WASHINGTON — As losses mount in lower federal courts, President Donald Trump has returned to a tactic that he employed at the Supreme Court with remarkable success in his first term.

Three times in the past week, and six since Trump took office a little more than two months ago, the Justice Department has asked the conservative-majority high court to step into cases much earlier than usual.

The administration’s use of the emergency appeals, or shadow docket, comes as it faces more than 130 lawsuits over the Republican president’s flurry of executive orders. Many of the lawsuits have been filed in liberal-leaning parts of the country as the court system becomes ground zero for pushback to his policies.

Federal judges have ruled against the administration more than 40 times, issuing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, the Justice Department said Friday in a Supreme Court filing. The issues include birthright citizenship changes. The administration is increasingly asking the Supreme Court, which Trump helped shape by nominating three justices, to step in, not only to rule in its favor but also to send a message to federal judges, who Trump and his allies claim are overstepping their authority.

“Only this court can stop rule-by-TRO from further upending the separation of powers — the sooner, the better,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote Friday in the deportations case, referring to the temporary restraining orders.

Stephen Vladeck, the Georgetown University law professor who chronicled the rise of emergency appeals in his book, “The Shadow Docket,” wrote on the Substack platform that “these cases, especially together, reflect the inevitable reckoning — just how much is the Supreme Court going to stand up to Trump?”

In the first Trump administration, the Justice Department made emergency appeals to the Supreme Court 41 times and won all or part of what it wanted in 28 cases, Vladeck found.

Before that, the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations asked the court for emergency relief in just eight cases over 16 years.

Deportation order

Immigration and the promise of mass deportations were at the center of Trump’s winning presidential campaign, and earlier this month, he took the rare step of invoking an 18th-century wartime law to speed deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang.

Lawyers for the migrants, several of whom say they are not gang members, sued to block the deportations without due process.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington, agreed.

He ordered deportation flights to be temporarily halted and planes already making their way to a prison in El Salvador be turned around.

Two planes still landed.

Anti-DEI training

Trump has moved quickly to try and root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government and in education.

Eight Democratic-led states argued in a lawsuit that the push was at the root of a decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training.