When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the US president’s mass deportation effort.

Instead, a top justice department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

By February, the district court judge in question, Sunshine Sykes, was fed up. Sykes accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people. She also said she regarded it as seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers”, adding that it could “only do so in a world where the constitution does not exist”.

Hardly isolated, the case illustrates a broader pattern by the US government’s executive branch, in Donald Trump’s second term, of defiance of decisions by the lower courts that are part of the judicial branch, with the tone set early by Trump and JD Vance, his vice-president. The US constitution’s creation of the three branches of government, with the legislative branch being the third, was intended to ensure checks and balances so that no branch had too much power.

Well, folks, we nearly made it to 250.