Trump vowed to 'bring free speech back'. Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it

US President Donald Trump repeatedly campaigned for his second term as a champion of free expression, vowing in his January 2025 inaugural address to stop what he described as years of "government censorship."

Since then, a wave of court rulings has concluded his administration has done the opposite. Reuters identified 75 federal-judge rulings finding Trump's government infringed on First Amendment rights including freedoms of speech, religion, and the press.

"The President's palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans' freedom of speech," Boston-based US District Judge William Young wrote.

The judge, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, ruled in September that the administration illegally detained, deported and revoked visas of foreign students and faculty because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Other judges found federal agencies terminated grants awarded to universities including Harvard for refusing to align with his ideological agenda; retaliated against law firms based on their legal advocacy; and used excessive force at protests.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly called federal judges ruling against them "activists" who are interfering with the president's executive authority. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson criticised the First Amendment rulings in a statement, saying "the federal judiciary has repeatedly endangered and obstructed the election choices of the American people with its unlawful rulings."

Losing streak

The 75 cases that produced lower-court rulings against the Trump administration were among 93 total cases during his second term in which judges addressed First Amendment arguments, Reuters found. Trump's losing streak mostly came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, but Republican appointees delivered decisions in 10 cases.

By comparison, during Democratic President Joe Biden's presidential term, Reuters identified just 27 cases in which lower-court judges weighed First Amendment challenges to his agenda. Judges ruled against his administration in 13 of those. Most of the lower-court rulings against the Biden administration involved its vaccine mandates, which were challenged on religious-freedom grounds.

Reuters tallied the First Amendment cases by searching federal court records and Westlaw, a legal research service. Both Reuters and Westlaw are owned by Thomson Reuters. When similar lawsuits were consolidated by a court or when a judge issued multiple rulings in the same lawsuit, Reuters counted them as one case. The review focused on civil lawsuits filed against the Trump administration and excluded cases by self-represented litigants.

Some of the rulings are preliminary, meaning that the judge acted on a request for speedy action before hearing the full merits of the case.

The lawsuits were frequently filed by Trump's ideological foes or by media organisations, such as when the New York Times and Associated Press asked judges to halt restrictions on their ability to cover the White House or the Pentagon. The AP and the New York Times won at the lower court level, though some of the rulings are on hold pending appeal.

The Trump administration launched appeals in about two-thirds of the cases while electing to let other rulings stand. It chose not to challenge rulings that, for instance, prevented it from interfering with what academics can discuss in classrooms and from slashing longstanding grants awarded to legal and medical organisations that have opposed the administration's agenda.

In appeals of 15 of the 75 rulings that went against Trump, his administration successfully persuaded courts either to put a district court judge's First Amendment ruling on hold or overturn it entirely.

In significant victories for the administration, two appeals courts this year have overturned lower-court rulings that had led to the release of pro-Palestinian campus activists who had attended Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. The appellate judges found the lower courts had no jurisdiction to hear those cases, without ruling on the lawsuits' merits. Khalil's lawyers have said he plans to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

In one appeal the administration did win on the merits, the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in February overturned a ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of the ability to engage in union bargaining with US agencies.

The unions argued that Trump took that action in order to retaliate against them challenging his administration's policies, in violation of the First Amendment. But a three-judge panel said Trump would have taken the same action whether or not he intended to punish unions for their advocacy.

Other appeals courts have been less receptive. In May, the 9th Circuit agreed with a lower-court judge that terminating federal grants awarded to University of California researchers – as part of Trump's anti-DEI push – constituted viewpoint discrimination.

Railing against 'censorship'

Trump rode to his second-term win after railing against an "online censorship regime" that he said the Biden administration imposed when it required media companies to suppress alleged misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the 2020 election. He echoed themes from his first presidential campaign, including opposition to what he called "cancel culture," as some conservatives complained that social and professional pressures discouraged the expression of their political views.

Hours after his 2025 inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," which directed that no federal agency or employee would unconstitutionally abridge Americans' speech rights.

Critics say that promise was almost immediately undercut by a flurry of other executive orders and policies seeking to exact retribution against foes or targeting viewpoints the president opposed.

Among those early orders were those directing an end to federal funding his administration deemed as supporting "gender ideology" or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), two subjects at the heart of many of the lawsuits alleging First Amendment violations by the administration.

Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School and author of a book titled "Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment," said no president has taken such sweeping action to suppress speech since President Woodrow Wilson, early last century, oversaw the thousands of deportations and arrests during the First Red Scare, a period of anti-communist and anti-immigrant fervour.

At that time, Zick said, court precedents were far less clear on whether the First Amendment protects speech critical of the government. "Trump is operating in this situation where the First Amendment's boundaries are very clear," he said.

A Washington federal appeals court appears poised based on arguments it heard in May to uphold lower courts' decisions that Trump's campaign against law firms and lawyers infringed upon free speech.

Among those decisions was a May 2025 ruling by US District Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, who castigated Trump for targeting the law firm Perkins Coie through an executive order that suspended its lawyers' security clearances and barred them from entering federal buildings based on its past work for his political opponents.

"Settling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business or individual for punitive government action is not a legitimate use of the powers of the US government or an American President," Howell wrote.