Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced on March 20 that he will put forward legislation to curtail district court judges’ ability to block President Donald Trump’s policies nationwide.
“District Court judges have issued record numbers of national injunctions against the Trump administration—a dramatic abuse of judicial authority,” Hawley wrote on the X platform. “I will introduce legislation to stop this abuse for good.”
The senator did not provide further details about the legislation he intends to introduce.
The Trump administration is currently facing a barrage of more than 100 lawsuits challenging the president’s executive orders. In dozens of those cases, district courts have blocked the implementation of various policies nationwide, including National Institutes of Health grant funding cuts, a wider federal funding freeze, a ban on people who identify as transgender joining the military, and new restrictions on birthright citizenship, among others.
“That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp this Court’s emergency docket,” Harris wrote, asking the court to lift the block on Trump’s birthright citizenship directive.
The court has yet to respond to the government’s request.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also been hindered by judicial orders.
Last week, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia halted the deportation of five suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua transnational gang.
The order followed Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to speed up the removal of members of Tren de Aragua, which the administration recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
Hours after issuing his first order, Boasberg issued another temporarily blocking the deportation of all illegal immigrants that might be targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
By the time that order was issued, deportation flights carrying 238 suspected Tren de Aragua members were already en route to El Salvador, which agreed to hold them in its Terrorism Confinement Center.
“Oopsie... Too late,” El Salvador President Nayib Bukele wrote on X amid news of the judge’s orders.
Bukele agreed to hold the suspected terrorists for $6 million—a price that he described in a subsequent post as “a very low fee” for the United States, “but a high one for us.”
The Trump administration has appealed Boasberg’s orders.
