Matters
Clusters of related cases around a single policy question or set of facts. Each matter tracks the full arc of litigation across courts and instances.
Press Freedom
Litigation aimed at the press: defamation suits, credential and access fights, and the reporter’s privilege.
Funding Cancellation
Challenges to the cancellation and freezing of federal grants and appropriated funds.
Alien Enemies Act Deportation
The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelans alleged to be Tren de Aragua gang members without immigration proceedings. …
Alligator Alcatraz
In mid-2025 Florida and the federal government built an immigration detention facility deep in the Everglades, on a site that is roughly 96% wetlands next to Bi…
AmeriCorps Dismantling
The Trump administration moved to effectively dismantle AmeriCorps, the federal national-service agency, by terminating grants, firing employees, and halting pr…
Birthright Citizenship
President Trump's January 20, 2025 executive order sought to redefine birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming children born to parents w…
CFPB Dismantling
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose constitutionality was already upheld by the Supreme Court in Seila Law (2020), was effectively shuttered in earl…
Challenge to State Law
The Trump administration filed a wave of offensive lawsuits against individual states, seeking to preempt state laws on immigration enforcement, climate liabili…
Chicago — Operation Midway Blitz
Operation Midway Blitz was the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Chicago area that DHS announced on September 8, 2025. The operation generated a clus…
Department of Education Dismantling
President Trump signed an executive order directing the dissolution of the Department of Education, which Congress created by statute. Mass reductions-in-force …
DOGE FOIA Suits
Journalists and transparency advocates filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking records about DOGE's operations, staffing, and access to federal data s…
DOGE Litigation
Challenges to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a non-statutory body created by President Trump, center on three questions: whether DOGE access to…
DOJ Voter-Roll Lawsuits
Beginning in September 2025, the Justice Department sued more than two dozen states and state election officials that refused to hand over their statewide voter…
E. Jean Carroll v. Trump
Writer E. Jean Carroll brought two defamation suits against Donald Trump arising from her account that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store…
Elections Integrity EO
Executive orders issued in early 2025 directed federal agencies to take steps the administration characterized as protecting election integrity, including deman…
Executive Influence on Law Firms
Beginning in March 2025, President Trump signed a series of executive orders against major law firms, most of which had ties to lawyers or causes he opposed. Ea…
FBI Firings
The Trump administration's dismissal of FBI leadership and the firing or forced resignation of scores of FBI agents and senior officials prompted litigation fro…
Federal Collective Bargaining Rescission
Executive orders stripping collective-bargaining rights from federal employees generated a cascade of litigation and a pattern Bryan noticed almost immediately:…
Federal Grant Cancellation
A wave of federal grant cancellations in early 2025 targeted universities, nonprofits, and state agencies, often citing diversity-equity-inclusion programs, for…
Federal Grant Conditioning
Suits challenging the administration's practice of attaching immigration-enforcement compliance conditions to federal grants for law enforcement, emergency prep…
Federal Grant Terminations
A cluster of suits challenging the Trump administration's mass cancellation of federal grants across public health, education, climate resilience, domestic viol…
Firing of Federal Workers
Mass terminations of federal employees beginning in January 2025 swept across agencies, targeting probationary employees, DEI personnel, and workers perceived a…
H-1B Visa Program Changes
New DHS and USCIS rules in 2025 significantly restricted the H-1B specialty-worker visa program, including heightened specialty-occupation requirements, increas…
ICE Enforcement
ICE enforcement operations that do not fit a specific geographic hotspot or individual case: airport arrests, workplace sweeps, and mass raids targeting people …
ICE Masks
Several states have enacted laws restricting when law-enforcement officers, including federal immigration officers, may conceal their faces, and requiring those…
ICE Operations
Through 2025 and 2026 the administration ran a series of named federal immigration enforcement surges in specific cities, each generating its own cluster of lit…
Ideological Deportations
The Trump administration has sought to deport or detain a series of individuals on ideological grounds, targeting primarily Palestinian and Muslim activists, fo…
IEEPA Tariffs
President Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs. Bryan saw the constitutional problem immediately: tariffs ar…
Immigration Detention Conditions
Lawsuits challenging conditions of immigration detention span county jails, ICE processing centers, Guantanamo Bay, and the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador to …
Independent-Agency Dismantling
Across 2025 and 2026, the administration fired the heads of the FTC, CFPB, NLRB, and ultimately the Federal Reserve Board. Bryan covers every stage: what for-ca…
Kilmar Abrego Garcia Matter
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a Maryland construction worker who was deported to a Salvadoran prison in March 2025 in what courts later found was a violation of a pr…
Los Angeles — Operation at Large
Operation at Large was the federal immigration enforcement surge across Southern California that began with large-scale ICE raids in Los Angeles in June 2025. T…
Minnesota — Operation Metro Surge
Operation Metro Surge deployed a surge of federal immigration enforcement agents to Minnesota beginning in December 2025. The operation triggered a cascade of c…
National Guard — Chicago
As Operation Midway Blitz ramped up in the Chicago area in the fall of 2025, the administration moved to deploy National Guard troops to Illinois. Illinois and …
National Guard — Los Angeles
In June 2025, as ICE raids under Operation at Large set off protests in Los Angeles, President Trump federalized about 2,000 California National Guard troops an…
National Guard — Portland
In late September 2025, President Trump announced the deployment of about 200 federalized Oregon National Guard troops to protect the ICE facility in Portland's…
National Guard — Washington, D.C.
On August 11, 2025, President Trump announced a federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department and the deployment of National Guard troops across Washin…
National Guard Deployments
In 2025 the Trump administration federalized National Guard troops, and in Los Angeles active-duty Marines, and deployed them to several cities alongside immigr…
NEH Dismantling
The Trump administration moved to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through a reduction-in-force affecting virtually all staff and a fre…
OMB Funding Freeze
In January 2025, OMB ordered a sweeping pause on federal spending, effectively impounding hundreds of billions in congressionally appropriated funds. Bryan cove…
Protests at ICE Facilities
As federal immigration enforcement expanded across 2025 and 2026, protests outside ICE facilities and immigration-raid sites drew aggressive crowd-control respo…
Redistricting
Redistricting litigation runs on two tracks: challenges to maps that dilute minority voting strength under the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, a…
Reflecting Pool Vandalism Prosecutions
In June 2026 the Trump administration finished a $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, including a new coating the administration call…
Removal to Third Country
Challenges to the administration's practice of deporting non-citizens to third countries (El Salvador, Libya, South Sudan, Ghana) without notice or the opportun…
Research Grant Indirect Cost Cap
NIH and NSF directives in early 2025 imposed caps on indirect-cost recovery rates for university research grants, immediately imperiling billions in federal res…
SEVIS Visa Termination
The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) is the federal database that tracks the legal status of international students. In spring 2025, the …
SNAP Benefits Suspension
USDA actions in 2025 targeting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program included suspension of certain state waivers for Able-Bodied Adults Without Depende…
Tariff Authorities
Congress holds the tariff power under Article I, so every tariff the executive imposes has to be traced back to a statute that hands some of it over. Four statu…
Temporary Protected Status
Temporary Protected Status lets the Secretary of Homeland Security shield nationals of a designated country from removal when conditions there make return unsaf…
The Elections Order
Executive Order 14399, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, 91 Fed. Reg. 17125 (Mar. 31, 2026), directs federal agencies to bui…
The Shootings
Three people were shot by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota: Renée Good, killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026; an unnamed…
TPS Cancellation
Challenges to the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status designations for nationals of Venezuela, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, South …
Transgender Military Service
Executive Order 14183, signed January 27, 2025, directed the Department of Defense to bar transgender people from military service, on the stated ground that th…
Trump's Defamation Suits
Donald Trump has repeatedly sued news organizations for defamation in his personal capacity. This page tracks the suits confirmed on federal dockets, what each …
USAID Dismantling
Litigation challenging DOGE-driven mass firings and the effective shutdown of USAID, an independent agency with a congressionally mandated foreign assistance mi…
Voice of America Dismantling
The Trump administration placed all Voice of America journalists on administrative leave in March 2025 and moved to shut down VOA and its parent agency, the U.S…
Warrantless Immigration Arrests
Suits challenging ICE and DHS enforcement operations that resulted in arrests near courts, in churches, in schools, and without administrative warrants. Plainti…