Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig recently noted that, unlike the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court, lower court federal judges have consistently honored their constitutional oaths and collectively struck down essentially every Trump initiative.
Yesterday alone, in courtrooms across Colorado, Boston and Burlington, there were three great examples of this, and I’d like to highlight them today. While it’s understandable to view such district court orders as mere Band-Aids that the conservative justices will just rip off later, they still represent significant victories for the parties involved and often forestall the worst consequences.
And as I argue toward the end of this discussion, the Trump White House might want to rethink the idea that SCOTUS will simply undo whatever blocks the lower courts have placed.
Food assistance as a weapon
It wasn’t long ago that the White House threatened to leverage SNAP benefits as a political weapon against states that opposed the federal government.
In a December 16, 2025, letter to Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins demanded that his state recertify roughly 100,000 SNAP households through in-person interviews within 30 days. She threatened to cut off the state’s SNAP funding and disqualify it from the program entirely if it did not comply. Minnesota sued, and the court found the USDA had “failed entirely to provide a reasoned explanation for how this pilot project will help it assess fraud in Minnesota.”
The same drama then played out in Colorado, resulting in an order issued yesterday by U.S. District Court Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson. He formalized a preliminary injunction blocking the USDA from forcing Colorado to participate in a similar food assistance “pilot project.” Judge Jackson ruled the requirement violates federal law, the U.S. Constitution, and “the bounds of reasoned decision-making.”
As with Minnesota, the USDA had sent a letter to Colorado Governor Jared Polis ordering five counties to recertify all SNAP households within 30 days. The order sought to impact approximately 106,500 SNAP households, or 36 percent of all SNAP recipients in the state.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser was pointed in his criticism, calling the letter “punishment from the Trump administration and Agriculture Secretary Rollins, who disagree with our mail-in ballot elections and how we carry out our state criminal justice system,” referring to pressure to commute the sentence of election fraudster Tina Peters. “The administration cannot punish Coloradans into submission, and I’ll continue to fight back when the federal government harms Colorado and acts like it’s above the law.”
At a preliminary hearing, Colorado’s Deputy Solicitor General David Moskowitz noted that the “USDA gave Colorado no advance notice, no time to plan. Just an unexpected letter that showed up in the governor’s mailbox with an untenable deadline. The request wasn’t remotely feasible. … It wasn’t meant to be. This is not a real pilot project.” Judge Jackson pressed the USDA for any evidence it actually had of fraud or mismanagement in the five counties, but the government’s attorney could only cite statistics from other states.
In his written order, Judge Jackson described the USDA’s letter “as astonishing as it is brief.” He elaborated that the recertification letter “runs roughshod” over statutory safeguards Congress established to give SNAP recipients “an orderly, predictable, and fundamentally fair process for periodically demonstrating their continued eligibility.”
Shots heard round the country
Yesterday in Boston, Judge Brian E. Murphy blocked HHS Secretary RFK Jr.’s efforts to reduce the number of recommended child vaccines. Siding with the American Academy of Pediatrics, he ruled that health regulators acted unlawfully by disregarding long-established scientific methods.
Back in January, HHS and the CDC had made sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of recommended vaccinations from 18 to 11. They dropped recommendations that all babies be protected against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, RSV, dengue and two types of bacterial meningitis. Experts warned this shift would result in significant increase in childhood disease and death.
Judge Murphy ruled that the CDC had not gone through the proper legal channels and thus had “undermined the integrity of its actions.”
In a big victory for health advocates, he also suspended appointments of 13 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, who were appointed unilaterally by RFK Jr. after he fired all the former members. Because the committee members were improperly appointed, the judge stayed all the votes that had been taken by them. Murphy further noted that the new members had been appointed without a rigorous screening process, and that “even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines.”
Noel Brewer, who was himself fired by Kennedy, heralded the ruling. Speaking of the committee, Brewer charged, “It’s been doing damage to people in the United States, as well as other countries that follow the U.S.’s lead. This is a good day for public health.”
The government is seeking an appeal of the order.
Chipping away at ICE in Vermont
Vermont has now entered the ICE chat in a big and courageous way. A day-long standoff between protestors and federal immigration forces took place last week in South Burlington, Vermont. It was the first such major confrontation in the state.
ICE agents had been targeting a Mexican national whom they claim had re-entered the country illegally. After a multi-vehicle chase, agents said their target had fled into a house on Dorset Street. Migrant activists responded with hundreds of protesters forming a human chain around the perimeter of the house.
The public confrontation stretched nearly nine hours. When a warrant finally came through, federal agents in tactical gear broke down the door, removed three people, and forced them into an unmarked car. So protesters linked arms to block the street.
Eventually, agents drove over a median and deployed flash bangs and tear gas to escape. When the smoke cleared, however, the public learned the man ICE sought was never in the house. Apparently, he had merely been driving a vehicle that one of the people seized had previously owned.
Among those taken was Jisella Johana Patin Patin, a 31-year-old asylum-seeker from Ecuador. She’s the mother of two girls, ages 4 and 8, who attend school in South Burlington. She and her sister had entered the U.S. through the southern border in 2023, and both have pending asylum claims.
Her attorneys sought to free Patin Patin immediately, and Judge Geoffrey Crawford was unambiguous in his ruling: “This is not really contestable.” The judge elected to free her on the spot, saying her situation was so clear-cut that there was no need for a separate bond hearing. “Ms. Patin Patin has done nothing of concern to us and has done much to deserve her community’s support,” Judge Crawford declared from the bench.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Greer did not address the circumstances surrounding Patin Patin’s detention, nor did he explain why it was necessary. He reiterated only that those who cross the border illegally—which, as asylum seekers, Patin Patin and her sister had not done—are subject to detention. Greer did acknowledge that judges have repeatedly disagreed with this Justice Department assertion.
Defense attorney Kristen Connors is considering pursuing an affirmative remedy for the government’s violation of her client’s legal rights: “The fact that someone broke down the door to her home and detained her using a warrant that did not have her name on it — that’s a big constitutional violation. That can’t keep happening to people.”
Patin Patin emerged from the courthouse to hundreds of jubilant supporters. She and her husband cried together after the hearing, and her first question was about her sister, whose hearing had not yet been scheduled.
But won’t SCOTUS just undo everything?
SCOTUS has regularly undermined federal district courts by using its “shadow docket” to lift injunctions while cases are pending, resulting in free rein for Trump. So we can be forgiven for not wanting to celebrate federal district court rulings prematurely. After all, a lower court stay is only so good as the appellate courts decide it is.
But amid all the terrible news and abuse out of their emergency docket, the Court lately has been less all-in for Trump. Yesterday, for example, it left in place a stay on Kristi Noem’s termination of temporary protected status for Haitian and Syrian migrants, numbering several hundred thousand, and ordered the case heard in April.
Perhaps now that Noem is gone and DHS is under such continued scrutiny from both Congress and the public, even some of the radicals in the majority believe it’s time to draw a line.
Indeed, together with recent adverse rulings on Trump’s troop deployment in Illinois and his illegally issued global tariffs, we are seeing considerable pushback, even from some far-right members of our nation’s highest court.
Trump was furious, calling out his own appointees while claiming they “openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land” so they can go “out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are”—as if those are bad things for a judge to be.
It may seem counter-intuitive for the President to aggressively attack the very justices whose votes he will need to preserve his most aggressive policies, along with the Executive Orders and agency actions that seek to effectuate them. But this is Donald Trump, and nothing makes much sense with him.
Suffice it to say, if the Supreme Court has begun to reach a point where it is no longer rubber-stamping the regime’s most extreme actions, then the lower federal courts will begin to play an even more important role. The courage and fidelity to the Constitution that they have consistently demonstrated will start to pose a far greater threat and higher backstop than ever against anti-democratic, destructive and indefensible policies.
And that is precisely why we must acknowledge and appreciate what they have done and are doing each day.
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I was honored to be asked by “Markers for Democracy” to moderate a panel of esteemed political cartoonists this Thursday, but due to a conflict I could not attend. If you’d like to tune in, here’s the registration link. It promises to be a fascinating discussion!
Sorry SCOTUS Six. Some sins are not forgiven. Generations will remember the destruction you brought to us when you enabled this monster.
Thank you for giving good details about the childhood vaccination case. I had just read about it in the "Your Local Epidemiologist" SubStack, but you provided even more details. The judgement is definitely a win. Now all we need is to somehow erase all the confusion RFK Jr. has caused.