The US system of checks and balances depends on good faith across all branches. When that breaks down, enforcement falls unevenly to courts and citizens.

The American constitutional system rests on three coequal branches – executive, legislative, and judicial – each designed to keep check on the others. The current executive has cultivated a vulnerability the founders never anticipated: what happens when one branch decides constitutional limits are optional, another becomes complicit, and only some of the courts are left to hold the line.

The documented record of the Trump administration is a case study in intentional creation of institutional stress. Executive orders were issued with foreknowledge of their illegality. Court rulings were ignored systematically with billions of dollars in federal funds withheld in defiance. A compliant legislature was designed as instrument rather than check, most visibly in the decision to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a separate $75 billion appropriation while leaving airport security workers (TSA) unpaid. Congress did not resist this. It participated, while citizens and persons are the targets.

Seven judges in the federal judiciary, and The People of the United States, are taking a stand.

Judge Mustafa Kasubhai vacated HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy’s declaration purporting to supersede state medical standards for gender-affirming care across 21 states and the District of Columbia, finding Kennedy had exceeded his statutory authority. Judge Brian Murphy also vacated Secretary Kennedy’s vaccine mandates for the same reason.

Judge Richard Eaton of the Court of International Trade is another example of the judicial applying laws to hold the executive accountable. Following the Supreme Court’s six-to-three ruling that the tariffs collected under emergency powers claimed by the president were never legally authorised, the administration attempted to force the 330,000 affected businesses, importers ranging from small traders to Costco and FedEx, into individual lawsuits to recover money the Court said was never the government’s to take. Eaton consolidated every affected importer into one case and the Customs Agency representing the president on a weekly compliance reporting schedule.

Judge Paul Friedman struck down the Pentagon’s press credentialing policy as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Within 72 hours, the Pentagon shut down its press corridor and announced a remote alternative. Pentagon counsel confirmed the revision used, in the court’s summary, “more words to say the same thing.” The ruling had not been complied with. It had been repackaged.

Chief Judge Matthew Brann twice ruled the administration had violated the constitutional appointment requirements by installing loyalists in a US Attorney’s Office without the Senate confirmation required. An appellate court affirmed this unanimously; those judges were two Bush appointees and one Biden appointee. Judge Zahid Quraishi effectively “fired” the leadership of that Attorney’s Office. Subsequently, career prosecutor Robert Frazer was appointed by district judges, not by the president.

The administration has not taken any of the above situations sitting down. In fact, it has postured quite aggressively, all in vain.

The most sustained record of judicial enforcement belongs to Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minnesota, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia – one of the towering figures of American conservative legal thought. The executive sent approximately 3000 federal immigration agents into Minnesota over the explicit objections of the state’s governor, without making any provision for the hundreds of court challenges that predictably followed.

Schiltz noted from the bench: agencies that intend to comply with court orders arrange for legal staff before deploying 3000 agents into a single jurisdiction.

The resulting violation count grew on re-examination: 97 confirmed violations across 66 cases from the original list, then 113 additional violations in 77 further cases. The government’s own challenge to the count made the record worse. Schiltz escalated to explicit criminal contempt warnings, writing that the Court is “not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt, again and again and again, to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” ICE leadership, including Acting Director Todd Lyons, now faces criminal contempt charges.

Into this environment, on 21 March, 2026, as spring break travellers faced wait times exceeding two hours at America’s largest airports, a crisis the administration created by letting airport security funding lapse while separately funding ICE, the President posted on social media that he would move ICE agents to airports to perform security screening, with "heavy emphasis" on Somali nationals and an explicit attack on Minnesota’s elected officials.

No legal authority was cited. No operational framework was offered.

ICE agents are not trained for airport security. The relevant agency requires a minimum of a hundred hours of training before autonomous public interaction. The post has not been retracted.

The president just signed an executive order to pay the heretofore unpaid airport screening workers but says ICE agents will remain at airports.

The three-legged stool is not functioning as designed.

One branch issues orders it knows courts will strike down, then ignores the rulings.

One branch funds the instrument of defiance and withholds pay from the agency it displaced.

One branch, through only some of its judges, applying the law to one extraordinary litigant, is attempting to hold the constitutional architecture together in relative isolation.

The citizens are noticing. Their voices are growing louder. This past weekend, the largest ‘No Kings’ rally took place at over 3,000 sites across the United States and Europe.

Citizens are now acting.

What the founders designed assumed good faith participation by all three branches. That assumption is currently being tested against an executive that has decided to treat constitutional constraints as optional, a legislature that has chosen complicity, and a limited judiciary sometimes using the laws as intended and available to it, one ruling at a time.

That three-legged stool has one more leg: The People. Some judges and the people have reached the same conclusion by different paths: the constraints exist, they matter, and their enforcement is the only thing standing between this republic and what the record has already shown this administration to be.

Mark Pirie is a trauma psychologist & an independent forensic-political researcher.