Last updated: July 16, 2026. This page lists additional violations beyond the most egregious cases.
| Date | Administration Action | Why does this violate the Constitution? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2025 | Attempted to unilaterally terminate New York’s congestion pricing program and threatened to withhold federal transportation approvals and funding from the state to force it to comply. | A federal judge barred the Transportation Department from retaliating against New York and in March 2026 ruled in a 149-page opinion that the department’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law” — an unlawful attempt to coerce a state out of its own duly enacted tolling program. | |
| April 2025 | Moved, via executive orders and a directive from the attorney general, to cut off all federal funding to “sanctuary jurisdictions” and published a public list of targeted cities and states. | A federal judge blocked the funding cutoff as likely violating the Spending Clause, the separation of powers, and the Tenth Amendment, and blocked expanded cutoff efforts again in August 2025. | In January 2026, the president threatened that the federal government would make “no payments” at all to sanctuary cities and states; existing injunctions continue to block such blanket cutoffs. Courts rejected the same tactic during his first term. |
| May 2025 | The Justice Department demanded full statewide voter registration lists — including Social Security and driver’s license numbers — from at least 40 states, then filed 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states and DC to compel production while building a national voter database. | States refused, citing state sovereignty over election administration. Courts dismissed the suits against California, Michigan, and Oregon, holding federal law does not require the handover; the California court found the demands violate the federal Privacy Act. | No court has ruled in the Justice Department’s favor in these suits as of July 2026. |
| June 2025 | Conditioned all federal transportation grant funding on states’ cooperation with ICE and the administration’s immigration policies. | Twenty states sued. A federal judge blocked the conditions, finding no “plausible connection between cooperating with ICE enforcement and the congressionally approved purposes” of the Transportation Department, and in November 2025 permanently enjoined them, writing that officials “blatantly overstepped their statutory authority… and transgressed well-settled constitutional limitations on federal funding conditions.” | |
| June 2025 | Attached conditions to roughly 40 DHS/FEMA grant programs — including disaster preparedness funds — requiring states to assist federal civil immigration enforcement as a condition of receiving emergency-management money. | Twelve jurisdictions sued, and a federal judge permanently blocked the conditions in September 2025, holding them unconstitutional under the Spending Clause — coercive, ambiguous, and unrelated to the programs’ purposes. | In December 2025, another federal judge ordered the administration to restore over $233 million in homeland security grants it had cut from Democratic-led states based on their immigration policies. |
| July 2025 | The Justice Department filed a campaign of lawsuits — at least 15, against Illinois, Colorado, New York, and other jurisdictions — seeking to strike down state and local “sanctuary” laws and force state officers to participate in federal immigration enforcement. | A federal judge dismissed the suit against Illinois, holding that declining to enforce civil immigration law is “a decision protected by the Tenth Amendment” under the anti-commandeering doctrine; a Colorado judge dismissed the parallel suit on the same grounds. | Legal commentators describe the suits as attempts to litigate around long-settled Supreme Court precedent barring the federal government from commandeering state officials. |
| August 2025 | Signed an executive order threatening to suspend or terminate federal funds to states and cities that have eliminated cash bail, directing the attorney general to compile a list of “cashless bail” jurisdictions to target. | Bail policy is a core state power over its own criminal justice system. Legal experts note the order has the same constitutional defects — coercive funding conditions unrelated to the funds’ purpose — that courts found in the sanctuary-city and transportation/FEMA conditions cases. | |
| August 2025 | Deployed National Guard troops to Washington, DC — including thousands of Guard members ordered in from Republican-led states — for street patrols and crime deterrence, without any request from DC’s mayor, with the deployment extended into 2026. | A federal judge ruled the deployment unlawful in November 2025, holding the president lacked power to deploy the Guard for “non-military, crime-deterrence missions” absent a request from civil authorities, and that “there is no state-law basis” for out-of-state Guard units to operate in the District. | An appeals court stayed the ruling, so troops remained pending appeal, with the administration signaling the deployment could last through summer 2026. |
| September 2025 | At the president’s request, Tennessee’s governor deployed roughly 700 National Guard members to Memphis as part of a federally driven “Memphis Safe Task Force,” over the objection of Memphis and Shelby County officials. | Memphis-area officials sued, and a Nashville judge blocked the deployment in November 2025, finding it exceeded constitutional limits on using the Guard for domestic law enforcement absent rebellion or invasion. | A state appeals court reversed on procedural grounds in April 2026, allowing troops to remain. The “consenting governor” model became the administration’s template after courts blocked non-consensual federalizations. |