Free Republic

Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack filed a federal civil lawsuit, asking a judge to order the hanging of a plaque to honor police heroes who protected the Capitol, lawmakers and staff from rioters. The lawsuit cites a 2022 law signed by President Biden that required the honorary plaque be hung by March 2023. The plaque has been completed and in storage since at least last year, but GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to installing it at the Capitol. The dispute over the plaque has angered victims and inflamed a...

Before BENNETT, MILLER and SUNG, Circuit Judges The Court has received the government's emergency motion for stay pending appeal. DKt No. 5. The request for an administrative stay is GRANTED. The district court's June 12, 2025 temporary restraining order is temporarily stayed pending further order. See Doe#1 v Trump, 944F.3rd 1222, 1223 (9th Circuit 2019). The response to the emergency motion is due June 15, 2025 at 9:00 AM PDT. The optional reply in support of the emergency motion is due June 16, 2025 9:00AM PDT. The panel will hold a remote hearing by Zoom on June 17, 2025 at...

A federal judge late Thursday ruled that the federalization of parts of California’s National Guard by President Donald Trump was “illegal,” and ordered Trump to return control of the Guard to state Gov. Gavin Newsom “forthwith.” But Judge Charles Breyer stayed his temporary restraining order from taking effect until 3 p.m. ET on Friday to allow the Trump administration to appeal his decision. The administration promptly did just that, asking the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to block Breyer’s ruling from taking effect. Trump, over the past week, had federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard, and mobilized...

When the Trump administration swept into the Department of Justice on Jan. 20, it moved swiftly to purge, demote, transfer and otherwise sideline career lawyers not perceived to be team players or sufficiently committed to the MAGA legal agenda. [snip] Inside, nearly a dozen of the government's most seasoned civil rights, environmental and national security lawyers have been reconstituted as members of a newly created group called the Sanctuary Cities task force. At first glance, the job seemed promising — a legal strike team that would sue municipalities the administration claimed were facilitating the violation of immigration laws, a task...

A U.S. appeals court agreed to pause a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to provide due process to hundreds of Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S. to El Salvador under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in a near-term victory for the Trump administration. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted the Justice Department’s request for an administrative stay, putting on hold a lower court order handed down last week by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. Last Wednesday, Boasberg ruled that the migrants deported solely on the basis of the Alien Enemies Act immigration...

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot deport Mahmoud Khalil, the radical, pro-Hamas activist who was a graduate student at Columbia University. Random activist judges have overstepped their authority to rule against the Trump administration so many times in the last few months that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the rulings. Who appointed these judges to run the country? No one, and the American people are already sick and tired of this. FOX News reports: Federal judge sides with anti-Israel ringleader Mahmoud Khalil, halts Trump administration’s deportation bid A federal judge sided...

A federal judge on Wednesday barred the Trump administration from continuing to detain Mahmoud Khalil under a rarely cited law invoked by the secretary of state — and suggested that Mr. Khalil could be released as early as Friday. However, the judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, paused his own order to give the administration a chance to appeal, saying it would not go into effect until 9:30 a.m. on Friday. And he left a pathway for the government to continue to detain Mr. Khalil for other reasons, though he suggested he would be skeptical were authorities to do so. ***Though Judge...

Trump administration officials are laying the groundwork for a bold new strategy to sidestep local opposition to their immigration agenda, according to a Fox News contributor who said he’s impressed with their plans. Marc Thiessen, a previous speech writer to former President George W. Bush, told a Fox panel he was left amazed after learning that immigration officials, led by White House border czar Tom Homan and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, will soon begin employing a new classification of law-breaking behavior by illegal immigrants that sanctuary cities and states may find impossible to ignore. Until now, sanctuary locales...

Not a week seems to go by without a rogue lower court judge issuing yet another overreaching edict designed to subvert the will of the American people. While these “judges” certainly deserve criticism for rubber-stamping leftists’ lawfare, there’s one individual who deserves primary blame for this concentrated effort to cripple Trump’s presidency via a judicial coup: Chief Justice John Roberts. Over the past five months, rogue lower courts have issued nearly 200 overreaching injunctions and temporary restraining orders attempting to prevent Trump from fulfilling his Article II obligation to execute the nation’s laws. And yet, despite this egregious usurpation of...

CNN data analyst Harry Enten revealed some numbers yesterday that are going to blow the minds of Democrats. Trump’s approval rating on the issue of immigration has ‘gone up like a rocket’ according to Enten, who points out where Trump was on this issue ten years ago as compared to now. It’s like night and day. He also notes that it’s not just Trump. Republicans in general are far more trusted by the public on this issue. What is unfolding in California is just going to drive Democrats further into the gutter. They are playing right into Trump’s hands.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and the state’s attorney general filed their much-anticipated lawsuit over President Trump’s decision to send in California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell immigration protests, calling it an “unprecedented power grab.” Filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, the suit asks a federal judge to block Trump’s authorization as an unconstitutional incursion into state authority under the 10th Amendment.

The judge says the president didn’t cite an actual invasion and that he violated the Fifth Amendment. A federal judge in Texas became the latest on June 9 to hold that President Donald Trump had misapplied the Alien Enemies Act in attempting to remove from the United States purported members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. In a 56-page opinion, U.S. District Judge David Briones said that Trump violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process and failed to demonstrate that Tren de Aragua (TdA) was engaged in the type of invasion that allowed presidents to invoke the Act. His...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing anti-diversity and anti-transgender executive orders in grant funding requirements that LGBTQ+ organizations say are unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar said Monday that the federal government cannot force recipients to halt programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion or acknowledge the existence of transgender people in order to receive grant funding. The order will remain in effect while the legal case continues, although government lawyers will likely appeal. The funding provisions “reflect an effort to censor constitutionally protected speech and services promoting DEI and...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced his plans to sue the Trump administration for “illegally act[ing] to federalize the National Guard” to contain the Los Angeles anti-deportation riots, accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of being “in over his head.” When asked by left-wing YouTuber Brian Taylor Cohen if he has any “confidence” that Hegseth will be as “principled” as former Defense Secretary Mark Esper was on Monday, Newsom coldly responded, “Pete Hegseth is a joke. He’s a joke. Everybody knows it, so in over his head. What an embarrassment.” “That guy’s just weakness masquerading as strength. I don’t even know...

Despite delusions of grandeur at the district court level the White House is winning.While mainstream news outlets, cable networks and social media obsess over Elon Musk’s latest antics, they have neglected a far more important story — the Trump administration is accumulating a significant catalogue of appeals court and SCOTUS victories. Last Friday alone three more wins were added to the list. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House may exclude AP from its press pool while SCOTUS stayed a district court order requiring DOGE to heed a Freedom of Information Act request and ruled that...

On CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," political commentator Van Jones urged President Donald Trump "to take this opportunity to win his feud with Musk by punishing all of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees Musk left behind. Trump may be top dog right now, but he's only got a few years left to affect public policy. The much richer and younger Musk has 40 years left. Trump needs to recognize that these DOGE employees are dangerous." "You think Trump should prosecute them?" Cooper asked. "Yes. He needs to learn from the Biden Administration's lawfare against him and ramp up a...

Bucks County Sheriff Fred Harran is facing legal action for his partnership with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Harran applied to take part in a federal program known as 287(g), which would give officers the authority to detain illegal immigrants while performing routine police duties. But, the American Civil Liberties Union and Community Justice Project says what he's doing is illegal in Pennsylvania. Steve Loney, the lead attorney representing the ACLU, said, "The sheriff is breaking the law by unilaterally and illegally over the objection of his county commissioners entered into an agreement with federal immigration enforcement to essentially appoint...

Was there a coup? That question, when asked in the context of American politics, invites ridicule from respectable quarters. Yet when the subject turns to foreign regimes, that same question is treated with analytic seriousness. Political scientists pore over cases from Georgia to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Egypt, cataloguing the hallmarks of so-called "color revolutions", soft regime-change efforts executed through legal, media, and civic levers, rather than military ones. Oddly, however, the moment one notices similar tactics deployed on American soil, the conversation ends. That silence deserves scrutiny. For there is a credible case that the 2020 effort to remove...

Have Soros dollars now seeped into the judiciary? Either leftists are working for the Communist Chinese Party (CCP), or they have certainly read their playbooks. The playbooks of the CCP are “The Art of Warfare” and “Unrestricted Warfare”—both of which speak to exploiting the weakness of an enemy and argue that the United States does not consider the wider picture of military strategy, including “legal tools” (lawfare and economic factors) to leverage one’s opponent and circumvent the need for direct military action resulting in the same, if not even greater, destructive force. Three unelected New York federal judges of the...

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Mexican government's lawsuit against major U.S. gun manufacturers, delivering a win for the firearms industry in a test of a federal law that shields them from civil suits. The high court unanimously rejected Mexico's arguments that its effort to hold firearms makers accountable for the violence wreaked by drug cartels armed with their products should proceed because it satisfied an exception to the liability shield provided through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA. In the case known as Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Mexico had...