Four Rights Groups Sue to Stop Trump’s ICC Sanctions, and the Swamp Couldn’t Be More Nervous

Funny how the same crowd that spent four years screaming about the rule of law goes dead silent the second a court might actually apply it to them.

Four human rights organizations filed suit in federal court Tuesday challenging Trump’s executive order slapping sanctions on the International Criminal Court. The American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute are arguing what any literate person already knows: you cannot criminalize Americans for talking to a court. The First Amendment does not have a footnote that says “except when the president’s friends might get embarrassed.”

Executive Order 14203, signed in February 2025, calls the ICC’s investigations into U.S. and Israeli nationals a “national emergency.” A national emergency. Because a court in The Hague looked at Gaza and said maybe we should look at war crimes. That is the emergency. Not the war crimes. The looking at them.

Ask yourself who benefits. The sanctions have frozen bank accounts, triggered travel bans, and cut off digital services for ICC prosecutors, judges, three Palestinian human rights groups, and the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The word “service” in the order is so broad that sharing a legal brief with a sanctioned organization could land you in prison for 20 years. DAWN, the organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi, has already halted its ICC submissions. The ACLU filed a separate suit in Maine on behalf of two advocates who were forced to stop helping the ICC investigate atrocities against Myanmar’s Rohingya and Afghan women. Human Rights First sued in May on behalf of Eric Iverson, an Army veteran and ICC prosecutor who has spent 15 years building genocide cases out of Darfur. He is the first American to try a case before that court. Now his own government is telling him he might be a criminal for doing his job.

Marco Rubio, who never met a principle he could not abandon for a promotion, took to the Wall Street Journal in July to pledge that the administration would “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.” He warned that the court’s “overreach” could subject Border Patrol agents and U.S. Marines to its jurisdiction. Rubio wrote that accepting the ICC means surrendering control of our national destiny. That is a remarkable argument from a man whose idea of national destiny seems to be sending weapons to whoever the Pentagon points at this week and hoping nobody asks questions later.

Here is the part the establishment does not want you to connect. Trump did this before, in 2020. A federal court said the sanctions likely violated the First Amendment. Biden rescinded them. Trump reimposed them, broader and meaner. Both parties had their turn. One administration puts the boot on, the other takes it off, and neither ever lets the ICC actually finish the job. The ping-pong is the point. The court exists as a prop for speeches about human rights. The second it reaches for someone who matters, the prop gets yanked offstage.

DAWN filed a 279-page submission in January 2025 asking the ICC to investigate Biden, Blinken, and Austin for aiding and abetting the crimes for which Netanyahu and Gallant already face arrest warrants. Three weeks later, the executive order landed. You do not need to be a dot-connector to see the line there. You just need to be willing to look.

The swamp does not fear war crimes. It fears a court that might actually call them what they are.