A Road Map of Trump's Lawless Presidency, According to 35 Legal Scholars

New York Times

28-04-2025

In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.
You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration's revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students, and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.
Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency, and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.
We heard back from 35 scholars — a group full of diverse viewpoints and experiences, including liberals like U.C. Berkeley's Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard's Jody Freeman; the conservatives Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Michael McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who directs Stanford's Constitutional Law Center and is a member of the Federalist Society; and the libertarians Ilya Somin at George Mason University and Evan Bernick at Northern Illinois University. Many are among the nation's most cited scholars by their colleagues in law review articles.
From all of their responses, we constructed a road map through Mr. Trump's first 100 days of lawlessness, including his defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms and targeting of law firms, universities, the press and other parts of civil society; the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power.
This road map largely draws on the scholars' own words, which serve as bright red warning lights about the future of America:
Not all of our legal scholars saw every Trump action the same way, and one saw the problem as lying more with the courts than with the administration. But there was abundant assent that the president is trying to operate without limits, and that the rule of law and especially due process are being profoundly tested and challenged. This guide through the first 100 days is by no means exhaustive, but rather reflects legal issues our 35 scholars highlighted repeatedly or with the gravest concern.
Let's start with what many of them flagged first: Ending birthright citizenship.
No other issue united our legal scholars, as a group and across ideological lines, more than Mr. Trump's attack on birthright citizenship, which they assessed as flagrantly lawless in nature with little hope of succeeding in the courts.
But the fact that the president has taken on this fight speaks to his tenacity in trying to upend long established rights and, in this case, a Supreme Court decision that has stood for 127 years.
Federal courts in three states have issued temporary nationwide pauses on Mr. Trump's order. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to modify the reach of those injunctions, which would allow the president's executive order to go into effect in some or even many parts of the country. But this battle is likely to be a mere prelude to one over the constitutionality of the order itself.
From there, it's a straight shot to deporting people without due process.
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia has put a klieg light on the Trump administration's contempt for perhaps the most fundamental guarantee of the Bill of Rights: due process under the law. It means the government must provide a person — and that is any individual, not just a United States citizen — with notice and an opportunity for a hearing before stripping him of life, liberty or property.
But it is not just the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia that is alarming. He was among 238 migrants declared 'alien enemies' under a rarely used 1798 law that allows the government to quickly deport citizens from an invading nation. In other cases, the Trump administration cited a seldom used provision of a 1952 law to target international students who protested the war in Gaza on the ground that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy. By using a broad interpretation of what constitutes a threat, critics say the Trump administration eroded constitutionally protected rights to due process and free speech.
The State Department also revoked the visas or student status of over 1,500 international students and recent graduates, generally without providing clear justification. This lack of transparency provided little recourse for students or universities to correct or appeal these decisions. On Friday, the Trump administration, in an apparent about-face, announced that it will restore the legal status of hundreds of students as it works on a new system for assessing and terminating student visas. But officials said those students may yet see their status and their visas discontinued.
The lawless attacks also have targeted law firms …
In February Mr. Trump began targeting top law firms that he has accused of helping to 'weaponize' the justice system against him by representing clients or causes at odds with his agenda. He has forced them to bow to his demands or see their federal contracts summarily terminated and their lawyers lose security clearances and access to federal buildings that they need to represent their clients. Jenner & Block, one of the firms targeted, has argued in court that the order violates the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment's due process clause and the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel. 'It goes beyond the president's constitutional power' and 'is authorized by no statute,' the firm said. One federal judge has called a similar effort against another law firm 'a shocking abuse of power.'
So far, to avoid reprisals, at least nine firms have promised to provide roughly $1 billion in top-tier pro bono legal advice to causes Mr. Trump embraces. More than a few of these scholars likened this coercive scheme to extortion.
And universities …
Universities have similarly come under attack. Mr. Trump has threatened to pull billions of dollars in federal funds unless campuses knuckle under to his demands on hiring, admissions and curriculums. Many of the scholars framed these attacks as part of a larger war on civil society and brazen violation of the First Amendment and procedural protections.
And The Associated Press.
For the last few months, the White House has sharply reduced The Associated Press's access to Mr. Trump because it declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the name that Mr. Trump designated for it. A.P. journalists were excluded from the small, rotating group of journalists who routinely cover events in confined spaces at the White House, including the Oval Office and Air Force One. But recently the White House, on a few occasions, allowed A.P. journalists into such events after a Federal District Court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the exclusion violated the First Amendment's free speech clause.
Using money as leverage is key to Mr. Trump, even if the Constitution stands in his way.
Mr. Trump wasted little time in challenging Congress's constitutional power of the purse to control government spending. On Inauguration Day he signed an executive order freezing foreign aid and funding for energy programs. He has impounded billions of dollars, despite a 1974 law that limits the president's power to withhold those funds and requires him to follow specific steps to delay or rescind funding. He has called that law a 'disaster' that 'is clearly unconstitutional' and 'a blatant violation of the separation of powers.'
But in fact, many scholars see the president's actions as a further effort to arrogate power within the White House at the expense of Congress.
Deploying tariffs at will is suspect, too.
The president's tariffs are facing numerous legal challenges, including a lawsuit contesting levies that Mr. Trump announced on China in February and later expanded. In imposing the tariffs, the administration invoked a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows a president to regulate imports if the president declares a national emergency.
He argued that tariffs were necessary because U.S. trade deficits have 'led to the hollowing out' of the nation's manufacturing base, undermined supply chains and made the country's 'defense-industrial base' dependent on foreign adversaries. But the 1977 law has never been used before to impose tariffs, and it is unclear whether it authorizes them.
Then there's the firings at independent agencies.
Independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission were created by Congress with regulatory authority over their domains. Their leaders are appointed by the president but operate independently from the White House. This arrangement, as the Heritage Foundation argued in its blueprint for a second Trump term, 'makes them constitutionally problematic in light of the Constitution's having vested federal executive power in the president.'
And that is why these agencies are now in Mr. Trump's cross hairs as he seeks to extend and strengthen his hold on the bureaucracy. The president has already summarily fired members of several independent commissions without cause before their terms were up, in violation of the law and a 1935 Supreme Court decision. But the judicial winds may be blowing the president's way. Many of these scholars expect the Supreme Court will side with Mr. Trump.
Now let's turn to actions within Trump's authority.
We asked these scholars to offer examples of significant actions by Mr. Trump that have received legal criticism but were within his writ as president, regardless of whether they agree with what he did.
As a starting point, Professor Johnsen at Indiana University noted, 'Presidents possess enormous powers to change policy.' Another scholar, Derek Black at the University of South Carolina, made the argument that legitimate exercises of Mr. Trump's authority may simply be obscured by the sheer breadth and velocity of his effort to impose his will on the government and the country.
Not everyone agreed on the particulars, but among the actions some scholars pointed to as being within Mr. Trump's power, or likely to be upheld by the courts, were:
All of which brings us to Trump and the courts.
More than 200 legal challenges have been filed so far against the administration's actions since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. With the Republican-controlled Congress broadly compliant with the White House agenda, the courts are left as the last fortification against administrative overreach. But will the judiciary, in the end, be up to the task? And will the White House comply with judicial orders?
Courts have limited power to actually enforce their orders — judges rely on the executive branch to do that — and some federal judges have complained that the administration has ignored them or slow-walked compliance.
In a worrisome comment in February, Vice President JD Vance asserted that 'judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.' He has made a similar argument in the past. Moreover, the president and his allies have demeaned judges who have ruled against the administration and called for their impeachment. In a striking development on Friday, F.B.I. agents in Milwaukee arrested a state court judge on charges of obstructing immigration agents.
All of this has led to concerns about whether court orders will be ignored by the Trump administration or the courts will be undercut by Congress, which controls their budgets and can, under the Constitution, largely dictate which cases federal courts can hear — and can't.
Last month the House speaker, Mike Johnson, raised the possibility of eliminating some federal courts. 'We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know,' Mr. Johnson told reporters. 'We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.'
And finally, we end at … the Big Picture.
What do Mr. Trump's lawless actions add up to? And where do they suggest the president is heading? We concluded by asking those questions to our legal scholars, too.