Public debate over the policies of the second Trump administration—both in the mainstream press and across social media—frequently collapses two distinct questions into one: whether a policy is lawful, and whether it is just. That conflation has a concrete effect. It shields policies that impose severe and foreseeable human suffering from sustained moral scrutiny, substituting legal outcomes or legal silence for ethical judgment.
Chicago provides a concrete example. The administration’s immigration—more precisely, deportation—program has been felt here with particular severity. Residents have encountered roving ICE units on residential blocks and at public primary and secondary schools; warrantless searches and seizures; mass arrests; and confinement in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. Whatever their adjudicated legality, policies that separate children—including U.S. citizens—from their parents deliberately inflict suffering along multiple axes: race, ethnicity, age, nationality, and immigration status. They are cruel by design.
These practices have prompted multiple federal lawsuits and motions in Chicago, including one suit brought by the Trump administration itself seeking to invalidate state and local “sanctuary” policies. While many of these matters remain pending, some have already yielded meaningful relief. The administration’s challenge to Illinois and local sanctuary policies was dismissed. In another case, Judge Cummings found that the Department of Homeland Security had systematically violated a consent decree by conducting warrantless arrests and extended that decree through February 2, 2026, ordering interim relief that included alternatives to detention and concrete limits on ICE’s authority.
Other policies inflicting comparable harm are insulated from judicial review altogether. The administration’s successful effort to slash enrollment and benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s principal anti-hunger program, is one such example. Of SNAP’s roughly 42 million recipients, the majority are children, the elderly, or people with disabilities. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduces nutrition assistance by approximately $186 billion over 2025–2034, a cut projected to remove millions from the program—including tens of thousands in Chicago—and to reduce benefit levels nationwide. When the administration’s budgetary objectives are enacted into law by a compliant Congress, those choices are largely immunized from legal challenge. That immunity does nothing to mitigate their human cost.
The dismantling of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) presents an even starker case. According to a peer-reviewed study in The Lancet, the continued starvation of PEPFAR programming is projected by 2030 to result in approximately one million additional children—virtually all of them Black or brown—becoming infected with HIV; half a million additional child deaths from AIDS; and nearly three million children orphaned by the disease. No court ruling authorizes this devastation, and it is difficult to imagine how anyone of even modest moral sensibility could stand behind it.
Alas, public debate persistently treats legality as the controlling metric of legitimacy. That pattern is advanced by the administration’s celebration of its litigation victories, particularly in the Supreme Court, where it has prevailed with notable frequency. The administration’s media allies—including FOX and, increasingly, CBS—amplify those victories as proof of fidelity to the rule of law, a core pillar of democratic legitimacy.
But that narrative is misleading in at least two respects. First, taken as a whole, the administration’s litigation record is mixed at best. Faced with a volume and breadth of legal challenges unmatched at a comparable point in prior administrations, it has suffered significant setbacks in the lower federal courts (including those in Chicago, as noted)—the forum in which most challenges to the administration’s policies are actually resolved. Second, and more importantly, many of the administration’s most consequential initiatives—such as its cuts to SNAP and its evisceration of PEPFAR—have never been subject to judicial scrutiny at all, and in practical terms never will be. Their absence from the courts is quietly transmuted into an assumption of legitimacy, because legality is treated as the default metric and judicial silence is mistaken for approval.
Taken together, the administration’s court victories, its losses, and its unchecked initiatives have produced a profoundly legalistic framing of public debate. Where courts have ruled, legality is treated as synonymous with legitimacy. Where courts have not ruled, legitimacy is presumed. In either case, justice drops out of the analysis.
In The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America (2021), Adam Serwer argued that cruelty was not an incidental by-product of Trump-era governance, but a deliberate political instrument—a means of forging solidarity through the humiliation, demonization, and punishment of disfavored groups. That argument has only gained force in the administration’s second term. Whatever their adjudicated legality, policies that predictably impose suffering on vulnerable populations function not as unfortunate side effects of governance, but as tools of it.
Legality and justice are not coextensive. Law establishes minimum constraints, not moral aspiration. Public officials sworn to uphold the Constitution are obligated not only to comply with its text and with duly enacted statutes, but also to respect the principles that animate constitutional governance: human dignity, fairness, personal autonomy, compassion, and fidelity to truth. Government action that disregards these values may be lawful in a narrow sense while still corroding the moral foundations that give law its legitimacy.
The Chicago Council of Lawyers has long insisted on this distinction—between what the law permits and what justice demands—and on the responsibility of the legal profession to resist their conflation. That insistence reflects the Council’s understanding of the lawyer’s role not merely as a technician of legality, but as a guardian of justice.
Justice Brandeis famously observed that government “is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.” When governmental actors behave lawfully but harshly, they teach the public that cruelty and legality are compatible. That lesson is especially corrosive when delivered from the highest office in the land.
Whether a government—and this administration in particular—is acting lawfully, or is believed to be acting lawfully, does not by itself establish the legitimacy of its policies. The question in every case is whether those policies embody the values that give law its moral force. Across domestic and foreign policy alike, this administration’s policies do not. They instead exemplify the use of cruelty as an instrument of governance.
By Robert E. Lehrer, a member of the Board of Governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers. The full Board approved this statement.
