“Two law firms targeted by President Donald Trump sued Friday to bar enforcement of his executive orders seeking to shut them out of government business and strip key lawyers of their security clearances.
In separate suits, Big Law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale say Trump’s effort to target them amounts to an unprecedented attack on the legal profession in retaliation for their work for past clients he doesn’t like and for past causes with which he disagrees. If carried out, they say, the orders would devastate their practices and have already begun to cause anxiety among their hundreds clients with government business.
Jenner & Block’s lawsuit contends Trump’s order is an unconstitutional threat to the firm and the legal system itself, seeking to “punish citizens and lawyers based on the clients they represent, the positions they advocate, the opinions they voice, and the people with whom they associate.” The lawsuit was filed on the firm’s behalf by California-based law firm Cooley LLP.
“The President’s sweeping attack on WilmerHale (and other firms) is unprecedented and unconstitutional,” writes Paul Clement, a veteran Supreme Court lawyer representing the firm in its lawsuit. “The First Amendment protects the rights of WilmerHale, its employees, and its clients to speak freely, petition the courts and other government institutions, and associate with the counsel of their choice without facing retaliation and discrimination by federal officials.””
“The government now claims “he had willfully failed to disclose his membership in several organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, when he applied to become a permanent U.S. resident last March,” reports The New York Times. “The government also said that Mr. Khalil failed to list his continuing employment with the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after 2022.” If these allegations are true, they may put the deportation on firmer footing: It is easier for the authorities to argue that the First Amendment isn’t a relevant factor when the issue is whether Khalil disclosed relevant information during a green card application.
But even if that is true, the Justice Department has shown its true motivation, even if it may be able to weasel out of the hole it’s dug. Since it told The Free Press that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law” and suggested that “he was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S.,” it sure seems obvious that it was Khalil’s role in the Columbia protests that attracted ICE agents initially. If officials can now find a better pretense to deport him, that may pass more legal muster, but they already made clear that this is retribution for protest. This will have a chilling effect on speech. And if they legitimately believed he was a threat, they should have actually spent the time to substantiate this.”
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“As for what actually happens to Khalil, it’s not clear these new allegations will make much of a difference: “In order to deport Mr. Khalil on the basis of the new allegations, the government would have to convince an immigration judge that any failure to disclose the relevant information was willful, and that it would have made a difference in his chances of receiving legal permanent residency status””
“Until Trump took office in January, the AEA had been invoked only three times in 226 years: during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. All of those situations fell into the “declared war” category. The AEA has never previously been invoked in response to a putative “invasion or predatory incursion” outside the context of a declared war. That is the threat Trump cites to justify peremptorily deporting suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
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“Trump does not claim to be at war with Venezuela. Nor does he claim that the Venezuelan government has mounted an “invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” And a criminal organization, even one that has corrupted or “infiltrated” a foreign government, is not a “hostile nation or government” as those terms are ordinarily understood.
Nor does Trump’s understanding of “invasion or predatory incursion” make sense in the context of the AEA. “As the Supreme Court and past presidents have acknowledged, the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime authority enacted and implemented under the war power,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in national security issues, explained last fall. “When the Fifth Congress passed the law and the Wilson administration defended it in court during World War I, they did so on the understanding that noncitizens with connections to a foreign belligerent could be ‘treated as prisoners of war’ under the ‘rules of war under the law of nations.’ In the Constitution and other late-1700s statutes, the term invasion is used literally, typically to refer to large-scale attacks. The term predatory incursion is also used literally in writings of that period to refer to slightly smaller attacks like the 1781 Raid on Richmond led by American defector Benedict Arnold.””
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“”There is a lot of law about what constitutes a foreign government,” Gelernt told Boasberg. “And I don’t think the United States recognizes [Tren de Aragua] as a foreign government. They recognize Venezuela as a foreign government. I think that’s the
historic understanding of the statute.”
Gerlent also questioned the government’s definition of “invasion or predatory incursion”: “We think the Court certainly can review whether immigration constitutes some kind of invasion….We know of no historical precedent that would suggest that straight migration or noncitizens coming and committing crimes constitutes an invasion within the meaning of the statute or the Constitution.””
“Claiming vast executive powers and “the mandate of the electorate,” the Justice Department on Monday night informed a federal judge that it was invoking the state secrets privilege and refusing to answer a judge’s orders for more information on several deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and other high-ranking Justice Department officials filed a “Notice Invoking State Secrets Privilege” claiming that it “would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs” to comply with U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s fact-finding inquiries to determine if the U.S. government violated his order to turn those deportation flights around.”
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“Boasberg has repeatedly ordered the Justice Department to produce detailed information on those flights to determine if officials knowingly defied his orders. The Trump administration has offered various explanations for why it did not comply—that it didn’t consider Boasberg’s verbal order valid, and that Boasberg didn’t have jurisdiction once the flights crossed into international space, for instance.
As Boasberg’s fact-finding orders have proceeded toward considering contempt, the Justice Department’s responses have grown more obstinate, culminating in Monday night’s invocation of the state secrets privilege.”
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“the Trump administration is claiming that it can declare a war by executive order and send immigrants to a labor camp in another country, all without meaningful judicial review of the facts. As Ilya Somin recently wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy, the Trump administration’s policy violates the Due Process Clause of the Constitution and is “obviously unjust.”
“Imprisoning people without any due process whatsoever is a cruel and evil practice usually used only by authoritarian states,” Somin wrote. “And if the Trump administration gets away with it here, there is an obvious danger it will expand the practice.”
The Trump administration’s attempt to invoke the state secrets privilege raises another, tertiary danger: that we won’t even be able to know if they’re expanding the practice.”
“There are many excellent reasons why Boasberg should not be impeached, including the fact that Boasberg’s judgment against Trump is both persuasive and well-grounded in the law. Trump may claim that he has the unilateral authority to deport alleged criminal aliens without due process. But the administration’s arguments in support of that sweeping claim fail to pass muster on multiple counts.
Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, “whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government,” the president may direct the “removal” of “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized.”
Trump invoked that law in his March 15 proclamation ordering the “immediate apprehension, detention, and removal” of alleged members of the street gang Tren de Aragua, who are allegedly “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States…in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela.”
Except there is no “declared war” between the United States and Venezuela. And while Trump and his allies have certainly promoted the idea of a rhetorical “invasion” of the U.S. by unlawfully present aliens, that is merely a talking point. Such rhetoric does not alter the plain text of the Alien Enemies Act, which refers to military invasions by a “foreign nation or government.” As James Madison explained in his “Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts,” published on January 7, 1800, “invasion is an operation of war.” The alleged crimes of the alleged members of a nonstate street gang do not magically become “an operation of war” just because the president says so in the hopes of unlocking extra powers.
Speaking of James Madison, he said that the role of the judiciary was to stand as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” That description is probably as good of an explanation as any for why Trump, just like Roosevelt before him, is so eager to stop the courts from doing their job.”
“President Donald Trump has reached a peace deal with a prominent law firm, agreeing to lift a punitive executive order in exchange for concessions that include an agreement to do pro bono work on behalf of conservative causes.”
““We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending.”
His plan, known as “impoundment,” threatens to provoke a major clash over the limits of the president’s control over the budget. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate the federal budget, while the role of the executive branch is to dole out the money effectively. But Trump and his advisers are asserting that a president can unilaterally ignore Congress’ spending decisions and “impound” funds if he opposes them or deems them wasteful.
Trump’s designs on the budget are part of his administration’s larger plan to consolidate as much power in the executive branch as possible.”
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“The prospect of Trump seizing vast control over federal spending is not merely about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing conservative goal. It is also fueling new fears about his promises of vengeance.”
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“Trump and his aides claim there is a long presidential history of impoundment dating back to Thomas Jefferson.
Most historical examples involve the military and cases where Congress had explicitly given presidents permission to use discretion, said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Jefferson, for example, decided not to spend money Congress had appropriated for gun boats — a decision the law, which appropriated money for “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats” using “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars,” authorized him to make.
President Richard Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, wielding the concept to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. He faced overwhelming pushback both from Congress and in the courts. More than a half dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the appropriations bills at issue did not give Nixon the flexibility to cut individual programs.
Vought and his allies argue the limits Congress placed in 1974 are unconstitutional, saying a clause in the Constitution obligating the president to “faithfully execute” the law also implies his power to forbid its enforcement. (Trump is fond of describing Article II, where this clause lives, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”)
The Supreme Court has never directly weighed in on whether impoundment is constitutional. But it threw water on that reasoning in an 1838 case, Kendall v. U.S., about a federal debt payment.
“To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible,” the justices wrote.”
“Trump doesn’t have to do something dramatic like cancel the election in order to erode democracy. The relationship between democracy and autocracy is a spectrum, not a binary; for example, countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Turkey and Hungary still hold elections, but their leaders aren’t held meaningfully accountable by them (or by other mechanisms like the courts). A more realistic concern is that the U.S. will slide into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which democratic institutions still exist but they are regularly abused. Maybe the chief executive can’t just abolish the other branches of government, the free press and other tools of accountability for fear of being seen as illegitimate, but he can find ways to weaken or circumvent them. And while the incumbent party still must face elections — and can even lose them — it makes every effort to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.”
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“some of these things wouldn’t be new for Trump. During his first term, he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. He purged the Republican Party of his critics by endorsing their opponents in primaries. And of course, he sowed distrust in the results of the 2020 election and attempted to overturn former President Joe Biden’s win. But that’s just the point: According to some political scientists, Trump’s actions during his first term already meet the definition of democratic erosion.”
“Across Washington, China hawks are trying to draw a hard line against any plan that would let ByteDance maintain a degree of control of the company or insight into its underlying technology, both of which are banned by the bipartisan 2024 law passed by Congress.
But Trump is already violating that law by allowing the app to stay online. And if his promised deal goes through, Congress has almost no leverage to stop it: The law leaves final approval in the president’s hands, and lawmakers can’t take him to court even if he violates its clear meaning.
“Congress does not have standing to sue,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. He said a lawmaker can typically only file suit if they’re personally harmed by a violation.
An illegal TikTok-Oracle deal blessed by Trump would immediately join a host of White House actions that flout settled law. The Trump administration is being sued for breaking laws around deportations, civil-service protections, federal spending rules, government data-sharing and more — all of which are now playing out in federal courts across the country.
When it comes to TikTok, however, even the courts offer little recourse to enforce the 2024 law, which the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed in January.
The law requires a “qualified divestiture” of TikTok — an arrangement where ByteDance gives up all control of both the company and the powerful algorithm that runs TikTok’s video-sharing service. It can retain at most a 20 percent financial stake in the company.
The Oracle deal under discussion — a modification of a prior arrangement between TikTok and Oracle, where U.S. user data was stored on Oracle-run servers while ByteDance retained a role in TikTok’s operations — would likely flunk one or more of those tests. But it’s Trump who is ultimately empowered to declare an agreement acceptable.
“The president gets to decide what constitutes a qualified divestiture,” said Michael Sobolik, a former national security staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “That is completely up to him, even though the contours of what needs to happen in a divestiture are spelled out in the law.”
China hawks on Capitol Hill are rattling their sabers at Trump, warning against any deal that keeps ByteDance in the room.
“The law is clear,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, wrote on Tuesday. “Any deal must eliminate Chinese influence and control over the app to safeguard our interests.”
But Moolenaar and other lawmakers have few options to stop Trump once he decides to proceed. And lawyers say Washington’s sense of powerlessness is compounded by the fact that the White House is already ignoring the TikTok law.”