Roberts Court Making Up New Laws For Trump Again
We aren't at war, but Trump can use war powers to detain immigrants now, great
So, the Supreme Court has vacated two restraining orders issued in DC over the Trump Administration’s WE CAN WHOOPS-DISAPPEAR ANYBODY TO FOREIGN PRISON policy, leaving mistakenly deported immigrants who were here with protected status, including legal US resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia and gay makeup artist Andry Hernandez Romero, stuck in El Salvador’s mega torture-prison indefintely. But the Supreme Court ruled that from now on deportees have to get notice and individual hearings in the venue where they’re being held, so at least they will get SOME due process, however performative and also in Louisiana, as opposed to the ZERO Trump and his ghoul-toady Stephen Miller would have preferred.
But NOT GOOD: The court will allow the administration to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to remove immigrants, even though the US is not at war, and gangs are not a country, and there’s no evidence that the five men who are suing, or any of the nearly 300 deported men, were in the Tren de Aragua gang that the administration claims to be at war with, or any other gang. In fact, 75 percent of them have no criminal records at all.
And the Alien Enemies Act is the same law that was used to put more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II, which is ominous and chilling.
Also chilling, Roberts and the majority of the Court simply did not seem to care that the people being held are at risk of “extraordinary harm” / torture, or care that the Trump administration was lying about having credible evidence the men were in gangs, or how the administration pulled the whole disappeared-in-the-dark-of-night-oops-too-late routine on purpose to circumvent the law, brazenly refusing to provide judges (and sometimes even their own lawyers) with the most basic who-what-where-when of what happened.
PREVIOUSLY!
Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a powerful 17-page dissent that put it all right out there, calling the “decision to intervene in this litigation is as inexplicable as it is dangerous.” Because, once again, like with King Trump’s Coup cases, there was no reason for the Supreme Court to intervene here at all.
The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.
[...] the majority flouts well-established limits on its jurisdiction, creates new law on the emergency docket, and elides the serious threat our intervention poses to the lives of individual detainees.
So, now with their class-action tossed, immigrants may make individual habeas corpus claims in the venue where the immigrants were last held in the US, which in the Venezuelan’s case is Texas, and for Abrego Garcia in Maryland (he has already filed for another stay). That is better than no due process at all, but also another hardship too; immigrants do not have the right to government-appointed counsel, so now they or their families have to hire individual lawyers and pay them to fight for their return from the state where they were last detained. And if they or their families can’t afford the thousands of dollars a lawyer costs, and the ACLU or other nonprofit is too busy, well, tough shit!
And that’s assuming the administration even decides to follow the law anyway. Abrego Garcia and the other immigrants are already OOPS gone, and it is far from clear what the Supreme Court might do if the administration simply OOPSies-hurries to shove more people on planes now anyway, and runs the same routine of lying that Kristi Noem just CAN’T simply ask El Salvador to return the people the US is paying it to warehouse. That sure seems to be the Stephen Miller plan.
Miller went on Fox News last night to crow. “This was a huge, I mean monumental victory for President Trump. A total embarrassment for Judge Boasberg. Those monsters can now be hunted down and expelled from this country with speed, force, and efficiency.”
I’ll spare you the clip, because he is so disgusting.
But, and, so, now what might the Court do if Trump doesn’t just ignore this ruling, but goes on to oops-disappears Liz Cheney, or an American journalist, or any other citizen who is an enemy to Salvadoran Supermax? We should prepare to be not surprised at anything this regime does.
And that’s the game Roberts likes to play, turn a blind eye, delay and act like Trump isn’t doing what he’s doing while Trump does more damage and devises new ways to push the boundaries of decency and the law.
Justice Sotomayor did at least advance-admonish that the Government cannot “immediately resume” removing individuals in “a shroud of secrecy” without notice: “To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.”
So, consider yourselves told.
One interesting thing, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court's three liberal justices in dissenting with parts of the majority ruling, which is already driving MAGA to sexist rants and histrionics. She is in a culty group (People of Praise), which apparently trumps the MAGA cult for her, and it drives them insane.
Anyway, we shall see what happens, and keep you posted.
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PS: There is a Mexican-American cartel leader named Juan García Abrego, who was expelled from Mexico to America and sentenced to 11 life terms in federal prison. Texas Monthly has an interesting story about him. Is sharing a last name perhaps how this Maryland schoolteacher Kilmar Abrego found himself on ICE’s list? We will probably never know.
Marcie wrote: "And the Alien Enemies Act is the same law that was used to put more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II, which is ominous and chilling."
Yes, it is ominous and chilling. And many/most of those put in camps were in fact United States citizens.
I'm taking a break for the rest of the day.
I don't need to get banned for talking about what Miller deserves.