in the courts

Federal judges in Maine and Wisconsin on Thursday dismissed lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking to compel the states to hand over detailed voter registration information.

U.S. District Judge James Pederson in Wisconsin said the state’s voter registration list is not a record that can be requested under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, as President Donald Trump’s administration argued. In Maine, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker described the government’s claim as “half-hearted” and granted a state motion to dismiss it.

The rulings were the latest in a string of defeats for the Trump administration in its attempts to force states to turn over voter rolls. In addition to Maine and Wisconsin, judges have rejected similar attempts in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Rhode Island, In Georgia, a judge dismissed a DOJ lawsuit because it had been filed in the wrong city, prompting the government to refile elsewhere.

Attorneys for musician Chuck Redd say a D.C. Superior Court judge dismissed a breach of contract lawsuit filed against Redd after he canceled a Christmas Eve performance at the Kennedy Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s influence over the venue.

The dismissal on Friday was granted under Washington’s Anti-SLAPP laws, which are designed to prevent meritless lawsuits intended to silence opposing points of view on matters of public interest.

Redd, a drummer and vibraphone player who has toured with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Ray Brown, had presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006. He called off last year’s performance shortly after Trump’s handpicked board at the Kennedy Center voted to add the president’s name to the facility.

“The Center sued Mr. Redd because he publicly and rightly objected to adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to former President John F. Kennedy,” Lisa J. Banks, one of Redd’s lawyers, said in a statement. “The lawsuit against Mr. Redd was political retribution, pure and simple, by the Trump Kennedy Center, and the Court correctly saw it as such in dismissing the case with prejudice.”

Legal challenges to the fund and its addendum have been growing. A bipartisan group of 35 ex-federal judges on 27 May filed a motion appealing to a federal judge in Miami who oversaw Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to reopen the case, and launch an inquiry to determine if Trump and DoJ’s unorthodox deal to settle the lawsuit involved fraud. The jurists’ charge that the settlement fund’s creation was a “fraud on the court”.

In an extraordinary turnaround on 29 May, the Miami judge reopened Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to explore whether the court had been deceived by the parties involved including DoJ, and the deal was “premised on deception”.

Separately, responding to a lawsuit filed by a former January 6 prosecutor who the DoJ fired, plus other individuals and entities who say they have faced Trump administration attacks, a Virginia federal judge ruled on 29 May temporarily blocking further moves to set up the fund and fund dispersals until at least a hearing on 12 June.

The filing Saturday by the Public Integrity Project on behalf of two Virginia residents contends the Trump administration’s authorization of the June 14 event was unlawful. The lawsuit says such approval violated National Park Service regulations prohibiting sporting events on federal parklands, Congress did not consent to the towering arch overlooking the event space and no environmental review was conducted before the construction.

“This is fundamentally a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain,” said Brendan Ballou, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “And that is what is motivating this lawsuit.”

In his Friday June 5 decision, McConnell described the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ actions as “contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious” in legal terms, according to a statement published by AP News.

A federal judge has approved a settlement agreement between the NAACP Virginia State Conference and the Virginia State Board of Elections that will make it easier for college students to register to vote and ensure fewer of their registration applications are rejected. 

The agreement represents a major victory both for students and voting access more broadly in the Old Dominion.

In November, the Virginia NAACP filed a lawsuit accusing state election officials of unlawfully rejecting college students’ voter registrations. The civil rights organization said the students’ applications were often denied for missing address information — such as a dorm name or room number — that students aren’t required to include. 

After initially fighting the lawsuit, the state eventually came to an agreement with the plaintiffs. Now, Virginia officials cannot reject applications solely for missing a campus mailing address, dorm room number or campus mailbox number. 

A federal judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against Oliver and his HBO show’s production company, Partially Important Productions, over a 2024 Medicaid segment—preserving what Oliver has described as the show’s undefeated record in court.

As is often the case with legal proceedings of this nature, the win was a long time coming. The segment at the center of the suit aired in April 2024. Dr. Brian Morley, a former medical director for AmeriHealth Caritas, filed his lawsuit nearly a year later, in March 2025. And now U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams has dismissed the case, more than two years after the original broadcast.

The segment itself was a characteristically blistering takedown of privatized Medicaid programs. As part of that critique, Oliver discussed the cancellation of nursing services for Louis Facenda, an Iowa man with cerebral palsy who, according to the segment, lost services including in-home bathing and diaper-changing after a managed care organization got involved.

Federal judges across the country have been grappling for months with ICE’s decision to dramatically expand the number of people the agency locks up in detention facilities while their deportation proceedings are pending. This “mandatory detention” push — an unprecedented reinterpretation of decades-old laws — has resulted in thousands of people, most without criminal records, being detained, even if they have lived in the country for decades without incident.

That has led to a deluge of emergency lawsuits brought by individual detainees, thousands of whom have challenged their detention as illegal and unconstitutional.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for confidential transgender patient information from Rhode Island’s largest hospital that provides gender-affirming care to minors.

The US district judge Mary McElroy’s ruling on Wednesday is the latest setback for the US Department of Justice, with at least seven other federal courts having agreed to quash or limit the expansive civil subpoenas sent to more than 20 doctors and hospitals last summer.

McElroy’s decision also echoed similar concerns raised by judges surrounding the broad scope of the subpoenas, describing the justice department as having “immense prosecutorial authority and discretion” but no longer being trustworthy that it will enforce its power fairly and honestly.

“[The justice department] has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case,” McElroy wrote.

Albanese’s husband and daughter, who is a US citizen, sued the Trump administration in February, alleging that the US sanctions are “effectively debanking her and making it nearly impossible to meet the needs of her daily life”.

US district judge Richard Leon in Washington DC found that Albanese’s residency outside the US does not undercut her protections under the first amendment of the US constitution and that the Trump administration sought to regulate her speech because of the “idea or message expressed”.

“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” Leon wrote in his opinion. “It is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions-they are nothing more than her opinion.”