The Swamp is alive and well. And it’s coming after Donald Trump.
But this federal judge could lose their job after a brazen attack on Trump.
Reagan-Appointed Judge Escalates Feud with Trump Over Deportations
A federal judge installed by Ronald Reagan has drawn fire this year for unleashing some of the sharpest rebukes against President Donald Trump’s executive directives, including a recent showdown where two Supreme Court justices slammed him for ignoring their urgent directives.
U.S. District Judge William Young, a fixture on the federal bench for nearly four decades, dropped a fiery 161-page ruling Tuesday in a dispute over Trump’s push to deport and rein in pro-Palestinian demonstrators and campus agitators.
Young deemed the administration’s moves unlawful and a blatant First Amendment assault on free speech. He seized the moment to lambast Trump’s overall style, labeling it “bullying.”
Trump, Young contended, is a leader who botches the basics of governing the nation he leads. Young painted him as obsessed with “hollow bragging” and “retribution” above all else.
“Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment,” Young quipped.
Past Clashes: From NIH Cuts to Supreme Court Scolding
This isn’t Young’s initial foray into publicly skewering the Oval Office occupant.
In June, he struck down Trump’s NIH research grant reductions as illegal, backing the recipients and mandating a reversal. He branded the slashes “appalling” proof of “racial discrimination” and “discrimination against the LGBTQ community.”
“That’s what this is,” Young said at the time, adding that, in his decades on the federal bench, he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this.”
“I would be blind not to call it out,” he said, adding later, “Have we no shame?”
The Trump team appealed to the First Circuit, which let the block stand amid ongoing litigation.
But in August, the Supreme Court overturned it 5-4—and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh used the moment to rap Young’s knuckles for flouting an April emergency order greenlighting Trump’s ax on millions in education grants tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
“When this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,” Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in the August opinion.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting, seemed to echo Young’s frustration, writing: “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” she said. “We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
Young issued an apology for the misstep. Yet Tuesday’s ruling shows he’s undeterred in calling out what he sees as Trump’s cavalier attitude toward free speech safeguards.
“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” Young said Tuesday, before adding: “Is he correct?”
Judicial Impartiality Under Fire: Why This Can’t Stand
The judiciary’s bedrock role demands unflinching neutrality—interpreting the law without injecting personal vendettas or partisan jabs into rulings. An unbiased bench ensures every citizen, regardless of politics, gets fair play under the Constitution, preserving trust in a system that’s supposed to rise above electoral fray. When judges like Young veer into editorializing—lacing opinions with barbs about a president’s “bullying” or “hollow bragging”—it erodes that foundation, turning courts into echo chambers that undermine democratic accountability.
This latest broadside at Trump exemplifies the peril: a Reagan-era appointee, once a GOP stalwart, now weaponizing the bench to throttle lawful executive actions on border security and campus order. Such overreach not only flouts Supreme Court precedent, as Gorsuch and Kavanaugh rightly noted, but invites chaos—emboldening activist judges to play kingmaker. It mustn’t stand; Congress should probe these abuses, and higher courts enforce restraint, lest the rule of law become the rule of the robes. Only then can we safeguard the separation of powers that keeps tyranny at bay.
