In July, the judge overseeing the dispute over a National Park Service-owned golf course reminded government lawyers that she had resisted issuing any firm orders precluding the NPS and Department of Interior “from doing anything.”

Judge Ana Reyes continued, “The only thing I have done, and it wasn’t even an order, it was a request, was that if more than ten trees are going to get chopped down, that we all know” so that the plaintiffs could renew their request for emergency relief — and she had sufficient time to review that request.

But last Friday, just shy of 5 p.m. before a three-day weekend, the Justice Department filed a notice informing the court and the plaintiffs that it expected to begin work the next day on a “tree management and cultural landscape rehabilitation project” expected to clear 260 trees initially and nearly 530 ultimately.

It was enough to make a judge, frustrated with the administration’s semantics and gamesmanship, furious.

The golf course case

That tree management project, according to a sworn statement by the NPS’s director of the National Mall and Memorial Parks, “is not a renovation or redesign of the Golf Course, is not a part of any potential project to redesign or renovate the Golf Course, and would be carried out irrespective of any future renovation or redesign.”

Instead, he insisted, it was intended to “utilize available resources to complete long-deferred maintenance needs; and to implement the recommendations” in a 2019 “Cultural Landscape Report” on the golf courses in Washington within the NPS’s control.

Perhaps predictably, after the plaintiffs filed an emergency motion Sunday night seeking relief, Reyes excoriated the government lawyers, who admitted involvement in preparing the NPS director’s sworn statement the day before it was filed.

“I am just beyond disappointed in the government. I have done everything humanly possible to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this case. I have done it for months.”

And in announcing a temporary order preventing the government from removing as much as even one tree, she stated, “I have no faith that the government is not going to cut them down unless there’s an order in place not to do so.”

In Reyes’ case, it’s not clear the administration is defying any court order; at worst, it seems to have run afoul of a district judge’s strenuous request.

But over the last month, there have been other cases in which the administration has plainly violated district court edicts.

The Trump ads case

Take the order issued last week by Judge Jennifer Rochon, a Manhattan-based federal judge, in a case challenging the use of taxpayer funds to air ads touting Trump’s achievements over the last two years. Among other provisions, that order directs the defendants, which include the Department of Homeland Security, the Executive Office of the President, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, to “cancel or cause to be cancelled any slot, placement, reservation, or arrangement for the airing or dissemination of the challenged advertisements, including those placements” for Sunday, Oct. 11.

Yet by the next day, plaintiffs notified Rochon that even after her order was in effect, two of the ads had aired in more than 400 spots, including during news shows on two major networks.

The government’s subsequent letter — signed only by the chief of the civil division in Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney’s Office — said simply that although the DOJ notified unnamed “agency counsel” of her order at roughly 8 p.m. on Oct. 11, that “agency counsel did not become aware of Government counsel’s email until” the next morning and “apologize[d] to the Court and the plaintiffs” while insisting that in all other respects, the government was in compliance with her order.

Unlike with Reyes, who seems to have acknowledged that her earlier ask fell short of an actual judicial order, Rochon could credibly find her order was ignored.

But the harder question is who is to blame? And specifically, are DOJ lawyers themselves culpable? Or are they some combination of ignorant of and covering for those who are willfully curtailing or even violating court orders?

The letter DOJ sent to Rochon subtly answers that question, at least in her case. There, the DOJ signaled that on a Sunday night, it sent her order to the affected agencies roughly an hour after it came down and that the agencies themselves were literally or figuratively asleep at the wheel until the next day. Put another way, the DOJ’s guy is saying he did his job as the lawyer on the frontlines, but he won’t accept responsibility for others’ inaction. On the other hand, he won’t name those others or even characterize their conduct as accidental or unintentional.

It’s not clear that Rochon will find his brief explanation sufficient; she’s called an in-person conference for Wednesday morning.

Reyes seems to understand that the DOJ might be less culpable than those policymakers who, at least thus far, have hidden under their lawyers’ metaphorical skirts. She has now ordered the acting director of the NPS and a high-ranking Interior appointee to testify at a preliminary injunction hearing on Oct. 19.

Even as she resisted giving the plaintiffs relief in July, Reyes told a DOJ lawyer, “I have 1,000 percent faith in you,” but “I am quite confident that more is happening than we’re aware of, including you.”

But both judges appear ready to investigate whether and to what extent the career DOJ lawyers before them are complicit in misrepresenting or concealing facts from the court while also examining whether the clients themselves willfully skirted their directives.

The deportation case

And depending on what they learn and the administration’s future conduct, both judges potentially could consider holding the defendants before them in contempt, as Judge Stephanie Gallagher of the District of Maryland did last month.

Gallagher, who is presiding over a yearslong class action, learned in early September that the administration had again deported a 19-year-old Salvadoran man seeking asylum despite her orders in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026 forbidding them from doing so. And weeks prior to her contempt ruling, the government admitted that the man’s deportation was an “erroneous removal.”

But as I’ve written previously, it’s not clear that a contempt ruling is enough to change behavior, at least during this administration.

Roughly two weeks after that contempt ruling, the man still has not been returned to the United States. In fact, according to his lawyers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not even granted his counsel’s request to be copied on communications between ICE and their client.

Again, it’s enough to make a judge furious — and could explain why, at least so far, Reyes has shown that fury but has taken no disciplinary or other measures against the government.

But it’s worth watching when and whether Reyes — or Rochon — goes from anger to actual contempt.

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