Topline
President Donald Trump and his administration have won less than one in three of the significant rulings that courts have issued over his policies in the months since Inauguration Day, though judges he appointed have sided with him 76% of the time—and the Supreme Court’s ruling limiting lower courts could give the president a slew of new wins.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he was sworn ... More
The Trump administration has lost approximately 60% of the court rulings against it since Inauguration Day and won 30%—while another 10% were mixed rulings both in favor and against the administration—based on a total of 182 rulings between Jan. 20 and June 30, with 55 in the government’s favor and 109 against it.
LOSS: Judge John Coughenour issued the first major ruling of Trump’s second term, imposing an injunction that blocked the president’s new restrictions on birthright citizenship from taking effect nationwide.
LOSS: Judge John Bates ordered the Trump administration to restore health-related government websites that it had taken offline following Trump’s inauguration, after Doctors for America argued the information being removed violated federal law and the loss of information harmed its membership.
WIN: Judge George O’Toole cleared the way for the Trump administration to enforce its policy asking federal employees to decide if they wanted to take a buyout offer, as O’Toole reversed a previous order he issued that blocked the deadline for employees to respond, ruling the unions that brought the lawsuit didn’t have standing to challenge the policy.
LOSS: A federal appeals court ruled for the first time in Trump’s second term, upholding the injunction blocking Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship—one of numerous district and appeals court rulings that also sided against the president on the executive order.
LOSS: The Supreme Court weighed in for the first time on Trump’s second-term actions, keeping an order in place that temporarily allowed former head of the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger to stay in his role while the court considered whether Trump firing him was legal—though Dellinger later ended his case after an appeals court then ruled against him.
WIN: The Trump administration also won in court that day, as Judge Carl Nichols—a Trump appointee—denied a request by labor unions to block the Trump administration from dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, as he backed the Trump administration’s argument that putting employees living abroad on administrative leave will not be as harmful as the unions claim.
LOSS: Judge Lauren King blocked two Trump executive orders targeting transgender rights, siding with Democratic-led states and blocking policies that would bar federal funding from being used to “promote gender ideology” or to give grants to any organizations that provide gender-affirming care to minors.
LOSS: The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 not to grant Trump’s request to halt a lower court ruling requiring the administration to pay out money for work by foreign aid groups that had already been completed; in his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito—joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh—chided the majority for giving a lower court judge “the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”
LOSS: Judge John McConnell issued a more lasting order blocking the Trump administration’s directive for agencies to halt all federal spending, after previously issuing a more temporary pause right after the freeze was announced, with McConnell writing the policy “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.”
WIN: Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied labor unions’ effort to block officials with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data—at least while the case moves forward—ruling that while the plaintiffs’ concerns are “understandable,” they hadn’t met the high bar to show access must be blocked while the litigation moved forward.
LOSS: Judge Deborah Boardman granted labor unions’ request to block DOGE officials from accessing Americans’ personal information through databases at the Department of Education, Office of Management and Budget and Treasury Department, including the database with information about student loan borrowers.
WIN: The Trump administration largely received a win as an appeals court allowed the government to suspend refugee admissions, pausing a lower court order that blocked the suspension—though the three-judge panel, which included one Trump appointee, did allow any refugee admissions for anyone who was conditionally approved to enter the U.S. before Inauguration Day.
MIXED: Judge Anthony Trenga partially granted federal employees who work in diversity, equity and inclusion’s request to halt their termination, barring the Trump administration from firing them without court approval, but rejecting a request by the plaintiffs to extend that block to other employees with similar jobs who aren’t parties in the case.
MIXED: The Supreme Court threw out lower court orders that barred the removal of some migrants under the Alien Enemies Act—which Trump has sought to use to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang—but also ruled people subject to deportation under the act are entitled to judicial review before they can be deported, as the Trump administration has faced criticism for deporting people without affording them due process.
LOSS: After the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador—to the U.S., a federal appeals court similarly upheld a lower court order requiring the government to return Garcia to the U.S., ruling the Trump administration defending its decision to deport the man without any due process was “unconscionable.”
WIN: While lower courts barred the Trump administration from firing probationary employees at multiple federal agencies, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the mass terminations to take place, ruling 7-2 to pause the lower court rulings and let the firings take place while the appeals process plays out.
LOSS: Judge Brian Murphy blocked the Trump administration from deporting immigrants to third countries—places that aren’t the U.S. or their original homeland—while litigation moves forward; the judge later asserted his ruling in May and said the Trump administration had “unquestionably” violated it by sending some migrants to South Sudan.
WIN: The Supreme Court let the Trump administration’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military take effect, ruling 6-3 to pause a lower court ruling that blocked the ban while the appeals process plays out.
LOSS: The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals also dealt a blow that day, denying the Trump administration’s effort to appeal an order over the detention of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil—who remained in detention until June 20, when a federal district judge ordered his release after declaring the Trump administration’s main argument for detaining him to be insufficient.
WIN: Judge Dabney Langhorne Friedrich, a Trump appointee, denied a request by immigrant rights groups to block the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement purposes, as plaintiffs warned the government could use people’s private tax information in order to deport or detain them.
LOSS: The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to block the Trump administration from continuing to remove people from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act, which is a temporary ruling while the litigation moves forward; the court did not make any judgment on whether or not Trump can lawfully use the act to deport people more generally.
WIN: Supreme Court justices ruled 8-1 to let the Trump administration halt the government’s Temporary Protected Status for some 500,000 migrants while litigation moves forward—paving the way for those immigrants to be deported—with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting from the court’s decision.
LOSS: Judge Jeffrey Steven White blocked the Trump administration’s decision to cancel thousands of international students’ visas, at least while litigation remains pending, issuing a preliminary injunction that bars the Trump administration from broadly taking action against student visa holders after hundreds of individual students had separately challenged their visa revocations in court.
WIN: The Supreme Court delivered a win for the Trump administration that same day, allowing the government to fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board and a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board who had challenged their removals, with the court ruling 6-3 along partisan lines to pause lower court orders that kept the board members in their jobs while their lawsuits moved forward.
WIN: The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to allow the Trump administration to cancel grants through the Department of Education while litigation remains pending, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberal justices in dissenting from the court’s opinion and voting to leave the grants in place.
LOSS: Judge Richard Leon ruled in favor of law firm WilmerHale as it fought Trump’s executive order retaliating against the firm for bringing cases and hiring lawyers he doesn’t like, with the judge writing that doing anything but striking down the executive order “would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers”—one in a suite of court rulings that have unanimously been in favor of the law firms Trump has targeted.
MIXED: Judge Tanya Chutkan—who previously oversaw one of the criminal cases against Trump—ruled both for and against the Trump administration in a case challenging Elon Musk and DOGE’s broad authority over the federal government, with Chutkan denying the government’s motion to dismiss the case when it came to the allegations against Musk and DOGE, but throwing out claims against Trump himself.
WIN: The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to let the Trump administration dissolve the temporary legal status for some asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela while litigation moves forward, meaning the government can deport more than 500,000 immigrants, throwing out a lower court order that kept the protections in place while the lawsuit proceeded.
LOSS: Judge James Boasberg issued a preliminary injunction saying the migrants the Trump administration deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act were unlawfully denied their due process rights, after the judge previously ordered the Trump administration to halt its flights to El Salvador while they were still in the air—and then ruled in April to hold Trump officials in criminal contempt for violating that order.
LOSS: Trump suffered two court losses that day, as a federal appeals court also denied the government’s effort to pause a lower court ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, including firing workers en masse and moving department functions to different agencies.
WIN: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along party lines to block a lower court order requiring DOGE to turn over depositions and other evidence about its activities, as part of a lawsuit over its authority to comply with federal public disclosure rules, with justices also ordering a lower court to narrow the scope of the information that DOGE must provide.
WIN: The Supreme Court also ruled 6-3 to halt a lower court order that barred DOGE’s access to Social Security data, meaning officials with the agency can access Social Security information while the case moves forward.
WIN: After the Court of International Trade blocked Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs and ruled they were unlawfully imposed, a federal appeals court then put that ruling on hold, meaning the tariffs will stay in effect until the appeals court can issue a further ruling in the case—though the court did not uphold the tariffs’ legality, as Trump claimed.
LOSS: Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, ordered the Trump administration to restore research grants through the National Institutes of Health, harshly rebuking the government during a hearing and saying its “appalling” actions “[represent] racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” adding, “The Constitution will not permit that … Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
WIN: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused an order that blocked Trump deploying the National Guard in response to protests in Los Angeles, allowing the president to keep troops in place in California while the appeal is pending.
WIN: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to pause Murphy’s April 18 order barring the Trump administration from deporting migrants to third countries, clearing the way for the administration to resume deportations, though Murphy ruled shortly after that the high court’s ruling did not affect his decision barring the Trump administration from deporting people to South Sudan.
WIN: The Supreme Court delivered its biggest ruling on Trump’s agenda thus far, ruling 6-3 along partisan lines to restrict lower federal judges’ ability to block the government’s policies nationwide, though justices declined to weigh in on whether his birthright citizenship order at the heart of the case is constitutional.
- That’s the total number of lawsuits that have been brought against the Trump administration as of June 27, according to a tally by Lawfare, which does not include separate cases in which the Trump administration has brought lawsuits under state laws.
The Supreme Court’s ruling restricting judges’ ability to constrain Trump is likely to upend how litigation against the administration plays out going forward. Justices ruled that while the Supreme Court can still block policies nationwide, lower courts can only issue rulings that provide relief to the parties in the lawsuit and do not extend beyond that. The Trump administration intends to move quickly in court to challenge existing court orders that block its policies nationwide, Reuters reports, singling out orders restricting DOGE and federal layoffs as being particularly big priorities. That means there could soon be an influx of judges who, constrained by the high court’s ruling, let Trump policies take effect after previously blocking them. The court’s ruling did keep in place several ways that federal judges can still block policies nationwide even without nationwide injunctions, such as plaintiffs bringing class-action lawsuits on behalf of specific demographics (like people subject to certain immigration orders) or challenging federal statutes under the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets judges block actions by federal agencies if they’re deemed to be unlawful. Courts could also block policies nationwide when doing so is logistically necessary to give parties relief: States challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order argued the policy has to be blocked nationwide, for instance, because otherwise people could be citizens in their states but not other states. While plaintiffs are likely to try and tailor their cases to fit one of those carveouts going forward, the Supreme Court’s ruling is still likely to have widespread impacts. It could create a patchwork situation where policies are only in place in some states but not others, and likely ensures more major policies will be ultimately decided by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Trump and his allies have railed against judges as the administration has faced a series of court losses, claiming they’re biased against Trump and in some cases calling for the judges’ impeachment. While there’s no evidence that any judges’ decisions are motivated by anti-Trump bias, the data does suggest the Trump administration overwhelmingly has far better luck in court when a Trump-appointed judge is considering its case. While the government has only had success about 30% of the time in court overall, that number shoots up to 76% when a Trump judge has ruled on the case, whether alone as a district court judge or as part of a panel of appeals court judges. Trump’s appointments of judges to appeals courts has been particularly helpful to him: Every single ruling by an appeals court that the administration has won, as of June 30, has included at least one Trump-appointed judge on the panel. There are only two occasions so far in which a Trump appointee has voted against the president in an appeals court and three in district courts. Rulings decided by judges appointed by other presidents are much less favorable, by contrast, coming out in Trump’s favor only 13% of the time, not including mixed rulings. That includes judges appointed by presidents of both parties, including Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Trump has reportedly been privately lamenting that the three conservative justices he appointed to the Supreme Court are not doing his bidding as much as he’d like, CNN reported in early June, though his win in the birthright citizenship led him to praise the justices and say they should be “proud.” While Trump has singled out the birthright citizenship case as benefiting him, the 6-3 conservative court has largely ruled in his favor even beyond that decision: Of the 15 cases the full court had issued rulings on as of June 30, ten of them have sided with the Trump administration. Three rulings were against the government, while another two were more of a mixed bag that had wins for either side. (That tally does not include any temporary rulings that only one Supreme Court justice made, which would be interim decisions before the full court could weigh in.) With the exception of the birthright citizenship case, those rulings have so far only been through what’s known as the “shadow docket,” which means the court rules on an issue without taking it up for oral arguments, as it typically does for big cases. Those rulings will typically put a policy on hold or keep it in place while litigation moves forward in lower courts, which means the high court could still issue rulings on it again in the future.
There are still a number of pending cases in which courts haven’t reached any major rulings yet, such as Trump’s defunding of NPR and the government’s agreement with El Salvador to imprison migrants. In other cases, judges have only issued temporary restraining orders that are set to expire if the court doesn’t grant more lasting injunctions, such as in cases regarding various grant freezes at federal agencies.
Forbes’ tally of court rulings is based on lawsuits that have been brought against the Trump administration since Inauguration Day, as compiled with the help of legal trackers by Fix the Court, Lawfare and Just Security. The tally does not include temporary restraining orders issued by district courts or administrative stays issued by appeals courts—which just immediately put actions or rulings on hold while the court considers whether to issue a more lasting decision—but does include rulings on preliminary injunctions, which are not final rulings, but rather block Trump administration policies or court rulings while litigation moves forward. It also includes rulings by appeals courts to pause lower court rulings while the appeals process plays out. Rulings on summary judgment—final rulings on an issue without it having to go to trial—and permanent injunctions against policies were also included, as were cases in which a judge rules on a motion to dismiss a case. Any rulings based on parties voluntarily dismissing their case were excluded. While the tally includes a number of immigration-related cases, it does not include court rulings on immigration cases brought by an individual who’s seeking relief from being detained or deported, given the hundreds of such cases that have been brought. It does include rulings on those cases at the appeals court level or by the Supreme Court. In instances where two or more lawsuits have been consolidated and the court only issues one ruling applying to multiple cases, that only counts as one ruling for the sake of the analysis. The count only includes one ruling per case in a certain court, meaning if a judge were to rule against the Trump administration but then in favor of it, that would count as a win.