Opinion | Trump Is Breaking Things. They Cant All Be Fixed by the Courts.

The second Trump administration appears to have learned some lessons from the first.For instance, even when courts eventually strike down the administration’s policies, there are tactics that can keep those policies in effect long enough to do quite a bit of damage.The courts can do only so much when the goal of imposing a policy isn’t to win as much as it is to break things and, as F.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground.Much of the unlawfully frozen federal money is still frozen; many of the unlawfully fired federal workers are still out of work.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested March 8 in New York on exceptionally tenuous legal grounds remains in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.The central problem isn’t that the courts have upheld legally dubious actions, or even that the White House is openly defying adverse rulings.Rather, it seems that chaos and disruption are themselves key to President Trump’s objective.Mr.

Trump’s March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in an attempt to speed up his mass deportation effort is a good example of this phenomenon.The 227-year-old statute, which was intended to give the government broad authority over a narrow class of foreign nationals present on these shores during wartime, cannot plausibly be applied to citizens of countries with which we are at peace.

Although the statute applies not just during times of declared war, but during periods of “invasion or predatory incursion” as well, that invasion or incursion must be “by any foreign nation or government.”There may be some allure in referring to unauthorized border crossings as “invasions,” but the White House would be hard pressed to identify which “foreign nation or govern...