Court Cases

This case challenges President Trump's attempt to require burdensome documentation to register to vote—a requirement that he lacks authority to impose and that will obstruct many voters' efforts to register. Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ("NVRA") and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, Congress created a voter registration form (the “Federal Form”) that each state must accept. Regardless of the contents of State voter registration forms, the Federal Form (as the Supreme Court has explained) “provides a backstop” that “guarantees . . . a simple means of registering to vote in federal elections will be available.” Congress created a bipartisan, independent Election Assistance Commission ("EAC") to maintain the Federal Form and consider changes—which can be made, according to the statute, only through notice-and-comment rulemaking and not by EAC members of a single party acting alone. Congress set strict requirement about what the Federal Form must and may not include. Every person who registers using the Federal Form must swear under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen. But Congress prohibited “any requirement for notarization or other formal authentication.” Congress further authorized the EAC to require “identifying information” and “other information” on the Federal Form only if the information “is necessary to enable the appropriate State election official to assess the eligibility of the applicant and to administer voter registration and other parts of the election process.” On March 25, 2024, President Trump issued an Executive Order instructing the EAC within 30 days to change the Federal Form to require that voters, in order to register, show documents proving their citizenship. But when Congress passed the NVRA in 1993, it had specifically considered and rejected adding such a requirement to the Federal Form. Since then, the EAC has repeatedly rejected requests to add such a requirement. And with good reason: many citizens lack the types of documentation that would suffice. For instance, roughly half of Americans, including more than two-thirds of Black Americans, lack a valid passport; obtaining one is costly and can take months. Birth certificates pose challenges, too: according to one survey, one third of voting-age women lack documentary proof of citizenship that reflects their current name (because many change their names when they marry); additionally, many of the roughly 1.3 million transgender Americans have changed their legal names, and some Americans—especially Black citizens—never received a birth certificate because of racially discriminatory laws. More fundamentally, President Trump lacks authority to order changes to the Federal Form or to direct the actions of the EAC, an agency set up by Congress to be independent. The Constitution’s Elections Clause vests Congress and the States—not the President—with authority to set rules for federal elections. Congress exercised this authority when it passed the NVRA. In acting contrary to that law, the President violates the separation of powers. On April 1, 2025, together with our co-counsel at the National ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Latino Justice PRLDEF, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, we challenged the Executive Order in federal court on behalf of the League of Women Voters and several other voting rights organizations. In light of the short deadline for the EAC to act, and with the required changes likely to affect voter-registration efforts by our clients in advance of a federal special election coming up in July 2025 in Arizona, we sought a preliminary injunction. Two other sets of plaintiffs sued as well, and the cases were consolidated; the case became known by one of the other case names, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Executive Office of the President. On April 24, 2025, the day on which the EAC was required to change the form, the court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the EAC from imposing a documentary proof of citizenship requirement because the President's command that it do so violates the separation of powers. The court's thorough, 120-page opinion rejected the government's arguments that the case was premature and that our clients lacked standing to challenge the Executive Order, and the court held that the President lacked authority under the NVRA or the Constitution to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement: "If the President, acting alone, could dictate the content of the Federal Form, Congress’s careful structural choices would be for naught. . . . No statute expressly or impliedly grants the President authority to require documentary proof of citizenship on the Federal Form. Nor does any provision of the Constitution vest the President with that authority."

Federal employees filed a complaint against the Trump administration for targeting workers, especially people of color, women, and non-binary workers, for participating in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities, violating their First Amendment rights.

We filed this lawsuit alleging that the Alien Enemies Act had no application in this situation and violated the immigration statutes, which are explicit that they provide “the sole and exclusive procedure” by which the government may determine whether to remove an individual.

Federal law guarantees noncitizens fleeing persecution and torture in other nations the opportunity to seek protection in the United States, if they arrive here. It has prohibited the government from removing individuals to places where they face persecution and torture. But President Trump has attempted to wipe away these laws by fiat. On January 20, 2025, within hours of his inauguration, President Trump issued a proclamation, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” that purports to prohibit noncitizens who have arrived in the United States from seeking asylum and instead to summarily expel them to countries where they face persecution and torture. The proclamation principally relies on Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), which authorizes the President to “suspend the entry” of noncitizens when their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” But this authority to “suspend entry” does not empower the President to expel people who have already entered the United States, much less to do so in violation of the protections and procedures Congress provided elsewhere in the same statute. We filed this lawsuit on February 3, 2025, together with the National ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, on behalf of three nonprofit organizations that provide legal services to refugees seeking asylum. The case asks the court to prohibit the government from implementing this Trump proclamation.

In 2018, President Trump signed into law the bipartisan First Step Act, which was designed to reform extreme criminal sentencing laws, reduce the population in federal prisons, and encourage people in prison to take advantage of educational, training, and rehabilitative programs by earning credits towards time off their sentences. The statute unambiguously provides that the Bureau of Prisons shall move people out of prison—into halfway houses, home confinement, or supervised release—when they meet certain requirements and when their earned credits are equal to their remaining sentences. But instead of following the law, BOP adopted a regulation providing that it may move people out of prison when their earned credits are equal to their remaining sentences. As a result, thousands of people who are legally entitled be back in their communities and with their families remain in prison. On December 20, 2024, we filed this class action lawsuit, together with the National ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, asking the federal court to order the Bureau of Prisons to obey the law. On January 14, 2025, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and provisional class certification, asking the court to order the Bureau of Prisons to transfer class members out of prison when their earned time credits were equal to the time remaining on their sentences.