In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.
You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration’s revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students, and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.
Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency, and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.
We heard back from 35 scholars — a group full of diverse viewpoints and experiences, including liberals like U.C. Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard’s Jody Freeman; the conservatives Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Michael McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who directs Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center and is a member of the Federalist Society; and the libertarians Ilya Somin at George Mason University and Evan Bernick at Northern Illinois University. Many are among the nation’s most cited scholars by their colleagues in law review articles.
From all of their responses, we constructed a road map through Mr. Trump’s first 100 days of lawlessness, including his defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms and targeting of law firms, universities, the press and other parts of civil society; the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power.
This road map largely draws on the scholars’ own words, which serve as bright red warning lights about the future of America:
Not all of our legal scholars saw every Trump action the same way, and one saw the problem as lying more with the courts than with the administration. But there was abundant assent that the president is trying to operate without limits, and that the rule of law and especially due process are being profoundly tested and challenged. This guide through the first 100 days is by no means exhaustive, but rather reflects legal issues our 35 scholars highlighted repeatedly or with the gravest concern.
