Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

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It’s a $16 disappointment every time.

These days, the airport sandwich tends to emerge from a fluorescent-lit vending machine with a name like Farmer On-the-Go or Nutrition Inc. The machine is usually white, decorated with soothing green or blue iconography meant, I suppose, to conjure grass and sea in one of the least pastoral spaces on earth. Through its glass door, you can survey the foods generally understood to be “healthy,” at least compared with the Panda Express and Cinnabon farther down the concourse: yogurt parfaits with thin geological strata of berries; Caesar and chef salads in plastic clamshells; a few juices and smoothies; wraps, usually Caesar; and sandwiches, almost invariably ham or turkey.

The last time I bought one, I was flying from Louisville to Chicago. It was early, and I was travel-day queasy enough that whatever Smashburger considered a breakfast sandwich seemed unwise. A turkey sandwich and a pack of mint gum appeared to be the more prudent option.

I accepted the disappointment the moment I tapped my debit card: this was not a $16 sandwich.

It came in a rigid plastic triangle sealed with peel-and-stick film—a transparent reliquary for something nobody revered. Condensation had gathered beneath the lid, suggesting freshness, or at least recent contact with the natural world, but when I peeled it back there was a suspicious lack of smell.

The bread was stale. One piece of lettuce was limp; another was somehow entirely lettuce rib. The turkey was fine, and the cheese was technically cheese, though the sandwich had achieved the improbable condition of being simultaneously refrigerator-cold and slightly melted. There were packets of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and mustard at the counter, which helped, but only so much.

This felt particularly insulting because I really, really love sandwiches—not merely as lunch, but as a form. Watching “Scooby-Doo” as a child, I came away with two clear ambitions for adulthood: a side gig solving mysteries and a refrigerator always full of sandwich ingredients. The towering versions assembled by Shaggy and Scooby embodied abundance, customization and the exhilarating possibility that nearly anything could be made better by placing it between two pieces of bread.

The airport sandwich represents the betrayal of that promise. It has presumably been engineered by a team, calibrated for refrigeration and focus-grouped into broad acceptability, yet it feels made by no one. Its chief ambition is endurance: it must survive transit, uncertain demand and an unknowable stretch between gates. Endurance is the full extent of its imagination. 

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Its true opposite is not the restaurant sandwich, constructed by a chef and eaten promptly under ideal conditions. 

It is the beach sandwich: made by everyday people with a zest for life and brine, then carried some distance before being eaten with an appetite sharpened by sun, swimming and the lugging of chairs across hot sand.

Building one brings out the latent chef in nearly everyone. Italian-American shore moms know this. So do dads carrying old-school Igloo coolers, each of whom, I suspect, has strongly held beliefs about bread density, condiment placement and whether tomatoes are worth the risk. These people may never use the phrase “moisture barrier,” but they know where the cheese belongs.

A good beach sandwich is designed not merely to survive the wait but to improve during it. The bread grows slightly more tender. The cheese softens. The sauces settle into the meat and greens. It becomes a little compressed, a little messier and somehow more itself.

Though the Scooby-Doo towers would never make it across the dunes, there are better ways to build a sandwich for adventure. Let me show you.

The beach sandwich blueprint 

Bread is the first and last defense against sogginess, which is why sturdy loaves — focaccia, baguettes, bâtards, Italian bread — shine in beach-sandwich applications. They can take a generous smear of sauce, withstand several hours of compression and still emerge recognizably bread-shaped.

For this sandwich, I wanted ciabatta because it is perhaps the most pillowy of the sturdy breads. It has enough backbone for the journey without requiring the determined chewing that makes lunch feel like a mandibular endurance event. Its open crumb absorbs just enough sauce to become more flavorful as it sits, while the soft crust remains easy to eat on a towel without showering your lap in shards.

Next come the condiments. I am an avowed condiment hound, especially when two sauces are doing different jobs. Double sauce is not necessary, but I like a little indulgence underscoring the practicality of a packable meal.

On one side goes lemon mayonnaise, our acid-fat lever: rich enough to keep the turkey lush, sharp enough to wake it up. On the other goes a coarse, olive-bar-inspired romesco made with jarred roasted peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, salted roasted almonds and smoked paprika. It brings vegetal sweetness, salt, smoke and nubby creaminess without requiring anyone to roast and peel peppers before packing the cooler. Marcona almonds are lovely if you want an amusing high-low dialogue with the potato chips that appear later, though any salted roasted almond will do.

I initially considered Manchego. Its saltiness and nuttiness made perfect sense with the romesco, but I realized I wanted foldiness rather than crystalline hunks. Muenster is less assertive but more accommodating: its mild butteriness stands beside the sauce without competing, and it softens agreeably in summer warmth without becoming stringy or oily. The best beach-sandwich ingredients have promising future states.

Then there is the turkey.

Like all good beach sandwiches, some of this comes down to pure personal desire. I could eat a turkey sandwich every day of my life. I maintain a running ranking of the best ones in Chicago, from the version at my local bánh mì counter—resplendent with pickled daikon and carrots, Vietnamese mayonnaise and soy sauce—to the one at my neighborhood café, served on crackly oat bread and actually worth its fifteen-dollar price tag.

I considered prosciutto, roast beef, cured meats and even a pickle-heavy chickpea salad. All would have worked. But good sandwich architecture is not the same thing as bloodless optimization. At some point, desire gets veto power.

Turkey, baby.

For greens, I turn to arugula. Crisp-head lettuces have their place — I love them on summer sandwiches destined to be eaten immediately — but given enough time, crunch becomes limpness.

Arugula knows how to wilt gracefully. Its peppery bite survives the wait, while the leaves soften into the sauces rather than collapsing into wet ribbons. It also lends the sandwich the air of something procured from a real cute deli, perhaps one with handwritten menu boards and expensive sparkling water.

Finally, the salt-and-vinegar chips go inside.

This is partly whimsy, but also practicality. Their crunch interrupts the softness of the turkey, cheese and sauces; their salt seasons the sandwich; and their pucker sharpens the lemon mayo and smoky-sweet romesco. Tucked against the arugula, they function almost like an extremely unserious vinaigrette.

They will soften somewhat as the sandwich waits, but not entirely. That slightly crushed, partially melded state is the point. A good beach sandwich should not remain frozen in the moment of assembly. It should settle into itself.

How you wrap it matters, too. I prefer parchment paper for the first layer, which allows the bread to breathe and avoids recreating the clammy condensation routine of the airport sandwich. Wrap it snugly enough to hold everything together and encourage a little beneficial compression.

If it is headed into a cooler, place the parchment-wrapped sandwich inside a resealable bag or hard-sided container. The inner layer remains breathable; the outer one protects it from the ice pack and the inevitable little lake at the bottom of the cooler. You are not trying to preserve the sandwich in suspended animation. You are creating the conditions under which it can improve without becoming waterlogged.

And improve it does.

It is delicious fresh. It is better after the walk to the lake and an hour in the water, when the ciabatta has grown slightly more tender, the Muenster has relaxed, the romesco has settled into the turkey and the crushed chips have become one with the peppery greens.

By then, the sandwich has changed, but so have you. Your appetite has been sharpened by sun, distance and swimming, and what you unwrap tastes less like something that survived the journey than something that has been quietly getting ready for you.

That is the true art of the beach sandwich: building something not merely to endure the wait, but to meet you at the other end of it.

 

 

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After the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Good and too many others, a familiar scene is unfolding in Madison, Wisconsin. Following yet another fatal shooting by law enforcement in broad daylight, the streets are full of protesters while social media is aflame with horrifying videos.

The difference is that this time, those responsible are local police — not Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The United States has watched federal immigration agents wreak havoc and fear in communities, shooting eight people to death in public on the streets since January and allowing more than 50 people in detention to die on their watch since 2025. The nation is justifiably angry, with nearly two-thirds of Americans saying ICE has gone too far. 

Being overlooked is the violence being brought by local law enforcement. On July 22, four police officers in Madison held down Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old Black man, and shot him three times during an attempted arrest. Tens of thousands have now seen the videos circulating on social media platforms: bystanders screaming in the background, the attempted arrest turning violent within seconds, another person killed by police. 

This is nothing new. Ruiz’s killing is a painful reminder that state and local police have been left out of the conversation about violence and accountability. Much of the country has moved on from the mass protests in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. 

But police violence has never slowed.

Police continue to kill around 1,300 people every year, with at least 689 killings in 2026 already. Much media attention has gone to ICE’s traffic stops, but far less to the 93 people killed by police in traffic stops this year. While the enthusiasm behind police accountability in 2020 resulted in some important changes — including state bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants — we never saw the “major changes” 58% of Americans called for, including reforms that would protect everyday people from police brutality. Congress failed to pass even modest police accountability legislation in George Floyd’s name after bipartisan negotiations broke down, and most federal lawmakers have shown little interest in returning to the issue.

Under the Biden administration, the federal government remained an important force for police reform, including executive orders that increased accountability and prioritized deescalation and alternatives to use of force. These orders quickly fell after Donald Trump returned to office, alongside consent decrees designed to curb police violence, leaving communities to fend for themselves.

Part of the reason the issue has fallen off the national radar has to do with a (perverse) relative comparison. ICE has made local police look astonishingly well-trained, well-behaved and accountable, leading Senate Democrats to take action. In January, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto introduced a bill to redirect $75 billion in federal funding from ICE to local police. Her colleague and fellow Nevadan, Sen. Jacky Rosen, said, “It’s simple: ICE should be held to the same standards as our local police departments.” Rosen and Cortez Masto, and their colleagues like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are correct, but we should hold ICE and police to a significantly higher standard of accountability.

A majority of voters agree. Extensive polling by Vera Action has found that the most popular position on policing is “supporting police who put their lives on the line for us everyday and holding those who use excessive force or abuse their power accountable.” This message consistently ranks far above simply adding more police officers or funding. The majority position on policing is one of support and accountability — better policing, not simply more policing.

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Six years ago, the country’s demand for police accountability was subsumed by a muddled debate over “defunding the police” and valid concerns about rising crime. In 2026, we are past that conversation. The country is in the middle of a quiet public safety revolution, in which police departments, despite having fewer officers, are working with partners like mental health crisis response and community violence intervention to drive record-low crime rates.

Many people have become numb or indifferent to — or even defensive of — police violence. But ICE violence continues to shock us. The killing of Ruiz is a reminder that both problems persist — and can be solved with similar measures. As lawmakers propose accountability measures for ICE like better use-of-force standards, ending qualified immunity, improved training and more budgetary oversight, these same accountability measures should apply to police. We should also demand more than the tools, like body cameras, that have failed to stem police violence.

The officers who killed Corey Ruiz should and may face accountability. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “Our community deserves full transparency and accountability,” and the killing is being investigated as a homicide. 

But it will be a rare exception. One ICE officer recently told a reporter that the Trump administration has empowered aggressive behavior by officers because they know “they’re going to be protected.” Until accountability becomes the norm across all levels of law enforcement, this violence will continue. 

The message should be clear: If America wants accountability from federal law enforcement, it is time to demand real accountability for police as well.

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As The New School’s 2026 class of performing arts graduates enters the workforce and we face the beginning of a new school year, we are reminded of what our students will take into the world. Viola Spolin, one of the great acting teachers of the 20th century, put it simply: “being part of the whole generates trust and frees the player for playing, the many then acting as one.” 

That lesson — how to genuinely inhabit a shared world with others — has never felt more urgent.

Our nation is divided on everything from food safety to our country’s future, and there are numbers to back this schism. Half of Americans report feeling divided from one another; a recent Stanford study gives this fracture a sharper name: the “empathy perception gap.” People have not stopped caring about others, but they believe that no one else does. This misperception carries profound consequences and is currently rippling through our world, eroding trust, deepening isolation and creating a social environment in which empathy is swiftly becoming an atrophied muscle in desperate need of exercise. 

We are living through a crisis of empathy and, more precisely, of empathy not being learned. We live saturated in opinion, reaction and digital noise, a culture that turns other people into content: flattened, accelerated, easy to dismiss. We’re quick to cut off those we disagree with, and the conditions that might allow for empathy to flourish — time, attention, presence and vulnerability — are increasingly scarce. Empathy becomes something we endorse in principle but rarely practice. There is one place, however, where these conditions not only still exist, but are required: the stage.

Actors, musicians and performers train to inhabit perspectives not their own, to remain present through discomfort, and to sustain attention across time. In rehearsal and performance, they develop the capacity to hold another’s reality without collapsing it into their own. Crucially, they do so in the presence of others — before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention. 

Empathy, on stage, becomes a cornerstone of experiencing live performance that pulls heartstrings, inspires raucous laughter or elicits a collective groan when a poorly-hatched plan falters. For example, in “Hadestown,” the moment Hades allows Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living on one impossible condition — he can’t look back to make sure she’s there — converts a moment of positive surprise when the song lands into a dark swell of tension, anxiety and doom. It’s felt between the actors on stage and from the orchestra pit to the last row of balcony seats.

Of course, this is not a new function of the stage. When audiences gathered in ancient Athens to watch plays by Sophocles, they were confronting a shared reality together. Theater operated as a civic technology, a structured environment in which a society could examine itself in public. What the ancients understood, and what remains true now, is that empathy can be taught through the sustained act of attending to another’s experience in the presence of others. 

The stage has always taught this, and the evidence of its impact is no longer anecdotal. Participation in the arts has been shown to reduce isolation, improve mental health and strengthen social bonds. 

Broadway is home to several plays that address these issues head-on while bringing deeply human experiences to life in creative, even comedic ways. For example, in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the lone person on stage, currently played by Tracee Ellis Ross, is tasked with cheering up a deeply depressed mom by making a list of things that make life worth living. The answer: bring the second cast member — the theater audience — into the brainstorming session to help them understand and connect more deeply to the very human situation the main character finds himself in.

Programs in social prescribing — the act of doctors prescribing non-medical care — are now expanding from their origins in the United Kingdom to states like Massachusetts and New Jersey — recognize that engagement in shared cultural activity can be a meaningful complement to clinical care. Medical schools, too, have long incorporated the study of performance to develop empathy and observational acuity in future doctors. These practices point to something central: The ability to encounter another person’s experience with care and attention is a skill, and it can be taught.

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That skill is cultivated through education in the performing arts. Actors and musicians learn to exist and create out of tension without rushing to resolve it. They learn to inhabit perspectives that are not their own, and to recognize the humanity within them. They practice sustaining tension, navigating uncertainty and responding in real-time to others. 

Playwrights from Shakespeare to Sondheim to Manuel-Miranda, meanwhile, write around human emotion while infusing relatability to enrich the audience’s theater experience. But it’s the actors who execute their vision by playing off of each other and leaning into creative impulse when the scripted scene or real-time audience reaction calls for it.

The ability to hold another person’s reality alongside one’s own, without reducing it or rewriting it, requires training, repetition and exposure. Studies have even shown that inhabiting a character increases one’s ability to see from others’ perspectives. And crucially, they do so in the presence of others—before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention. 

At its best, the performing arts create a space for shared witnessing. Audiences experience a story alongside others, in real time, aware of each other’s presence. Faces clench before pivotal moments of conflict on stage. Eyes tear up when unrequited love leads to isolation or forbidden love leads to death. Our bodies experience excitement and anticipation when hearing musical tension or suspension. Outside the theatre, this collective attention is increasingly rare and necessary. In a society shaped by fragmentation and misperception, the capacity to remain present with complexity is one of the most urgent skills we can cultivate.

A performing arts education does more than train artists to perform. It prepares individuals — actors as well as audience members — to live with tension rather than flee from it, to participate in spaces of collective witnessing and to build communities grounded in attention, responsiveness and critical reflection. It offers a structured, repeatable method for developing empathy as a lived, practiced capacity. At a time when our social contract with each other is fraying, and we speak to Claude or ChatGPT as much as we chat with friends or family, we need more spaces where this work can happen, and more people trained to do it.

The stage is one of the last places where we learn, together, how to be with one another. It may be the most important classroom we have left. 

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Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

Former federal Judge John E. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee

Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”

“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.

In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.

“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.

In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.

Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.

“Breakdown” of a Presumption

The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.

It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.

About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.

Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.

“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.

Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.

But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.

In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.

In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.

News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”

Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.

“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.

In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.

“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”

Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.

“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.

Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries

The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.

Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”

That dynamic is gone, he said.

“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”

“There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council

Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.

Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.

This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.

The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.

In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.

“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”

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