Judges Big Mad at Trump DOJ in Wave of New Rebukes

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Presumption of Regularity Is Gone

The pace of this important story is slow by dramatic standards, but by the somnambulant standards of the federal judiciary, the erosion of the credibility of the Justice Department, which took decades to establish and has all but vanished in one year under Trump II, is moving at lightning speed.

The first six items in today’s Morning Memo feature some variation on the theme of confrontation between federal judges and the Trump DOJ, all of them since late last week.

One of the things I hear most often from readers is: So what? If the judges don’t do anything about it, this is all play-acting.

I think this is more than kabuki theater. There has been movement. As Lawfare’s Anna Bower and I discussed at last month’s Morning Memo Live event, it took district judges about six months last year to catch on to what was happening and stop giving the Trump DOJ any benefit of the doubt. Over the last six months, you’ve seen increasingly harsh assessments from judges, and slow but definite steps towards contempt and sanctions.

It’s slow going though, and ultimately it will be up to appeals courts to have district judges’ backs, and the track record on that front so far is decidedly underwhelming.

Deliberate Sabotage

A NYT review found 35 instances since August in which federal judges have issued show cause orders for why Trump DOJ attorneys should not be sanctioned for failing to abide by court orders in immigrant habeas cases.

The judge in Minnesota who last week found special assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara in contempt and imposed a $500 fine until he complied with her order (he did) issued a scathing new rebuke in that case despite the government’s eventual compliance:

SAUSA Isihara blamed his oversights on this case inadvertently “slipp[ing] through the cracks.” But SAUSA Isihara had notice of this case and at least three chances to remedy the issue before the show-cause hearing. And the Government offered little defense to avoid contempt. Rather, the Government asked the Court to exercise its “discretion” and “good graces” based on the understaffing and oversized caseloads in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, the Government has offered that excuse to this Court again, and again, and again (and to other judges in this district again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again) to excuse its oversights and disobedience of court orders in immigration habeas cases.

Isihara, a military JAG, isn’t the problem, but a symptom of a Justice Department deliberately broken by President Trump (whose mug shot now adorns the exterior wall of Main Justice in a victorious middle-finger authoritarian salute), as U.S. District Judge Laura M. Provinzino pointed out in a footnote:

SAUSA Isihara stated at the show-cause hearing that prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a SAUSA last month, he had not practiced in federal court. Since joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he has been assigned nearly 130 cases.

Assigning some 130 cases to someone with no federal court experience is deliberate sabotage.

Trump DOJ’s Latest Dipsy-Doo

As Morning Memo reported two weeks ago, Trump DOJ lawyer Tiberius Davis told U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in a hearing in the original Alien Enemies Act case that the administration’s agreement with El Salvador to ship immigrants there for confinement, including in CECOT, would expire in March, after one year.

That was a bit of news, and it caught Boasberg’s ear because he’s overseeing a separate case in which human rights groups are suing to invalidate that agreement. So Boasberg circled back and asked Davis again if the agreement was set to expire after one year, and Davis confirmed what he’d originally said.

Three days later, Boasberg followed up in the other case by asked the Justice Department to file a brief on whether and when the agreement expires and whether that moots the case.

In its response to Boasberg, the Trump DOJ dipsy-doo’d again: “Defendants respectfully state that the non-legally binding diplomatic arrangement at issue in this case does not have a termination date.” (Davis is listed on the filing that case, too.)

It’s this kind of inability to get straight or consistent answers from DOJ lawyers that is driving judges crazy and spelled such a quick end to the presumption of regularity previously afforded to the Justice Department.

It’s still not clear that Davis was wrong when he told Boasberg it was a one-year agreement. In the case challenging the agreement, the plaintiffs already succeeded in making public a March 22, 2025 letter agreement between the administration and El Salvador that says El Salvador would hold the AEA detainees “for up to one year” in exchange for a $4.76 million grant.

Mass Deportation Watch

• NYT: A 23-year-old U.S. citizen was fatally shot by ICE last March in Texas, but ICE’s involvement didn’t become public until last week.
• Star Tribune: ICE detained a Minnesota teen, labeled him an ‘unaccompanied minor,’ and lost him
• Bloomberg: U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin of the Southern District of West Virginia excoriated ICE for wearing masks à la the KKK and called the Trump mass deportation operation a “regime of secret policing”:

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

Judge Irate Over Reporter Search Warrant

U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia tore into Trump DOJ attorneys for not alerting him to a law protecting journalists from government searches and seizures when it applied for a search warrant last year for the home of WaPo Hannah Natanson.

Porter also revealed in the court hearing that he had previously turned down the Natanson search warrant several other times before he finally approved it.

Blanche Does It Again: ‘You’re Fired’

On a separate front, the Trump DOJ is continuing to provoke a confrontation with federal judges over who has the power to name interim U.S. attorneys. As soon as the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia named James W. Hundley as a replacement for the disgraced Lindsey Halligan on Friday, he was fired by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche:

Here we go again. EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you’re fired! https://t.co/QnHHUZqhw1

— Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) February 20, 2026

The latest eff you to federal judges came nine days after Blanche similarly fired the judge-appointed interim U.S. attorney in the Northern District of New York.

3 Killed in 43rd Known Boat Strike

The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign of high seas attacks against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 147 when three people were killed Friday in a strike in the eastern Pacific.

Quote of the Day

“I thought his head was going to explode.”—Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT), who witnessed President Trump getting the news that the Supreme Court had struck down his global tariffs

Police Close Probe of Shawn DeRemer

After reviewing video footage of the incident, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office has determined no crime occurred when Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband Shawn DeRemer embraced a department employee in what his lawyer called a “friendly hug/embrace.”

“Based upon the evidence presented to this office in relation to the video, there is no indication of a crime,” a spokesperson for Pirro said.

Shawn DeRemer has reportedly been barred from the Labor Department’s D.C. headquarters and was disinvited to the premiere of the “Melania” documentary after two department employees complained he had touched them inappropriately.

DeRemer has denied the allegations.

Court Sides With Trump on Slavery Exhibit

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals lifted parts of the preliminary injunction issued by a district judge that required the Trump administration to restore slavery exhibits it had removed at the Philadelphia site of the former home of President George Washington, but by the time the appeals court intervened, the administration had already restored a significant portion of what it had originally taken down.

10 Commandments Okay in Classrooms

A majority of the full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for a 2024 Louisiana law requiring that the 10 Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, including colleges and universities.

The Joke Is On Us

Mike Somes: The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment

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