特朗普政府未遵守半数法院禁令，法官严厉批评

This is Bloomberg Law with June Graasso from Bloomberg Radio.

The Trump administration is not following all court orders, and that's according to federal judges. The judges are fielding more requests to force the administration to comply with their rulings against the federal government than in any other administration, including the first Trump administration. One of the earliest cases, was when the chief DC judge in March of 2025 ordered the administration to turn back planes flying Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador, and the administration failed to do so.

Now, a study by Bloomberg Law shows that judges have found the administration has failed to comply with their orders in more than half of the 25 cases identified regarding preliminary injunctions. Joining me is Bloomberg Law reporter Suzanne Manac, who's done the research and crunched the numbers. Normally, a judge issues an order and the parties comply with the order. What's been happening in several cases with orders issued against the federal government?

We've seen some recent examples where the Trump administration has been at least accused of and in some cases found of not fully complying with these court orders. I've tracked two dozen examples at least of times when initial preliminary injunction orders issued early in a case were not fully followed or at least the challengers alleged that they were not being fully followed by the government under this administration alone.

What kind of cases are we talking about?

All different types of cases against the government. We've seen them in big cases over USAD funding cuts, the dismantling of international broadcaster Voice of America, other big cases across the country where there were early preliminary injunction orders granted against the administration telling them to stop doing something. And then we saw the challengers come back into court and claimed the administration wasn't fully following that order.

And in about half of those 25 instances, the judge agreed, at least in part,

there was a scathing opinion by a Reagan appointee in the Voice of America case. And in another case, a senior DC federal judge said that the defense department's actions flout the court's explicit directives. So, these federal judges are not beating around the bush. How upset are the judges about this failure to comply with their explicit orders? in some cases pretty upset and obviously when it comes to judges sometimes they're upset and they still write a pretty boring opinion.

Um so it's hard to always know but yes as you mentioned in a couple of examples the judges did in fact let us know that they weren't happy with the government's conduct. In that one instance you mentioned Judge Lambert a Reagan appointee in DC when he was handling the Voice of America case said that he thought the government was quote in violation of even the most meager reading end quote of his court order. So definitely not pleased.

Um, we've also seen plenty of orders where the judge is kind of very matterof factly is like, I don't see the government as having fully complied with this order. These are inconsistent. You know, you need to do this differently if you want to be in compliance with my order.

A few judges wanted to take things further or did take things further. So, in Minnesota, you had the chief judge finding that ICE violated court orders in dozens of immigration cases. And then there was a federal judge who held a government lawyer in civil contempt, though that didn't last long. Tell us about that.

Yes, in this story, I was tracking motions to enforce preliminary injunctions, but there have been a lot of different types of motions filed uh to force compliance with court orders against this administration. And in that one example you mentioned, we saw a Minnesota federal judge actually held a government lawyer briefly in civil contempt of court for not correctly facilitating the release of a detained immigrant. he was released in the wrong state without his property and it came out that the lawyer hadn't forwarded the court's order to ICE on time.

Um so there was just a full breakdown in communication. The lawyer actually, you know, did apologize and said she's been really overwhelmed, but the judge had ordered essentially a financial penalty for every day that the detained immigrant, you know, was not with his property. And the government did remedy it very quickly. I I don't believe the government lawyer who was um acting in the capacity of representing ICE did actually end up having to pay anything personally, but it was a pretty significant sanction to see against the government.

So in these cases, the government is giving instructions about what the court said and what the agency is supposed to do. Do you know is it a lot of times that the government lawyers are screwing up or that the agency is just not complying?

I think it's a mix. Um, in the case I just mentioned in Minnesota, um, that was a case where there was definitely seemed to be an overwhelmed lawyer for the government, uh, who was dealing with a lot of these immigration detention challenges known as habius cases. But certainly, I think there may be instances where it is, you know, the agency and we've seen the um, government actually like in that Minnesota case say like, look, we can't always be responsible for what the agency does.

The Justice Department of course represents federal agencies in court. And so, you know, that's really kind of an interesting question as we see some of these compliance issues come up in cases. To what extent is the Justice Department responsible for a federal agency not fully following a court order or interpreting it too narrowly and and you know, not fully complying in the full spirit of the order. Um, I think that's an interesting question and one that we've seen come up already.

One of the first and probably still most famous cases is where the chief judge in DC, Judge Booseberg, ordered the government when they were sending Venezuelan immigrants to prisons in El Salvador to turn the planes around and they didn't. And he he wanted to have a criminal contempt investigation. But what happened? the DC circuit uh ruled against him on that issue um and you know blocked a hearing from being held. Proceedings are still pending on that issue.

Um but yes, that was probably one of the most famous issues of court compliance that have happened in this administration and it happened so early. Um kind of set the tone perhaps for some of the issues to come. Um and in that case we were talking about criminal contempt which is a different form of contempt than we were discussing with the Minnesota lawyer that was civil contempt. So quite a bit more serious. I mean, particularly it's noticeable in the immigration cases to me, but is it a reflection of the Trump administration sort of flexing or trying to flex its executive power or is it something else?

Certainly, it depends who you ask. Um, I think that it is fair to say that when we're seeing this many motions to force compliance of court orders, more motions to enforce preliminary orders, but also some of the other ones you've talked about to compel compliance to consider contempt, that does probably show that we're dealing with an executive branch that is, you know, maybe interpreting court orders in a new way or really, you know, drawing more of this litigation as well.

Like it's also partly, you know, a bit of a numbers game. To be clear, the majority of cases we're not seeing these compliance orders. It is still a small share of them. It's just a significantly higher share than we've seen involving the government in administrations past. The Department of Justice did respond to our reporting and they blamed really more the the plaintiffs. You know, they said this is not a pattern of non-compliance on our part.

Like our DOJ lawyers work closely with the agencies to make sure they'r