Tracking Lawsuits Resisting White House Activities

We see new headlines every day telling us about new legal action taken against the Felonious Punk White House. So far, not a day has passed without the administration doing something that violates the law, prompting a lawsuit to have the action stopped. That the number of lawsuits is an overwhelming understatement, but it is also intentional. The White House is causing as much chaos as they can in hopes that we’ll give up fighting back against them. There is no accident here. This was their plan from the very beginning.

Fortunately, there is now a tool to keep track of all the litigation filed against the White House and/or the US Government. Based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, Just Security describes itself as “an editorially independent, non-partisan, daily digital law and policy journal that elevates the discourse on national security, democracy and the rule of law, and rights. We publish rigorous, expert analysis and informational resources on the issues that matter most. Our goals are to inform and empower decision-makers with high-quality analysis, foster informed dialogue on challenging issues, and remain accessible to our global audience.”

What they’ve done is create a database of all the active lawsuits against the federal government. Cases are listed according to the date on which the lawsuit was filed. So, for example, to see the entry for CENTRO DE TRABAJADORES UNIDOS v. BESSENT, which was filed this past Friday, one could filter the database according to the case name, topic (immigration), or the date filed. More often than not, we use the date filed filter to catch filings that didn’t make mainstream news sources.

Each entry provides a summary of the complaint. For example, for the afore-mentioned case, the summary is, “Plaintiffs allege that the Trump administration “has begun taking steps to collect information about individuals for potential immigration enforcement” by seeking access to data associated with individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITINs). The IRS assigns ITINs to individuals who lack social security numbers (i.e., noncitizens) so that such individuals can file tax returns and pay federal income taxes as required by law. Plaintiffs assert that granting immigration enforcement agencies access to the sensitive data of individuals who file using ITINs would “expose millions of taxpayers to the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.”
Plaintiffs claim the government’s actions are ultra vires and violate the Administrative Procedure Act by running afoul of the IRS statute requiring confidentiality of tax return information.
They seek declaratory and injunctive relief to prevent Defendants from providing ITIN applications to DHS, ICE, the President, or any others, unless such disclosure is specifically permitted by law.“

The entry also includes the executive order that prompted the suit. In this case, it’s IRS Data Sharing for Immigration Enforcement Purposes (Executive Order 14165) (Executive Order 14159) (Executive Order 14158).

There are currently 113 cases in the database and it hasn’t been updated since Friday, so any cases filed this morning are not yet in the system.

If we are going to resist the illegal actions of this administration, we have to stay on top of everything going on, and there’s a lot of information to track. No one’s ever created a database like this before because no other administration has been so fucking stupid, careless, and illegal. This way, we can see which cases make progress, which cases are dropped, and which cases need our strongest support.

The only way to resist illegal actions such as the ones perpetrated by Punk and his White House is for everyone to stand together and voice our resistance in unison. The web address for the database is: https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/. We strongly encourage everyone to bookmark it.