At a hearing in Boston in March, U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun asked attorneys for a coalition of states what they stood to lose if he didn't immediately intervene to block hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump administration cuts to teacher training programs nationwide.

"Your Honor, the situation is dire," California Deputy Attorney General Laura Faer responded. "Right now, as we speak, our programs across the state are facing the possibility of closure and dissolution and termination."

Joun quickly issued a temporary restraining order blocking the cuts as "arbitrary and capricious," a victory for the states. But less than a month later, the Supreme Court reversed that decision, finding the states had failed to refute an administration claim that it would be "unlikely to recover" the funds if they were disbursed amid the litigation.

It was a loss for the state, but not the end of the fight over the teacher training. It was also just one of many ongoing court battles in a much larger legal war being waged against the Trump administration by California and its allies.

During President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, California has on average challenged the administration in court more than twice a week, according to an analysis by The Times. It has filed 15 lawsuits against the administration, all but one alongside other states, and filed briefs in support of other litigants suing the federal government in at least 18 additional cases.

Attorneys in California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office have been working at a blistering pace to draft and file complex legal arguments opposing Trump's policies on immigration, the economy, tariffs, LGBTQ+ rights, federal employee layoffs, government oversight, the allocation of federal funding to states and localities, the limits of the president's executive authority and the slash-and-burn budgetary tactics of his billionaire advisor Elon Musk.

Along the way, the state has won victories that have slowed Trump's agenda and could block some of his policies permanently. It has won multiple temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions blocking Trump policy measures, including a sweeping freeze of trillions of dollars in federal funding that Congress had already allocated to the states, and a Trump executive order to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants.

California also has suffered losses in court, with judges in some instances allowing administration policies to take hold while the state argues for their ultimate reversal. Higher courts have reversed a couple of restraining orders sought by the state and granted by district court judges, including the one on teacher preparation grants and another that had halted Trump's mass firing of federal probationary employees.

The state also was denied an emergency order to block Musk's exercise of sweeping power over the federal budget.

Bonta acknowledged the setbacks but noted they denied emergency relief only — without reaching any final conclusions about the underlying legality of the administration's actions or the merits of the state's challenges to them.

"We have not lost any case substantively at this point, and we've had major successes," Bonta said.

What's being litigated

All of the state's lawsuits remain active, each at a different stage depending on when they were filed and how fast judges have responded.

California filed its first lawsuit, over Trump's order to rescind birthright citizenship, on Jan. 21, the day after Trump was inaugurated. It argued the order is in clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

Other groups sued on the same grounds, and three federal judges have issued orders striking down the policy nationwide as unconstitutional. The Trump administration has appealed the rulings, arguing district judges should not be able to issue nationwide orders, and the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on May 15.

It is unclear whether the high court will rule on the constitutionality of Trump's order, or simply on the national authority of district judges. Either way, Bonta said he is bullish on winning in the end.

California and its allies secured early wins, too, with their second lawsuit, challenging an Office of Management and Budget memo freezing trillions of dollars in federal funding pending a Trump administration review of whether the spending aligned with the president's agenda.

Federal judges have blocked the freeze and repeatedly ordered the release of funding. The Trump administration has said it is complying with those orders — including as recently as last week, when the administration filed a "notice of compliance" with a court order to release Federal Emergency Management Agency funding that Bonta's office argued was being withheld in violation of the court's orders.

California also won a court order blocking employees from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data, though that order has since been modified to allow one specific DOGE employee to access such data.

And it won a permanent injunction to block sweeping cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for research at institutions across the country, though the administration has said it will appeal the ruling.

Judges are in the midst of reviewing briefings from California and the Trump administration in multiple other lawsuits, including claims by the state that emergency relief is needed and claims by the administration that the lawsuits lack merit.

Those include lawsuits in which the state is challenging mass firings at the Department of Education, billions in cuts to health and education funding, a Trump executive order requiring voters show proof of citizenship and restricting mail ballots, and Trump's sweeping tariffs against foreign trading partners.

In the voting case, the court is considering whether California's lawsuit, brought with other states in Massachusetts, should be consolidated with similar lawsuits brought in the District of Columbia, where judges have already blocked parts of Trump's order. In the tariff case, which Bonta brought with Gov. Gavin Newsom, the court is considering a Trump administration request to transfer the proceedings to the U.S. Court of International Trade.

California's latest lawsuit, challenging the Trump administration's threat to revoke federal funding from schools with diversity, equity and inclusion programs, was just filed Friday.

California also has backed other litigants challenging the Trump administration.

Through what are known as amicus briefs, the state has questioned the legality of the Trump administration's ban on transgender people serving in the military, threats to providers of gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, suspension of refugee services, dismantling of asylum protections, rescinding of temporary protected status for Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants, and politically motivated revocations of student visas.

It also has questioned the administration's dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, removal of members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission, and attacks on several law firms whose legal work had riled the president.

Judges have paused several of those policies as a result of the litigation — including the ban on transgender service members, which Trump has now asked the Supreme Court to take up.

The broader stakes

The mountain of litigation continues California's leading resistance role during Trump's first administration, which involved some 120 lawsuits over four years. The White House and other supporters of the president have sharply criticized the latest lawsuits as just more of the same from California liberals, who they allege are harming their own constituents by refusing to respect the will of voters who elected Trump.

"In recent years, California dreams have transformed into California nightmares of skyrocketing crime and dystopian scenes of homelessness and open-air drug use," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to The Times. "The Trump administration is trying to restore American Greatness, and if California Democrats would work with us — or at least not waste taxpayer resources to grandstand in the way — the people of California would be infinitely better off."

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson said the DOJ "will continue to fight in court to defend President Trump's agenda no matter how many frivolous lawsuits are filed."

Bonta and other critics of the president see it differently. They noted the state won often in suing the first Trump administration, and said they expect it to win many of its current cases, too.

They said the challenges are coming at a faster pace this term because Trump is brazenly violating the law at a breakneck speed, with major implications for American democracy.

"We don't take him to court if he's doing something that's lawful," Bonta said.

Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, recently co-authored a lengthy report accusing Trump of "smashing constitutional and legal guardrails to build an authoritarian presidency." The report cited many of the same Trump administration steps that California has sued over.

Sozan said states such as California are "acting as a very important bulwark against the new imperial presidency," and that Bonta and other state attorneys general "are going to play a key role in the months ahead," too, as Trump "tries to test the boundaries of the law and of court precedent and of democracy."

Bonta said if Trump and other officials in his administration "keep breaking the law," California will respond "every time."

"We've got a full tank of gas," he said. "We're ready to go."

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