The Roberts court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with these key exceptions

WASHINGTON- The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ended the first year of President Trump’s second term with a series of decisions that gave him much broader power to control the federal government.

In a series of fast-track rulings, the judges granted emergency appeals and overturned district judges’ rulings that blocked Trump’s orders from taking effect.

With court approval, the administration has laid off thousands of federal employees, cut funding for education and health research grants, dismantled the agency that funds foreign aid and allowed the U.S. military to reject transgender troops.

But the court also imposed two important checks on the president’s power.

In April, the court ruled twice — including after midnight — that the Trump administration could not secretly remove immigrants from the country without giving them a hearing before a judge.

Upon taking office, Trump claimed that migrants suspected of belonging to “foreign terrorist” gangs could be arrested as “enemy aliens” and secretly flown to a prison in El Salvador.

Roberts and the court blocked these secret deportations and declared that the 5th Amendment gives immigrants, like citizens, the right to “due process.” Most of the men arrested had no criminal record and claimed to have never belonged to a criminal gang.
Those facing deportation “are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their deportation,” the justices said in Trump v. JGG.

They also asked the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. He is now back in Maryland with his wife, but he could face additional criminal charges or action to deport him.

And last week, Roberts and the court barred Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago to enforce immigration laws.

Trump had claimed he had the authority to defy state governors and deploy Guard troops to Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Chicago and other Democratic-led states and cities.

The Supreme Court disagreed over dissents from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

However, for much of the year, Roberts and the five other conservatives formed the ruling majority in favor of Trump. Disagreeing, the three liberal justices said the court should stand aside for now and defer to district judges.

In May, the court agreed that Trump could end the Biden administration’s special temporary protections granted to more than 350,000 Venezuelans as well as an additional 530,000 migrants who arrived legally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Venezuela.

It was easier to explain why the new administration’s policies were cruel and disruptive rather than why they were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the law gave the president’s top immigration officials sole authority to decide on these temporary protections and that “no judicial review” was allowed.

Nonetheless, a federal judge in San Francisco twice blocked the administration’s repeal of temporary protected status for Venezuelans, and a federal judge in Boston blocked the repeal of entry parole granted to migrants under Biden.

The court is also prepared to uphold the president’s authority to fire officials appointed to specified terms in independent agencies.

Since 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, the government has had semi-independent boards and commissions headed by a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

But Roberts and the Court’s conservatives believe that because these agencies enforce the law, they fall within the president’s “executive branch.”

The move could include an exception for the Federal Reserve, an independent agency whose nonpartisan stability is valued by business leaders.

David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown and former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court sent mixed signals.

“On the emergency issue, he has consistently ruled in favor of the president, with a few notable exceptions,” he said. “I think it’s significant that this has put an end to National Guard deployments and Alien Enemies Act deportations, at least for now. And I think that by this time next year, it’s possible that the court will have struck down two of Trump’s signature initiatives: the birthright-to-citizenship order and the tariffs.”

For much of 2025, the court was criticized for issuing unsigned temporary orders with little or no explanation.

The practice emerged in 2017 in response to Trump’s use of executive orders to make abrupt and sweeping changes to the law. In response, Democratic prosecutors and lawyers from progressive groups filed lawsuits in friendly forums such as Seattle, San Francisco and Boston and won rulings from district judges that suspended Trump’s policies.

The 2017 “travel ban” announced during Trump’s first week in the White House set the tone. It suspended the entry of visitors and migrants from Venezuela and seven majority-Muslim countries on the grounds that those countries had lax screening procedures.

The justices blocked it from going into effect, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the order discriminated on the basis of citizenship.

A year later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and upheld Trump’s order by a vote of 5 to 4. Roberts pointed out that Congress, in immigration laws, clearly gave that power to the president. If he “considers that the entry of… any category of foreigners… would be detrimental,” he says, he can “suspend the entry” of all such migrants for as long as “he deems it necessary.”

Since then, Roberts and the Court’s conservatives have been less willing to stand on the sidelines while federal judges issue rulings nationwide.

Democrats saw the same problem when Biden was president.

In April 2023, a federal judge in West Texas ruled in favor of abortion advocates and ruled that the Food and Drug Administration had wrongly approved abortion pills that can end an early pregnancy. He ordered them to be removed from the market before the appeals could be heard and decided.

The Biden administration filed an emergency appeal. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court overturned the judge’s order, due to dissents from Thomas and Alito.

The following year, the court heard arguments, then dismissed the entire lawsuit on the grounds that abortion opponents lacked standing to sue.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the Court’s conservative majority has not deferred to district judges. Instead, he repeatedly lifted injunctions that blocked Trump’s policies from taking effect.

Although these are not final decisions, they are clear signs that the administration will prevail.

But Trump’s early victories don’t mean he will win on some of his most controversial policies.

In November, the justices appeared skeptical of Trump’s claim that a 1977 trade law, which did not mention tariffs, gave him the authority to set those import taxes on products from around the world.

In the spring, the court will hear Trump’s claim that he can change the birthright principle enshrined in the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship to newborns whose parents are here illegally or entered as visitors.

Decisions in both cases will be made at the end of June.