What legal actions involving Donald Trump occurred in 2025–2026 and how are they documented?
Executive summary
Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025 triggered an unprecedented wave of legal battles — hundreds of lawsuits challenging executive orders and agency actions, multiple high‑profile Supreme Court matters, and new litigation he himself brought against media outlets — all documented across litigation trackers, court rulings, advocacy reports, and mainstream coverage [1] [2] [3]. Reporting from legal trackers, advocacy groups, and national outlets shows a pattern: rapid issuance of executive orders and policies, immediate judicial pushback in district courts and the Supreme Court, and extensive public documentation by organizations monitoring litigation and enforcement [4] [5] [6].
1. The litigation surge: hundreds of suits and litigation trackers
Within 2025 the federal judiciary became the arena for an extraordinary number of challenges to the administration’s actions — commentators and trackers counted hundreds of suits (358 by year‑end in one review), and specialist projects from Lawfare and Just Security compiled live litigation trackers to catalog the filings, rulings, and procedural posture of challenges to national‑security and other executive actions [2] [1] [5]. Those trackers treat some families of suits as single “cases” for clarity — for example, the cluster of lawsuits over removal of F‑1 student visa registrations was tallied across more than 100 suits and dozens of restraining orders before policy reversal in April 2025 [5].
2. Supreme Court involvement and major constitutional tests
Several of the administration’s signature orders rose quickly to the Supreme Court, which accepted review of consequential questions such as an executive order restricting birthright citizenship and disputes over the president’s power to remove agency officials; analysts noted that the Court handled multiple cases tied to the administration in 2025 and sided with the administration in at least one merits decision that year [7] [2] [8]. Reporting also documents procedural limits placed on lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions — a June 2025 decision that affected how judges could block presidential policies was widely cited as altering the litigation landscape [8].
3. Immigration, enforcement and state‑by‑state challenges
Immigration policy was a central front: the administration’s expansion of enforcement against noncitizens, visa revocations for students and researchers, and border measures prompted numerous suits and legal analyses by bar associations and advocacy groups documenting both the policies and the legal claims brought against them [9] [10]. DHS and its components publicly framed 2025–2026 as a period of expanded hiring and enforcement, which has translated into litigation from states, districts, unions and civil‑rights groups alleging unlawful practices around schools, grants of relief, and detention policies [11] [12].
4. Civil‑rights and advocacy litigation: ACLU and others
Civil‑liberties groups reported a massive litigation campaign against the administration: the ACLU stated it filed over 230 legal actions in 2025 and claimed a high rate of success in delaying or defeating policies, a fact that documents the scale and the advocacy‑driven record being kept against the administration [6]. Democracy‑oriented trackers and organizations also catalogued “power grab” litigation and flagged ongoing cases as the new year began, reflecting advocacy perspectives and priorities in the public record [13].
5. Administrative funding and equal‑protection rulings
Courts did not only address procedural or immigration questions; federal judges issued substantive rulings finding constitutional limits on some agency actions — for example a judge ordered restoration of specific grants totaling tens of millions of dollars after concluding political considerations factored into grant cancellations, an opinion that has been widely reported and cited as a judicial check on executive funding decisions [14].
6. Trump as litigant: suits against media and other civil actions
Parallel to defending his administration, Trump pursued high‑value civil litigation himself, suing major media organizations for defamation in mid‑2025 — reported cases include billion‑dollar suits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and related filings tracked in public court dockets and press reports [3]. Those suits are documented in court filings and media coverage and reflect a reciprocal legal strategy of offense as well as defense [3].
7. How this record is documented and the perspectives shaping it
The documentary record is dispersed across court dockets, litigation trackers (Lawfare, Just Security), advocacy reports (ACLU, Democracy Docket), Congressional summaries and mainstream press analyses [1] [5] [6] [10]. Each source carries an implicit perspective — trackers aim for comprehensiveness, advocacy groups emphasize impact, and partisan or institutional sources frame actions through policy or political lenses — and readers should weigh those vantage points when using these compilations as evidence [4] [13].