Trump Finds Some Early Success at Supreme Court–A Look So Far

More than 100 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration. So far, of seven emergency motions, the president has won five and lost two.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Nonprofits, states, and others have launched more than 100 legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s agenda, sometimes halting his actions.

The legal battles have reached the Supreme Court on 10 occasions. Of those, the administration has won five in five cases and lost two. Three cases surrounding Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order have yet to be decided.

In all of the rulings so far, the Trump administration requested temporary halts of lower court rulings blocking certain executive actions. As such, they’ve prompted decisions by the high court that mostly offer narrow legal rulings rather than drawing firm conclusions of law, as Supreme Court cases more typically do.

“In all, the administration has been largely successful in cases reaching the Supreme Court,” Joe Luppino-Esposito, federal policy chief at Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal group, told The Epoch Times.

“There appears to be two clear trends—rejection of sweeping, overbroad lower court orders, and an affirmation of the idea of the unitary executive. Issues involving those employees or other appointees of the executive branch are particularly falling the president’s way.”

Here’s the breakdown of the rulings so far.

Deportations

On April 7, the Supreme Court handed Trump a win in his use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

While the court didn’t rule on the legality of Trump’s invocation of the 18th-century law, it did remove one of the lower court’s blocks on his deportations. In doing so, the high court allowed the deportations to proceed but required the Trump administration to provide notice to deportees before their removal flights.

The plaintiffs in that case had challenged Trump in the wrong court and with an improper legal avenue, a majority said. It also agreed with the administration that the proper avenue for challenging a detention was through a petition known as habeas corpus, rather than the method the plaintiffs used.

Before that ruling, the administration faced potential contempt for allegedly disobeying a district court’s block on deportations. The issue could reach the Supreme Court again as detainees filed habeas petitions in New York and Texas following the justices’ decision.

One of the men deported is a Salvadoran national whom the administration said is a member of the MS-13 gang but who was deported to El Salvador rather than another country because of an “administrative error,” according to a Department of Justice court filing.

Chief Justice John Roberts initially halted a federal judge’s ruling requiring that the administration return the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from an El Salvador prison. But the Supreme Court on April 10 issued an order that partially upheld the district judge’s ruling, saying that the administration must “facilitate” the man’s return to the United States.

Guards stand outside a cell block at the Centre for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on April 4, 2025. The United States deported 238 alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren De Aragua, and 21 MS-13 gang members to CECOT. Alex Peña/Getty Images

At an Oval Office meeting on April 13, top Trump officials said it was ultimately up to El Salvador whether to return Abrego Garcia, an El Salvador citizen, to the United States.

Referring to the Supreme Court ruling, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “If they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that foreign policy is an executive function. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” he said.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, also at the Oval Office meeting, said he won’t return Abrego Garcia, raising the prospect that the case may end up being moot.

Spending

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Part of Trump’s agenda has involved sweeping cuts to government spending across multiple federal agencies and departments. Legal challenges have alleged that Trump violated the Constitution’s separation of powers by redirecting funds without approval from Congress, which is in charge of appropriating funds.

One of the administration’s counterarguments has been that the lawsuits were essentially disputes over contracts with the federal government. Like the deportations case, the administration contended that the suit belonged in a different tribunal—the Court of Federal Claims, which deals with federal contract disputes.

The Supreme Court appeared to agree on April 4 when it stayed a lower court decision that would have forced the administration to reinstate $65 million in Education Department grants. The government froze those grants over concerns about about their use to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

A majority of the court said that the administration was likely to succeed in its claim that a lower court lacked jurisdiction in ordering payments under the Administrative Procedure Act, which states had relied on in their lawsuit against the federal government.

The high court pointed to the Tucker Act, which the administration raised in court. Enacted in 1887, the law allows entities to sue the federal government where the government has waived sovereign immunity for specific types of claims, including those founded on any “express or implied contract” with the United States. These cases need to be brought before the Court of Federal Claims in Washington.

(L–R) Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Chief Justice John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor attend inaugural ceremony of President Donald Trump's second term at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2025. Melina Mara/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Another case involving the disbursement of federal funds saw a different outcome, however. A majority of the justices on March 5 refused to allow the administration to freeze $2 billion in foreign aid payments.

In its decision, the court didn’t offer much of an explanation but said that the payments were “owed for work already completed.”

Four justices dissented from that decision, with Justice Samuel Alito penning a strongly worded opinion in which he said he was “stunned” by the majority’s decision.

“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” he wrote.

“The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise.”

Federal Employees

Some of the legal pushback to the Trump agenda has come from former agency heads and labor unions—specifically over the administration’s attempts to terminate many in the federal government.

At the beginning of the Trump administration, the heads of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board each received brief emails notifying them that the president had decided to fire them. They sued in response, claiming that Trump violated federal law in part by not providing a cause for removing them.

A National Labor Relations Board sign outside its headquarters in Washington on Sept. 8, 2012. Geraldshields11/CC BY-SA 3.0

The case has led lower courts to wade into a debate over the president’s removal power, which has been addressed in historical and recent Supreme Court precedents.

After two district courts ordered Trump to reinstate the agency heads, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted Trump some initial relief by staying those decisions. However, the full circuit reversed its colleagues’ decision, prompting the administration to ask for the Supreme Court’s intervention.

On April 9, Chief Justice Roberts issued an order halting the district court decisions pending further order of the Supreme Court.

Neither that order nor another involving Trump’s termination of probationary employees offered much in the way of legal reasoning. In the latter case, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to terminate some probationary employees and indicated on April 8 that nine nonprofits that brought the action hadn’t done enough to establish standing, or a right to sue.

“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine nonprofit-organization plaintiffs in this case,” it said. “But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing.”