The US president, Donald Trump, repeatedly campaigned for a second term as a champion of free expression and vowed in his January 2025 inaugural address to stop what he described as years of “government censorship”. A wave of court decisions since then has concluded that his administration acted in the opposite direction, with judges repeatedly finding that it chilled or suppressed the speech of citizens and groups opposed to the Republican president’s agenda.Reuters identified 75 rulings by federal judges that found the Trump administration had infringed First Amendment rights, including freedoms of speech, religion and the press. The pushback on constitutional grounds was unprecedented.“The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” William Young, a Boston-based US district judge, wrote. Young, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, ruled in September that the administration had illegally detained and deported foreign students and faculty members, and revoked their visas, because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Other judges found that federal agencies had terminated grants awarded to universities, including Harvard, for refusing to align with Trump’s ideological agenda; retaliated against law firms based on their legal advocacy; and used excessive force at protests.Trump administration officials have repeatedly called federal judges who ruled against them “activists” and accused them of interfering with the president’s executive authority. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson criticized the First Amendment rulings, saying in a statement that “the federal judiciary has repeatedly endangered and obstructed the election choices of the American people with its unlawful rulings”.
How often has the Trump administration lost?
Of the 93 cases during Trump’s second term in which judges considered First Amendment arguments, 75 produced lower-court rulings against his administration, Reuters found.Most of the adverse decisions came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, although Republican appointees delivered rulings against the administration in 10 cases.By comparison, Reuters identified just 27 cases during Democratic President Joe Biden’s term in which lower-court judges considered First Amendment challenges to his agenda. Judges ruled against the Biden administration in 13 of them.Most of the adverse lower-court rulings against the Biden administration involved vaccine mandates challenged on religious-freedom grounds.Reuters compiled the tally through searches of federal court records and Westlaw, a legal research service. Reuters and Westlaw are both owned by Thomson Reuters.Consolidated lawsuits and multiple rulings issued in the same lawsuit were each counted as one case. The review covered civil lawsuits filed against the Trump administration and excluded cases brought by self-represented litigants.Some decisions were preliminary, meaning judges acted on requests for swift intervention before hearing the cases on their full merits.
Who brought the First Amendment challenges?
Trump’s ideological opponents and media organizations frequently brought the lawsuits.The New York Times and the Associated Press, for example, asked judges to halt restrictions on their ability to cover the White House or the Pentagon. The AP and the New York Times won at the lower-court level, although some of the rulings are on hold pending appeal.The Trump administration appealed in about two-thirds of the cases while allowing other rulings to stand. It chose not to challenge rulings that prevented the government from interfering with what academics could discuss in classrooms or from slashing longstanding grants awarded to legal and medical organizations that have opposed the administration’s agenda.The administration secured relief in appeals connected to 15 of the 75 adverse rulings, either obtaining a pause on a district judge’s First Amendment decision or having it overturned entirely.
Appeals courts hand administration some victories
In significant victories for the administration, two appeals courts this year overturned lower-court rulings that had led to the release of pro-Palestinian campus activists Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, who had attended Columbia University.The appellate judges found that the lower courts lacked jurisdiction to hear the cases but did not rule on the merits of the lawsuits. Khalil’s lawyers have said he plans to appeal to the US Supreme Court.In a separate appeal decided on the merits, the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in February overturned a ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of the ability to engage in union bargaining with US agencies.The unions argued that Trump acted in retaliation for their challenges to his administration’s policies, in violation of the First Amendment. A three-judge panel, however, said Trump would have taken the same action whether or not he intended to punish the unions for their advocacy.Other appeals courts have been less receptive. In May, the 9th Circuit agreed with a lower-court judge that terminating federal grants awarded to University of California researchers as part of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign constituted viewpoint discrimination.
Trump’s campaign against ‘censorship’
Trump won his second term after railing against what he called an “online censorship regime”, which he said the Biden administration had imposed by requiring media companies to suppress alleged misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic and after the 2020 election.He also returned to themes from his first presidential campaign, including opposition to what he called “cancel culture”, as some conservatives complained that social and professional pressures discouraged the expression of their political views.Hours after his 2025 inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”. It directed that no federal agency or employee would unconstitutionally abridge Americans’ speech rights.Critics say the promise was almost immediately undercut by a series of other executive orders and policies seeking retribution against opponents or targeting viewpoints the president opposed.Among the early orders were directives to end federal funding that the administration deemed supportive of “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI. The two subjects were at the heart of many of the lawsuits alleging First Amendment violations by the administration.
‘First Amendment’s boundaries are very clear’
Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School and author of “Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment”, said no president has taken such sweeping action to suppress speech since President Woodrow Wilson.Early in the last century, Wilson oversaw thousands of deportations and arrests during the First Red Scare, a period of anti-communist and anti-immigrant fervour. Zick said court precedents at the time were far less clear on whether the First Amendment protects speech critical of the government. “Trump is operating in this situation where the First Amendment’s boundaries are very clear,” he said.
Appeals court weighs action against law firms
A Washington federal appeals court appears poised, based on arguments it heard in May, to uphold lower-court decisions finding that Trump’s campaign against law firms and lawyers infringed free-speech rights.Among those decisions was a May 2025 ruling by Beryl Howell, a US district judge appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama.Howell castigated Trump for targeting the law firm Perkins Coie through an executive order that suspended its lawyers’ security clearances and barred them from entering federal buildings because of the firm’s previous work for his political opponents.“Settling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business or individual for punitive government action is not a legitimate use of the powers of the U.S. government or an American President,” Howell wrote.
