Main: Trump officials are hoping to build the 250-foot-tall arch in Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery on Oct. 1, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images). Center inset: President Donald Trump boards Air Force One, Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., en route to speak at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
The Trump DOJ and the judge handling multiple lawsuits over the president’s planned “Great Triumphal Arch” have clashed for months over her efforts to prevent a ballroom-like “fait accompli.” All of it came to a head late Thursday, as U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan temporarily restrained the administration from starting construction.
The judge — who once presided over President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 prosecution — concluded that the Department of the Interior has “issued its final decision […] approving construction” and, thus, the Washington, D.C., and Virginia plaintiffs were entitled to a temporary restraining order.
“[T]he harm is certain,” Chutkan wrote.
The Barack Obama-appointed jurist knew about the National Capital Planning Commission’s (NCPC) marathon hearing on Thursday, which ended with the arch’s approval.
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
Ahead of the NCPC meeting, Chutkan had ordered the government to notify her within an hour of a decision. After it, she doled out a sharp rebuke of the government’s last-minute legal and national security justifications.
In the memorandum opinion, Chutkan said it couldn’t be right that Congress greenlit a 250-foot arch at Memorial Circle more than a century ago and no one noticed until Trump.
Main: Memorial Circle, where President Donald Trump has proposed building an arch to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary, the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial are seen from the Washington Monument, Thursday, July 9, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson). Left inset: President Donald Trump speaks about Dulles International Airport modernization, in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, July 29, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson). Right inset: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia).
“The sheer improbability that a 100-year-old statute would contain authority, unknown to every previous administration, to erect a 250-foot arch at a principal location in the Nation’s capital indicates how far Defendants must stretch to justify this project,” the judge said. “Indeed, they materialized, for the first time, when Defendants filed their opposition brief last week.”
Nor did Chutkan buy eleventh-hour claims regarding presidential security and defense benefits, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touted in a sworn declaration.
“[T]hese recent and unsupported attestations of security aspects of a structure that has been extensively discussed over the last year appear nowhere in the planning documents on which the project was reviewed and approved,” Chutkan observed.
Hegseth’s declaration called the arch a “generational national defense opportunity” that would help “defend the Homeland” from drones and “evolving threats.”
An artistic rendering of the proposed arch shared by Secretary Doug Burgum (Department of Interior).
Vietnam War veterans are also opposing the “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” at Memorial Circle, which the president said would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers” across from Arlington National Cemetery.
Rejecting the government’s claim of injury from her judicial intervention, Chutkan emphasized that the administration “cannot suffer harm from an injunction that merely ends an unlawful practice,” concluding that “[t]here is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of unlawful agency action.”
The post ‘The harm is certain’: Trump’s Jan. 6 judge stands between president and his arch dreams with blistering late-night order, following marathon hearing first appeared on Law & Crime.
