Opinion | A Road Map of Trumps Lawless Presidency

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, i...