The Trump administration’s effort to end gender-affirming medical care for transgender people in federal prison is blocked again after a short lapse in protections on Wednesday.

About noon Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a 2-1 order that for two-and-a-half hours technically allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing the Federal Bureau of Prisons’s plan to “taper” — with a goal of ending — the provision of hormone therapy for transgender people in federal prison.

About 2:30 p.m., though, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request that had been pending from the plaintiffs challenging the BOP policy and issued a new preliminary injunction blocking the plan.

This was not the actions of a “rogue” judge or anything like that. The appeals court judges had even noted that the district court request was pending, but Judges Karen Henderson, a George W. Bush appointee, and Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, nonetheless issued the ruling on Wednesday — over the dissent of Judge Cornelia PIllard, an Obama appointee.

The D.C. Circuit move effectively forced Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, to act quickly if he wanted to keep the protections he had ordered in place.

He did so — continuing his role as the federal judge most clearly protecting the rights of trans people in prison.

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What is going on?

The quick back-and-forth orders, though confusing procedurally, were a progression that all judges on the appeals court acknowledged was possible. Despite that, rather than just waiting for Lamberth to rule on the new request, the two Republican appointees on the appeals court who made up the majority stated that they wanted to issue a ruling now — likely in an effort to place new limits on district court judges in D.C.

The unsigned, per curiam order from Henderson and Walker stayed a May 26 preliminary injunction issued by Lamberth. The order stated:

Lamberth has — since the first month of the second Trump administration — been issuing orders protecting trans people in prison from having their medical care discontinued and, for a smaller number of trans women, from being transferred to men’s facilities. Due to the confines of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, preliminary injunction orders can only last for 90 days, so, while the cases were proceeding, Lamberth has issued multiple 90-day preliminary injunctions in succession.

During the course of the litigation — which was initially prompted by President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order — the BOP issued a new “program statement” on February 19, 2026, which included the “tapering” policy.

When the plaintiffs filed a request for an updated preliminary injunction addressing the changes in the new policy, DOJ opposed the request and arguments were set for May 27.

At the same time, given the 90-day PLRA limit, the plaintiffs also asked for that earlier preliminary injunction to be renewed one last time — providing protection while the new preliminary injunction request could be considered. DOJ opposed that request, but Lamberth granted it on May 26 and held the hearing on the new request the next day.

Nonetheless, DOJ went to the D.C. Circuit on May 29, asking for that May 26 preliminary injunction to to be stayed. The appeals court did not grant DOJ its requested administrative stay and set a briefing schedule over the next week and the plaintiffs opposed DOJ’s request.

On Wednesday, Henderson and Walker granted the stay pending appeal — even as they acknowledged its practical effect in the case could soon be (and was) rendered moot.

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Why did the majority do this?

First, on the merits — the likelihood of success on the merits — the panel decided that Lamberth’s preliminary injunction order of May 26 “appears to have been an administrative injunction.” To that, they stated:

There does not appear to be any “discernible legal basis . . . for issuing administrative injunctions,” especially not in cases like this one involving the Prison Litigation Reform Act. Christopher D. Moore, So-Called “Administrative Stays” in Trump 2.0, 104 Tex. L. Rev. Online 1, 17 (2025); see also id. at 16–27 (canvassing potential legal bases); 18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(2) (permitting the court to issue “a temporary restraining order or an order for preliminary injunctive relief,” not a standardless administrative injunction). Thus, the Government is likely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to this particular injunction.

Here is Moore’s article. Moore is a 2024 Harvard Law School graduated who clerked for Judge Andy Oldham, a Trump appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is currently a research fellow at University of Texas School of Law, per his LinkedIn.

Additionally, in addressing the irreparable harm factor, the majority — which included Walker — quoted from Walker’s dissent in the case over the Trump administration’s effort to end temporary protected status for people from Haiti.

In other words, with a different panel, Walker literally turned his March dissent into a June majority. (That said, his own actions show how irrelevant that might be.)

The reasons for this aren’t absolutely clear beyond what the order stated, but it could be as simple as the fact that this was a three-judge panel that had two Republican appointees. The pair might have used the chance to craft a majority that could be used elsewhere to restrict district court judges in the future. Relatedly, it could represent part of an ongoing dispute on the D.C. Circuit about how to address the significant number of district court injunctions that come out of the D.C. District Court.

The dissent

In dissent, Pilliard explained that this is about “maintain[ing] the status quo by requiring the Bureau of Prisons (BOP or Bureau) to continue providing medical care it has so far afforded to these plaintiffs” — a harm ignored by the majority.

“At bottom,” she continued, “BOP’s theory of irreparable harm is that the Executive is irreparably injured by a temporary delay in effectuating its new policy.“ That, she wrote, is not the rule in the D.C. Circuit:

[T]his court has already repeatedly declined to adopt that “broad and seemingly novel proposition”—particularly when the order at issue maintains the status quo. Miot, 2026 WL 659420, at *4; see Make the Rd. N.Y. v. Noem, 2025 WL 3563313, at *31-32 (D.C. Cir. Nov. 22, 2025); Fed. Educ. Ass’n, 2025 WL 2738626, at *3.

Notably, Miot is the Haiti TPS case — where Walker dissented.

Pillard went on to note how absurd the government’s irreparable harm argument is — and, accordingly, her colleagues’ decision to go along with it — in light of the fact “[t]he government never appealed the original March 2025 preliminary injunction of the Executive Order. Nor did it appeal when the district court renewed the preliminary injunction thrice thereafter.”

In short, she wrote, “I would not intervene on an emergency basis here, when everything suggests that the district court is expeditiously considering plaintiffs’ challenge to the new policy.“

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Lamberth, yet again

Despite the D.C. Circuit majority’s actions, Lamberth, yet again, came through to protect trans prisoners in a sharp opinion that is only technically a ruling on the Administrative Procedure Act claim brought by the plaintiffs but, in reality, cuts down virtually all of the Trump administration’s anti-trans arguments.

“With this Opinion, the Court has no intention of wading into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals,“ Lamberth wrote, insisting that “the Court simply decides whether the Bureau of Prisons followed mandatory administrative procedure when it issued its new policy concerning the provision of gender-affirming care to inmates diagnosed with gender dysphoria.”

And yet — this is what Lamberth did on Wednesday. In ruling that the plaintiffs will likely succeed in their APA argument that the program statement was arbitrary and capricious, he found three independent bases for this ruling:

1. “Despite providing gender-affirming care to inmates in its custody for years, the government cites in the Program Statement zero evidence from its own medical or mental health professionals to support its conclusions. Moreover, the government does not point the Court to evidence that gender-affirming care was ineffective or harmful to its own inmates diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or that providing this care previously led to security concerns at BOP facilities. … Post-hoc rationalizations during litigation1 cannot replace the type of reasoned analysis the government must undertake at the front end.”

2. “[The Program Statement] reaches a conclusion ‘so implausible that it could not be ascribed to a difference in view or the product of agency expertise,’ as evidenced by its explanation, which ‘runs counter to the evidence before the agency.’ … Instead of relying on BOP’s own medical or mental health professionals, the agency supports its new policy with a declaration by a doctor it retained specifically for this litigation, who has limited experience treating gender dysphoria, and who promotes a treatment for gender dysphoria that he himself acknowledges is not evidence based. … Banning evidence-backed care for an alternative that has no evidentiary support is an ‘implausible strategy’ to treat gender dysphoria … to say the least.”

3. “It is more likely, given the record before the Court, that the government disregarded significant evidence in its possession to reach the EO’s mandated result. The Court’s conclusions in subsections [1 and 2] provide further evidence of pretext. If the government intended to form a policy based on the evidence, one would expect it to have seriously considered its own experience providing gender-affirming care to inmates in its custody. … No length of consideration can convince the Court that a policy is anything other than pretext when the agency has not demonstrated that it considered the relevant evidence and drew a reasonable conclusion from that evidence.”

With that, Lamberth wrote, “Having found that BOP’s prohibition on gender-affirming care is likely arbitrary and capricious under the APA, the Court leaves Plaintiffs’ Eighth Amendment claims for another day.“

Additionally, in considering the question of irreparable harm, Lamberth examined “the efficacy of gender-affirming care,” after having described how the Trump administration is claiming there is a “debate” — scare quotes his — over the question.

Law Dork raised this precise point in the report on the May hearing.

After then going through the evidence presented, Lamberth’s ruling on this point is exceptionally simple — and extremely important:

Based on this record, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated that gender affirming care is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria.

Ultimately, Lamberth issued his new preliminary injunction, protecting the class:

All in a days work for the 82-year-old senior judge — who is “not wad[ing] into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals,” mind you.

The Trump administration brought a new mass-indictment on Tuesday, charging 15 people for what Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen described as a “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” in those officers’ immigration enforcement duties as part of Operation Metro Surge and its aftermath.

The indictment from the federal prosecutor’s office that has lost many lawyers and faced court pushback describes events unfolding over several months, conveniently beginning on January 11 — four days after a federal officer killed Renee Good in the midst of the administration’s extremist immigration enforcement.

The indictment never names Good or mentions her killing, instead beginning the timeline laid out with, “On or about January 11, 2026, DAVIS moderated an event called ‘Emergency Meeting on Resistance to ICE Operation’ on Central Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis.”

There is no mention of why an “Emergency Meeting” might have been needed or called. When asked why these charges were being announced when no charges have been brought relating to the killings of either Good or Alex Pretti, Rosen simply said those investigations are ongoing.

This indictment, both Rosen and the unsealed indictment itself made clear, is an effort to go after the “antifa” boogeyman that members of the Trump administration have sought to turn into both an identifiable organization and a massive conspiracy — finding a handful of people to scapegoat with charges out of the mass protests that took over the Minneapolis-St. Paul region during that time. It also appeared to be an effort to find some new prosecution — any new prosecution — in the wake of the misconduct-related dismissal of the case against the Broadview Six in Chicago. (More on that below.)

The result appears to be a slipshod indictment that combines — even if as alleged — a handful of low-level disturbances to law enforcement (that could have been individually charged) with effective organizing and mass protest and throws in a bunch of MAGA fever-swamp paragraphs to create a 94-page indictment that was filed either with the prosecutor’s name redacted or the line left unsigned.

The alleged “conspiracy“ largely consisted of Signal chats identifying federal officials — who often were unidentified — and where those federal forces were going to violently take people off the streets and even out of their homes (regularly using unconstitutional methods) and related protests at the Whipple Federal Building that served as a primary ICE facility during Operation Metro Surge.

The indictment fails to note that the federal government’s actions at Whipple — the subject of the protests — were likely unconstitutional. A temporary restraining order was issued against the Trump administration on February 12, with a preliminary injunction issued on March 26. “Defendants chose to operate a detention facility, so ‘they must meet constitutional standards,’” U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel wrote in issuing the TRO.

As Aaron Rupar noted, a part of the indictment that Rosen highlighted was a Facebook post that included the oft-used phrase, “[B]ecome ungovernable.”

Four of the 15 people face additional charges, but they, too, are less than they might appear. One person is charged with solicitation to commit a crime of violence and interstate threats; a person is charged with interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property; another person is charged with interstate stalking; and another person is charged with assault on a federal officer.

To highlight what these charges look like when examined more closely, here is what appears to be the entire foundation for one of the interstate stalking charges:

The destruction of government property charge, meanwhile, appears to be premised on a person having “kicked Government Vehicle 2 twice, causing dents.“

At the news conference announcing the charges, Rosen was asked if any law enforcement were injured in relation to the allegations in the indictment.

He had no answer.

Now, however, another group of defendants will have to secure lawyers and face down the federal government to contest these charges.

Already, though, the government effort to overcharge and overprosecute has faced its first pushback.

The government sought detention hearings for the defendants, and that was denied for all defendants who appeared before Magistrate Judge John Docherty on Tuesday, with personal recognizance bond being set instead.

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Probing the “Broadview Six” misconduct

Even as the Trump administration brought its new charges in Minnesota, the fallout from the grand jury-related misconduct that led to the dismissal of the charges against the Broadview Six — relating to protests outside the ICE facility outside Chicago — continued.

In a series of filings on Tuesday night, the former defendants made clear they are not done trying to hold the government accountable.

First, they revealed in connection with their request for attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses from the federal government (under the Hyde Amendment, which allows such payments where a government prosecution was “vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith“) that the federal government “had decided it would not contest that Defendants are entitled to their legal fees, albeit ‘without admitting or conceding to the fact.’“

As criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Ken White put it bluntly, “Holy shit. The government is conceding it willl pay some amount of fees to the Broadview Six. They are DESPERATE to stop further inquiry into the case. Never heard of such a thing.“

More legally, he followed up: “Seriously, though, it’s VERY hard to make the showing to win fees on a Hyde Amendment motion, it’s very winnable for the government even when there’s bad misconduct, and it suggests that there is even WORSE stuff that hasn’t come out that they are willing to do ANYTHING to keep quiet.“

As the filing made clear, though, the former defendants did not think that admission should end matters — even as to the Hyde Amendment request. In their request, they had been seeking significant discovery about the misconduct at issue. This decision from the government shouldn’t be an end to that, they wrote:

[A]s noteworthy and rare as it is, the government’s acknowledgment that Defendants are entitled to recover their legal fees does not end the issue of discovery that is authorized under the Hyde Amendment. If anything, the government’s recognition that Defendants are entitled to their legal fees supports the need for fuller discovery.

Further, they filed two additional requests — seeking a hearing on the misconduct and asking for a special counsel to be appointed by the court to investigate matters.

In a statement provided to Law Dork, Christopher Parente, the lawyer for former defendant Brian Straw, said that the effort “is not just about six protestors who were targeted at one immigration facility.“

He continued:

It is about protecting our collective Constitutional rights, ensuring we understand the full scope and nature of the corruption within the Department of Justice at this time, and sending a signal to U.S. Attorney's Offices across the country that there will be consequences when they engage in corrupt actions. The transparency and accountability we seek today will be the foundation of a stronger democracy tomorrow.

Law Dork will follow both matters — in Minnesota and Illinois — as they develop.

And just like that, it is mid-June.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, there are still 20 argued cases awaiting action, with 19 opinions expected in those cases. The court is not particularly behind on its release of opinions, and the court does not appear to be in any hurry, either. The justices did not add a day to their opinions schedule for this week (as of now), so the next — and only (as of now) — opinion day this week is Thursday.

What’s going to happen?

I think we are most likely to keep one decision day this coming week, have two decision days the week of June 22, and finish this term’s opinions on June 29. That would leave June 30 or even July 1 for “clean-up orders,” when the court generally addresses a batch of certiorari petitions that have been lingering on the docket — for varying reasons, including awaiting the outcomes of the cases just decided.

There could be an additional opinion day added into the mix — the court, for example, could announce on Thursday that the next decision day is Friday — but an average of 5 decisions each of the upcoming 4 dates would not be unusual for this time of year.

The court doesn’t tell us ahead of time how many decisions will be coming down on any given day, let alone which decisions they are.

Additionally, while the justices announce decisions from the bench (and some justices sometimes also announce their dissents), the court does not livestream those opinion announcements to the public (despite the press corps, including Law Dork, requesting that the justices instruct the court to do so as they have done with oral arguments since the pandemic began). The court, instead, does not make opinion announcements publicly available until they are sent to the National Archives at the start of the next term.

All that said, the cases that are left include many that could result in ground-shifting — if not nation-altering — decisions. (Of course, we’ve already gotten three significant rulings — on tariffs, conversion therapy bans, and the Voting Rights Act.)

What are those cases?

There are only three cases left that were argued in 2025 — meaning they should be coming at any time and there’s likely significant dispute in the cases among the justices:

• The case over President Donald Trump’s effort to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause despite congressional for-cause removal protections. Trump is likely to win, and I’ve written previously about how important this case is.

• The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s effort to further gut campaign finance laws, challenging limits on coordinated party expenditures. It was an up-in-the-air argument, as Politico’s Andrew Howard and Josh Gerstein reported — but Elena Schneider and Howard also reported since how the parties are already preparing for change.

• A case over whether lawsuits can be brought against government officials in their individual capacities under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Amy Howe covered the arguments — and likely loss for the inmate seeking to sue — at SCOTUSblog.

From the January sitting, four arguments and three decisions remain:

• The other firing case, over Trump’s effort to fire Lisa Cook as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, is not likely to turn out as well for Trump — but how, precisely, the court will resolve the case was not exactly clear from arguments.

• The arguments over Idaho and West Virginia’s bans on trans girls and women in scholastic sports were not consolidated but will most likely only result in one opinion, and it will likely uphold the laws. Again, though, and as I covered at the time, it was not clear how far the opinion will go.

• The case over a provision in Hawaii’s restrictions on concealed carry that prohibits concealed carry on private property open to the public absent explicit permission is given from the property owner. NBC News’s Lawrence Hurley covered the arguments, concluding that the law was likely to be struck down as violating the Second Amendment.

What else remains?

From the February, March, and April arguments, 13 cases remain. Among them are several likely to bring significant decisions:

• The birthright citizenship case is obviously front and center. Trump is likely to lose. The questions are how badly and with what sort of an opinion.

• The case over then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s effort to end temporary protected status for people in the U.S. from Haiti and Syria.

• The challenge to states that allow ballots mailed by Election Day to be counted if received by a certain amount of time after then.

• A case over the federal law barring firearm possession by anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” The New York Times’s Abbie VanSickle covered the arguments, which featured several justices skeptical of the law’s broad reach.

There also is a notable asylum case, the Roundup case, and the challenge to geofence warrants among the final remaining cases.

On Thursday, and whenever decisions are coming, Law Dork will be on it.

Talking with TPM about the Trump admin’s anti-trans attacks

On Friday, I spoke with ’s …

Morning Memo

TPM Live: David Kurtz and Chris Geidner on the Trump Admin’s Anti-Trans Crusade

The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives…

Listen now

4 days ago · 38 likes · David Kurtz and Chris Geidner

… and we had an important discussion about the ongoing and multifaceted attacks on trans people from the Trump administration. Check it out — and, if you don’t already, Talking Points Memo.

Relatedly, The Advocate’s Christopher Wiggins reported this weekend on a June 12 Department of Veterans Affairs memo that would “eliminate gender identity-based initiatives and strip the LGBTQ+ designation from a network of medical coordinators created to help LGBTQ+ veterans navigate care.“

Law Dork has also obtained and reviewed the memo from John Bartrum, Under Secretary for Health for the Veterans Health Administration. The two primary directives were that:

• VHA funds, official time, facilities, or resources may not be used for meetings, training, working groups, promotional materials, events, or any activities promoting gender-ideology or gender-identity. This reminder fully implements the directive in EO 14168 that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and “[a]gencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other messages.”

• LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators will be redesignated as Care Coordinators, dedicated to facilitating VA health care and benefits for all Veterans, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Updated role descriptions must be completed within 30 days.

Law Dork will have more as circumstances warrant.

The full memo is below:

Memorandum

Department of Veterans Affairs
Date: JUN 12 2026 [stamp]
From: Under Secretary for Health (10)
Subj: Reiterating Executive Order Compliance Responsibilities (VIEWS 14800586)
To: Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Senior Leaders, Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) Directors (10N1-23), and Medical Center Directors

1. This memorandum reaffirms VHA’s unwavering commitment to delivering high-quality health care to all Veterans and directs full compliance with applicable executive orders (EO). It reminds personnel of the Congressionally established mechanisms to address the unique needs of certain Veteran populations and prohibits the use of Government resources, except as authorized by law, for class-specific expenditures, training, meetings, promotional activities, or any form of prioritization that diverts from merit-based, mission-focused operations.

2. VHA serves every Veteran without regard to personal characteristics unrelated to medical need. All personnel must ensure consistent, mission-aligned care delivery.

a. VHA provides timely, accessible, high-quality health care to Veterans to fulfill its mission to “honor America’s Veterans by providing exceptional healthcare that improves their health and well-being.”

b. EO 14151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEl Programs and Preferencing, directs Federal agencies to end wasteful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spending and calls for the termination of “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEl and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

c. EO 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, calls for Federal Agencies to recognize only two sexes, that is, male and female.

d. To ensure maximum adherence to EOs 14151 and 14168, VHA must eliminate all DEI/DEIA programs, gender-identity based and gender-ideology based initiatives, and any activities, internal or external, that promote gender identity or gender ideology. All employees must align operations and communications accordingly.

3. To continue to adhere to these EOs and law, effective immediately:

a. VHA funds, official time, facilities, or resources may not be used for meetings, training, working groups, promotional materials, events, or any activities promoting gender-ideology or gender-identity. This

Page 2

Subj: Restoring Biological Truth (VIEWS 14800586)

reminder fully implements the directive in EO 14168 that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and “[a]gencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other messages.”

b. LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators will be redesignated as Care Coordinators, dedicated to facilitating VA health care and benefits for all Veterans, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Updated role descriptions must be completed within 30 days.

c. Facilities must ensure that local policies, SharePoint sites, communications, websites, and training materials comply with EOs 14151 and 14168.

d. Uniform Standards and attire policies must comply with EOs 14151 and 14168, as well as HA Directive 1850.03, subject to approved accommodations in HA Directive 1111, Section 3(i).

4. VISN Directors and Office Heads must confirm in writing to
VHACOOFrontOffice@va.gov within 14 days of this memorandum’s issuance that all non-compliant activities have ceased and that all employees have been advised of this notice and the requirement for compliance.

5. Compliance with these EOs does not affect operations explicitly authorized by Congress, including programs under 38 U.S.C. §§ 317, 318, and 7310. These do not impact our long-standing and congressionally mandated women Veteran and minority
Veteran programs.

6. VA must ensure all Veterans are treated based on their clinical needs and without discrimination. This guidance ensures VHA will do just that.

[signature]

John J. Bartrum, JD, MBA

Closing my tabs

For those who don’t know what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.

This Sunday, these are the tabs I am closing:

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This is what it will mean to win.

It will be messy, it will take longer than it should, they’re going to be obnoxious and petty and cause needless harm, and — yeah — it will be a little cringe.

The fight over the lawless act of putting Donald Trump’s name atop the memorial to a slain president — The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — has been unimaginably embarrassing in the run-up to “America 250.”

Everything about the six-month naming fight, though, is a perfect illustration of what the Trump administration does, what fighting back looks like, and how we win.

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Even as Matt Floca — the then-vice president for facilities and operations at the Kennedy Center — was overseeing the installation of Trump’s name on the marble on December 19, 2025, the whole exercise already felt like a slightly too-obvious metaphor.

Floca was upset by people taking photos of the action that they would insist — up to Friday — “represented a saving of The Kennedy Center.” He was upset that people were upset at the actions he was overseeing. Whatever his reasons for doing so, he — then under the leadership of then-executive director Ric Grenell — was eager and willing to carry out the Trump-appointed board’s will with no apparent regard for the law.

Days later, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio Kennedy Center board member, sued. When Trump in February announced his plans to shutter the Kennedy Center for two years, Beatty raised questions to Trump and Grenell and soon thereafter amended her complaint to challenge those plans as well.

After U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued an order ensuring that Beatty would have access to a mid-March board meeting and the materials relating to that meeting, Beatty on March 25 filed a motion for partial summary judgment as to the naming issue — essentially arguing that the naming dispute was a pure legal question that she should win.

The filing then stated: “The Court should right this wrong.”

By time the Trump-appointed board responded on April 6 to that request and a preliminary request from Beatty seeking to block the closure plans, Grenell had left the Kennedy Center and Floca was promoted to executive director. In a declaration filed with that opposition, Floca called himself “the Center’s main steward“ — while also referring to it as the “Trump Kennedy Center.“ Primarily focused on the alleged need to close the center for renovations, he described described his role as “the primary lead for the Center’s operational backbone“ and concluded that “[a] full two-year closure is the only responsible path forward.“

After an April 28 hearing on the requests, Cooper issued his ruling on May 29. The Obama appointee sided with Beatty on virtually all fronts, permanently protecting her voting rights and permanently barring the claimed name change — “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” — while disagreeing with Floca and the board regarding its consideration of the need for closure and granting Beatty temporary relief blocking the closure.

In his order, he gave the Kennedy Center two weeks — until June 12 — to remove the name of Trump “or any other individual besides President Kennedy“ from the building’s name.

Initially, there was nothing in response. But then, a day short of a week later, an unsigned memo to “STAFF” from “THE OFFICE OF THE GENERAL COUNSEL“ — published by The Washington Post — began implementing the order.

It made clear that the lawyers in the building understood precisely what was required of them:

Among other changes, it directed the employees “must immediately change email signatures, letterhead, and other documents to reflect the name as ‘The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,’ or ‘Kennedy Center.’”

It also made clear that “Outdoor Signage” was to be brought into compliance with Cooper’s order “[b]y 6-12-26.”

Nothing had changed to the front of the building by Thursday morning — less than 48 hours before Cooper’s deadline.

That day — 13 days after Cooper’s order — the Justice Department filed a notice it was appealing the ruling and requested that Cooper stay his permanent injunction regarding the naming while DOJ appealed. In the request, DOJ stated:

Earlier today, the Board of Trustees voted to appeal this permanent injunction and to seek a stay of the permanent injunction pending that appeal. Accordingly, Defendants now move for a stay pending appeal, to preserve the status quo until the D.C. Circuit has an opportunity to consider the novel issues raised by this case.

The request was signed by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, head of the Civil Division; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton; and Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Brantley Mayers.

Beatty opposed the request, and Cooper denied it about 1:00 p.m. Friday. “Defendants have not ‘made a strong showing that [they] are likely to succeed on the merits’ of any appeal,” he wrote. “Nor have Defendants demonstrated that they ‘will be irreparably injured absent a stay.’“

As 2:00 p.m. approached, minimal scaffolding had been erected out front and no one was working to expand that scaffolding — and there had not been any filing for a stay at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Livestreams — some of which had begun days earlier — had already begun picking up increasing numbers of viewers.

Tara Hoot, a D.C. drag queen who has regularly clashed with Trump, was doing more than any scaffolding crew when Law Dork showed up in the afternoon.

At 3:46 p.m., however, Shumate — alone — filed an “emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and an immediate administrative stay” at the D.C. Circuit.

Like the earlier April 27 ballroom case filing, it read at points more like a Truth social post from Trump than a legal filing from the Department of Justice. Shumate, a Senate-confirmed attorney who spent more than five years as a partner at Jones Day before returning to DOJ in January 2025, signed the D.C. Circuit request that opened as such:

Defendants respectfully seek a stay pending appeal of the district court’s permanent injunction requiring the removal, from the campus of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (the Center), of all physical signage reflecting the name of President Donald J. Trump. This appeal raises serious questions about Article III standing and about the powers of the Center’s Board. Major physical changes to the Center should await this Court’s resolution of those issues; as an equitable matter, it does not make sense to alter the Center’s name and signage now, only to potentially revert the name again after what should be a successful appeal. The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below — Indeed, total collapse! Moreover, stripping President Trump’s name from the Center threatens to substantially undermine fundraising and financial viability at the most sensitive point in its history, a time when other such performing arts structures throughout the Country are in serious financial difficulty, many of them, like The Kennedy Center, losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Before considering Trump-style unending paragraph structure — the opening paragraph went on for another 540 words — and Trumpian phrasing — “Indeed, total collapse!” — note how that first sentence misrepresented Cooper’s order, as the general counsel even clearly understood it in the June 4 memo.

The filing went on to declare that a bylaw of “The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation“ had “condition[ed]” donations on the illegal name change staying in place. Further, it insisted, “No one else other than President Trump would be in the position of both rebuilding the Building, and raising the money for its operation.”

Less than 30 minutes later, Beatty’s lawyers — from Democracy Defenders Action and Washington Litigation Group — filed her opposition.

At 7:09 p.m., the D.C. Circuit panel — Judges Patricia Millett (Obama), Robert Wilkins (Obama), and Gregory Katsas (Trump) — denied the request for an administrative stay, meaning Cooper’s order — and deadline — remained in effect. The panel set briefing over the rest of the month for the broader request for a stay pending appeal, meaning any order would come long past the June 12 deadline.

In the midst of all of this, thunderstorms temporarily stopped the scaffolding crew.

By time Law Dork was back on site at 10:00 p..m. — two hours before Cooper’s deadline — a substantial crowd had gathered, buoyed when the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance let out a little past 10:00 p.m.

It was a celebration, in part, but also just a very D.C. night of people wanting to be present for a moment that felt like it might also become A Moment. Time in D.C. among the many who have come to this city for politics is often marked by these Moments. Outside the Kennedy Center, I heard people talking about the night Barack Obama announced Osama bin Laden had been killed, the White House celebration the night of Obergefell v. Hodges, the impromptu celebration in the streets on the day Biden was declared victor in 2020.

There were selfies, there were neighbors just stopping by, there was a spirit of hope. As midnight approached, however, the mood shifted and there was a desire for accountability, as it became clear the job would not be done in time.

As June 12 turned to June 13, no letters had been removed. A smattering of “Contempt of court!” cries rung out.

It turned out that DOJ, minutes before midnight, had asked Cooper for a 12-hour extension. In a declaration, Floca cited the couple of hours of “thunderstorms” — not their own 13-day delay — for the reason they needed the additional time.

Floca was not out front on Friday night and Saturday morning — at least not in any public way seen by Law Dork — to oversee the taking down of the name that had been illegally installed on the building with his oversight nearly six months earlier.

A little past 1:00 a.m. Saturday, a much-rumored tarp began being affixed to the top of the scaffolding and the mood among the dedicated crew that remained — still well over 100 people — shifted yet again, as cries of “Cover up!” and “Traitors!” rung out. Over the course of the next hour, the white tarp was extended to cover all of the scaffolding — and all of Trump’s name.

By 4:00 a.m., reporters still on site confirmed by looking along the wall beside the edge of the tarp that the name was down — and Beatty was there to declare victory.

As the sun came up, Cooper granted the extension, and, before noon, DOJ certified compliance — with a new Floca declaration.

As of Saturday afternoon, the tarp remained covering the front of the building where Trump’s name had been affixed 24 hours earlier. (Yes, Law Dork also confirmed that the name was down by looking along the wall.)

It was what a resigned, petty loss looks like.

But, it was also what a win looks like.

The lessons to take from the Kennedy Center debacle — itself by no means over — are essential to understanding how we get out of this moment and, in particular, how we move forward while Trump remains in power.

First: Stand up, speak out, and challenge them. Beatty’s lawsuit, like so many over the past 17 months, was the result of a person who thought the Trump administration did wrong and lawyers willing to back that person up in that fight.

Second: Remember that this is not a quick process, especially not litigation. It took nearly six months for this clearly illegal act to be reversed.

Third: Realize they’re going to push back — and that they’re going to get more unhinged as you are closer to winning. Friday’s D.C. Circuit filing was embarrassing (at best), but, at this point, it should not have been unexpected.

Fourth: Support one another. From the support Beatty got for her effort to the guy going around offering pizza to people at the Kennedy Center on Friday night, Trump’s effort to destroy community is best combatted by simply not allowing it.

Fifth: Be ready for the fact that they’re not going to be nice about the losses — and that there will be malicious compliance and passive aggressive compliance (as well as, yes, noncompliance at times). But, as here, even the temporary noncompliance was a sign of how much this win mattered — and gave way to compliance by morning.

Sixth: Celebrate the wins. They purported to change the name, it was despised and also illegal, Beatty sued, the lawyers did their job, the judges did as well, and — after an absurd 48 hours — they took down his name. Take the W.

Seventh: Get up the next day, and start it all over again.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Alabama’s request for the justices to intervene on Thursday so that the state could go forward with an execution scheduled for Thursday.

Alabama planned to kill Jeffery Lee using its “nitrogen hypoxia” protocol, but a series of rulings from the district court and appeals court had led U.S. District Judge Emily Marks to declare that protocol to be unconstitutional on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, both Marks and, later, a 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied Alabama’s request for a stay of the ruling. In this posture, a stay would have allowed the state to proceed with the execution.

On Thursday, Alabama went to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay or vacate Marks’s ruling. In addition to the opposition filed by Lee’s lawyers at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, Trial Lawyers for Justice filed an amicus brief on behalf of Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck explaining why the final judgment issued by Marks in this case made it a different situation than in most other last-minute death penalty litigation.

A little past 9:00 p.m. ET Thursday, the Supreme Court issued its order denying Alabama’s request.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch noted their dissent.

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Neither the majority nor the dissenting justices wrote any explanation for their ruling or votes, so it is not clear why the majority rejected Alabama’s request or, technically, who all was in the majority. (Justices do not need to note their vote on the shadow docket.)

Nonetheless, the outcome meant that — as reported — Alabama would not be proceeding with Lee’s execution on Thursday.

This is not the end of things; it’s not even the end of this case challenging the nitrogen gas method of execution.

Alabama could continue fighting the merits of that appeal, or it could seek to use another method of execution — including the firing range method Lee proposed as a less painful alternative.

To do so, however, would take the time of putting in place the new protocol, training staff, and addressing any challenges.

For now, though, Alabama will not be killing Jeffery Lee.

This is a breaking news report. Check back at Law Dork for the latest.

A pair of rulings over the past 30 hours led to a final judgment from U.S. District Judge Emily Marks on Tuesday permanently blocking Alabama from suffocating Jeffery Lee to death using nitrogen gas, a method of execution referred to as “nitrogen hypoxia.”

Following a Tuesday opinion from Marks building on a Monday ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Marks ultimately declared that the state’s “nitrogen hypoxia execution protocol violates the Eighth Amendment.“

Alabama, which had been scheduled to kill Lee on Thursday using the nitrogen hypoxia protocol is now barred from doing so, in large part because the appeals court found that method is likely to cause “severe pain over and above death itself.“

In order to get relief, however, Lee also had to show Marks that there was an alternative method of execution that the state could use that would be likely to cause less pain. He put forward the firing squad as that possibility.

The ruling, in short, is limited. As Marks put it: “The result [of this ruling] is that the State of Alabama cannot execute Lee by nitrogen hypoxia—no more, no less.“

[UPDATE, 11:15 p.m. June 10: On Wednesday morning, Judge Emily Marks denied Alabama’s request for a stay pending appeal. A stay, in this instance would allow the nitrogen gas execution to proceed.

On Wednesday night, on a 2-1 vote, the Eleventh Circuit likewise denied the state’s request for a stay. Judges Adalberto Jordan and Embry Kidd voted to deny the stay. Judge Robert Luck, who had not dissented from Monday’s ruling, dissented on Wednesday — believing that Lee's firing squad option is not a sufficient alternative under the Supreme Court’s requirements.]

[UPDATE, 12:25 p.m. June 11: On Thursday morning, Alabama went to the Supreme Court seeking a stay of Marks’s final judgment pending appeal. Such a stay, in this posture, would mean that Alabama could proceed with the execution.]

[UPDATE, 10:05 p.m. June 11: The Supreme Court denied Alabama’s request, meaning Jeffery Lee will not be executed this week. A new Law Dork report is here.]

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What happened?

Marks, a Trump appointee, had earlier rejected Lee’s request, finding in May that Lee had “failed to prove that the Protocol causes more than ‘the necessary suffering involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely.’“

On Monday evening, however, the Eleventh Circuit — using Marks’s factual findings — held instead that “Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia protocol presents a ‘substantial risk of serious harm’—severe pain over and above death itself.“

The panel — which consisted of Judges Adalberto Jordan (Obama), Robert Luck (Trump), and Embry Kidd (Biden) and included no dissent — further explained:

That is the first of two requirements the U.S. Supreme Court set in Glossip v. Gross for a person challenging their method of execution. The second is to “identify an alternative method that ‘is feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces the risk of harm involved.’”

Lee had, as noted above, put forward the firing squad. Because Marks had ruled against Lee on the first step, however, she had not considered back in her May ruling whether the firing squad was a sufficient alternative method. As such, the Eleventh Circuit on Monday “remand[ed] the case to the district court with instructions to immediately address the second prong of Glossip.“

A day later, on Tuesday, Marks issued her ruling, applying the Eleventh Circuit’s “legal conclusion that the Protocol poses an unconstitutional risk of pain,“ and addressing Lee’s proposed alternative method.

In summing up her legal conclusion in Lee’s favor, Marks explained:

[T]he Court finds that Lee has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that firing squad is feasible, readily implemented, and significantly reduces the substantial risk of serious harm posed by the Protocol, and that the State failed to proffer a legitimate penological reason not to adopt it.

More simply, she wrote later: “On this record, and in light of the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion, Lee has shown that his proposed firing squad alternative significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain as compared to nitrogen hypoxia.“

It is not a pleasant read to get there. After detailing the evidence presented about the firing squad proposal, these were Tuesday’s factual findings:

Nonetheless, those facts led a federal district court in Alabama to declare, with Lee having met both of Glossip’s standards, that Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia protocol is unconstitutional.

Tuesday’s order came nearly two-and-a-half years after federal courts — up to and including the Supreme Court — allowed Alabama to carry out the first nitrogen hypoxia execution in the United States in January 2024.

The Trump administration’s actions aimed at making it more difficult for transgender minors to receive gender-affirming medical care regardless of state policies allowing or even protecting such care are facing strong pushback. And while the Justice Department has described a “nationwide” investigation into the care, it was those challenging DOJ who prompted hearings on both coasts on Tuesday.

The Justice Department’s efforts to obtain information about patients who received gender-affirming medical care by way of administrative subpoenas and, more recently, grand jury subpoenas are extreme — and lawyers say, unprecedented.

The pair of hearings Tuesday highlighted the extreme nature of DOJ’s requests — and the speed with which DOJ has moved to try and get the invasive patient data in recent weeks after nearly a year since the first requests went out in July 2025.

The administrative subpoenas have been blocked when challenged, leading a set of patients to seek a class-action order quashing the patient-specific requests in all of the administrative subpoenas.

At 10:00 a.m. ET Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Julie Rubin held a hearing related to that request at the Edward A. Garmatz U.S. District Courthouse in Baltimore.

Rubin, a Biden appointee, was one of the judges who had previously quashed the patient-specific requests, as to those who moved to quash the administrative subpoena issued to Children’s National Hospital (headquartered in D.C. but with locations in Maryland as well), finding that the “Subpoena lacks a legitimate purpose.“

The bulk of Rubin’s questions to Rachel Berg from the National Center for LGBTQ Rights on Tuesday related to whether Rubin could certify a class in a motion to quash an administrative subpoena and, if not, how far relief could go.

Ultimately, Berg acknowledged that, if Rubin did not certify a class, relief could only reach those with a connection to Maryland. In their filing, they had noted that “[a]t least two Movants currently reside in Maryland and four families received services from Children’s National Hospital in Maryland.“

That would, however, not accomplish what the litigation is seeking to do — stop DOJ from getting any of the patient-specific information in response to any of the administrative subpoenas. As such, if Rubin denies this request, there likely would be a further effort to accomplish that goal.

At the same time, Rubin pushed DOJ’s Scott Dahlquist on the opposite side nearly as strongly as she’d pushed Berg. When he insisted that the patients were seeking “sweeping, nationwide” relief, Rubin asked how that’s different from any class-action litigation. Dahlqust’s response was, essentially, that you can’t get class relief for an administrative subpoena.

On rebuttal, though, Berg responded that, though the patients’ request to the court might be without a perfect match from past litigation, the reason that is so is because there is no precedent for the Justice Department’s actions here.

Although it is not clear how Rubin will rule, the relevance of the administrative subpoena fight could be taking on less importance in short order. As Law Dork has covered in depth, DOJ’s apparent move to grand jury subpoenas issued in the Northern District of Texas in May is reaching a head — with at least two grand jury subpoenas having initially had a return date of Wednesday, June 10.

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Over the past week, patients of Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford have made efforts to block the grand jury subpoena issued to Packard. After a first attempt to block Packard from turning over the information — in a lawsuit filed only against Packard — was rejected over the weekend, the patients filed an expanded lawsuit on Monday. In that, they added the Justice Department and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as defendants and asking for class-action relief for all who received gender-affirming medical care as minors in California and, specifically, Packard patients (similar to litigation in New York City). They also filed a request for a temporary restraining order barring DOJ from receiving patient-specific information, given the forthcoming return-date deadline.

At 10:00 a.m. PT Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts held a conference related to that request. Pitts was presiding over the remote hearing from his courtroom at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Jose.

The hearing before Pitts, another Biden appointee, ultimately, was less adversarial — for now — than the Baltimore hearing.

Late Monday, Pitts had issued a temporary order blocking Packard from turning over any more documents to the government and blocking DOJ from taking any further action to enforce any grand jury subpoenas that would affect the would-be class here while he considered the matter.

Everyone, more or less, was OK with keeping that status while taking up the TRO request on a slightly less rushed timeline.

Although it took a few minutes at the status conference for everyone to agree that everyone was on the same page, ultimately John Wollman, the assistant U.S. attorney from the Northern District of California representing the government at the hearing, while not acknowledging any grand jury subpoena, agreed to push back any Packard subpoena response date to June 25 to allow time for briefing and arguments on the patients’ request.

Although the parties need to submit a briefing schedule to Pitts for how to proceed, the outcome is similar to that reached temporarily as to the grand jury subpoena challenge in New York City, where the next hearing is set for June 22.

In short, the grand jury subpoenas that are known to have been challenged are on hold for now by agreement of the government while the litigation is considered.

Despite that, though, the return date was June 10 on both published grand jury subpoenas, so it is possible that others are out there that have not been challenged and will lead to productions on Wednesday. (Of course, it is also possible there are other challenges that have just flown under the radar.)

Regardless, and as NCLR’s Berg detailed Tuesday in Baltimore, this is an unprecedented, multi-pronged attack on a small handful of children. What’s more, given the way DOJ is going about this, they and their families might not even know that their records might be turned over to the government — or if their provider has even been subpoenaed.

Law Dork will continue to cover this story. If you know about any previously unreported subpoenas, other related DOJ efforts, or other challenges to those efforts, please reach out. Chris Geidner is available on Signal at crg.32 for more secure communications.

A federal judge who has been steadfastly protecting the rights of transgender people in prison on Sunday night issued a ruling that blocked the Trump administration from transferring the small number of trans women assigned to women’s federal prisons to men’s prisons.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who has been hearing a series of challenges to the Trump administration’s anti-trans prison policies, issued the preliminary injunction protecting the 14 trans women after assessing their individual circumstances, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit required the district court to do following an earlier appeal of the case.

Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, concluded that the Trump administration’s plan to transfer the 14 transgender women already assigned to women’s prisons would likely violate their Eighth Amendment rights.

(Lamberth also has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to “taper” hormone therapy for trans people in federal prison — with a goal of ending it — in a companion case. DOJ is seeking a stay of that order at D.C. Circuit, even as Lamberth considers new relief in that case — as he discussed in denying DOJ’s request for a stay at the district court.)

In concluding that the 14 trans plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their Eighth Amendment claims, Lamberth displayed a level of knowledge and understanding about transgender people’s lives that show just how disingenuous and cruel anti-trans efforts tend to be — and how flimsy the Trump administration’s arguments in defense of its anti-trans policies tend to be.

First, Lamberth contextualized all of this with numbers, citing the Federal Bureau of Prisons’s own data: “Plaintiffs represent less than one percent of the transgender population in the Bureau’s custody (14 individuals out of approximately 1,500) and transgender inmates as a group already account for only a small minority group among federal inmates (approximately 1,500 out of 154,000).“

In addressing the Eighth Amendment claim regarding their conditions of confinement — which requires objective evidence of “intolerable” risks and subjective evidence that the government acted with “deliberate indifference” to those risks — Lamberth stated that the plaintiffs’ two claimed risks were: “(1) the risk of physical and sexual violence from fellow inmates, and (2) the risk of severely exacerbated gender dysphoria.”

After noting that the Justice Department’s primary response was that the trans women would be sent to “Federal Medical Center (FMC) Rochester or Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (MCFP) Springfield—two prisons where the rates of assault are generally lower than those at the facilities where Plaintiffs are currently housed,“ Lamberth explained:

This is such a simple — and obvious — point, and yet it is and would be missing from most judges’ analysis. It represents Lamberth’s significant understanding of both the federal prison system and transgender people.

This is illustrated even more clearly as to the trans women’s second risk — that such a transfer would risk making their gender dysphoria worse. To that, Lamberth takes the government at its word — to show how insufficient that is:

The government’s reliance on the two medical facilities went even further at the subjective phase of the analysis. Specifically, Lamberth wrote:

The government argues that those facilities are equipped to manage the deterioration in mental and physical wellbeing that Plaintiffs argue will predictably occur. In Plaintiffs’ words, “that argument concedes the critical point: BOP’s response did not determine whether transfer would expose Plaintiffs to a substantial risk of serious harm, but merely identified facilities purportedly capable of treating the foreseeable and avoidable consequences of that harm after it occurs.”

Lamberth agreed with the plaintiffs that the “the government has evidenced a subjective awareness of the objectively serious risks to Plaintiffs by presenting specific (though inadequate) plans to mitigate them.“

Ultimately, Lamberth found that the mandatory transfer to men’s prisons “was not a reasonable response” because “it is fundamentally unreasonable for prison officials to respond to serious risks such as mental health deterioration, self-harm, and suicidality by intentionally creating those risks and offering to treat them after they predictably occur.” Additionally, he found that “it is unreasonable, given the known risks, for the Bureau to adopt a categorical policy of transferring all transgender female inmates to men’s prisons without first considering whether it would be safer to house Plaintiffs in women’s facilities.“

He then engaged in 30 pages of redacted individualized consideration of each of the 14 plaintiffs, concluding the trans women are likely to succeed on their Eighth Amendment claims. He also found that the other preliminary injunction factors — irreparable harm, balance of the equities, and the public interest — favor an injunction.

Finally, Lamberth does note a preliminary injunction issued in the Northern District of Texas on June 2 in a case, Fleming v. Rule, brought by cisgender women in federal prison assigned to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Forth Worth, Texas. The injunction limits where transgender women can be housed in that facility and intersects with the case before Lamberth because four of the Doe plaintiffs are currently assigned to FMC Carswell. Lamberth, however, found that that injunction does not conflict with his injunction, which prohibits the transfer of those transgender women to men’s facilities.

Over the past two months, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Ryan Nelson has participated in arguments and issued opinions in his role as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In recent days, however, the Idaho State Journal’s Jimmy Hancock reported that Nelson has been addressing his own criminal charges in Idaho during that time — misdemeanor charges of battery and malicious injury to property — for a confrontation that took place on April 2.

Nelson, a Trump appointee on the Western appeals court, has written one of the most aggressive (and careless) defenses of President Donald Trump’s effort to send the National Guard into American cities — a position that, in effect, was rejected even by this U.S. Supreme Court.

That aggression apparently transfers over into Nelson’s personal life.

The video, also obtained by the Idaho State Journal, is a parody of male rage, involving two oversized trucks and an apparently bad parking job by Nelson leading to an exchange of words that, within seconds, escalates to what appears to be Nelson throwing the other man’s sunglasses across the parking lot and later taking a swipe at his cell phone.

“He was trying to grab my phone,” the other man told the Idaho State Journal. “Which made no sense to me.”

Nelson’s lawyer, Curtis R. Smith of Smith Woolf Anderson & Wilkinson, told the Idaho State Journal: “Mr. Nelson maintains a presumption of innocence. He will work through the judicial system to resolve these personal charges which allegedly resulted in a pair of broken sunglasses and are unrelated to his professional position.”

Per the Idaho State Journal report, “According to the affidavit of probable cause filed in the 7th Judicial Court, the alleged victim told police that Nelson tried to challenge him to a fight, ‘asking him if he wants to go’“ during the April 2 confrontation.

On April 13, Nelson was in San Francisco for a pair of oral arguments in pending cases.

A week later, per the Idaho State Journal report, he was charged on April 22, with court records showing that Nelson “entered not guilty pleas to both charges May 13.”

Two days later, Nelson authored an opinion upholding Trump administration immigration rulings that would send Baljit Singh, who detailed past beatings and expressed fears of political persecution, back to India.

Nelson — affirming a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals rejecting Singh’s claims — wrote that “none of these incidents [put forward by Singh], viewed individually or cumulatively, rises to the level of persecution.“ Of two assaults Singh cited, Nelson wrote, “On both occasions, Singh was beaten with sticks for one to two minutes but the only lingering injury he reported from these beatings was swelling.“

He continued:

Although we are concerned that Singh was knocked unconscious in the first assault, Singh apparently suffered no concussions, skull fractures, lacerations, or traumatic brain injuries. … The beatings Singh suffered were reprehensible. But they were not serious enough to compel us to reverse the agency’s conclusion as we have in other cases.

The next week, Nelson was back on the bench, overseeing appellate arguments in Pasadena.

“Another week without any hiccups,“ Nelson said in complimenting the court staff’s work.

Closing my tabs

For those who don’t know what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.

This Sunday, here are the tabs I am closing:

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Key court appearances in the Trump administration’s attack on transgender children’s right to obtain gender-affirming medical care are scheduled this month. The outcome of those appearances — and decisions regarding the underlying requests at issue — could represent the most critical moment in the past year for Justice Department’s effort to target the provision of medical care for transgender minors.1

As Law Dork has covered in depth, from the opening day of the second Trump administration, President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had aggressively sought to challenge the provision of gender-affirming care for trans minors — even in states where such care is allowed or even explicitly protected by law.

Among other steps, the Justice Department issued administrative subpoenas last summer to more than 20 providers of such care seeking extremely invasive data about individual patients, in addition to other records.

The shifting rationales for the requests have included “health care offense“ claims related to off-label prescribing of medication used in gender-affirming medical care, coordination with pharmaceutical companies regarding the provision of such medication, and billing of such care. Despite that attempt at nuance, last August a DOJ lawyer admitted the broader goal, telling a court that “the executive branch wants to reduce or eliminate gender-related care to minors, especially … medicalized gender-related care to minors.“

Several providers challenged the administrative subpoenas, as did some patients who became aware of the administrative subpoenas. All of those challenges ended with judges quashing the subpoenas in whole or at least as to the individual patient information, with judges finding the subpoenas lacked a proper purpose or went “beyond the authority granted by Congress.”

Although DOJ did file appeals of those rulings, at least initially, it has since come to light that DOJ was moving forward with two other efforts — both in the Northern District of Texas.

In one, DOJ filed a motion in Fort Worth, Texas on April 30 asking for a court order enforcing one of those administrative subpoenas issued in Washington, D.C., to a hospital in Rhode Island. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee with a long record of anti-LGBTQ rulings (and one of two active judges in the division), and he granted the request that day without even seeking a response from Rhode Island Hospital.

Days later, as news of the Texas order spread (and follow-up litigation proceeded), DOJ opened another front. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas — as part of an apparent (alleged?) criminal investigation — issued grand jury subpoenas to several providers, including NYU Langone Health, which disclosed the issuance of the subpoena under New York law.2 The return date for the grand jury subpoenas — the date by which the documents sought are to be submitted — is Wednesday, June 10, at least as to NYU Langone.

Although the pushback to these efforts had been piecemeal, advocates, working with patients and their families, have launched two larger legal efforts over the past month to try and stop DOJ in its tracks.

Judges in each effort — one in Maryland and the other in New York — have ordered the parties to court next week, and, given the June 10 grand jury subpoena date, a lot could happen — to advance or block DOJ’s efforts — over the next several days.

[Update, 5:55 p.m.: The parties are seeking to push the New York hearing, filing a joint stipulation Thursday afternoon. More on that below.]

[Update, 6:30 p.m.: The New York hearing, previously set for June 10, has been rescheduled for June 22. Again, more below.]

TIPS: If you have information about the subpoenas discussed in this report or related subpoenas, challenges to them, any federal grand jury activity or any criminal investigation, or related developments, please reach out. Chris Geidner is available on Signal at crg.32 for more secure communications.

The administrative subpoenas

In Maryland, patients and families represented by lawyers from GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders and National Center for LGBTQ Rights, joined by Brown Goldstein & Levy LLP, filed a request for a class-action ruling to protect all patients targeted by the administrative subpoenas:

They are seeking a class injunction quashing the three patient-specific requests in the subpoenas and blocking DOJ from obtaining or using the personal health information of patients requested in the administrative subpoenas:

The matter was assigned to U.S. District Judge Julie Rubin, a Biden appointee, who ordered DOJ’s response by June 1. DOJ opposed the request in its response, largely arguing that class-wide relief is not possible here.

The families replied on Thursday, with a two-paragraph introduction that really sums things up quite well:

Rubin has set a hearing for 10 a.m. ET Tuesday, June 9, in the federal courthouse in Baltimore, Maryland.

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The grand jury subpoenas

On the grand jury subpoena front, patients and families represented by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, and New York Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action complaint in the Southern District of New York this week challenging the NYU Langone subpoena and more.

In the June 2 complaint, they raise Fourth and Fifth Amendment claims and are seeking class certification as to anyone who received gender-affirming medical care “at a healthcare institution located in New York City” while they were younger than 18 (and as to an NYU-specific subclass).

The argument is direct and blunt:

The Plaintiffs and proposed class representatives in this putative class action are minors, their parents, and young adults seeking to challenge the imminent and unconstitutional disclosure of their identities and sensitive health information related to gender-affirming medical care to the DOJ Defendants, whom they allege are seeking that information for improper, unlawful, and discriminatory purposes.

In the lawsuit, they are ultimately looking for an order that would bar DOJ from seeking personal health information “through the Subpoenas at issue or any substantially similar administrative or grand jury subpoenas“ as part of the claimed investigation and NYU hospitals from disclosing such information to DOJ.

Highlighting the time-sensitive nature of the request given the quickly approaching June 10 return date, they also are seeking a temporary restraining order in the interim.

The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee, who issued an order on June 3 requiring DOJ’s opposition to be filed by noon Friday. Any reply is due from the plaintiffs by Saturday.

She also made clear she is already looking forward, ordering the parties to answer a series of questions about plans for the remainder of the case — including whether a preliminary injunction motion from plaintiffs and a motion to dismiss from DOJ are forthcoming and whether discovery and/or an evidentiary hearing is going to be requested — by noon Tuesday.

In conjunction with all of that, Vargas has set a conference for 2:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, June 10, in the federal courthouse in Manhattan.

[Update, 5:55 p.m.: On Thursday afternoon, the parties filed a joint stipulation that would push off any need for the TRO until the end of the month. Per the filing:

As such, the letter — signed only by the plaintiffs’ lawyers but listed as a “joint letter motion” — continues: “[I]n light of the above stipulation and proposal, the parties respectfully request that the Court adjourn the June 10, 2026 conference date, and propose that said conference, along with any hearing on Plaintiffs’ TRO motion, occur on June 22, 2026, or on any other date prior to June 24, 2026 that is acceptable to the Court.”]

[Update, 6:30 p.m.: Judge Vargas moved the hearing to 2:30 p.m. ET June 22.

The briefing schedule also has been extended accordingly.]

An earlier lawsuit, covered by The Advocate, was also filed by patients of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford on May 27 in the Northern District of California. Represented by National Center for LGBTQ Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, along with Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, the lawsuit differs from this week’s lawsuit because it only names the hospital as a defendant. This subpoena was also issued on May 6 in the Northern District of Texas with a return date of June 10.

The patients filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and arguments supporting the request, the hospital responded on June 3, and U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts set a hearing on the TRO motion for 10:00 a.m. PT Friday via Zoom.3

Despite all of this action, it is not clear what — if any — action is being sought regarding any other possible grand jury subpoenas.

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The grand jury?

All of which brings us back to Texas and the potential grand jury investigation.

It is not clear what has already happened, what all is being sought, and what the aims of the investigation would be.

Much of the public information known about the involvement of the Northern District of Texas in this investigation beyond a handful of court filings and the NYU Langone subpoena itself came in a May 12 hearing before U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Rhode Island as part of the Rhode Island Child Advocate’s effort to quash the Rhode Island Hospital subpoena after news of O’Connor’s order in Texas was made public.

At that hearing, DOJ’s Brantley Mayers was asked when Main Justice began communicating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas about the investigation.

The speed with which DOJ’s approach morphed became clear in the exchange that followed as McElroy; Mayers, a lawyer in his first year of litigating; and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jordan Campbell, a more senior DOJ lawyer with a private practice history of anti-trans litigation who was sitting at counsel’s table at the hearing.

Although Mayers said the first discussion with the Texas office about the investigation was in mid-March, he and Campbell made clear that the decision to file the motion to enforce the subpoena was not made — or drafted — until the closing days of April immediately preceding the April 30 filing of that motion.

By a week later, the grand jury subpoena — at least the NYU Langone one — had also been obtained and issued. Although NYU Langone stated that it received the subpoena on May 7, it is dated May 6.

After having provided no information beyond a bare assertion of any connection to the Northern District of Texas in its April 30 motion to enforce the Rhode Island Hospital subpoena, when the hospital filed a motion on May 6 before O’Connor to stay the order, DOJ responded on May 8 by including an ex parte (meaning, only provided to the judge) declaration from Lisa Hsiao, the acting director of DOJ’s newly formed Enforcement & Affirmative Litigation Branch. In it, she apparently provided information that “the ‘investigation is being carried on’ in this district,” as DOJ told O’Connor in its public filing.

DOJ continued:

Before McElroy, however, Mayers made clear the limits of what is known publicly when she asked about “the fact of a grand jury” in Texas:

There are a few reasons why Mayers could have made these comments. First, there is Mayers’s inexperience. As Law Dork has noted previously, McElroy repeatedly highlighted that reality at the hearing — often in the context of questioning DOJ’s decision to put him up there. Second, and relatedly, this could be a result of Mayers’s efforts to adhere to grand jury secrecy rules.

Third, however, there also is the possibility that “a grand jury” — as McElroy had put it in her question — had not yet done anything at that point. A grand jury subpoena does not require judicial or grand jury approval. The NYU Langone grand jury subpoena was issued by the clerk of court upon the request of an assistant U.S. attorney.

In other words, we know little to nothing about what any grand jury has done — if it has done anything — regarding this alleged investigation.

That is set to change at 9 a.m. CT Wednesday, June 10, when — as of now — NYU Langone is to bring the subpoenaed documents to the grand jury room in the federal courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees used the shadow docket on Tuesday to dramatically expand the scope and effect of April’s Louisiana v. Callais Voting Rights Act decision — using a challenge over Alabama’s congressional map to make it all but impossible in practice to successfully challenge any map for diluting the votes of or even intentionally discriminating against minority voters.

The unsigned, per curiam opinion will allow Alabama to use a map that has twice been blocked — both before and since the Callais decision — under both Section 2 of the VRA and the Fourteenth Amendment. The map would eliminate one of two majority-Black districts in the state — itself a creation of the long-running litigation.

Tuesday’s decision was issued over a strong dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the Democratic appointees.

“[J]ust as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor wrote. “Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”

Although the April Callais case was primarily about the “effects test“ 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, Tuesday’s order transformed that decision into an all-encompassing ruling that ends the use of the VRA — or, apparently, the Fourteenth Amendment — to protect minority voters from having their voices shut out of elections through discriminatory redistricting.

Back in April while ending the effects test, Justice Sam Alito insisted that “§2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.“

On Tuesday, on the shadow docket, with no names attached, the same six justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Alito, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — allowed a fundamentally different principle to take hold.

“In Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U. S. ___ (2026), to resolve the tension between vote-dilution claims under §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and our colorblind Constitution, we updated the standards for §2 liability established by Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986),” the court stated.

The word “colorblind” did not appear once in Alito’s 37-page opinion for the court in Callais or even in Thomas’s two-page concurrence. For that matter, it also did not appear once in Kagan’s 48-page dissent.

But, on Tuesday, that is what the court retroactively shifted the April 29 decision into meaning.

The issue was back at the Supreme Court in the wake of the Callais decision because of the Supreme Court’s own post-Callais action in the Alabama case — which it had been holding since 2025. Following Callais, the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court vacated the earlier injunction issued blocking the Alabama map and sent the case back to the lower court to reconsider the case in light of Callais. The lower court did so and — given that there was finding of intentional discrimination in the Alabama case — still found the injunction against the use of Alabama’s map to be proper.

Alabama immediately went back to the Supreme Court, bringing us to Tuesday’s order.

With the supermajority’s newly expanded understanding of Callais, the unsigned court opinion declared that Alabama “is likely to succeed on the merits as to both claims“ — both the VRA claim and the Fourteenth Amendment claim. In one paragraph, the court essentially ended civil rights redistricting protections:

In dissent, Sotomayor — who also authored the dissent when the majority sent the Alabama case back down after Callais — was both blunt and comprehensive.

“This is now the third time these cases have come before the Court. See Merrill v. Milligan, 595 U. S. ___ (2022); Allen v. Milligan, 599 U. S. 1 (2023); Allen v. Caster, 608 U. S. ___ (2026). Each turn reveals just how unconscionable the Court’s action is today,“ she wrote.

After detailing the history and the state’s recent actions, Sotomayor declared that “the State has no legitimate interest in enforcing an unconstitutional map, while vast harms will likely arise from upending the status quo, sowing chaos in Alabama, and rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship.“

Of course, though, that’s exectly what the majority did on Tuesday — if not intended when it sent the case back after Callais.

Sotomayor went on to detail how Alabama officials worked to avert and ignore court rulings in the ongoing restricting case, as well as how the district court “did not clearly err when concluding that Alabama acted with discriminatory purpose” and “more than adequately accounted for the presumption of legislative good faith.” Specifically, she continued:

The reason the District Court found intentional discrimination even after affording such deference to the Alabama Legislature is simple: The record is crystal clear. Even if Alabama may have unintentionally drawn the first racially discriminatory map, when it later adopted redistricting criteria that made it mathematically impossible to remedy racial discrimination, the District Court drew the obvious (and certainly not implausible) inference that Alabama intended to discriminate. If the District Court clearly erred by doing so, then there is no realistic case in which the presumption of legislative good faith can ever be rebutted.

That, it appears, is what the majority intended with Tuesday’s shadow docket order. Not just for Alabama and now, but for the United States going forward.

In addition to the majority’s degradation of voting rights with Tuesday’s order, Sotomayor also noted the broader problems of the order:

In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public. It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.

The Republican appointee supermajority on the Supreme Court did corrode the rule of law on Tuesday, debasing not just the “democratic process” but also the court by short-circuiting its precious processes and undermining its legitimacy — all to let Alabama kick a Black person out of Congress.

That is what “our colorblind Constitution” apparently requires under Chief Justice John Roberts’s leadership.

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held on a 2-1 vote that unconstitutional “animus-filled reasons” motivated the Trump administration’s policy barring transgender people from the military.

“Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line—’who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’—we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth Policy,” Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a portion of his opinion joined by Judge Judith Rogers.

On that key front, Judge Justin Walker dissented, writing that such decisions are, by and large, left to the executive and legislative branches.

The three judges split three ways on the remedy in this preliminary injunction appeal, with Rogers voting to uphold the injunction blocking the policy in whole and Walker voting to end the injunction in whole. Wilkins cast the decisive middle vote, protecting current trans service members from separation but ending the injunction’s protections for trans would-be service members during litigation.

“[W]e affirm the preliminary injunction as it pertains to the Hegseth Policy for current servicemembers, but we vacate the preliminary injunction with respect to the provisions of the Hegseth Policy applicable to those persons seeking to enlist in the military,“ Wilkins wrote.

Additionally, and in light of the Supreme Court’s Trump v. CASA decision from last term, the court further limited the so-called “universal” injunction entered by the district court to an injunction only covering the named service members who sued.

In addition to the disagreements from Walker, a Trump appointee, on the merits, he also argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s unreasoned shadow docket decision blocking a similar injunction during appeals in a different challenge to the military policy should “inform“ the outcome here. The majority, however, noted that the lack of explanation from the Supreme Court in that case prevents any controlling reading of that order and that the stay there “could have been based on impropriety of the universal nature of the injunction.“

Monday’s decision did not go into effect immediately, and the preliminary injunction had earlier been stayed pending this appellate decision. As it often does, the court has ordered that the mandate — formally sending the case back to the district court — will not issue until after the time passes for either party to seek en banc review and the resolution of any en banc petition.

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The ruling in depth

Explaining the animus that Wilkins and Rogers found to form the foundation of the policy, Wilkins went back to the opening days of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

“In sum, the Commander-in-Chief declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity,” he explained. “To add insult, the President labeled transgender persons as dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars.“

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed up accordingly. “The extirpation from the military of all persons with a ‘false gender identity’ was Secretary Hegseth’s explicit goal. Targeting persons with a history of gender dysphoria was merely the means of achieving that end.”

Reviewing the applicable precedents, Wilkins held that the proper test for analyzing a constitutional challenge to a military regulation looks like this:

Even in light of U.S. v. Skrmetti — as to which he held the Hegseth policy had “many distinctions” from the Tennessee law at issue there — Wilkins held that, under this test, “the Hegseth Policy does not classify whether persons are eligible to serve in the military in a reasonable and evenhanded manner.“

Wilkins went on to explain how the Hegseth policy “contains classifications that are not sufficiently related to a legitimate government interest“; is “grounded, at least in part, on archaic and overbroad generalizations about sex“; and “does not treat, where possible, similarly situated persons in a similar fashion.”

In that discussion, Wilkins at one point stated that “the Hegseth Policy is a prototypical example of a sex-based classification created ‘reflexively and not for any considered reason,’ in direct contrast to the Congressional action that the Court upheld” in a challenge to male-only draft registration.

Also notable for a federal policy being defended by the Justice Department was the number of times Wilkins noted that the Trump administration simply provided no response to an points raised by the transgender plaintiffs — even, Wilkins wrote, waiving some arguments.

In discussing whether the policy treats similarly treated people similarly, Wilkins noted that “servicemembers with every other medical condition receive an individualized review of their circumstances to determine if they can continue to serve—except if they have gender dysphoria.“

He continued:

Plaintiff-Appellees pointed out this abnormal treatment of gender dysphoria in their brief, see Appellees’ Br. at 25, and Appellants made no response in reply.

Appellants have therefore conceded that persons with a history of gender dysphoria are not treated the same as similarly situated individuals.

Finally, and most importantly, Wilkins, joined by Rogers, concluded that the policy “contains classifications that are based on invidious discrimination.“

This is key. Wilkins explained:

For Walker, a Trump appointee, this was almost all an improper inquiry by the courts into a “professional military judgment” carried out by the executive branch:

While Wilkins acknowledged that the courts give “great deference” to the military “concerning the relative importance of a particular military interest,“ he countered that the dissent was wrong about the implications of that deference, writing that it “does not mean … our role is transformed into that of a judicial rubber stamp.”

In this context, moreover, Wilkins wrote, in conclusion, that this is about the foundational nature of equal protection guarantees.

“If we are at the point where invidious reasons that were expressly given for a classification can be completely ignored and replaced with our imagined non-invidious reasons, then equal protection jurisprudence has truly become bankrupt.“

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Three views on the interim remedy

Despite that, when it came to the other factors for granting a preliminary injunction, Wilkins split with Rogers, a Clinton appointee.

Wilkins wrote that “Plaintiff-Appellees who seek admission to the military have been deprived of constitutional freedoms,” but that “the harms and equities of their situations are not identical to those of persons already serving.“ Specifically, he wrote that those “seeking admission to the military can still obtain full relief later, following a final adjudication on the merits,” while “it is not clear how easily [those service members facing expulsion] can be reinstated and made whole.“ Additionally, he noted that there were different realities for the claimed national security harms because there was a “demonstrated” lack of harm from those currently serving but only “a predictive judgment“ as to those wishing to join the military, including as to “potential[] … increased risk” relating to health factors.

Those differences, he wrote, meant that “the District Court was obligated to consider separately the balance of equities and public interest for those who were already serving in the military as compared to those who are seeking to enlist.“

For her part, Rogers argued that Wilkins’s analysis misapplied the proper standard for reviewing the district court’s injunction. Under “the abuse of discretion standard,” she wrote, “Given the uncontested record evidence and the nature of this court’s review for abuse of discretion, the district court did not abuse its discretion in enjoining the Hegseth Policy on accession.“

Going further, she added, “No record evidence confirms the medical speculation offered by Judge Wilkins. So far, then, the government has not presented a basis for this court, upon review for abuse of discretion, to vacate the injunction on accession ….”

Although Wilkins and Walker, then, both were in agreement as to vacating the preliminary injunction regarding those seeking to join the military, Walker’s reasoning was wholly different given that he disagreed about the majority’s legal reasoning and its animus finding.

“The judiciary’s lack of institutional competence explains why judges should defer to the political branches in matters bearing on military-wide force composition, training, discipline, and readiness; constitutional structure explains why we must,” he wrote, later noting that “in every binding precedent identified by the plaintiffs regarding the constitutionality of internal military matters like military-wide preparedness, the military won.”

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Walker’s parting thoughts

In his dissenting conclusion, Walker waxed poetic, including quoting Justice Robert Jackson about the limits of judicial oversight of the military.

There’s just one problem. Literally one. The case Walker was quoting was not about a “system-wide military judgment[]” at all. It was, Jackson made explicitly clear, about one man’s claim — in the context of a habeas corpus petition — regarding the role to which he was being assigned within the military.

“Petitioner presents a novel case,“ Jackson wrote in opening the court’s 1953 decision in Orloff v. Willoughby about Orloff’s refusal to say whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, being assigned a noncommissioned military role because of that despite being a doctor called up under a special law for such conscription, and suing over being assigned that noncommissioned role.

In the paragraph immediately before the one quoted by Walker, Jackson wrote of the micromanaging that Orloff’s case would have been seeking: “[W]e are convinced that it is not within the power of this Court by habeas corpus to determine whether specific assignments to duty fall within the basic classification of petitioner.“

Of course, much has been decided since then to generalize that discussion in Orloff, but Walker’s disingenuous use of Jackson’s words — literally applying them to a very different context in which they were used — deserves note.

Later in the very paragraph from which Walker quoted, in fact, Jackson acknowledged that, while the judiciary has to be “scrupulous not to interfere with legitimate Army matters,“ it does have a role, noting that “the courts have found occasion to determine whether one has been lawfully inducted and is therefore within the jurisdiction of the Army and subject to its orders.“

Regardless of that, though, Walker was dissenting on that front on Monday.

Instead, Wilkins wrote for the court that it was not particularly difficult to conclude that what has happened here was not legitimate.

“It is neither conceivable nor reasonable to conclude that the President acted for reasons other than those he expressly gave in the Executive Order, nor is it conceivable or reasonable to conclude that the Secretary acted for reasons other than the ones he expressly gave when promulgating the Hegseth Policy,” Wilkins wrote in concluding that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their argument that “the Hegseth Policy violates the Equal Protection Clause.“

We are entering June and, with it, the U.S. Supreme Court’s increased pace at finalizing and releasing its remaining decisions. Although the court has no set deadline for doing so, it generally announces decisions in all argued cases by the end of June — with several of the key decisions usually handed down in the final days.

By the time all of that is done, we will have a better idea of the answer to the question I wrote this past fall would be the question of this term: Whether the U.S. Supreme Court has any intention of constraining President Donald Trump in any meaningful way in his efforts to take powers from both the judicial and legislative branches for himself.

Even the best-case scenario at this point would not be a sign of a healthy court interested in protecting constitutional rights — and we’re likely to get something less than that best-case scenario. And yet, as with Trump’s tariffs, there is likely to be some pushback against the most extreme efforts by Trump to ignore the constitutional and statutory limits that have been placed on the president.

Should that pushback come to pass — most notably in the cases over Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship and fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook — it will be both necessary and good.

But, even if Trump loses both of those cases, the Supreme Court will likely — in cases already decided and yet to have been decided — be taking steps to give Trump more power than the Supreme Court has held appropriate for the president since the Great Depression.

In the other firing case, over Trump’s effort to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are likely overturn Humphrey’s Executor, a 90-year-old precedent upholding the protections against political firings of commissioners of the FTC that Congress put in place when creating the commission.

The decision would be a watershed ruling, more accurately described as tearing apart the dam that has enabled expertise in government as the federal government has expanded and become more complicated — in matters of the economy, but also science, health and safety, and more.

It is a question that has been debated since the constitutional convention and in the first Congress, as Law Dork has covered previously. It is a question the contours of which were largely defined by the Supreme Court for the past 100 years in Humphrey’s Executor and a case decided a decade earlier.

It is a question that Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority of today might upend one morning in June.

We will all face — and have to deal with — the consequences.

In addition to those three decisions still to come, we are entering June with 23 other cases remaining.

They include:

• The challenges to West Virginia and Idaho’s bans on transgender women playing on women’s sports teams in schools, which the justices appeared poised to uphold at arguments in January.

• Three key immigration cases: Challenges to the Trump administration’s effort to end temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria were heard at the last day of arguments in April, and an earlier-heard case raising questions over a policy that could dramatically limit the ability to bring asylum claims.

• Two gun cases: one over Hawaii’s restrictions on concealed carry on private property open to the public and another over a federal law barring firearm possession by any person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”

• Two more election law cases (beyond the Voting Rights Act decision already handed down): one over limits on coordinated party expenditures and another over whether states are preempted by federal law from accepting ballots after Election Day that were mailed by then.

• A Fourth Amendment challenge to geofence warrants.

Law Dork will have coverage of all of this and more over the month of June. The next decisions are expected Thursday.

Trump’s slush fund “settlement” gets court scrutiny

The effort by dozens of former federal judges to reopen President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service has some, at least initial, traction from the judge who had been overseeing the case.

After the claimed “settlement” of the lawsuit included the creation of the nearly $2 billion “Anti-Weaponization“ slush fund, the former judges filed a motion on May 27 with U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams seeking an order reopening the case.

“To be clear, the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified,“ the motion argued. “That is because the Acting Attorney General’s Order creating the Anti-Weaponization Fund identified the Judgment Fund, 31 U.S.C. § 1304, and the Attorney General’s authority to enter “compromise settlements” under 28 U.S.C. § 2414, as the basis for the creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Both of those authorities require the existence of a legitimate litigation and not, as here, one that is collusive, feigned, or fraudulent.“

In an order issued on May 29, Williams, an Obama appointee, noted that “movants submit that the settlement ‘is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.’“ As such, she ordered the plaintiffs — Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization — to respond to the former judges’ motion and their “grievous allegations,” including “the charges of collusion” and fraud on the court, by June 12:

In other words, yes, briefing will be complete — and either arguments could be scheduled or a decision could be issued — as the Supreme Court is reaching its peak decision time — and as the Trump White House is readying for whatever its America 250 plans will look like by then.

Note: This scrutiny of the “settlement” is in addition to the lawsuit filed in Virginia challenging the fund itself. As Politico covered, that litigation led to a temporary order issued May 29 blocking officials from taking actions advancing the fund for now.

Closing my tabs

For those who don’t know what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.

This Sunday, these are the tabs I am closing:

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On Friday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper blocked, for now, the Trump administration’s plans to close the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years and ordered the center to — quite literally — take President Donald Trump’s name off of the building.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper, an Obama appointee, wrote of the federal law establishing the Kennedy Center in his 94-page opinion. In issuing a permanent injunction in the lawsuit brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, Cooper stopped the renaming absent congressional action.

Additionally, the addition of Trump’s name to the building is to be physically removed from the building within 14 days, per Cooper’s order issued along with his opinion:

It was a blunt reminder of the powers and roles of all three branches of our federal government. As such, yes, Trump has reacted angrily and dramatically.

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But first, Cooper’s ruling.

Cooper also found that the Trump administration-reconstituted board improperly voted to take away the voting rights of Beatty, an Ohio congresswoman, and other ex officio members.

“The Center’s organic statute makes no distinction between the powers of general and ex officio trustees,“ he wrote of the underlying law. “Nothing in the statute permits the Board to discriminate categorically between the two as to fundamental trustee rights. And stripping ex officio trustees of their voting rights runs afoul of common-law trust principles incorporated into the statute, principles which presumptively place trustees on equal footing when it comes to participating in the trust’s administration.”

As such, Cooper also permanently enjoined the board from giving effect to the efforts to make ex officio members non-voting members absent congressional action.

As to the closure, however, Beatty was only seeking a preliminary injunction at this time — an order stopping closure while the lawsuit proceeds. As such, the key determination is whether Beatty is likely to succeed in his lawsuit on this front — and Cooper found that she was.

“[T]he Congresswoman is likely to succeed on her claim that the Board violated its fiduciary duty in approving the closure plan at the March 16 Board meeting,“ he wrote. “Even accepting, for the purpose of this final [discussion], that the Board has the discretion to close the Kennedy Center for some period of time without Congressional or other regulatory approval, the evidence in the record strongly suggests that the Board’s decision to do so here was an abuse of discretion.“

When it came to assessing whether the board properly considered what its legal duties were as it related to the closure decision, Cooper noted that the board’s reliance on discussions from Matt Floca — the former vice president for Facilities and Operations at the Kennedy Center who became the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer after the departure of Ric Grenell — was likely insufficient because, “for all his background in project management and construction,” Floca “is no legal expert.“

Later, Cooper added, “[B]y his own admission, Floca was focused solely on the ‘needs of the building’; arts programming was simply ‘not a factor.’ He considered only the benefits of full closure and none of the costs.“

Considering the evidence, Cooper concluded:

[T]he one-sidedness of Floca’s approach and resulting presentation to the Board are plain. Whatever “analysis” Floca undertook in advance of February—evidence of which is nonexistent apart from his own description—entirely sidelined programming concerns. And critically, he is no expert in arts management. He had served in the role of Kennedy Center Executive Director for all of a few minutes before suggesting that the institution be shut down for years. … The evidence before the Court contradicts a conclusion that the Board’s reliance on Floca’s recommendation alone was reasonable under the circumstances.

Ultimately, Cooper blocked the closure with two caveats.

He granted a preliminary injunction “that prohibits the Board from implementing its March 16 decision to ‘conduct an orderly wind-down of programming activities through the Spring of 2026, and close [the Center’s] doors entirely effective July 6, 2026.’“

But, he also noted that “this preliminary relief should not be understood to enjoin the necessary maintenance and repair work that Congress authorized last June through its [$257 million repair] appropriation.“

Then, and more importantly for the situation going forward, Cooper also noted:

Second, although the Board may not take steps to operationalize the March 16 decision, this ruling does not mean that it is necessarily barred from closing the Kennedy Center while renovations take place. Beatty has only shown a likelihood of success on her claim that the Board acted imprudently in reaching a closure decision based on the circumstances of that vote. The Court is not persuaded that the closure is categorically unwarranted or impermissible under the U.S. Code. The Court’s preliminary injunction thus does not bar the Board from reconsidering the closure issue in a prudent manner.

In other words, if the board — with its full voting membership — can find a proper path toward closure, that remains a possibility.

As expected, Trump took the ruling in the careful spirit with which it was offered.

No. No, he did not.

“Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!” Trump wrote in a Truth social post that claimed he is “going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”

In other words, Trump, who has sought to take over Congress’s powers during his second administration, is now seeking to “transfer” the literal execution of the laws to the legislature.

That is not how any of this works.

With that, and for now, it’s another weekend in America.

For the second time in two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling tossing out a death sentence. Again, it was a 5-4 decision.

In both cases, the Democratic appointees — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — were joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in voting to vacate a death sentence imposed decades earlier. In both cases, Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch voted to uphold the death sentence.

On Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined Kavanaugh’s opinion for the court holding that the Mississippi Supreme Court and, later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit got the law wrong in Terry Pitchford’s challenge over the prosecutor’s decision to remove four of five Black potential jurors from the jury in Pitchford’s murder trial. Roberts had joined Alito’s dissent in last week’s decision in a case about standards for judging intellectual disability.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who provided the fifth vote tossing out Joseph Clifton Smith’s death sentence last week, joined Gorsuch’s dissent in Thursday’s decision in Pitchford’s case.

First, it is important to note, as Kavanaugh did, that Pitchford, then 18, did not fire the “fatal shots” in the robbery where Pitchford’s accomplice, then 16, shot and killed the store owner. His accomplice, however, “reached a plea agreement and received a 20-year sentence for the homicide.” Pitchford, however, was charged with capital murder, convicted, and sentenced to death.

It was Kavanaugh’s second majority opinion upholding the protection of what is referred to as a Batson challenge after the 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, establishing that a prosecutor cannot remove a juror solely on the basis of race. Kavanaugh’s first such opinion, Flowers v. Mississippi, came in his first term on the court in 2019.

On Thursday, as was clear at arguments, Kavanaugh was not buying Mississippi’s arguments, accepted by the Mississippi Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit, that Pitchford had “waived” his Batson argument.

Specifically addressing the third step of the Batson inquiry — when a defendant can rebut the race-neutral reasons given by a prosecutor (at the second step) to counter the prima facie showing of the defendant that a juror was excluded based on race (at step one) — Kavanaugh wrote:

[T]he [Mississippi] trial court did not afford Pitchford’s counsel a sufficient opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s proffered race-neutral reasons for striking the four black jurors and never determined whether the prosecutor’s stated reasons were pretextual. And as the U. S. District Court further stated [in Pitchford’s habeas case], the Mississippi Supreme Court’s conclusion that Pitchford waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s proffered race-neutral reasons was unreasonable.

Simplifying things, Kavanaugh later wrote:

After a prosecutor asserts race-neutral reasons for a peremptory strike, the defense counsel must at least have an opportunity to argue that the asserted race-neutral reasons were not the actual reasons—that is, the reasons were pretextual.

That is the standard.

Gorsuch dissented, focusing on the restrictions put in place by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) as to when federal courts can weigh in on state court decisions, but essentially agreed with Mississippi’s argument that the defense lawyer’s repeated spoken and written efforts to preserve Pitchford’s Batson objection did not suffice to preserve an argument that the prosecutor’s race-neutral reasons for excluding the jurors were pretextual.

Gorsuch wrote in dissent:

Compare that with Kavanuagh’s discussion for the court:

More generally, Kavanaugh wrote, “The bottom line: The State’s argument—that Pitchford preserved his Batson objection but nonetheless somehow waived his Batson pretext argument—does not make much sense and is not a reasonable reading of this record.“

There are two other points that I would like to highlight — signaling Gorsuch’s continued lockstep movement with Thomas and Alito on capital punishment.

In describing the case, Gorsuch wrote:

In 2004, Terry Pitchford and an accomplice robbed a store in Mississippi. At the end of it, the store’s owner, Reuben Britt, lay dead. Pitchford v. State, 45 So. 3d 216, 222–223 (Miss. 2010) (en banc).

At the Fifth Circuit, one of the country’s most far-right judges, Judge Kyle Duncan, wrote the opinion that was overturned on Thursday. Even he was less disingenuous in his characterization of the case:

A Mississippi jury convicted Pitchford of capital murder in 2006 for participating in an armed robbery during which the store owner, Reuben Britt, was shot to death by Pitchford’s accomplice. Pitchford v. State, 45 So. 3d 216, 222–23 (Miss. 2010).

They are literally citing to the same pages of the same opinion. Even the state, in its Supreme Court brief, admitted that Pitchford’s accomplice “kill[ed]” the shop owner.

Finally, at the conclusion of Gorsuch’s dissent, he claimed, “the Court issues a narrow judgment, holding only that Mr. Pitchford did not waive a step three Batson argument without dictating what further proceedings may be appropriate on remand consistent with §2254.“

This is false.

Kavanaugh — for the court — wrote much more in the penultimate paragraph of the opinion:

In light of the entire record in this case, we agree with the U. S. District Court that the Mississippi Supreme Court unreasonably applied the clearly established Batson precedents and unreasonably determined that Pitchford waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s asserted race-neutral reasons for the peremptory strikes of four black prospective jurors. 28 U. S. C. §§2254(d)(1), (2).

That is, as Kavanaugh stated earlier, the precise standard to obtain relief under AEDPA. And the district court here concluded its decision as follows:

Pitchford's petition for a writ of habeas corpus as to this claim is GRANTED. Pitchford's capital murder conviction and death sentence are hereby vacated, and the matter is remanded to the State of Mississippi for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion. The State of Mississippi must afford Pitchford a new trial within 180 days of the date of this order, otherwise it must release Pitchford from custody.

The majority held that the district court — not the Mississippi Supreme Court or the Fifth Circuit — was correct, and that result is where Pitchford’s case is directed to go from here, regardless of Gorsuch’s comment in closing his dissent.

On Wednesday morning, the Justice Department went to court to advance an argument that, if accepted, would all but erase the existence of transgender people in the law.

The request before the court from several transgender people in federal prison is for an order to block the Trump administration’s policy to move trans women to men’s facilities and “taper” all trans people’s hormone treatment — with an admitted goal of ending its provision to trans people in prison altogether.

The argument has not gotten as much attention as other cases, dealing as it does with trans people in prison. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, there are roughly 1,000 trans people in federal prison, so this is a significant population being affected in and of itself.

Barely beneath the surface, however, was a much more broad and consequential argument from DOJ — moving beyond even DOJ’s growing attack on care for trans minors.

“The pendulum has swung,” DOJ’s Jared Littman told U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of what he characterized as a growing opposition to the provision of gender-affirming medical care for trans people of all ages.

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Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, was skeptical of Littman’s arguments. He has repeatedly issued temporary restraining orders and then preliminary injunctions blocking the Trump administration’s anti-trans efforts in federal prisons (including holding a contempt hearing) and did so again with a preliminary injunction order on Tuesday.

Far quieter in his older age, the judge who has regularly sparred with the executive branch over his nearly 40 years on the bench still maintains a strong command of his courtroom on the sixth floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in D.C.

When Littman insisted that the plaintiffs’ lawyer, the ACLU of D.C.’s Michael Perloff, was incorrect to call the Federal Bureau of Prisons’s policy a “categorical ban,” Lamberth essentially told Littman that that was how he read the policy himself.

The best Littman could come back with is that the policy requires “individualized tapering bans,” but Lamberth pushed back, and eventually Littman acknowledged that the end goal of the policy is discontinuing hormone therapy for any of the roughly 600 trans federal inmates on hormones.

It was the actual legal arguments advanced by DOJ on Wednesday, however, that signal how far the administration appears ready to go to attack not just those 600 people’s medical treatment but any trans people’s medical care and broader legal recognition.

Highlighting the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans minors, U.S. v. Skrmetti, DOJ earlier this month in its brief argued:

Plaintiffs’ Equal Protection claim fails because the 2026 Policy “does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other.” United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. 495, 514–15 (2025). Under the Policy, “no [inmate] may be administered . . . hormones [absent certain circumstances unrelated to an inmate’s sex, or provided social accommodations or sex trait modification surgery] to treat gender dysphoria.” Id. at 515.

Littman was more succinct — and blunt — on Wednesday.

“This is just an extension of what the court said in Skrmetti,” he told Lamberth.

In its briefing, DOJ went on to argue that “the 2026 Policy does not, in the words of Skrmetti, ‘prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other’ but instead turns on ‘the underlying medical concern the treatment is intended to address,’ i.e., gender dysphoria.”

Echoing, while expanding, Chief Justice John Roberts’s disingenuous majority opinion from Skrmetti, DOJ now has made clear that it views — and plans to use — Skrmetti as a free-for-all to go after trans people of all ages by denying that, so far as the law is concerned, trans people exist at all.

Using Roberts’s logic, DOJ’s argument would mean that virtually any anti-trans law or policy can be reconfigured to make it neither a sex-based classification nor a trans-status-based classification:

As the Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit have recognized, not all trans-identifying individuals have gender dysphoria. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. at 502; Talbott v. United States, No. 25-5087, 2025 WL 3533344, at *2 (D.C. Cir. Dec. 9, 2025); Doe 2 v. Shanahan, 755 F. App’x 19, 24 (D.C. Cir. 2019). The classification is thus not based on trans-identifying status. See Skrmetti, 605 U.S. at 514–15 ….

As such, DOJ argued that rational basis applies and that BOP clearly had legitimate reasons for its policy.

It’s not just the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. DOJ would expand Skrmetti’s anti-trans reasoning to the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishments:

BOP’s decision to choose one side of the “fierce scientific and policy debates” about gender dysphoria treatment, Skrmetti, 605 U.S. at 525, does not offend the Eighth Amendment just as surely as the Tennessee law banning certain types of treatment for gender dysphoria at issue in Skrmetti did not offend the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The arguments are unlikely to work before Lamberth, but the case will soon be back before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where Lamberth’s initial rulings faced more scrutiny and the court sent the case back for more individualized development. After that, possibly, the case could find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. At that point, DOJ would have a far more receptive audience judging by Roberts’s Skrmetti decision for the court (and other Republican appointees’ writings in that case).

“It is controverted.“

After Perloff had argued to Lamberth about the uncontroverted view of medical associations about the value of gender-affirming medical care, Littman repeatedly insisted that wasn’t true — primarily citing a handful of court opinions saying so and relying on Trump administration-related policy developments.

“It is controverted,” Littman insisted.

Although that sounded weak on Wednesday, that was enough for Roberts when rational basis was applied to the law at issue in Skrmetti. “Tennessee concluded that there is an ongoing debate among medical experts,“ he wrote.1 In other words, manufactured debate is still a debate.

DOJ appears to be ready and willing to take all of the least coherent and defensible parts of Roberts’s Skrmetti opinion, expand them, and then apply them in new and varied areas of the law to pull back trans people’s rights.

Jared Littman gave a preview of how far that could go on Wednesday.

The Justice Department’s failure to seek — let alone do — justice in the second Trump administration was on full display Tuesday in a key legal filing submitted in the days following two high-profile prosecutions being ended following allegations of inappropriate DOJ actions.

Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center — facing an indictment unsealed a month ago — filed a motion Tuesday to have the case against the nonprofit civil rights organization dismissed because, they argued, the indictment represents an impermissible, unconstitutional vindictive prosecution.

“The Administration’s sustained campaign against civil rights organizations generally and against the SPLC specifically, particularly when considered in combination with the irregularities of this prosecution, are sufficient to establish a violation of due process,” the lawyers — including high-profile criminal defense lawyer Abbe Lowell — argued in an accompanying memorandum of law.

Alternatively, they argued that “should the Court conclude that the SPLC has not yet met its burden to prove either actual or presumptive vindictive prosecution, it has met the burden to require discovery, and the Court should order that and an evidentiary hearing into the government’s motive and procedures in bringing this case.”

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In advancing that alternative argument, the lawyers pointed, in part, to another court’s approach in DOJ’s criminal case brought against Kilmar Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, noting, “That was the process used by the court in the Abrego Garcia case.“

After seeing that evidence, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed the criminal case against Abrego Garcia on May 22, finding an improper vindictive prosecution there — “an abuse of prosecuting power,” he wrote.

Crenshaw noted in his opinion that “[t]he objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” Specifically, he added, “The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation.“

SPLC reiterated that 86-year-old warning from then-Attorney General Robert Jackson in Tuesday’s motion:

In a now famous 1940 speech by Attorney General Robert Jackson to federal prosecutors, he cautioned that because a prosecutor “can choose his defendants, therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” That is exactly what happened here.

It wasn’t only Abrego Garcia’s case in the past week that highlighted DOJ’s current failings — or that was highlighted by the SPLC legal team on Tuesday.

On May 21, as the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jon Seidel wrote, “Chicago’s top federal prosecutor announced the permanent dismissal Thursday of charges against the remaining members of the ‘Broadview Six’ [ICE protestors] in a stunning hearing that revealed apparent misconduct by his staff before a grand jury during Operation Midway Blitz.“

The alarming developments — detailed more clearly after the later release of the transcript from a closed hearing held the morning of the dismissal decision that day — shone a bright light on how removed the DOJ of today is from the “presumption of regularity” usually afforded to government lawyers.

On Tuesday, The New York Times’s Alan Feuer published an in-depth report on how, as he put it, DOJ in the second Trump administration “has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago” — with the “Broadview Six” grand jury questions front and center.

In their Tuesday motion, SPLC’s lawyers noted that, like in the since-dismissed “Broadview Six” case, SPLC is seeking disclosure of the grand jury proceeding transcript.

The SPLC motion to dismiss the case detailed already-known comments from President Donald Trump; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche; FBI Director Kash Patel; and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division to make the case that the indictment “had nothing to do with the SPLC breaking the law; it had everything to do with the SPLC’s perceived political leaning.“

And yes, there is a tweet (Truth social post):

In short, and along with other evidence, SPLC argued, “The Court need not look far to see the direct evidence of the government’s vindictive motive to punish the SPLC for engaging in constitutionally protected speech, expression, and political activity.“

There are other cases from the Trump administration that SPLC’s lawyers point to as legal support for their argument — but also as a subtle reminder of all of the ways in which people have argued the Trump administration has engaged in vindictive prosecutions.

They pointed to the prosecution of Jan Carey for burning a flag in Lafayette Park after Trump directed DOJ to, as U.S. District Judge James Boasberg put it in January, “prosecute anyone who engages in the protected speech of burning the American flag.“ After Boasberg allowed Carey’s vindictive prosecution argument to proceed to discovery, DOJ dismissed the case.

They also pointed to an April decision in Harvard Medical School researcher Kseniia Petrova’s case over the Trump administration’s detention of her and effort to deport her to Russia after she did not declare the frog embryos she brought with her on a flight from Paris, France. In the April decision, and relevant to the SPLC case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Gail Dein allowed discovery “in connection with the defendant’s contemplated claims of vindictive and selective criminal prosecution.“ (DOJ has appealed that decision to U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin.)

In concluding the arguments filed Tuesday, however, the lawyers brought it back to the simple reality of this case.

“At its heart, this indictment seeks to punish the SPLC for engaging in constitutionally protected speech with which the Administration disagrees,” SPLC’s lawyers wrote in closing. “The proper remedy here is dismissal of the indictment with prejudice.“

Joseph Clifton Smith will no longer face execution in Alabama following a 5-4 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday that followed years of back and forth in the courts and the nearly three decades that Smith has spent on death row for a 1997 murder.

The high court let stand rulings from two lower courts that ordered Smith’s death sentence to be vacated because the district court found him to be intellectually disabled and, as such, ineligible for the death penalty.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — the three Democratic appointees on the court — were joined by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — appointed to the court by President Donald Trump in his first term — in allowing the lower court rulings to stand and Smith’s death sentence to be vacated.

Alabama had asked the Supreme Court to reverse those lower court decisions, and though the court took up the matter, it dismissed the appeal on Thursday as having been “improvidently granted.”

Referred to as a DIG — dismissed as improvidently granted — the ruling from the high court means the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decision affirming the district court’s ruling stands. As U.S. District Judge Callie Granade concluded nearly five years ago, “[T]he Court finds that the Petitioner is intellectually disabled. Accordingly, Petitioner’s Writ of Habeas Corpus will be granted, and his death sentence will be vacated.“

Ordinarily, that would be the end of the matter. On Thursday, however, there were three opinions written in conjunction with the DIG. Each told us a bit about where things stand with the death penalty in the United States.

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First, we learned the vote of the DIG because Justice Sam Alito’s dissent was joined in whole or part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

Referencing Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision from 2002 barring the execution of the intellectually disabled, a portion of Alito’s dissent joined by the four justices stated:

Elsewhere, and also joined by all four dissenting justices, Alito wrote about the question initially taken up in the case at the high court, noting that “this Court has never explained when courts may treat multiple [IQ] scores as cumulatively dispositive“ of intellectual disability. “Our silence on this issue leaves courts without direction on how to address a recurring situation.“

Alito went on to state an opinion of the four dissenting justices — so, not for the court — that “courts and legislatures may rely on any reasonably sound method of estimating a defendant’s ‘true’ IQ.” He then went on to highlight three approaches that “appear in the APA’s Handbook of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.“

In an opinion concurring with the DIG on Thursday, however, Sotomayor, joined by Jackson, wrote, “The Court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores.“

Specifically, she explained why this was the wrong case to resolve these questions and why, in their view, the dissent’s discussion of “how courts should evaluate multiple IQ scores is incomplete and potentially misleading.“ Noting that “the litigation below did not focus on whether a precise methodology exists that courts must use,“ Sotomayor wrote that “this Court rightly concludes that it should not provide more detailed guidance beyond what this Court’s cases have previously said.“

Concluding for her and Jackson, as a counterpoint to Alito’s dissent, Sotomayor wrote:

Finally, not one to be left out, Thomas penned his own dissent on Thursday — in addition to having joined all of Alito’s dissent.

His primary reason for writing — joined by no other justice — was to complain about Atkins itself (or, really, any functional work being carried out by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments).

“Nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports Atkins,” he wrote. “It should be overruled.”

He went on to lay out the ordinary facts of death penalty litigation, then turns all of the rules and procedures involved in any complex litigation into, as Thomas characterized it, “the hopeless enterprise that this Court today shows it cannot control.” This is, simply put, Thomas’s imagination — not law. Nonetheless, he continued, laying out his case for why Atkins should be overruled and concluding with his hope that, “[i]n a future case,” the court should do so.

Despite that hope, though, Thomas was alone on that front on Thursday.

Atkins remains, and Granade’s 2021 decision granting Smith’s habeas corpus petition and vacating his death sentence because she found him to be intellectually disabled will stand.

At the same time, however, the reality of this process — the flip side of Thomas’s claimed concerns — should be noted.

Smith originally filed his habeas action before Granade, a George W. Bush appointee, more than 20 years ago, in her third year on the bench.

She has, at this point, been a senior status judge for a decade.

Two other executions before SCOTUS

Despite the action in the Alabama case, the U.S. Supreme Court denied requests to block executions scheduled for Thursday in Tennessee and Florida.

The Supreme Court denied multiple requests from Tony Carruthers to block his execution by Tennessee. There were no noted dissents.

Tennessee, however, botched the execution on Thursday morning — leading Gov. Bill Lee to issue him a one-year reprieve of execution.

According to the statement from the Tennessee Department of Correction, “the team was unable to immediately establish a backup [IV] line,” “could not find another suitable vein,“ and “was unsuccessful“ in an effort “to insert a central line.” (For more on what a central line is, read this from John Hopkins.)

The Nashville Banner’s report from Mikeie Honda Reiland, Steven Hale, and Steve Cavendish provides a much more stark — and likely more accurate — description of what actually happened Thursday morning:

“This was a tortured, botched execution. I mean, there’s no question about it,” Carruthers’ ACLU attorney Maria DeLiberato told the media. “By the grace of God, he’s still alive. But they tortured him, trying to find a vein.”

Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court, with no noted dissents, denied Richard Knight’s requests to block Florida from trying to kill him later Thursday.

Knight’s execution is set for 6:00 p.m. Thursday.

Three weeks ago, on April 29, lawyers for Rhode Island Hospital responded to an email from a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, D.C., sent the day before, asking for a conference on next steps in addressing an outstanding administrative subpoena issued by DOJ to the hospital nearly a year earlier about its provision of gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The next day, DOJ shifted tactics without even initially telling the hospital — going to court across the country to try and get an order enforcing the subpoena.

At least seven challenges to the invasive subpoenas had previously resulted in federal court rulings quashing the subpoenas or, at least, the parts of the subpoenas seeking identifiable patient information. In the wake of those losses — and as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took over the Justice Department — the strategy, as Law Dork has covered, began to shift to more aggressive tactics on multiple fronts.

The change has had at least one tangible effect already with regards to Rhode Island Hospital.

Beginning Tuesday night, at least some records responsive to the administrative subpoena were sent to a far-right federal judge in Texas who on Monday ordered the hospital to provide the records to him — although, for now, not to DOJ — while the hospital appeals his earlier ruling that the records need to be turned over to DOJ.

Any action on that earlier ruling, however, would appear to conflict with a later ruling from a federal judge in Rhode Island quashing the subpoena in full and barring DOJ from receiving any such records from the hospital — although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit late Tuesday denied a request to take further action immediately to enforce that order.

This latest dispute, which has now involved four courts across the country, as well as related discussions in court filings and before a federal judge in Rhode Island, serve as a warning for transgender people, their allies, and the parents of trans kids about how aggressively the Trump administration is acting to advance President Donald Trump’s anti-trans policies and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation of them — and where the administration could be going next in this attack.

That April 28 DOJ email to Rhode Island Hospital’s lawyers — in which David Gunn, a DOJ lawyer, referenced having been out of office for the past few weeks before asking for a conference to discuss the subpoena production — was a DOJ response to a February 4 email from lawyers from the hospital.

The hospital’s lawyer responded simply the next day: “We are happy to connect. Would Monday of next week work?”

The conference never happened because, on April 30, DOJ went to a friendly forum for them in the Northern District of Texas seeking to enforce the administrative subpoena, which, to be clear, was issued in D.C. to a Rhode Island entity. Going there meant the case had a good chance of and was, in fact, assigned to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a far-right judge with a history of anti-LGBTQ rulings.

Within hours, and before the hospital even had a chance to file any response, O’Connor granted the request — ordering the hospital to turn over the records within two weeks.

Over the past three weeks, there have been daily developments — and often multiple developments — shining an alarming light on what is happening.

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Grand jury subpoenas

In addition to the order to enforce the subpoena in the Northern District of Texas, one of the two other most significant other development was the news — acknowledged by NYU Langone Health in accordance with New York law on May 11 — that it had received a grand jury subpoena for similar records that was issued in the Northern District of Texas.

Ethan Womble is listed as the person who sought the grand jury subpoena. He is, as of last month, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Texas. (He was previously listed — as recently as February — as a trial attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, although that health care fraud work does appear to have been based out of Texas.)

Womble and Ryan Raybould, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, were the only two lawyers on the DOJ petition to enforce the Rhode Island Hospital subpoena. They are both former O’Connor clerks.

The grand jury subpoena — which does not require judicial approval — was received by NYU Langone on May 7 (although dated May 6), and the date for compliance is June 10.

There is also evidence that other grand jury subpoenas were issued. In addition to NYU Langone stating that it was “one of several institutions that received a grand jury subpoena,” Law Dork previously reported that DOJ’s decision to withdraw its appeal of one of its administrative subpoena losses — as to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) — came the same date that the NYU Langone grand jury subpoena was issued.

In a filing later on May 6 before the district court that had heard and granted the Philadelphia hospital’s initial request, the lawyers for CHOP were direct:

Just this morning, DOJ attorneys reached out to counsel for CHOP indicating that DOJ intended to dismiss its appeal, which has been proceeding in the Third Circuit since January and in which DOJ’s brief was due today. That development, along with DOJ’s unexplained effort to compel compliance by a Rhode Island hospital in the Northern District of Texas, suggest that DOJ may seek to end-run this Court’s jurisdiction over additional issues that arise involving the Subpoena.

Unlike the administrative subpoenas, which were challenged in the locations where the hospitals were located, challenges to the grand jury subpoena(s) would generally be in the Northern District of Texas — although lawyers will be looking for other paths.

It also should be noted that it is not yet clear what, if any, action beyond the issuance of the grand jury subpoenas has actually happened in the Northern District of Texas.

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The Texas Children’s Hospital settlments

The grand jury subpoenas aren’t the only new development.

On May 15, DOJ announced it had reached a “resolution” with Texas Children’s Hospital in conjunction with a long-running investigation against the hospital by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Although DOJ presented the development as “the first resolution secured under the Department’s ongoing national investigation into violations of federal law in connection with” provision of gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, Texas Attorney General Paxton only mentioned DOJ in one sentence and instead stated, “After a years-long investigation by the Healthcare Program Enforcement Division, Attorney General Paxton has negotiated a historic settlement that will help protect Texans.“ DOJ does cite agreements reached by the hospital with both federal and Texas governments.

In addition to ending the provision of such care, Paxton’s news release stated that Texas Children’s Hospital has agreed to “the creation of the country’s first-ever Detransition Clinic” and “pay $10 million for billing Texas Medicaid for unallowable and illegal ‘gender-transition’ interventions, including by using false diagnosis codes.“

In the DOJ news release, which only quotes Main Justice senior officials from D.C., it noted, “These matters and the investigations into sex-rejecting procedures (sic) on minors are being led by the Justice Department’s Civil Division Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch and Commercial Litigation Branch, Fraud Section.”

There was no mention of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas — or any district in Texas, for that matter — but the fact that the news releases are about a Texas hospital, DOJ’s release referenced what appears to be the same investigation at issue in both the administrative and grand jury subpoenas, and Texas’s release referenced one of the topics raised by DOJ in defending its subpoenas as allegedly supporting its investigation (improper billing codes) should not be glossed over.

For its part, Texas Children’s Hospital, in a statement to Law Dork, sounded a significantly different note than DOJ and Paxton’s office:

Over the last three years, we have cooperated fully with the Texas Attorney General and Department of Justice, navigating an unconscionable campaign of mistruths and mischaracterizations related to gender affirming care. We produced over 5 million documents and conducted multiple internal and external investigations. These efforts have required significant staff time and financial resources to defend ourselves. All reviews and investigations continue to support the facts – we have been compliant with all laws.

Today, we made the difficult decision to settle with the Texas Attorney General and the Department of Justice, closing a chapter that has been wrought with falsehoods and distractions. To be clear – we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation. This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists.

Nonetheless, if DOJ proceeds with a grand jury investigation in the Northern District of Texas, these settlements could quickly become very relevant to DOJ’s claims.

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What happened with Rhode Island Hospital

All of which brings us back to Rhode Island Hospital.

After O’Connor issued his initial order three weeks ago Thursday, the Rhode Island Child Advocate — responsible for oversight of children under the care of Rhode Island’s youth services — sought to quash the subpoena in Rhode Island.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee who had initially been nominated during the Obama administration, was assigned the matter. She denied DOJ’s initial request to move the matter to O’Connor and set a quick timeline for consideration of the request.

The hospital, meanwhile, sought to stay O’Connor’s order — first before O’Connor and then at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. (Both were denied.) The hospital also joined the Rhode Island Child Advocate’s request, intervening and filing its own motion to quash the subpoena.

On May 12, McElroy held an explosive hearing — accusing DOJ of having misled the hospital; the court in Texas; as well as, potentially, the court in Rhode Island.

Highlighting the incredibly invasive plans potentially involved in DOJ’s effort, McElroy told the relatively new DOJ lawyer before her, Brantley Mayers, counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, “[I]t is ridiculous to say that you’re going to find 14- and 15-year-olds who are undergoing gender reassignment or gender treatment and question them about what was told to them by their doctor. How invasive is that?”

An amicus brief submitted by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund addressed the improper ways DOJ is employing the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and other “healthcare offenses” to attempt to justify this investigation, but every judge has, again, found the effort to be an “improper purpose” under the laws at issue — or, at the least, the patient-specific documents requested not to have been appropriately sought.

Regarding the timing of the filing in Texas to enforce the Rhode Island Hospital administrative subpoena in conjunction with the emails earlier that week, McElroy told Mayers:

I take a very negative view to playing fast and loose by telling people one thing and filing other things with the court, and then taking the position like, oh, well, we didn’t tell you, but we did tell you afterwards. That is dirty pool, in my opinion, and the Department of Justice have willfully done that in this case.

Mayers had joined DOJ in November 2025 after three clerkships and with virtually no prior practice experience, a fact highlighted by McElroy, who repeatedly suggested that she believed the new lawyer was set up to defend the actions without having hardly any actual knowledge of the underlying investigation.

Sitting at his side, however, was Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jordan Campbell, a more senior Texas lawyer who joined DOJ in June 2025 after having co-founded a law firm that states it is “proudly seeking justice for the detransitioner community nationwide.“

Specifically as to the grand jury subpoena, which was discussed because NYU Langone’s statement had come out the day before, McElroy warned:

[T]he problem I’m having here is that it’s pretty clear to me that this was shopped to Texas, that’s fine, you have the right to investigate wherever you want, but these indictments that come out of Texas, if they ever come, because every person has signed an affidavit in this court and is going to be before me to explain it if they don’t.

Mayers insisted there were reasons for the investigation being in the Northern District of Texas — and acknowledged part of the content of a secret declaration that was filed ex parte (meaning just with the judge) in DOJ’s opposition to Rhode Island Hospital’s request that O’Connor stay his order enforcing the subpoena.

This secret declaration from Lisa Hsiao, the acting director of the Enforcement & Affirmative Litigation Branch — who has filed declarations in most if not all of DOJ’s efforts defending the administrative subpoenas and which have drawn questions previously — was later provided to McElroy as well. Of that, Mayers acknowledged:

[H]ere were many reasons why the investigation is being carried on in the Northern District of Texas. As the affidavit that you received yesterday ex parte indicates, there are potential targets, potential witnesses there.

The reference to “potential targets” of the investigation being in the Northern District of Texas appears to be a significant piece of information as that proceeds.

In any event, the next evening, on May 13, McElroy issued her ruling, quashing the administrative subpoena in full and blocking DOJ from receiving the requested documents. She also repeatedly questioned DOJ’s actions in the opinion, writing at one point that “the discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling.”

DOJ, however, did not let it go — appealing the order the next day and informing O’Connor of the ruling. O’Connor, on May 15, ordered an in-person hearing in Texas on May 18.

Following that hearing came the May 18 order from O’Connor, concluding that “RIH has also sought to circumvent the authority of this Court and the Fifth Circuit and attempted to collaterally attack the Enforcement Order“ and ordering the hospital to turn over to the court “all materials that it would have turned over to the Government in compliance with this Court’s Enforcement Order“ on the condition that the materials would be “secured and held in camera, inaccessible to the Government for the pendency of the appeals.“

Additionally, O’Connor — responding to his conclusion about the alleged circumvention — purported to bar Rhode Island Hospital from seeking relief from his order in any court aside from his court, the Fifth Circuit, or the U.S. Supreme Court and from “cooperat[ing] with others in seeking relief“ from his order.

The First Circuit

That led to one last effort to hold things off, with the Rhode Island Child Advocate filing a motion in the First Circuit — where DOJ had appealed McElroy’s order — on May 19 seeking an injunction ordering Rhode Island Hospital “not to produce patient-identifying information or protected health information” in response to the administrative subpoena “to any person or entity pending resolution of this appeal or until further order of this Court.”

DOJ opposed the request, and later highlighted the fact that, in Rhode Island Hospital’s notice about its production, “RIH represents that, ‘[t]o the extent that records RIH intends to produce contain any patient information, RIH will anonymize and de-identify this information.’“ DOJ stated that “RIH’s stated plan to anonymize any documents filed in the Northern District of Texas today further undercuts the Child Advocate’s claim of imminent irreparable harm.“

In a short order issued a few hours later, the First Circuit essentially agreed, denying Rhode Island Child Advocate’s request because, the court stated, “We detect no such irreparable injury.“

The panel consisted of Judges Gustavo Gelpí and Lara Montecalvo, both Biden appointees, and Judge Joshua Dunlap, a Trump appointee who took the bench in 2025.

Notably, Dunlap issued a concurring opinion, highlighting “additional concerns regarding the request for an injunction pending appeal“ — including, he wrote, “serious questions about the merits of the district court's decision.” This is contrary to the seven other federal judges to have ruled on the question and was an aside, but it is nonetheless notable coming from the one Republican appointee on the First Circuit.

The bigger problem, however, with the First Circuit’s ruling is what was missing.

The paragraph highlighted above seems to run counter to and with an almost blind ignorance to all that McElroy got on the record in her May 12 hearing.

This is a situation where DOJ has questionably, and without providing public evidence, claimed that it has moved an investigation to the Northern District of Texas, justifying invoking the court’s jurisdiction there to enforce an administrative subpoena issued many months before the investigation had a connection to the district and against an entity across the nation that had been in discussion with DOJ the day before the enforcement action was filed. Then, a far-right judge there granted the request sought by his former clerks and now has ordered the hospital to provide him with the information that every other judge has decided medical providers should not need to provide.

No awareness of that reality comes through in the First Circuit’s order. Although the caveats in the order do mean that renewed requests could follow and it certainly means nothing as to the hospital or Rhode Island Child Advocate’s chances on appeal in quashing the subpoena (Dunlap’s concurrence aside), the First Circuit’s presumption of regularity is particularly ill-suited here.

As McElroy wrote specifically in her order, quoting an Oregon colleague:

The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that “[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.” United States v. Oregon, No. 6:25-CV-01666-MTK, 2026 WL 318402, at *11 (D. Or. Feb. 5, 2026). It is regrettable that this is now the case.

As DOJ continues with these escalations of its attacks on trans people — and the provision of medical care specifically — courts need to keep their eyes opened to the reality as McElroy saw and detailed it, not to the image of courts as they would wish things to be.

Senior officials in the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service on Monday signed off of the “settlement agreement” that ended President Donald Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the I.R.S. — an agency Trump oversees — by creating “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

It is a cartoonishly evil, corrupt act in defiance of all ethical and democratic norms that is to transfer nearly $2 billion of federal funds ($1,776,000,000, to be precise) into a slush fund over which Trump will have ultimate control. Further, the fund — at least on its face — is aimed at giving money to people such as those prosecuted, convicted, and pardoned over their actions on and surrounding January 6, 2021.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Frank Bisignano, the chief executive officer of the I.R.S. — both of whom Trump appointed to their positions — signed the “settlement agreement” that led Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the case that was based on his tax returns having been unlawfully disclosed to the media and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to issue an order creating the nearly $1.8 billion fund on Monday.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams acceded to Trump’s dismissal of the case — which is automatic under the federal rules — in an order closing the case that was filed Monday night. In that order, though, she noted that since no one submitted the settlement to the court “there is no settlement of record.“ She added:

Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the “public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources” and the “fair administration of justice,” 28 C.F.R. §§ 50.9, 50.23—neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.

However, DOJ has since provided a copy of the settlement agreement — updating its news release about “The Anti-Weaponization Fund” to include it. (The news release initially only included a link to Blanche’s order.)

Some lowlights from the settlement include:

• A “formal apology” to Trump “from the United States.”

• Blanche gets to choose the five members in charge of the fund (one in consultation with an undefined “congressional leadership”), but Trump can fire any of them “without cause,” so, ultimately, they are answerable to Trump.

• What the fund does is apparently going to be “confidential.”

“Entities,” in addition to people, can ask for money if they claim they were “a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization.”

• The fund is to look at things like “damages incurred as a result of the Lawfare and Weaponization” and “time the claimant spent in prison … as a result of the Lawfare and Weaponization“ when deciding who to give money to and how much to give them.

  

  

• Trump, as well as Don Jr. and Eric Trump, or the Trump Organization — as the plaintiffs — can challenge the settlement agreement, as well as the I.R.S. and U.S., but, per the terms of the settlement, no one else.

  

• And, per the settlement, there are no appeals from or judicial review of any decisions the fund makes about claims.

  

  All of this in “settling” a case where — as Judge Williams made clear in nearly a page of case citations in her three-page order closing the case — there was not like “an actual case or controversy,” as required for federal courts to have jurisdiction over a case.

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