Morning Report

September 22, 2025 — Morning Report

Sep 22, 2025

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Pacito v. Trump 25-cv-00255 · 1:25-cv-00255

Trump's January executive order blocked essentially all refugees from entering the US. The people suing are refugees who had already been approved to come here — they just weren't here yet. Last week the Ninth Circuit sent some of them a message: you're still waiting. But the contractors who care for those refugees, including unaccompanied minors? The government told the court eight months ago they were "just looking for new contractors." The circuit court said: no more waffling. Those contracts are back.

Bryan opened with a refugee vocabulary lesson — defining immigrants vs. non-immigrants, internally displaced people, offshore refugees vs. onshore asylum seekers — to set up why the legal question matters. President Trump issued an EO in January blocking refugee admissions and canceling the contracts that provide care for refugees (including UACs) while they wait. Two statutory provisions are in tension: one lets the president set an annual refugee ceiling (but requires prior congressional consultation, which didn't happen); another lets the president bar entry of groups "detrimental to national interests" — and the administration used the broader provision to bar essentially all global refugees. The Ninth Circuit ruled on two issues: (1) it blocked the district court's preliminary injunction that had been letting pre-approved refugees enter — those people remain stuck outside the country; (2) it reinstated all the contracts caring for refugees and UACs, rejecting the government's eight-month-old "still shopping for new contractors" excuse. No final ruling on the merits yet — everything so far is PI/TRO-level procedural.

ImmigrationAPA

Constitutional question: Executive power over immigration and refugee admissions at the intersection of congressional delegation and Article II. The president has substantial (but not unlimited) authority over refugee admission — Congress explicitly shared and constrained that authority in the refugee statutes. Whether using the "detrimental" bar to zero out all admissions globally exceeds the scope of that delegation is the underlying merits question the circuit hasn't resolved. The contractor reinstatement also implicates the Spending Clause and the limits on executive discretion to unilaterally unwind congressionally mandated programs by simply declining to fund their administration.

DOD v. AFL-CIO 25-cv-00119 · 6:25-cv-00119

Eight federal agencies sued a union — not because the union did anything wrong, but because the agencies wanted a court to pre-authorize them to cancel union contracts via executive order. The court said: that's not how courts work. We don't issue permission slips. Case dismissed. The government appealed anyway.

The case is unusual because the government is the plaintiff — it sued the AFL-CIO seeking a declaratory judgment that federal agencies were authorized by executive order to terminate their collective bargaining agreements. The suit was dismissed in July because the government failed to demonstrate any actual injury from the contracts it wanted to cancel. What the agencies actually wanted was an advisory opinion: a judicial ruling saying "yes, in general, you are allowed to do this." But Article III prohibits courts from issuing advisory opinions — courts can only adjudicate real disputes with real injuries. The government didn't show it had been harmed by the union contracts; it just wanted advance judicial approval for action it hadn't taken yet. The court said no and dismissed. The federal government gets 60 days (not the standard 30) to appeal a dismissal, and the agencies got in right at the wire, filing an appeal. Bryan's assessment: limited chance of success given how foundational the justiciability problem is, though he noted Texas and the Fifth Circuit tend to find executive branch authority.

Article III justiciabilityadvisory opinion doctrine

Constitutional question: Separation of powers as a structural limit on courts as well as the executive. The advisory opinion doctrine isn't just procedural — it enforces the constitutional boundary that courts exist to resolve disputes, not to pre-validate executive action. If federal agencies could obtain advance judicial authorization for policy moves, it would effectively turn courts into a branch of the executive approval process. The underlying EO question (can the president void federal collective bargaining agreements by executive order?) remains unresolved because the case never reached the merits.

CA v. Agriculture 25-cv-06310 · 6

The federal government threatened to cut off SNAP food stamp funding to states that refused to hand over food stamp recipients' personal data — so it could use it to track immigrants. A California judge issued a TRO. The reasoning: federal law prohibits sharing the data, state law prohibits sharing the data, and even the USDA's own regulations say it can't use the data this way. Bryan's summary: "I'm just applying your own rules here. You yourself won't allow you to have this information. It says it right here."

The USDA told states: share the personal data of SNAP (food stamp) recipients or lose your federal SNAP funding. The explicit purpose was to use the data to identify and track immigrants. California and other states refused and sued. The district court issued a TRO blocking the funding cutoff. The legal basis was twofold: (1) the statutory framework governing SNAP data sharing includes strict federal and state privacy protections — sharing personal data with immigration enforcement isn't one of the permitted exceptions, and the states refusing to share are actually complying with the laws that are a condition of receiving the funding in the first place; (2) the USDA's own regulations explicitly prohibit using SNAP data for this purpose. The court called this a near-done-deal — until, in Bryan's words, "literally the last minute of the hearing," the USDA introduced new arguments, including a proposal for a narrower injunction permitting only certain uses of the data. Because counsel had no time to research and argue those issues, the court issued a TRO rather than a longer-lasting preliminary injunction, and scheduled a second hearing with full briefing.

APAspending clause

Constitutional question: Spending Clause limits on the use of conditional federal funding as a lever to coerce states into violating other laws. Congress set up SNAP with its own data-sharing restrictions as a structural feature of the program — the executive can't use the program's funding conditionality to override statutory and regulatory protections Congress built in. Anti-commandeering is adjacent: the federal government cannot conscript state agencies into serving federal immigration enforcement by threatening to cut off unrelated program funding, particularly when the state's refusal to share the data is itself required by law.

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