A Justice Department lawyer apologized to a federal judge in Manhattan on Monday after taxpayer-funded ads promoting President Trump kept running on national television for about a day after she ordered them off the air.
Judge Jennifer L. Rochon of Federal District Court blocked the ads on Sunday and told the government to cancel airtime it had already booked. That night, according to AdImpact data that the plaintiffs gave the court, the spots ran nearly 400 times on programs that started at 7 p.m. Eastern or later, CNN reported. One ad ran in 193 spots during CBS’s 60 Minutes. Another ran in 198 during ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos.
The airings didn’t stop Monday morning. By 2:45 p.m., the plaintiffs said, an ad called “Maduro” had run 20 more times, “Final Battle” 11 times and “The Country He Loves” once.
The government’s explanation came down to an inbox. Judge Rochon emailed her order to the parties at 6:46 p.m. Sunday, but government counsel didn’t forward it to agency counsel until 7:58 p.m., and the agency lawyers didn’t see it until Monday morning, according to Democracy Docket. News outlets had reported the order within minutes. In a letter on Monday evening, the Justice Department said the relevant Department of Homeland Security lawyers “did not become aware” of it “until this morning” and apologized “to the court and the plaintiffs,” Mediaite reported.
The letter said the government was now complying. The $20 million Customs and Border Protection purchase order that paid for the campaign had been stayed, future payments were frozen, the Office of Management and Budget’s $20 million apportionment was on hold and the outside vendor had been told to pull the commercials.
The plaintiffs, a coalition led by Common Cause, aren’t asking for contempt sanctions yet. They asked Judge Rochon for a status conference to find out whether the administration had followed her order.
The day before the order, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is defending the administration, had told the judge the ads would stop after Sunday anyway. Judge Rochon said that promise didn’t make the request moot. In an opinion on Monday, she said the government had not given “reasonable assurances that OMB will not reapportion funds from another source to continue running similar advertisements,” as Jon Brodkin wrote for Ars Technica.
The opinion found that the plaintiffs were likely to win their claim that the ads broke a provision of the 2026 Consolidated Appropriations Act barring spending “for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.”
“Defendants do not contest that the at-issue advertisements are purely partisan and unconnected to DHS’s official functions,” Judge Rochon wrote.
One spot, she wrote, “is almost identical to one used during President Trump’s 2024 campaign,” except that its disclaimer now names the United States government as the payer instead of his campaign. It shows Mr. Trump walking down a hallway, promising to “demolish the deep state,” “drive out the globalists” and “rout the fake news media.” The judge said it “provides no information about DHS’s official functions.”
That ad alone had run about 9,679 times by Oct. 8, for an estimated 972 million impressions at a cost of more than $9.09 million, according to the opinion. Four other challenged ads cost an estimated $6.3 million, putting the total near $15.4 million on that date. By the time of the order, about $19 million of the $20 million set aside had been spent, CNBC reported.
Judge Rochon also found “a clear and substantial likelihood” that the spending violated the Administrative Procedure Act, because Congress never gave DHS money to run the ads. The ads aired less than a month before the federal election, The Washington Times reported.
The restraining order lasts 14 days unless it’s extended, and it could become a preliminary injunction that keeps the ads off the air while the case goes on.
A second case is moving in Washington. The Democratic National Committee sued Mr. Trump, the White House, OMB and DHS in federal court in the District of Columbia, arguing that the ads violate campaign finance law. A hearing on its request for a temporary restraining order is scheduled for Thursday.