Maryland Democrats expressed alarm Tuesday about President Donald Trump’s “extreme and outlandish” rhetoric against federal judges, as well as language tucked into a 1,116-page bill that would make it easier for chief executives to defy U.S. court injunctions.
Trump escalated his attack on U.S. judges in an all-caps, Truth Social post on Memorial Day, calling them “USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY” and “MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL.”
The president was seemingly referring to judges who are ruling against his deportation orders, claiming they are protecting and keeping murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members and released prisoners in America. In the same post, he lauded the U.S. Supreme Court and “compassionate judges” he hoped would “save us.”
“The fact that President Trump chose to use a Memorial Day post to literally call judges monsters is incredibly problematic,” Rep. Johnny Olszewski, a Baltimore County Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s almost so extreme and outlandish that you would think that this would be something that’s happening in a made-for-TV series about a president gone wild.”
The Maryland-based federal court has been a popular venue for challenges to Trump orders. In recent months, judges in the state have approved a request for a preliminary injunction preventing immigration authorities from conducting raids in certain houses of worship, blocked an order seeking to end government support for diversity programs, and extended a block on federal funding for providers of gender-affirming health care for young transgender people.
“It’s very dangerous for the president of the United States to be talking about judges in this way,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County, the top-ranking House Judiciary Committee Democrat. “He engages in a lot of vicious, dehumanizing rhetoric toward his opponents, and now he’s merged the assault on judges with language of total dehumanization at a time when judges are facing a rising tide of violent threats and personal attacks.”
Congressional Republicans say judges have overreached and that their rulings don’t reflect the will of the people who elected Trump for a second time in 2024. “It’s never been more obvious that parts of our federal judiciary have a major malfunction of judicial activism,” said a recent statement by California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, chief sponsor of House-passed legislation restricting federal judges’ authority to impose nationwide injunctions blocking Trump orders on immigration and other issues. The bill is pending in the Senate.
Last week, the chief judge of Maryland’s federal district court issued an order prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody who request to have their detention reviewed by a judge.
Congressional Republicans, seeking to dial back federal judges’ authority, inserted a paragraph into what Trump calls his “big, beautiful” tax and immigration package that passed the House last week by a single vote.
The paragraph would prevent federal judges from enforcing contempt of court orders in cases where they had not required a plaintiff to post a bond before seeking to block an executive order.
Critics of the provision say it would deter challenges to presidential orders because of the financial hurdle.
“You don’t want to deter people from vindicating their civil rights,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said in an interview. “Often the litigants aren’t that flush. They don’t have a lot of resources.”
However, the language’s backers argue that requiring the plaintiff to have a financial stake would deter frivolous lawsuits.
It is uncertain whether the provision will survive in the Senate.
In the meantime, a Maryland federal judge, Paula Xinis, is exploring whether the administration is defying orders to return a mistakenly deported man, Kilmar Ábrego Garcia, to Maryland.
Raskin said Ábrego Garcia’s situation “is undoubtedly a test case” of whether the administration will adhere to court orders. “Alas, there are dozens of test cases that test that proposition,” he said.
The Trump administration argues that it lacks the authority to return Ábrego Garcia, a 29-year-old sheet metal apprentice mistakenly deported to El Salvador from Prince George’s County and imprisoned since March.
Vice President JD Vance said during a New York Times podcast last week that Ábrego Garcia “had a valid deportation order. And our attitude was, ‘OK, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who is a citizen of a foreign country, who we had a valid deportation order with?”
But his attorneys say expelling Ábrego Garcia back to Central America went against an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling that shielded him from deportation to his birthplace because of possible persecution by local gangs.
The Trump administration, which has vowed on social media that the Maryland man will never come back, has slowed the process by invoking its “state secrets” privilege, arguing that sharing that information would pose a threat to national security. Justice Department attorneys have also argued that they can’t be legally ordered to negotiate with a foreign nation for Ábrego Garcia’s return.
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