A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

No More Fishing For Needles In Haystacks With Sledgehammers

U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland issued a detailed enumerated temporary restraining order barring DOGE from accessing the personally identifiable information of Americans kept by the Social Security Administration. In her scathing 137-page opinion accompanying the order, Hollander berated the Trump administration for its actions and for its lame defense:

The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.

To facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.

Yet, defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government. Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task. Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer

In response, Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek petulantly threatened to essentially shut down the Social Security Administration because the TRO broadly targeted “DOGE affiliates”:

“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek said. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”

He said he would ask the judge to immediately clarify her order. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,” he said.

Dudek, you’ll recall, was the low-level SSA bureaucrat who showed enough affinity for the arriving DOGE team to get himself elevated to the top spot.

‘Woefully Insufficient’

The Trump DOJ is pushing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to the breaking point as he seeks to determine whether to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating his order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

After asking for and getting a last-minute reprieve on a key filing deadline, the Justice Department missed its new deadline and filed a declaration from a low-level acting ICE official that essentially told the judge to pound sand.

Calling the government’s filing “woefully insufficient,” Boasberg quickly ordered the government to meet a new set of deadlines and began to set the stage for a contempt hearing, though he hasn’t scheduled one yet. The Justice Department met the first of those deadlines this morning with a terse, minimally compliant declaration from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that the administration is considering invoking the state secrets privilege.

A hearing later today will refocus the case for now on the substance of last weekend’s Alien Enemies Act deportations of Venezuelan nationals with claimed but unsubstantiated criminal gang ties. They remained imprisoned in a labor camp in El Salvador after the Trump administration rushed through the paperwork and flight logistics in what seems like a clear effort to avoid judicial scrutiny until after the fact.

Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the U.S. intelligence community issued an assessment last month that Tren de Aragua was not controlled by the Venezuelan government, undercutting a key portion of the Trump administration’s already dubious justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

Quote Of The Day

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it. We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse. These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”–Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism,” on the speed of Trump’s subversion of the judiciary

Capitulation

You’ve seen by now that President Trump played the Paul Weiss law firm like a drum, targeting it with an unlawful executive order, drawing it into a negotiation over how much of its professional ethics and independence it would get to keep, and then publicly holding the law firm’s scalp up high for everyone to see.

IMPORTANT

The Justice Department is now moving to short circuit the civil lawsuits against Donald Trump over Jan. 6.

Federal Judge Blocks Deportation Of Georgetown Fellow

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles of Virginia issued an order blocking the deportation of Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri until his habeas action can be heard. DHS says Suri, who had his visa unilaterally revoked without due process, was singled out because of his father-in-law’s ties to Hamas. In a new filing in the case, Suri’s wife, who is an American citizen, attested that her husband has only met her father twice, both times more than a decade ago.

The Destruction: Schools, Libraries, Museums

• DoE: President Trump issued an executive order purporting to abolish the Department of Education
• IMLS: DOGE descended on the DC offices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the bedrock of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, has ignited fears among union leaders that the agency’s staff could be next on the chopping block, NBC News reports.

The Corruption: Treasury Secretary Touts Tesla Stock

“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers Wednesday night to buy Tesla stock, an apparent violation of federal ethics rules that prohibit officials from endorsing products or businesses,” WaPo reports.

What Elon Wants Elon Gets?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Elon Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing today that the NYT reports was going to the U.S. military’s highly secret contingency plan for a war with China. After the NYT report, President Trump and the Pentagon denied that the briefing session was going to be about military plans involving China.

The WSJ duplicated the NYT’s reporting and included this remarkable paragraph:

Musk, according to one person familiar with the arrangements, is receiving the briefing because he asked for one. He has a security clearance but isn’t in the military chain of command or known to be a military adviser to Trump.

Because he asked for one.

Brilliant

CNN: “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s February memo ordering all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites was so vague that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like “racism,” “ethnicity,” “history” and “first” when searching for articles and photos to remove, and to interpret the directive “broadly,” multiple defense officials told CNN.”

Don’t Mess With Jackie Robinson

The Pentagon’s absurd purge of a Jackie Robinson tribute page has cost a controversial senior Defense Department spokesman his position.

Nonsense Watch

• Attorney General Pam Bondi has “as many as a thousand FBI agents” working day and night to scour investigative files on the late Jeffrey Epstein to satisfy right-wing demands that more materials be released, ABC News reports.
• The Trump White House scrambled to clean up the mess it created by exposing Social Security numbers when releasing JFK assassination files, WaPo reports.

Have A Good First Weekend Of Spring

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

They’re Coming For The Judges

The Trump White House and the MAGA hordes unleashed a withering volley of rhetorical fire Wednesday against the federal judiciary. It was partly a performative response to the series of legal setbacks President Trump suffered the day before, a show of defiance and strength to reestablish the sense of dominance that was eroded by the adverse court rulings and the rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

The White House blasted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, dragging his wife into the melee in classic Trump fashion (see below), while MAGA figures Elon Musk and Laura Loomer attacked the judge’s daughter. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, fecklessly promised hearings as soon as next week on the spate of injunctions against the Trump administration. GOP House members who have been agitating to impeach judges for rulings they don’t like got a boost from Musk, who maxed out his political contributions to them.

All of this came against a backdrop of heightened security threats to judges and their families that became glaringly obvious with the right-wing backlash that targeted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for her vote in the USAID case. Some people, it won’t surprise you to learn, can’t distinguish between the rhetorical excesses of Trump and actual harassment and intimidation. Nor is it a distinction Trump has ever shown any interest in maintaining. It leads to things like this, as collected by the NYT:

• a mailbox pipe bomb hoax at the Charleston, South Carolina home of one of Justice Barrett’s sisters;
• a “swatting” attack against U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour of Seattle;
• a mailbox bomb hoax against Judge Coughenour;
• a series of anonymous Domino’s pizza deliveries to the homes of judges, including the immediate family of Justice Barrett, suggesting “we know where you live.”

There is always a background level of threats against federal judges. It’s often forgotten that a federal judge was killed in the 2011 attempted assassination of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ). The son of a federal judge was killed in 2020 in their New Jersey home by a gunman targeting the jurist. What’s different now is the level of rhetorical vitriol coming from the president himself and amplified and extended on his behalf by elected officials and supporters.

Trump White House Goes After Judge’s Wife

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went on a long rant against the chief federal judge in DC, including targeting the judge’s wife for her political contributions:

LEAVITT: This judge is a Democrat activist. He was appointed by Barack Obama. NBC: He was originally appointed by George W Bush.

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 19, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Trump DOJ Hits New Low In Absurdity

In what was probably the most absurd legal filing I’ve ever seen the Justice Department file, the Trump administration flipped shit – to use the term of art – at U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in a last-ditch effort to keep from having to reveal information that would help him determine whether the government violated one of his orders in the Alien Enemies Act case.

Boasberg remained measured, almost bemused, in the face of a suddenly rogue DOJ making preposterous arguments, presenting unreliable assessments of the law, and trying to bully its way into avoiding having to comply with court orders.

The upshot was that Boasberg gave the Justice Department another 24 hours to either answer his questions or to go ahead and invoke the state secrets privilege, a threat he didn’t find very credible. As a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Boasberg clearly knows the legal terrain better than the Trump DOJ lawyers on this case. The new deadline is noon ET today.

Again, this ruckus is about whether the government disregarded a valid court order and continued deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. As to the substance of the deportations, Boasberg has scheduled a hearing tomorrow.

Judge Declines To Block DOGE Takeover Of Institute Of Peace

TPM’s Kate Riga reports on the hearing before U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in which she expressed dismay over the armed DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace but declined to immediately put a stop to it.

The Courts Alone Won’t Save Us

Steve Vladeck on the practical limits of using judicial power to reign in a rogue president.

Khalil’s Deportation Blocked By Second Federal Judge

After a federal judge in Manhattan transferred the case of detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil to New Jersey, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz quickly entered an order barring Khalil’s deportation until the court can review and rule on his claims.

It’s Not Just Khalil

• Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri was reportedly detained Monday on the streets of suburban DC and swiftly transferred to Louisiana after his student visa was revoked under the same dubious law used to target Mahmoud Khalil for his political views. “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” a DHS spokesperson said, a possible references to Suri’s in-laws. His wife is an American citizen whose father has been described in the past as a Hamas adviser.
• A French scientist traveling to Houston for a conference was reportedly denied entry to the United States on March 9 after phone messages critical of the Trump administration research policies were found on his phone.
• Germany updated its advisory on U.S. travel after several German citizens were recently detained at the border.

Ummm, Not Sure What To Make Of This

Semafor:

Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss and one of the most powerful lawyers in New York, has been in Washington this week meeting with officials in President Donald Trump’s orbit, people familiar with the matter said, days after the White House issued an executive order revoking the security clearance of attorneys working at the firm.

Karp, people familiar with the matter said, is discussing a particular path back into the administration’s good graces: helping the White House respond to alleged instances of antisemitism that came out of the wave of campus protests last year. 

The Attack On Higher Ed Continues

• WSJ: Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants
• NYT: Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation
• AP: Trump administration suspends $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over transgender swimmer

Quote Of The Day

“When for any reason, in a university on private foundation or in a university supported by public money, the administration of the institution or the instruction in any one of its departments is changed from an influence from without; when an effort is made to dislodge an officer or a professor because the political sentiment or the religious sentiment of the majority has undergone a change, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university, and it cannot again take its place in the rank of universities so long as there continues to exist any appreciable extent of coercion.”

–William Rainey Harper, founding president of the University of Chicago, in a speech he gave in 1900 (h/t Genevieve Lakier)

Lack Of Imagination Is The Big Obstacle To Trans Acceptance

An especially thoughtful essay by Jennifer Finney Boylan on what it means to be a trans woman:

[T]he Trump administration’s attacks on us are, in some ways, founded on the supposition that women like me are “really” men. Whenever I hear, for instance, the simplistic edict that there should be “no men in women’s sports,” my first instinct is to agree. Because transgender women are not “really” men. We are women. We may have different histories than other women, but then, every woman has her own history.

DOGE Watch

• AP: DOGE lieutenant takes the reins at USAID, an agency DOGE dismantled.
• NYT: Meet Elon Musk’s Top Lieutenant Who Oversees DOGE
• Politico’s Kyle Cheney: In new sworn declaration, DOGE administrator Amy Gleason says DOGE has 89 employees and no “formal front office or organizational chart.”

The Purges

• DoE: President Trump could sign as soon as today an executive order purporting to abolish the Department of Education.
• Hollow victories: Many purged government workers reinstated by the courts find themselves in the limbo of paid administrative leave while they wait to see if the Trump administration uses other legal authority to terminate them again.

Down The Pentagon’s Memory Hole

• Articles about the Holocaust, Sept. 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention have been removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites purportedly as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI.
• A Defense Department article honoring the military legacy of baseball legend Jackie Robinson was removed Wednesday before being restored later in the day.

White House Plans Military Zone Along Southern Border

WaPo: The Trump administration is evaluating plans for the Pentagon to take control of a buffer zone along a sprawling stretch of the southern border and empower active-duty U.S. troops to temporarily hold migrants who cross into the United States illegally, according to five U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

On America Destroying Its Own Symbols

Ukrainian Stanislav Aseyev, who was tortured by the Russians for his reporting for Radio Liberty, writes about the Trump administration shutting down the U.S. government broadcaster:

When you’re sitting in a chair, wires hooked up to your body, in some sense everything is simple. You are an enemy, and opposite you are your enemies. The electric current that ran through my body on April 11, 2017, for articles I’d written for Radio Liberty, forces my muscles to contract. Victims’ psyches “contract” in the same way, enabling them to endure torture: the organism musters everything it has.

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