A federal judge on Friday gave a thumbs-down to President Donald Trump's directive requiring federal voter registration forms to include a requirement to provide proof-of-citizenship paperwork.

According to PBS News, "U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C., sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul U.S. elections," determining that this order would violate the constitutional separation of powers because the executive branch doesn't have power over election administration.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, who has been appointed to various federal judgeships under former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Trump's order would have been carried out by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. But under the ruling, they are permanently blocked from making such a change to federal voter registration forms.

Over the years, the president has tried to expand his crusade against immigrants to a number of facets of government administration.

He also triggered a massive controversy in his first term by seeking to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census, despite warnings from experts that this would reduce response rates and make census data less accurate; the Supreme Court ultimately prohibited this change. And this week, Trump's Education Department issued guidance barring any employees of public service sector organizations that are found to be involved in illegal activity, including unauthorized immigration, from receiving student loan forgiveness.

Officials in Evanston, Illinois, are accusing federal immigration officials of “deliberately causing chaos” in their city during a Friday operation that led to angry protests from local residents.

As reported by Fox 32 Chicago, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and other local leaders held a news conference on Friday afternoon to denounce actions earlier in the day by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials.

“Our message for ICE is simple: Get the hell out of Evanston,” Biss said during the conference.

In a social media post ahead of the press conference, Biss, who is currently a candidate for US Senate, described the agents’ actions as “monstrous” and vowed that he would “continue to track the movement of federal agents in and around Evanston and ensure that the Evanston Police Department is responding in the appropriate fashion.”

As of this writing, it is unclear how the incident involving the immigration officials in Evanston began, although witness Jose Marin told local publication Evanston Now that agents on Friday morning had deliberately caused a car crash in the area near the Chute Elementary School, and then proceeded to detain the vehicle’s passengers.

Videos taken after the crash posted by Chicago Tribune investigative reporter Gregory Royal Pratt and by Evanston Now reporter Matthew Eadie show several people in the area angrily confronting law enforcement officials as they were in the process of detaining the passengers.

The operation in Evanston came on the same day that Bellingcat published a report documenting what has been described as “a pattern of extreme brutality” being carried out by immigration enforcement officials in Illinois.

Specifically, the publication examined social media videos of immigration enforcement actions taken between October 9 to October 27, and found “multiple examples of force and riot control weapons being used” in apparent violation of a judge’s temporary restraining order that banned such weapons except in cases where federal officers are in immediate danger.

“In total, we found seven [instances] that appeared to show the use of riot control weapons when there was seemingly no apparent immediate threat by protesters and no audible warnings given,” Bellingcat reported. “Nineteen showed use of force, such as tackling people to the ground when they were not visibly resisting. Another seven showed agents ordering or threatening people to leave public places. Some of the events identified showed incidents that appeared to fall into more than one of these categories.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was flatly rejected by a New York state judge Friday in his first-of-a-kind effort to override another state's healthcare shield laws, The New York Times reported.

Paxton had sought "to compel a New York court to enforce an order by a Texas judge in a case filed last year against a New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a patient in Texas," the Times reported. "The order levied a $113,000 penalty on the physician, Dr. Margaret Carpenter, and barred her from continuing to send abortion medication to Texas."

Paxton was rebuffed earlier this year by Taylor Bruck, the acting county clerk of Ulster County, New York, who refused to accept Paxton’s legal filing, citing the shield law.

"It's designed to protect health care providers who prescribe abortion pills by telemedicine and send them to patients in states with abortion bans," the Times reported.

Ulster County Judge David Gandin dismissed Paxton's lawsuit. He wrote that because “the medical services Dr. Carpenter rendered are legal in New York State,” her conduct “falls squarely within the definition of ‘legally protected health activity’” under the shield law. “In fact, her activities were the precise type of conduct” the shield law “was designed to protect."

The Times noted that some 20 states have adopted some form of shield laws under which "authorities are prevented from obeying subpoenas, extradition requests and other legal actions that other states take against abortion providers. The laws are a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in legal matters."

"New York and seven other states have particularly comprehensive shield laws, which explicitly protect providers who prescribe abortion pills by telemedicine and send them to patients in states with abortion bans."

The case raises constitutional issues that experts believe will be addressed in future appeals, the report stated.