President Donald Trump’s second term is testing the boundaries of Article II executive power like no presidency before.
Through sweeping legal battles over federal firings, immigration crackdowns, budget authority, and attacks on liberal institutions, Trump is aiming to reshape the office’s reach for decades — and the courts have been the battleground since the first weeks of his reunion with Washington, D.C.
More than 200 lawsuits have challenged Trump’s record-breaking 139 executive orders issued in his first 100 days, with at least 11 emergency appeals already landing at the Supreme Court.
Legal scholars who spoke to the Washington Examiner say the outcomes could permanently alter the balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, while sparking some of the most consequential immigration litigation in U.S. history.
Firing federal officials
Trump has aggressively targeted federal employees seen as obstacles to his agenda, from career bureaucrats to political appointees.
His administration is targeting a long-standing Supreme Court precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor, a 1935 opinion that saw a unanimous high court rule that presidents lack authority to remove heads of independent agencies unilaterally.
“The reasoning of the Supreme Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor is widely considered to be incorrect,” said Chad Squitieri, a law professor at the Columbus School of Law.
This term, Trump has tested legal limits by seeking to remove officials from bodies such as the Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board, claiming broad presidential authority under Article II. That request is now pending before the Supreme Court and is poised to mark the next major power battle that the justices will decide.
He has also leaned on Cabinet secretaries’ discretion and civil service loopholes to oust probationary employees and senior figures like Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden and served at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel until his firing earlier this year.
Dellinger fought his firing in court and ultimately lost during his second examination at the federal appeals court level in Washington, D.C., prompting him to drop his case.
“The Court has, for some years now, taken a series of steps to move away from that mistaken precedent,” Squitieri said. “If the Supreme Court were given the opportunity to formally reconsider Humphrey’s Executor outright, I think the court would overrule the decision.”
Legal fights over his removal of lower federal worker positions have played out across the courts.
In April, the Supreme Court paused a lower court’s order requiring the reinstatement of 16,000 federal workers fired from six agencies, a move that gave his administration more confidence that they are on the right side of Chief Justice John Roberts’s jurisprudence.
Other appeals courts have issued similar stays on orders protecting probationary workers, with no clear timeline for final arguments.
Deporting noncitizens
Trump’s immigration moves are at the heart of what some experts call the most pivotal era of immigration law since the nation’s founding.
He has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, historically used only during wartime, to expedite deportations of alleged gang members, including those in Tren de Aragua and MS-13.
But on May 1, a federal judge in Texas dealt a major blow to that strategy — for now.
Judge Fernando Rodriguez, a Trump appointee, ruled that Trump did not meet the necessary conditions under the AEA to justify the mass removal of Venezuelan migrants, finding that no evidence had been provided that Tren de Aragua was invading the United States on behalf of the Venezuelan government — a key legal threshold under the statute.
“The historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms,” Rodriguez wrote in his order. He emphasized that allowing the president to define invasion conditions unilaterally would erase statutory limits on the executive and gut the courts’ role in reviewing such powers.
The case, brought by three Venezuelan nationals with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged their imminent deportation under the law. Rodriguez’s ruling not only blocked their removal but also approved class certification for all possible deportees in the Southern District of Texas — a move legal experts say is highly unusual in this type of immigration case.
“You can’t do class actions,” said Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Not everybody in that class is exactly the same … there should be individual cases.”
Arthur added that the ruling was surprising given the historic deference courts have shown to presidential authority during times of invasion or threat, dating back to World War II.
“Most American press outlets don’t really understand Tren de Aragua, or they put it in the same bucket as MS-13,” Arthur said, noting how the gang has entrenched itself in parts of Colombia, Chile, and Brazil.
Arthur explained that the administration is making the pitch that Tren de Aragua could also attempt to gain further footholds in the United States without these deportation efforts, thus creating an argument that their members’ presence is a significant national security threat.
Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, concurred in part with Arthur’s position.
“Traditionally, the Alien Enemies Act was invoked when there was an actual war. Here, Trump is using it in response to his declared ‘invasion or incursion.’ I don’t think it should make a difference what the basis is,” Blackman said, adding that most importantly, courts lack “authority to scrutinize his actions under the law.”
Despite last week’s setback before the Trump-appointed judge in South Texas, legal experts expect the administration to appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where Arthur believes the government might fare better.
A senior DHS official told the Washington Examiner that Rodriguez’s decision will not stop their immigration agenda, saying, “A single judge cannot stop the will of the American people for a safe and secure homeland.”
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, said he could “easily see a judge in a separate jurisdiction ruling that there is an invasion,” underscoring the chaotic elements of having a single district judge determining the legality of the 18th-century law.
“This is 100% going to be appealed,” he said.
Canceling government spending
Trump’s moves to slash government spending have revived sharp legal fights over the president’s power to withhold or redirect congressionally appropriated funds.
The 1974 Impoundment Control Act, passed in response to President Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend funds for programs he opposed, says money can only be drawn from the Treasury “in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
Trump, however, has treated congressional appropriations as ceilings, not floors — arguing the executive has discretion to spend less than allocated.
“Trump’s actions are pushing the limits of the Impoundment Control Act, which was designed to prevent presidents from withholding or redirecting funds without Congress’s consent,” said George Carrillo, CEO of the Hispanic Construction Council.
“By freezing funds for programs like infrastructure or climate initiatives, Trump is testing whether the courts will uphold the ICA’s restrictions. So far, courts have blocked these actions, but the administration seems intent on provoking a Supreme Court review,” Carrillo said.
Curbing liberal institutions
Trump’s legal agenda has also targeted DEI initiatives, higher education policies, and even major law firms he views as hostile to his administration.
His administration has invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to challenge race-conscious policies at colleges and universities.
“Not only is the administration on firm legal ground withholding funding, this is exactly what Title VI is for,” said Shawna Bray, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity. “You may not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin — the end.”
“People want to believe there’s discrimination that should be allowable because they’d like it to be, but it’s simply not supportable under any statute,” Bray added. “Many DEI trainings and initiatives push concepts that drift far from what the Civil Rights Act actually says — they’re teaching something else entirely, and in some cases, they’re effectively training people to violate the law.”
The administration’s transgender military ban, blocked by lower courts, has also reached the Supreme Court in the form of a petition to the justices. The administration argues the ban is necessary for military readiness, while challengers say four years of open service under the Biden administration produced no evidence of harm.
Trump’s aggressive targeting of major law firms, many of which have advocated liberal policy positions and clients, also marks a striking new front in his second-term legal battles, as the administration pressures firms seen as politically hostile or unwilling to back its agenda.
From cutting off government contracts to raising questions about security clearances, the administration has sharpened its tools to challenge the legal industry’s influence — moves that critics call retaliatory and defenders describe as an overdue assertion of executive power.
“The president has the right to say which law firms the government will or won’t hire,” said Raul Gastesi, partner and co-founder at Gastesi Lopez Mestre & Cobiella. “But once you start taking away their security clearances, you better have a real good reason — and I don’t know that he always does.”
Courts, Congress, and crisis
Trump’s public attacks on judges who blocked his policies have raised liberal fears of a so-called “constitutional crisis.”
On social media, Trump has lambasted them: “These people are Lunatics, who do not care, even a little bit, about the repercussions from their very dangerous and incorrect Decisions and Rulings.” He has accused the courts of ignoring the 77 million votes that returned him to office and treating the presidency as if it required 80 million votes to govern.
But Trump’s outrage is not entirely unwarranted. No modern president has faced as many nationwide injunctions as he has. During his first term, courts issued 64 nationwide injunctions against his administration, compared to 12 under Barack Obama, 12 under Bill Clinton, 14 under Joe Biden, and just six under George W. Bush. Already in his second term, Trump has racked up 17 more as of this spring, fueling his argument that the judiciary is overreaching and unfairly targeting his policies at a scale no prior president has experienced.
In April, the House passed a bill to limit the power of individual federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, but its fate in the Senate is uncertain.
Meanwhile, two federal judges are investigating whether the Trump administration has defied their orders, a possible trigger for contempt proceedings. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg accused the administration of “willful disregard” for his order blocking certain deportations under the AEA.
The final Supreme Court argument on May 15 will be one to watch on the issue of Trump’s gripes with nationwide injunctions. Justices will hear a case surrounding three lower courts that stalled his efforts to curtail birthright citizenship, but the underlying question will be more closely tied to whether the justices have an appetite to rein in lower courts’ abilities to enjoin presidential policies universally.
What’s at stake for the next 100 days and beyond?
As Trump presses forward into the next 100 days and beyond of his second term, more court decisions will be made — and the closer he will get to seeing final resolutions in some of his more contentious executive order fights.
Other experts also agreed that these court clashes could force Congress to revisit its broad delegation of powers to the executive branch and reshape the fundamental architecture of governance.
Rahmani, the former prosecutor, suggested it might be time for lawmakers to step in and “do their job.”
“Congress can say, ‘You don’t have a right to see an immigration judge in these types of cases.’ That way, DHS doesn’t have to force things through like a square peg in a round hole,” Rahmani said.
“If immigration courts are backed up, and you don’t want to give people these rights, then you don’t have to give them,” he added.
TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE POWER STRUGGLES: WHAT’S STALLED AND WHAT’S ADVANCING
Time is also of the essence for Trump. With approximately 18 months until the 2026 midterm elections, it is incumbent upon his administration to pass any of his agendas that are the most likely to sustain scrutiny in courts through Congress, or risk having portions of his agenda blocked.
As more court challenges pile up, the closer the Supreme Court will get to taking on more challenges over his orders on the merits, and it is likely the fall term will include multiple oral argument hearings over the cases being adjudicated in lower courts now.