On May 13, 2026, Judge Leon of the D.C. District Court temporarily enjoined on First Amendment grounds U.S. financial sanctions and travel restrictions against Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Gaza and the West Bank. Albanese was sanctioned under a 2025 Executive Order against those who facilitate International Criminal Court (ICC) efforts to prosecute U.S. and allied individuals, including Israeli officials.
Regardless of what one might think about the substance of Albanese’s views, L.C. v. Trump is cause for celebration for those who believe it is a very bad idea for the United States to use the draconian instrument of individual economic sanctions against international officials for acting in their formal capacities. The case also highlights the substantial risks for the government in pursuing sanctions that strongly implicate the First Amendment, and the willingness of reviewing courts to push back.
Yet recent judicial efforts to scale back ICC-related sanctions are in tension with Supreme Court precedent. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Court held that the First Amendment did not bar Congress from criminalizing coordinated support, including speech-based support, for organizations the U.S. government had designated as national security threats. A similar issue arises here with respect to Albanese’s support for the ICC. The D.C. Circuit has already temporarily stayed the District Court’s ruling and reinstated sanctions against Albanese.
But while Holder makes L.C. v. Trump and related rulings vulnerable on the law, cases like Albanese’s call for distinguishing that precedent. As the executive overextends economic sanctions in ways that increasingly implicate speech and domestic interests, the assumptions that supported heavy judicial deference to the government’s national security argument in Holder should be revisited.
ICC Sanctions and Albanese’s Challenge
In February 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” pursuant to his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). He had issued a similar order during his first administration, which also faced judicial pushback before being revoked by President Biden.
Executive Order 14203 provides that “any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute” nationals of the United States or other major allies “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. It explicitly cites ICC actions against Israel. The Executive Order authorizes sanctions against foreign persons who have “directly engaged” or assisted the ICC in such efforts. Individuals designated under the Executive Order are subject to an asset freeze and travel restrictions. U.S. persons are barred from providing them funds, goods, or services, lest they face criminal and civil penalties themselves. IEEPA designations have often been described as a “financial death sentence” because being blacklisted by the U.S. financial system means effective excommunication from the global one.
Later that year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Albanese under Executive Order 14203 for advocating with the ICC to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. Albanese is an Italian national and a well-known human rights activist. She was appointed as special rapporteur by the U.N. Human Rights Council—the political arm of the U.N. human rights machinery, which the United States and Israel have frequently accused of disproportionately criticizing their records while ignoring grave human rights violations elsewhere.
Albanese has spoken widely and controversially about Hamas’s October 7 attack and the ensuing Gaza war. France and Germany have criticized her for downplaying and even justifying the attack. Others have accused her of antisemitism and denying Israel’s right to exist.
Albanese’s spouse and daughter challenged her designation in federal court. Judge Leon, who has a reputation for ruling against the government in major national security cases, provisionally ruled that Albanese’s designation violated the First Amendment. The designation, he held, was entirely based on protected speech, and it was not narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest.
The first hurdle the court had to overcome was to determine whether the First Amendment even applied to speech by a foreign national outside the United States. Judge Leon found that Albanese satisfied the substantial connection test, which affords foreigners constitutional protection when they come into U.S. territory or establish sufficient ties to the country. Albanese has spent time living in the United States with her husband, a World Bank official, and her U.S. citizen daughter. She has property in Washington, D.C., a mortgage with an American bank, and strong professional ties to the United States. She was affiliated with U.S. universities. And although the speech in question took place outside the United States, the government took action “against Albanese’s extensive connections to the United States . . . because of her speech.”.
The court then found that Albanese’s designation under Executive Order 14203 purely targeted her speech. Because she holds no official role at the ICC, her alleged involvement in ICC efforts consisted solely of nonbinding recommendations and opinions. The court therefore rejected the government’s argument that it merely regulated conduct tied to ICC investigations of U.S. persons or allies. It concluded that the speech restriction here was content-based.
Content-based restrictions of speech survive only if the government proves they are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests. The government framed the compelling interest as “upholding the sovereignty of the United States” and defending U.S. interests against ICC action. The court sidestepped this claim without really addressing it. It emphasized only that national security and foreign relations concerns did not displace judicial review, and asserted that action against Albanese was not narrowly tailored because she had no real power over ICC action. The court very briefly applied Holder’s distinctionbetween protected independent advocacy and unprotected coordinated support for a designated entity. By taking aim at Albanese’s independent advocacy, the court held, the government violated the First Amendment.
IEEPA Sanctions and the First Amendment
L.C. v. Trump joins two similar district court rulings, Smith v. Trump and Rona v. Trump, that enjoined the application of Executive Order 14203 on First Amendment grounds. An earlier district court decision, Open Society Justice Initiative v. Trump, blocked the application of Executive Order 14203’s predecessor in the first Trump Administration. All of these rulings, however, are in tension with Supreme Court precedent.
Judge Leon’s cursory treatment of Holder in L.C. v. Trump involved a fair bit of cherry-picking, making his ruling vulnerable on the law. In Holder, a Supreme Court majority upheld the material support statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, against a First Amendment challenge. The statute criminalizes knowingly providing “material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization” (FTO). It broadly prohibits the provision of “any property . . . or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel.”
Unlike Albanese’s IEEPA designation, Foreign Terrorist Organizations are designated by the Secretary of State under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). Holder was brought by groups who wanted to engage in certain activities that would benefit two designated FTOs: the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK. Both had committed numerous violent terrorist acts. The plaintiffs argued they only wished to support the lawful aspects of the FTOs’ activities through coordinated teaching and advocacy, including legal training.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts held that the statute did not violate the First Amendment as applied to the specified activities. The Court acknowledged that the material support statute may sometimes prohibit speech, but maintained it was “carefully drawn to cover only a narrow category of speech [coordinated with FTOs].” The Court concluded that “[t]he statute reaches only [coordinated] material support . . . . Independent advocacy that might be viewed as promoting the group’s legitimacy is not covered.”
The Court reasoned that even support in the form of speech and training without the intention of facilitating violent acts could advance an FTO’s unlawful activities. Money is fungible, and there was evidence that FTOs use all forms of support to advance or reallocate resources for their violent activities. The statute, the Court found, clearly prohibits support for any aspect of an FTO’s operations, and the considered view of both Congress and the Executive is that any coordinated support advances the violent activities of FTOs.
Holder is also well known for its heavy reliance on national security deference. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the “evaluation of the facts by the executive, like Congress’s assessment, is entitled to deference. This litigation implicates sensitive and weighty interests of national security and foreign affairs. . . . It is vital in this context ‘not to substitute . . . our own evaluation of evidence for a reasonable evaluation by the Legislative Branch.’” Roberts continued, “[t]he Government, when seeking to prevent imminent harms in the context of international affairs and national security, is not required to conclusively link all the pieces in the puzzle before we grant weight to its empirical conclusions.” The Supreme Court recently cited this aspect of Holder in Tik Tok v. Garland, in which it upheld the statute known as the TikTok Ban against a First Amendment challenge.
Holder addressed a non-IEEPA statutory mechanism that explicitly criminalized all forms of material support to formally designated FTOs. Albanese’s case is different in that she was designated under IEEPA, and the ICC is not a designated FTO. And to be clear, making informal recommendations to an international organization like the ICC is not remotely equivalent to providing legal or logistical assistance to terrorist organizations responsible for mass violence. Yet the First Amendment issues are similar. In both cases, the question was whether one could face government sanctions for providing support in the form of speech to an organization condemned by the U.S. government on national security grounds.
Holder’s coordination-focused doctrinal distinction is translatable to the ICC cases. Judge Leon concluded that Albanese’s advocacy with the ICC was protected independent advocacy rather than unprotected coordinated advocacy. But Albanese’s exchanges with the ICC under a formal U.N.-ICC cooperation agreement through reports, recommendations, and consultations are analytically similar to certain forms of advocacy that Holder says constitute coordinated support, like the furnishing of legal advice. Judge Leon also added a requirement that Albanese wield actual control over the ICC’s actions, which appears to go beyond Holder’s threshold of simple coordination. No one argued that the plaintiffs in Holder wielded any control over the PKK or LTTE.
Moreover, Judge Leon’s ruling downplayed the substantial weight Holder gives to the views of Congress and the Executive in national security and foreign affairs, especially when the executive is taking “preventive” measures to counteract future harms to U.S. national interests.
But there are good reasons to distinguish Holder, and the District Court could have done a better job doing so. To start, Holder’s reasoning is tethered to Congress’s very detailed language and clarification through amendments of what constitutes material support for terrorism. Congress established that almost anything counts. Here, it was the President who decided to use IEEPA to go after an international organization. The targets for designation have been selected at his unguided discretion under IEEPA’s broad and vague delegation of authority to the President to regulate and restrict economic transactions in a national emergency. The statutes are fundamentally different and Congress’s role in this case is diminished, which should breed far less deference compared to Holder on Holder’s own terms: Chief Justice Roberts emphasized it was the considered judgment of both Congress and the Executive that warranted heightened deference.
Albanese’s case also illustrates the dramatic quantitative and qualitative expansion of sanctions under IEEPA in recent years, which justifies greater skepticism toward government assertions of compelling national security state interests. Holder concerned terrorism—a traditional and widely recognized national security threat. At issue was a set of clearly dangerous organizations with established, longstanding records of violence. Now the same tools are used against international diplomats, institutions, and much more. The Trump administration has used IEEPA to impose universal tariffs and to go after TikTok and other tech companies with strong U.S. presences. Those targets have a different profile from traditional IEEPA sanctions targets. They often have much stronger connections to the United States and resources to pursue litigation. In cases like Albanese’s, they have robust First Amendment claims. As I show in recent work, the result of this shift in executive practice has been greater judicial willingness to constrain executive use of IEEPA, a retreat from national security deference, and new limits on an instrument the executive could in the past use relatively freely without serious fear of judicial intervention. District courts enjoined President Trump’s IEEPA executive orders against TikTok and WeChat during his first Administration, and the Supreme Court barred the President from relying on IEEPA to impose any tariffs in its landmark recent ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump.
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Overextension of IEEPA and the resulting strengthening of judicial responses to assertions of IEEPA authority have consequences for the government’s litigation position in L.C. and the sister cases. If the Trump Administration wishes to deny appellate courts an opening to distinguish permissive precedent like Holder, it would do well to abandon the measures against Albanese and others similarly situated. Seeing the case through could invite further limits on the government’s powers under IEEPA.