Courts have threatened to hold the Trump administration in contempt. It’s time to follow through | Austin Sarat

Late last month, a Minnesota federal court judge, Patrick Schiltz, issued an opinion detailing hundreds of instances in which the Trump administration has failed to comply with court orders. He threatened to find it in contempt and to impose penalties.

Schiltz and other federal judges have made such threats before, but they have not followed through. It is time they did, lest they turn their courts into paper tigers.

The administration knows what it is doing. It treats judicial decisions the same way it regards elections.

As the president has said many times, he will abide by the results of elections only if they are “fair”. And in his mind, an election can only be fair if his side wins.

The same thing seems to be true for court decisions. The latest example occurred in the wake of the supreme court decision holding his imposition of tariffs to be unconstitutional.

The president reacted by accusing the justices who ruled against him of being “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution”. But he didn’t stop there. He accused the court of being “swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think”.

He has used such invective many times before. And in December, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, weighed in with similar claims, this time directed against judges in the eastern district of Virginia after they ruled that the administration violated the law in its appointment of US attorney Lindsey Halligan. Bondi accused them of “engaging in an unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility” and called them “rogue judges who fail to live up to their obligations of impartiality because of their own political views”.

I could multiply the examples, but Trump and his colleagues have made clear their contempt for judges who don’t see the constitution and laws the way they do.

That’s why, almost from the start of the president’s second term, his administration has perfected the art of what the law professors Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon have dubbed “legalistic noncompliance” with court orders. As they explained: “The administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not.”

However, it has not stopped there.

In his extraordinary opinion, Schiltz identified “210 orders issued in 143 cases in Minnesota in which he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had not complied with court orders,” per the New York Times. In many of those instances, the administration ignored them without offering any legal justification.

The same day that Schiltz issued his ruling detailing such non-compliance, another federal district judge accused the administration of engaging in “numerous unlawful violations of court orders”. Judge Jeffrey Bryan noted: “On February 20, 2026, the Court ordered Respondents ‘to immediately return all property in their possession, custody, or control to Petitioner’s counsel’” and to file declarations “by an individual with personal knowledge … confirming that all property of Petitioner was returned to Petitioner and attaching documentation of that fact”.

He noted: “As of the date of this Order, Respondents have not complied.” Bryan scheduled a hearing at which “Respondents must show cause why they should not be held in civil or criminal contempt in each of the above-captioned cases.”

We will see what happens. So far, federal judges have talked a good game about holding Trump administration officials in contempt for defying their orders but have rarely acted.

In a break from that pattern, last April, federal district judge James Boasberg found “probable cause” to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for ignoring an order to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador. He said: “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”

But in August, a federal appeals court overruled him.

Contempt can be a powerful tool. Last month, for instance, federal district judge Laura Provinzino entered a conditional civil contempt judgment against an assistant united states attorney in Minnesota. She imposed $500 a day fine for every day that he refused to comply with her order to release an immigrant detainee with all his identification documents.

The government returned the documents the next day.

The power of the courts to issue and enforce contempt citations to government officials is not in doubt. In 1975, the United States supreme court put it simply when it said that it is a “basic [legal] proposition that all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly”.

The court explained: “If a person to whom a court directs an order believes that order is incorrect, the remedy is to appeal, but, absent a stay, he must comply promptly with the order pending appeal. Persons,” it continued, “who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.”

Those persons include government officials.

Scholars trace the judiciary’s contempt power back to 14th-century England when judges “employed the contempt power to enforce obedience to writs, address dereliction of duty by court officers, and punish contumacious behavior (a legal term meaning disobedient or disrespectful conduct showing contempt for the court or the law), whether committed in or out of court,” as the Federal Judicial Center explains.

In this country, Congress granted federal courts the power “to punish by fine or imprisonment … all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same” in the Judiciary Act of 1789.

Almost 100 later, the supreme court justice Stephen Field wrote: “The power to punish for contempts is inherent in all courts; its existence is essential to the preservation of order in judicial proceedings and to the enforcement of the judgments, orders, and writs of the courts, and consequently to the due administration of justice.

“The moment the courts of the United States,” he added, “were called into existence and invested with jurisdiction over any subject, they became possessed of this power.”

If they don’t use that power, courts allow their decisions to be treated like mere requests that litigants are free to ignore. That is what Trump administration officials are now doing.

It is time for judges to remind them that when courts issue decisions, they are obligated to obey by holding those officials in contempt and fining or sentencing them to jail accordingly.

Judge Schlitz was right to observe that never before in American history has “a federal court had to threaten contempt-again and again and again-to force the United States Government to comply with court orders.” He ended his ruling by saying: “One way or the other ICE will comply with this court’s rulings.”

Now it is time for him and other judges to turn such words into action.

• Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.