Trump Administration Won’t Stop Mandatory Detention Of Migrants Despite 200 Court Rulings Calling It Illegal

from the one-hundred-duck-sized-judges-ot-one-trump-sized-trump dept

This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration’s willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide.

Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, if mandatory detention of people suspected of immigration violations is this obviously (and almost unanimously) illegal, doesn’t that mean it eventually has to end?

More than 100 federal judges have now ruled at least 200 times that the Trump administration’s effort to systematically detain immigrants facing possible deportation appeared to violate their rights or was just flatly illegal, according to a POLITICO review.

The rulings come from judges appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, including 12 appointed by President Donald Trump. One of those appointees took the bench just last month.

Any ruling against Trump and his policies receives the same response: “activist” judges are ruining America and probably love crime. That some of these “activist” judges were appointed by Trump tends to go ignored by the loudmouths engaged in PR work for the nation’s leading producer of unlawful bullshit.

And that’s the case here as well.

“President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe,” said Tricia McLaughlin, who predicted appellate courts would side with the administration.

The Justice Department echoed DHS, saying “President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda is a top national security priority that this Department of Justice will continue to vigorously defend whenever challenged in court.”

But mandatory detention of migrants isn’t something that’s ever been considered legal, much less normal. People accused of criminal acts (rather than the civil violations most immigration offenses are) are generally able to avail themselves of their due process rights, as well as being able to return home until their cases are presented to the court.

That’s not what’s happening to migrants under Trump. Nearly everyone picked up by ICE, CBP, or any number of federal officers now expected to concentrate on civil violations rather than actual crime gets sent to a detention center, reversing three decades of immigration enforcement practice that allowed migrants without prior criminal records or who had longstanding ties to this country to remain free until their cases were called. It’s even worse than that now: ICE is using the same policy revision to deny detained migrants access to legal assistance or to ask judges to release them on bond.

This stems from the administration’s willful misreading of prior policies and previous case law. It applies the term “applicants for admission” (who can be detained until cases are heard) to any migrant its roving goon squads come across, even if they’ve already been in this nation for years and/or are already engaged in asylum requests or nationalization efforts. That’s why the DHS and DOJ are dismissing pending immigration violation hearings: to convert those seeking to remain in this country into indefinite detainees… and then into deportees to whatever country the US government feels like sending them to.

Sure, there’s still an argument to be made (albeit in extremely bad faith) that “liberal” judges are going after Trump just because they don’t like Trump. 87 of these judges were appointed by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton. But 27 judges appointed by GOP presidents have reached the same conclusions, including 12 appointed by Trump himself.

The ultimate question is whether or not this will ever matter. The Trump administration seems to feel it won’t. It’s not changing its policies and it is certainly aware that a majority of Supreme Court justices are activists who play for the “right” team. All it has to do is keep the appeals process rolling until the Supreme Court takes up the case. If it loses that one, it might be shocked. But it may also be that the clock runs out on this administration before it manages to generate precedent it doesn’t like. It still has more than three years to go. And until the upper levels of the court system step up to shut this down, its presumptively illegal actions will continue uninterrupted.

Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, donald trump, due process, ice, immigration, kristi noem, mass deportation, trump administration