Court Cases

The Biden Administration's new immigration regulation violates the Immigration and Nationality Act and is arbitrary and capricious, violating the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.

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."

On March 6, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order called “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP.” Perkins Coie is a major national law firm, headquartered in Seattle. The President declared that Perkins Coie engaged in “dishonest and dangerous activity,” had “manufactured” evidence in connection with the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, had engaged in “a pattern” of “egregious activity” by challenging (and defending) election laws, and had “racially discriminated against” its employees and applicants by pursuing diversity an inclusivity. To “address” these “risks,” he suspended the security clearances for all firm employees, ordered all federal agencies to terminate any contracts with the law firm’s clients, and ordered firm employees to be denied access to federal buildings and meetings or other engagement with federal employees—measures that would have the effect of putting the firm out of business. Perkins Coie filed suit on March 11 and on March 12 obtained a temporary restraining order enjoining the government from enforcing most of the Executive Order. The case was then scheduled for a prompt determination on the merits. On April 2, we and the National ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie’s motion for summary judgment and in opposition to the government’s motion to dismiss the case. We were joined by a cross-ideological group of other amici, including the Cato Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Institute for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Rutherford Institute, and the Society for the Rule of Law Institute. Our brief argues that the executive order unconstitutionally retaliates against Perkins Coie for its constitutionally protected advocacy, in violation of the First Amendment; that it violates the constitutional separation of powers and due process; and it violates clients’ rights to representation by the lawyers of their choice; and that it is fundamentally a frontal attack on the rule of law. The president has issued similar executive orders aimed at destroying other law firms with which he has grievances. Jenner & Block and WilmerHale have challenged the orders directed at them, and on April 11 we filed amicus briefs supporting them.

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.

Curtrina Martin and her partner were injured and terrorized during a violent pre-dawn FBI raid on their suburban Atlanta home in 2017, all because the FBI agents went to the wrong address. Fifty years ago, in response to similar wrong-house raids, Congress enacted the "law-enforcement proviso" in the Federal Tort Claims Act (“FTCA”). That provision, which enables people to sue the government for "assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, abuse of process, or malicious prosecution" by "investigative or law enforcement officers of the United States Government," ensures that people like Ms. Martin have can go to court to seek a remedy for the harms the government inflicted on them. After the trial and appellate courts held that Ms. Martin's case could not proceed, the Supreme Court agreed to review it to consider the proper reading of the "law-enforcement proviso," which is a critical tool for holding the federal government accountable when federal officers injure people through unconstitutional physical force or arrests. Together with the National ACLU, the ACLU of Georgia, Public Accountability, and the Cato Institute, we filed an amicus brief to argue that "law-enforcement proviso" claims cannot be defeated by the government's argument that officials were acting in an area in which they had "discretion." We explain why the government's argument fails both as a matter of statutory interpretation and because the government never has "discretion" to commit a constitutional violation. Further, we argue that the Court should not accept the government's proposal to import into the FTCA a version of "qualified immunity" — the problematic rule (which we have opposed in a number of other cases) that officers' actions cannot result in liability unless their actions were not just unconstitutional but in violation of "clearly established" law. This unnecessarily high barrier to holding officials accountable dilutes the force of constitutional rights and has no basis in text, history, or policy.