A federal judge appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump is not budging in his demand that the government “facilitate” a deported Venezuelan man’s return to the United States.

In the case, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, 20, was “wrongfully” deported to El Salvador in violation of a legal settlement agreement that was meant to keep him in the country while his pending asylum claim was litigated with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Notably, the plaintiff has filed his case under the pseudonym “Cristian,” but Politico reported his full identity on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the court itself, in line with a prior order binding the parties, is continuing to use the pseudonym.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, cited contract law principles in a 19-page opinion directing the government to try and get Lozano-Camargo back stateside “so that he can receive the process he was entitled to under the parties’ binding Settlement Agreement.”

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On Monday, the government filed sealed arguments in an attempt to convince the judge to vacate her order. Along with those mysterious legal arguments, the government publicly filed a heavily redacted “Indicative Asylum Decision.”

The government’s public formal document explains why the Trump administration believes Lozano-Camargo’s underlying asylum claim will fail.

During a hearing on Tuesday, however, the judge said the asylum case is too far removed from the current legal dispute to be dispositive.

“I don’t think that this is a case about whether or not Cristian is going to eventually get asylum,” Gallagher said, according to a courtroom report by Politico. “Whether he ultimately receives asylum is not the issue. The issue is, and has always been, one of process.”

The issue, rather, is a 2024 settlement that limits how people who came to the country as unaccompanied minors can be deported, according to the judge. In Lozano-Camargo’s case, because he came to the U.S. when he was 17, that court-approved agreement means the government must wait until his asylum claim is extinguished.

“It is an axiomatic principle of contract law that when a defendant breaches a contract, that defendant must restore the situation that existed before the breach,” Gallagher wrote. “In the case of Cristian, this requires putting him in the position ‘to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.’ In other words, under contract law principles, Cristian, and any other Class Member who has been removed in violation of the Settlement Agreement, must be returned to the United States to await adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS.”

An accompanying April 23 order explains, in relevant part:

Defendants are hereby ORDERED to facilitate Class Member Cristian’s return to the United States to await the adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS under the terms of the Settlement Agreement. Facilitation includes, but is not limited to, a good faith request by Defendants to the government of El Salvador to release Cristian to U.S. custody for transport back to the United States.

President Donald Trump won a rare victory at the district court level on Friday when a judge in Washington, D.C., allowed the government to move full steam ahead with a series of executive orders aimed at rooting out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives.

On Feb. 19, the National Urban League and others sued the Trump administration over several executive orders ending DEI programs in federal government contracts, barring the government from contracting with vendors who have internal DEI programs or that “promote the idea that transgender people exist,” and directing administrative agencies to only recognize “two sexes.”

In the original petition and a later-filed motion for a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs alleged eight provisions in Trump’s anti-DEI orders ran afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause and the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other issues.

In a 58-page memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, rejected those claims, both procedurally and for their legal arguments.

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“For one reason or another, Plaintiffs’ claims are likely to fail,” the judge writes. “Some falter on standing—a prerequisite to success on the merits—and others on the underlying First and Fifth Amendment claims.”

The majority of the court’s opinion strikes a blow for the long-aggressive nature of Article III standing, which is widely understood by legal scholars as “conservative standing doctrine.”

This judicial theory was created in two cases from the 1920s by conservative judges who sought to restrain the use and limits of constitutional redress. In other words, standing doctrine was created – and has over time been honed and sustained – to limit citizens from suing the government over perceived violations of their rights. While technically procedural in nature, as opposed to relying on underlying arguments in a dispute, standing arguments are fact-intensive.

Kelly, for his part, quickly dispenses with how he views the facts in the case brought by the nonprofit organizations.

“For half the challenged provisions, Plaintiffs fail to establish a prerequisite to success on the merits: standing,” the opinion goes on. “Presidential directives to subordinates that inflict no concrete harm on private parties—or at least not on these parties—do not present a justiciable case or controversy.”

In the present case, the judge found many of the challenged provisions had to do with changing the government’s own behavior, and do not result in what, in standing doctrine legalese, is known as an “injury in fact.” This state of affairs, rather, turns the plaintiffs into “at most ‘concerned bystanders’ to internal Executive Branch processes.”

“Everything is intra-governmental,” the judge muses.

More Law&Crime coverage: ‘The opposite of diversity is segregation’: Judge castigates Trump over anti-DEI policies, but says he cannot intervene

In sum, Kelly found four of the challenged provisions asked “nothing from Plaintiffs—no compliance, no changed behavior, nothing at all” because those provisions are “not aimed at them” but instead tell “only the agencies to do something.”

For the remaining four challenged provisions, however, the court determined the plaintiffs did, in fact, have standing.

But the court still rejected their arguments as legally deficient.

“Plaintiffs have not shown that the provisions threaten a protected liberty or property interest—a threshold requirement for due process claims,” Kelly’s opinion continues. “And even if they had, Plaintiffs’ vagueness challenge fails for independent reasons. The First Amendment claim, moreover, clashes with two settled rules: the government does not abridge the right to free speech by choosing not to subsidize it, and that right does not permit Plaintiffs or anyone else to violate federal anti-discrimination law.”

One of the major problems, the court says, is that the plaintiffs argued a bit too much, resting their claims on so-called “facial rather than as-applied challenges.”

In lawsuits, government action can be challenged facially, meaning in general, or as-applied, meaning in a specific circumstance.

In the present case, Kelly suggests the plaintiffs would have been better off limiting their claims to more specific problems. Instead, they argued, as the judge framed the issues, that each of the challenged anti-DEI provisions “is unconstitutional in all its applications.”

A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday expressed severe misgivings about the Trump administration‘s efforts to root out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives, but insisted he had little power to change the current state of play in an ongoing legal battle.

In the underlying litigation, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, a membership organization, won a late February injunction barring the new policies. This initial victory came when U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson, a Joe Biden appointee, found that the directives were both unconstitutionally vague and violative of the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

But the victory was short-lived.

On March 14, Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, along with Circuit Judges Pamela Harris and Allison Rushing, granted the government’s request for a stay pending appeal.

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The plaintiffs, undeterred, then asked Abelson to vacate his original injunction, citing what the court termed “new factual developments.” This effort was in service of a bid for a new preliminary injunction.

“[T]hey believe that ‘evidence related to agencies’ interpretation and implementation of the Executive Orders’ would further support the likelihood of success on the merits of their already-asserted claims, and further that they ‘could amend their complaint to add new facial claims’ challenging the executive order provisions at issue,” the court explains. “The new ‘facial claims’ Plaintiffs state they may add in an amended complaint would be claims under the Administrative Procedures Act.”

Such an injunction would more or less reset the case – and force the Trump administration to spend several weeks requesting and litigating another stay. And, the plaintiffs argued, even the appellate panel that paused the first injunction would be amenable here.

From the plaintiff’s motion, at length:

The concurrences emphasized that their opinions spoke only to the record so far and that future developments might alter the outcome. In his concurrence, for example, Chief Judge Diaz noted he was satisfied “for now” that Defendants had met their stay burden, but explicitly “reserve[d] judgment on the extent to which the government relies on the Orders’ savings clause provisions as it enforces the Orders’ directives ” …

Similarly, in her concurrence, Judge Harris concluded “for now” that Defendants had met their burden, but offered the “caveat” that “[a]gency enforcement actions that go beyond the Orders’ narrow scope may well raise serious First Amendment and Due Process concerns, for the reasons cogently explained by” this Court.

The full slate of judges on a federal appeals court in Virginia rejected the Trump administration’s request to give the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “immediate and unfettered” access to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) records systems, dealing the president another court loss just after passing the 100-day mark in office.

In a nine-to-six vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on Wednesday kept in place a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, of Maryland, that blocked the Elon Musk-led organization from gaining access to the highly sensitive personal information of “essentially everyone in the country.” The majority reasoned that the “bedrock” principle of the SSA keeping personal data confidential “has been flouted by the sudden grant to DOGE of unfettered access to SSA system of records.”

In the majority’s 12-page order, Circuit Judge Robert Bruce King, an appointee of Bill Clinton, heaped praise on Hollander, an appointee of Barack Obama, referring to her as a “very able district judge” who had “carefully and thoughtfully examined the evidence and the legal issues” in the case. He also noted that her initial TRO order was accompanied by a 137-page opinion, while her preliminary injunction order included a 148-page opinion.

King lauded Hollander’s dual opinions as “addressing extensive evidence proffered by the parties” and “refining the pertinent legal analysis” of the lawsuit. The complaint accused the administration of violating the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by granting DOGE SSA system access, and claimed it was acting in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by “flouting SSA protocols for hiring, onboarding, training, and granting systems access to the DOGE affiliates.”

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In her latest opinion in the case, Hollander noted that since the SSA’s inception in 1935, it has “collected, stored, respected, and protected” personal and private data of U.S. citizens. She then emphasized that ensuring the confidentiality of that information was a “bedrock principle of the agency” — a principle the Trump administration sought to change by giving DOGE “unfettered access to SSA systems.”

“The objective to address fraud, waste, mismanagement, and bloat is laudable, and one that the American public presumably applauds and supports,” Hollander wrote. “Indeed, the taxpayers have every right to expect their government to make sure that their hard earned money is not squandered.”

Rather, she said, the issue was how DOGE wants to perform its work, and how the SSA was willing to abandon its long-standing mission.

“However, the issue here is not the work that DOGE or the [Social Security Administration] want to do,” she continued. “The issue is about how they want to do the work. For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records,” adding, “This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation.”

Hollander ultimately found the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on the merits, as did the majority of the appellate court judges.

“[Hollander’s preliminary injunction] analysis of those claims and the preliminary injunction factors is lengthy, thorough, and compelling,” the appellate court’s opinion says. “Rather than repeating that carefully crafted analysis herein, I adopt and attach hereto the [preliminary injunction] Opinion in its entirety.”

A coalition of 24 states and Washington, D.C., is suing the Trump administration, claiming that it unlawfully dismantled the AmeriCorps grant program, an independent federal agency that funds volunteer efforts throughout the United States. The lawsuit came in response to billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutting the agency’s funding by $400 million and terminating about 85% of its workforce as part of the administration’s ongoing efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy.

States joining the filing include California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Michigan.

In the 69-page complaint, the state attorneys general state that the administration’s stripping of resources is an “unlawful effort to dismantle AmeriCorps” that usurps the power of the legislative branch by rendering the agency ineffective and unable to pursue the goals set forth and funded by Congress.

“The Administration’s abrupt decision to dismantle AmeriCorps flouts Congress’s creation of AmeriCorps and assignment of agency duties; usurps Congress’s power of the purse and thereby violates the Constitution’s separation of powers; and arbitrarily and capriciously — without any reasoned analysis — vitiates the agency’s ability to function consistent with its statutory mission and purpose,” the 69-page complaint states. “It also violates a provision of AmeriCorps’ statutory appropriation that requires the agency to make ‘significant changes to program requirements, service delivery or policy only through public notice and comment rulemaking.’”

The suit asserts that if the Trump administration wants to put an end to the agency, it is “free to ask Congress” to do so, but the executive branch “cannot simply terminate the agency’s functions by fiat or defund the agency in defiance of administrative procedures, Congressional appropriations, and the Constitutional separation of powers.”

“The Executive Branch violates the Take Care Clause where it declines to execute or otherwise undermines statutes enacted by Congress and signed into law or duly promulgated regulations implementing such statutes,” the attorneys general wrote, adding, “The President is without authority to set aside congressional legislation by executive order.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said that Trump and Musk’s actions in “turning away tens of thousands of volunteers who want to serve their communities” were “unlawful,” in a news briefing on the lawsuit Tuesday afternoon.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Friday halted key sections of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order purporting to unilaterally change the rules regarding how federal elections are run, finding that the plaintiffs in the case were “substantially likely to prevail” on the merits.

In a 120-page order, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a preliminary injunction blocking the president’s measure that would require amending the national voter registration form to require proof of U.S. citizenship as well as a provision ordering federal agencies to “assess the citizenship” of individuals who receive public assistance before they are provided a voter registration form.

Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote that allowing those measures to be implemented would cause “irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs and “would not be in the public interest.”

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” the order states. “Consistent with that allocation of power, Congress is currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the President purports to order. And no statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”

The court noted that the legislation in Congress is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility [SAVE] Act, a Republican-backed measure critics have said could potentially disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. Many provisions of the SAVE Act are encompassed by Trump’s executive order.

In what might seem like a weeks-removed bout of deja vu, a lawyer representing the Trump administration was harshly quizzed — and seemingly hardly believed — by a judge on Tuesday during oral arguments over the Pentagon’s planned transgender ban on service members.

During the hearing, Circuit Judge Cornelia T.L. Pillard, a Barack Obama appointee, was obviously and audibly askance of arguments advanced by U.S. Department of Justice attorney Jason Manion.

“How can you say that?” the judge asked the DOJ attorney at the outset — scorn apparent — taking issue with the government’s perspective out of the gate.

Manion, for his part, is no stranger to judicial dressing-downs.

A federal judge in Colorado this week appeared skeptical of allowing the Trump administration to resume using an 18th-century wartime authority to fast-track the removal of Venezuelan migrants with limited notice and minimal, if any, due process.

U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney on Monday heard arguments from attorneys representing the Justice Department and immigration rights groups regarding whether she should renew a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the government from invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA) to deport migrants to a notorious work camp in El Salvador.

The hearing came after the U.S. Supreme Court in the early morning hours of Saturday issued an order — the first and only Saturday order issued this term — directing the government “not to remove” any immigrant detainees subject to President Donald Trump’s proclamation invoking the AEA in northern Texas.

The Saturday order follows the justices April 7 order in which they unanimously held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal” under the AEA “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

In light of the high court’s ruling, an incredulous Sweeney questioned how the government could prevail in the instant case, asking the government’s attorney, “How could I not continue the temporary restraining order?” the Daily Camera reported.

Seeking to have the TRO lifted, the DOJ assured the court that any individuals subject to removal under the act would be given 24 hours to challenge their deportation before a judge, Denver CBS affiliate KCNC reported.

Attorneys from the ACLU and the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, the organizations representing the two unnamed petitioners in the case, pushed back on the administration’s position, asserting that affording migrants only one day to file individual habeas corpus petitions could not possibly comply with the Supreme Court’s directive requiring “reasonable time” for court challenges.

Attorneys representing several Venezuelan men being detained in Texas have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to once again weigh in on the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of an 18th-century wartime authority to fast-track deportations of accused gang members, claiming that the government has been flouting the court’s order to provide detainees with notice before they’re removed to a notorious work prison in El Salvador.

The high court in the early morning hours of Saturday issued an order — the first and only Saturday order issued this term — directing the government “not to remove” any immigrant detainees subject to President Donald Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA). The Saturday order came after the justices on April 7, unanimously held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal” under the AEA “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

In Monday’s 15-page filing, the ACLU, which represents the detainees, asserted that the administration was not abiding by the court’s order. Instead, they allege the government has been shuffling groups of migrants between different judicial districts and providing them with “English-only AEA notices” less than a day before they are deported without “any explanation” as to how they may seek judicial review.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will quickly appeal a court order aimed at prying open the internal structure of the beleaguered pseudo-agency helmed by Elon Musk, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a late Thursday court filing.

In a 13-page ruling handed down on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, directed titular U.S. DOGE Service Administrator Amy Gleason to sit for a deposition. The group was also ordered to provide certain documents and answer limited questions issued by nonpartisan government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The underlying lawsuit is an effort to enforce Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests against the Trump administration’s intra-governmental fraud-and-waste-focused organization. DOGE, in turn, has maintained “it is not an agency subject to FOIA,” Cooper noted.

The court disagreed and entered an injunction requiring expedited processing of CREW’s FOIA requests against DOGE. The plaintiffs then moved for summary judgment on the lawsuit and, seeking a quick bit of finality, moved for expedited discovery.