Washington — President Trump’s cascade of executive actions announced soon after he took office has already prompted more than half a dozen legal challenges before the end of his first week. And they’re likely just the opening salvos in a series of court battles that will play out as federal agencies begin the work of executing the president’s directives.
In the hours and days after his inauguration Monday, Mr. Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations tackling a wide range of policy issues, from immigration to federal hiring and remote work to energy.
His wave of Day 1 signings wasn’t unusual — his predecessor issued more than a dozen executive actions on his first day in the White House — and neither are Mr. Trump’s unilateral efforts to change policy. But whether his proposals are ultimately implemented by federal agencies in the face of legal challenges remains to be seen.
Already, Mr. Trump’s order seeking to end birthright citizenship and prohibiting federal agencies from issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas has been the subject of at least four separate lawsuits brought by 22 states and advocacy groups.
A federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order’s implementation Thursday, in response to a request from a group of four Democrat-led states calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Mr. Trump’s executive order reinstating a policy from his first term that removes employment protections from career federal workers has been challenged by the National Treasury Employees Union, and his directive establishing the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is at the center of three separate court fights mounted by nonprofit organizations.
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But other groups, many of which mounted court battles during Mr. Trump’s first term in office, have so far remained on the sidelines — for now.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said it is examining “all available options to stop this administration from implementing alarming and dangerous policies like these executive orders, which aim to subvert our equal protection and anti-discrimination laws and would cause great harm to Black people and other people of color.”
Jonathan Adler, a constitutional law scholar at Case Western Reserve University, said more challenges will likely arise after federal agencies take action to follow the instructions Mr. Trump laid out in his measures.
The executive actions said, “don’t have independent legal force, and the consequences come from the fact that people in the executive branch follow those instructions in taking various actions, and those actions can have consequences.”
But Mr. Trump’s orders cracking down on immigration, which he pledged to do on the campaign trail, are likely to have concrete effects quickly, and will be litigated more swiftly.
“When we’re talking about domestic regulatory policy, it takes a while before the executive order produces the sort of tangible agency action that somebody can sue over, whereas in the context of immigration, trade, foreign affairs, the ability of the president to take actions that have more immediate effects is broader,” Adler said.
Lambda Legal, which advocates for the civil rights of LGBTQ people, is preparing to pursue litigation targeting Mr. Trump’s executive actions, including one that declares the U.S. recognizes two sexes, male and female, and those related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
“It’s really attempting to be a scorched-earth approach to censor language and change the culture with the stroke of a Sharpie, and of course that’s directly contrary to the First Amendment and to the Equal Protection Clause,” said Jennifer Pizer, chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, of Mr. Trump’s directives. “It’s an area of enormous concern because it’s attempting to reimpose an exclusionary worldview and to make it difficult to provide effective services to minority communities. And that’s not acceptable and lawful.”
During Mr. Trump’s first administration, many of his key policy proposals were tied up in the courts, in part because agencies failed to follow the federal law governing the process for issuing regulations. In one instance, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program violated that law, the Administrative Procedure Act.
With the second Trump administration still in its first opening days, it’s too early to tell whether that will recur.
But Pizer said that based on Lambda Legal’s experience during Mr. Trump’s first term — with victories stemming from both a failure to follow the legal process for issuing regulations and the constitutionality of his orders — the organization has “substantial confidence that much of what this administration appears determined to do will not stand. It’s blatantly defying settled law in a range of ways.”
A shift in how the courts evaluate the policy decisions of federal agencies could also affect the success of Mr. Trump’s actions.
Last year, the Supreme Court reversed a 40-year-old decision that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power by requiring courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of laws by Congress if it was reasonable. But it has also been reinforcing the message that Congress must give clear authorization for an agency to decide an issue of major political or economic significance, known as the major questions doctrine.
The Supreme Court applied this legal theory when it blocked President Biden’s sweeping student loan forgiveness plan in June 2023 after finding that a 2003 federal law did not authorize the education secretary to cancel nearly $500 billion in student loan debt.
“Agencies don’t have a roving license to just make the world a better place because they think there’s a problem,” Adler said. “I would be surprised if the court backed away from that under the Trump administration.”
But he said there are two areas — both of which are central to Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda — where courts and existing laws are more permissive of the executive branch’s exercise of authority: trade and immigration. Immigration laws create a structure where the president can do more unilaterally, Adler said, and Congress has over the years given the executive branch more emergency powers.
“On traditional domestic policy, I think the overall trend of the court’s jurisprudence will constrain the ability of the administration to do things that are particularly dramatic, but trade and immigration will be an exception to that,” Adler said.
