in the courts

This weekend, a Kansas judge issued a scathing 117-page rebuke of the state's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth—and in doing so, methodically dismantled the case against that care. In his ruling, Judge Carl Folsom III worked through the testimony of the state's witnesses one by one, finding that its anti-transgender “experts”—routinely paraded by groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, SEGM, and Genspect—offered opinions built on "cherry-picked information, conjecture, and research taken out of context," and granting their testimony little to no weight. He then laid out 349 individual findings of fact, drawn from scientific evidence and the testimony of credible medical experts, documenting the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care. He ultimately found that the ban likely violates the Kansas Constitution—which guarantees broader protections than its federal counterpart. That distinction matters enormously: because the ruling rests on state constitutional grounds, it is largely insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court and its decision in Skrmetti, which closed the federal courthouse door to these challenges but left the state one wide open.

A federal judge in New York has banned US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from arresting immigrants in or around three federal courthouses in lower Manhattan, where vigorous confrontations have played out since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Under an order issued on Monday by P Kevin Castel, a US district judge, federal agents are no longer allowed to make arrests of immigrants except under exceptional circumstances at the sites where hearings are held before immigration judges.

Castel’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road NY and other groups.

An Ohio-based federal appeals court Monday became the latest to reject ICE’s effort to detain the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport without offering a chance for bond — even if they’ve lived in the U.S. for decades without incident.

A divided panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s mass detention policy — the latest victory for immigrant advocates on a likely march to the Supreme Court. The ruling follows similar victories in the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit and the New York-based 2nd Circuit. Two appeals courts, the 5th Circuit and the 8th Circuit, have sided with the Trump administration. Another, the 7th Circuit, deadlocked on the issue.

“Petitioners are more than just names on a pleading. Petitioners have lived in the United States for years or decades,” Judge Eric Clay, an appointee of Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority in Monday’s ruling, which was joined by Judge Guy Cole, Jr., another Clinton appointee.

Her finding was based off a declaration filed earlier this month by Dottie Romo, IRS’ chief risk and control officer, which revealed that the IRS had provided DHS with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people that ICE requested — and, in most of those cases, gave ICE additional address information in violation of privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data.

Kollar-Kotelly said in her Thursday decision that the agency violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE.” She called the Romo declaration “a significant development in this case.”

A nonprofit is suing the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over the decision to resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall, and to paint the pool's basin blue.

The suit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), an education and advocacy organization. In the suit, TCLF is asking a federal judge to halt the project, saying that the Trump administration failed to have the project reviewed federally, as is dictated by the National Historic Preservation Act.

Attorney Paul Schwiep, who represents the groups, said the legal fight would continue even if the camp closed.

“While it is welcome news that people will no longer be inhumanely confined at this facility, the damage caused by this reckless and ill-conceived endeavor cannot simply be abandoned and forgotten,” he said.

“This project was recklessly advanced without any meaningful regard for the remote, environmentally sensitive and ecologically fragile landscape in which it was imposed. The fencing, lighting, paving and other infrastructure – all constructed without environmental permits, review, or analysis – must be removed, and any lingering harm remediated.”

Federal judges in one of the Trumpiest states in the country have suddenly become a firewall against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

District court judges in West Virginia describe rampant lawlessness by masked ICE agents, defiance of court orders and a wanton infliction of fear and intimidation by the federal government after the Trump administration deployed a targeted immigration enforcement operation in the state last month.

With another ruling that an immigrant was wrongly jailed in West Virginia, a federal judge has issued “a final notice” to the federal government over continued unlawful detaining of immigrants.

U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin wrote that, “The government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over.” He added that in each case, the federal government has presented no factual dispute or no legal argument beyond what the court previously rejected.

The judge wrote that, “Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences.”

Under Trump, the US government has said that it will take steps to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, alleging that it promotes climate alarmism. The organization that manages NCAR — a coalition of around 130 universities called the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) — sued the government in March to stop NCAR’s break-up.

Researchers say that NCAR is a crucial global resource whose models underpin much of modern atmospheric science, including artificial-intelligence studies¹ aimed at decoding and predicting extreme weather. “Losing NCAR would mean losing decades of institutional knowledge, something that cannot be plugged back in two or four or even ten years from now,” says Angeline Pendergrass, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.