Three news organizations that had been blocked from accessing the White House by President Donald Trump asked a federal judge to extend an order that temporarily restored their access after they had been barred for almost a week.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted an emergency request to restore White House access early Thursday morning, blocking Trump’s ban until at least Oct. 8. On Monday, the three affected news organizations — MS NOW, CNN and Politico — asked him to extend that order to indefinitely restore their access to the White House.
“The White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstate a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO if allowed the opportunity,” lawyers for the news organizations wrote in the filing. “Because the ban is an unlawful assault on the most fundamental First Amendment freedoms and will inflict irreparable harm on Plaintiffs and the public if not restrained.”
They argued a continuation of the ban would have negative effects spreading beyond the affected journalists.
“Every day, critically important news is breaking at the White House, and the ban will substantially interfere with Plaintiffs’ ability to cover it. The ban also inflicts an injury on all news media organizations — which now risk a similar fate if they engage in fact-based, independent reporting the President deems insufficiently favorable,” they wrote.
“Each day the ban remains in effect, the public loses access to essential reporting on the President and his administration.”
Kelly ordered the Trump administration to respond to this filing by Friday.
The government previously argued that Trump’s ban was lawful under the First Amendment. It claimed that the president has the right to “[enforce] minimum standards for bona fide journalists and [safeguard] national security information.” It also argued that his ban — implemented after Trump complained that the outlets’ coverage was unfair to him — was not retaliatory.
Kelly will likely consider those arguments when he holds a hearing at some point in the next couple of weeks, likely before the block on the ban expires.
Kelly didn’t buy the national security argument, which didn’t emerge until late Tuesday night when the White House sent letters to MS NOW, CNN and Politico, respectively, explaining the reasoning for the ban. Those letters were sent four days after the ban was announced and three days after several journalists had their “hard” passes, which gave them access to the White House, confiscated.
“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of the Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Kelly wrote. “Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”
The Trump administration also contends that it gave the journalists due process by sending those letters Tuesday night.
Kelly disagreed, ruling solely on due process grounds. He found that the Trump administration had not given the news organizations appropriate due process before enacting the ban.
“The record is bereft of any relevant ‘formally articulated standards’ in place before any of the conduct for which the Defendants revoked their hard passes,” Kelly wrote. “One standard Defendants appear to offer — reflected in letters they sent to plaintiffs on September 22, 2026, identifying their objectionable reporting — is so vague it hardly does the trick.”
“Moreover, Defendants renewed Plaintiff Betsy Klein’s hard pass several months after she published some of the identified reporting, undercutting any argument that she or her employer, for example, had the requisite notice that the conduct at issue violated a relevant standard,” Kelly added.
Kelly issued a similar ruling in 2018 when he oversaw a legal challenge after the White House revoked then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s credentials. Kelly found that the White House had not given Acosta due process and ordered the Trump administration to restore the credential. Shortly after that ruling, Acosta dropped the lawsuit. Kelly never ruled on the First Amendment claims similarly made by Acosta.
Circuit court precedent says the White House may not arbitrarily deny a journalist a press credential, because press access to the White House is protected by the First Amendment and may not be revoked without due process.
The First Amendment issues remain less settled, as the news organizations continue to argue that Trump’s ban was both retaliatory and blatant viewpoint discrimination.
The order restoring access to the White House for MS NOW, CNN and Politico was effective immediately when it was issued overnight in the early hours of Thursday morning. But it took almost 12 hours for the affected journalists to regain access to the building.
For now, that access has been restored and will remain until at least next week.
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