’ actions are blatantly unlawful, and they threaten severe and irreparable harm to Ms. Perlmutter and her ability to fulfill the duties entrusted to her under the law,” they wrote.

Government lawyers argued that blocking Perlmutter's removal would amount to a "severe intrusion” into the president’s authority to exercise executive power.

Kelly said it is “striking” that nobody from Congress is involved in the lawsuit. He said the absence of Congress from the case “has to impact my assessment” of Perlmutter's request for a temporary restraining order.

But the judge also emphasized that the case has been pending for fewer than three business days and has produced “a very limited record” for him to consider so far.

___

Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press

Judge refuses to temporarily block the Trump administration from removing Copyright Office director

 

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Federal trade court blocks Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs under emergency powers law

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal trade court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.

The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based Court of International Trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump has exceeded his authority, left U.S. trade policy dependent on his whims and unleashed economic chaos.

“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs," the court wrote, referring to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The Trump administration is expected to appeal.

At least seven lawsuits are challenging the levies, the centerpiece of Trump’s trade policy.

Tariffs must typically be approved by Congress, but Trump says he has the power to act because the country’s trade deficits amount to a national emergency. He imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world at one point, sending markets reeling.

The plaintiffs argued that the emergency powers law does not authorize the use of tariffs, and even if it did, the trade deficit does not meet the law’s requirement that an emergency be triggered only by an "unusual and extraordinary threat." The U.S. has run a trade deficit with the rest of the world for 49 consecutive years.



Trump imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world in an effort to reverse America’s massive and longstanding trade deficits. He earlier plastered levies on imports from Canada, China and Mexico to combat the illegal flow of immigrants and the synthetic opioids across the U.S. border.

His administration argues that courts approved then-President Richard Nixon’s emergency use of tariffs in 1971, and that only Congress, and not the courts, can determine the "political" question of whether the president’s rationale for declaring an emergency complies with the law.

Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs shook global financial markets and led many economists to downgrade the outlook for U.S. economic growth. So far, though, the tariffs appear to have had little impact on the world’s largest economy.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of small businesses, including a wine importer, V.O.S. Selections, whose owner has said the tariffs are having a major impact and his company may not survive.



A dozen states also filed suit, led by Oregon. “This ruling reaffirms that our laws matter, and that trade decisions can’t be made on the president’s whim,” Attorney General Dan Rayfield said.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Paul Wiseman contributed to this story.

Lindsay Whitehurst, The Associated Press

 

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Federal court says Trump doesn't have the power to impose tariffs unilaterally

Federal court determined that President Trump doesn't have the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, dealing a sweeping blow to his main weapon in his trade war.

abcnews.go.com

In a sweeping opinion, a three-judge panel of the New York-based Court of International Trade struck down President Donald Trump's global tariffs as "contrary to law."

The judges found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act -- which Trump used to enact his tariffs -- does not give him the "unlimited" power to levy tariffs like the president has in recent months.

"The President's assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law," the judges wrote.

According to the judges, Congress, not the president, has the authority to impose tariffs under most circumstances, and Trump's tariffs do not meet the limited condition of an "unusual and extraordinary threat" that would allow him to act alone.



"Because of the Constitution's express allocation of the tariff power to Congress, we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President. We instead read IEEPA's provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers," the ruling said.

Responding to the ruling, White House spokesman Kush Desai evoked the trade deficit and said, "It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency," adding that that the administration is committed to using "every lever of executive power to address this crisis."

The Trump administration has already filed a notice of appeal to challenge Wednesday's decision.

The case now heads to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit where they can ask for a stay of the order.

The Court of International Trade issued the decision across two cases -- one filed by a group of small businesses and another filed by 12 Democratic attorneys general.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford called the ruling "a win for the rule of law and for Nevadans' pocketbooks."


"I am extremely pleased with the court's decision to strike down these tariffs; they were both unlawful and economically destructive," he said. "The president had no legal authority to impose these tariffs, and his unlawful actions would have caused billions of dollars of damage to the American economy."

Since Trump announced sweeping tariffs on more than 50 countries in April, his administration has faced half a dozen lawsuits challenging the president's ability to impose tariffs without the approval of Congress.

New York Attorney General Letitia James called the decision a "major victory for our efforts to uphold the law and protect New Yorkers from illegal policies that threaten American jobs and economy."

"The law is clear: no president has the power to single-handedly raise taxes whenever they like. These tariffs are a massive tax hike on working families and American businesses that would have led to more inflation, economic damage to businesses of all sizes, and job losses across the country if allowed to continue," James' statement continued.


MORE: Lawyer calls Trump tariffs 'unlawful' as they face 1st test against small businesses


Lawyers for the small businesses alleged that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act -- which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs -- does not give the president the right to issue "across-the-board worldwide tariffs," and that Trump's justification for the tariffs was invalid.

"His claimed emergency is a figment of his own imagination," the lawsuit said. "Trade deficits, which have persisted for decades without causing economic harm, are not an emergency."

During a hearing earlier this month, a group of three judges -- who were appointed by presidents Obama, Trump and Reagan -- pushed a lawyer for the small businesses to provide a legal basis to override the tariffs. While a different court in the 1970s determined that the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 -- the law that preceded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act -- gave the president the right to impose tariffs, no court has weighed whether the president can impose tariffs unilaterally under the IEEPA.

During a May 13 hearing, Jeffrey Schwab, a lawyer from the conservative Liberty Justice Center representing the plaintiffs, argued that Trump's purported emergency to justify the tariffs is far short of what is required under the law.

"I'm asking this court to be an umpire and call a strike; you're asking me, well, where's the strike zone? Is it at the knees or slightly below the knees?" Schwab argued. "I'm saying it's a wild pitch and it's on the other side of the batter and hits the backstop, so we don't need to debate that."

The ruling marks the first time a federal court has issued a ruling on the legality of Trump's tariffs. In May, a federal judge in Florida nominated by Trump suggested the president has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, but opted to transfer the case to the Court of International Trade.

Federal court says Trump doesn't have the power to impose tariffs unilaterally

Federal court determined that President Trump doesn't have the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, dealing a sweeping blow to his main weapon in his trade war.

abcnews.go.com

 

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BTW the 3 judges were appointed by Trump, Obama, and Reagan. Unanimous decision.