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Judge Jamal Whitehead, of the Western District of Washington, directed the Trump administration during a hearing on Tuesday to “restart the refugee-admissions program that legally resettles people from across the globe,” which Trump had ordered be shuttered on his first day in office. Judge Whitehead has not yet issued a written ruling, but the “injunction” will stay in place as the case continues. (WSJ.)
D.C. District Court Judge Loren AliKhan on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction extending the temporary restraining order on the Trump administration’s implementation of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum “freezing federal assistance under open awards.” Judge AliKhan noted that although the administration earlier said it was complying with the court’s administrative stay of the OMB action by rescinding the memo directing the freeze, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on X that the administration had not rescinded the freeze and that it remained in effect. Judge AliKhan determined that the court would not confer on the administration a “presumption of good faith” when it “says one thing while expressly doing another.” (Opinion.)
Another D.C. District Court Judge, Amir Ali, in a Tuesday hearing “ordered the State Department to pay all aid contractors who completed work” before Judge Ali’s emergency order on Feb. 13 requiring the Trump administration to restore foreign assistance funding. Judge Ali reportedly “grew impatient with a lack of clear responses from the administration’s lawyers to claims from aid contractors that they have seen no payments from the State Department or U.S. Agency for International Development.” (Politico.)
The White House, rather than the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, will decide which news outlets are included in the press pool, according to Leavitt. This comes amid The Associated Press’s ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its banning of the AP from covering news events with President Trump. (Axios.)
The Trump administration reportedly created a registry for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally to “to submit their personal information or face fines and prison time.” According to The Wall Street Journal, “Immigrants who qualify but fail to register could be fined up to $5,000 and sentenced to up to six months in prison.” (WSJ.)
After much uncertainty, a White House official said Tuesday that Amy Gleason, a former healthcare investment executive, is the acting administrator of DOGE. (NYT.)
Cass Sunstein argued that the Trump administration’s “broadest current claims about executive authority are a creation of the 21st century, not the 18th,” noting that the “most careful evidence suggests that [in 1789] a majority of members of Congress did not embrace but actually rejected the view that Congress lacks power to protect subordinate officials in the executive branch from presidential control.” (NYT.)
Jonathan Adler charted the history of the Supreme Court’s Humphrey’s Executor ruling, limiting the president’s power to remove certain executive branch officials, and analyzed how the Court is likely to treat the precedent when adjudicating President Trump’s authority to dismiss executive branch officers. (Civitas.)
Brooke Harrington contended that the Trump administration “is running Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in reverse: Instead of rebuilding institutions and public trust at a moment of national peril, it seems to be trying to unravel both — and is creating a moment of national peril.” (NYT.)
University of Michigan law students are maintaining a very helpful tracker of all the cases against the Trump 2.0 administration. By David Post’s count, “there are 28 separate cases … in which a TRO or a Preliminary Injunction has been issued against the government’s implementation of its policies.” (Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.) (The Volokh Conspiracy.)