10,000 Court Decisions Can’t Be Wrong, Even If Trump Thinks Otherwise

Legal Issues

from the but-has-the-needle-moved? dept

It’s absolutely amazing how wrong this administration has been when it comes to immigration enforcement. That some people still think the Supreme Court is in the best position to resolve this is insane. This isn’t a circuit split in need of mending. This is pretty much the entirety of the court system coming to the same conclusion.

You can look at this two ways: it’s either a resounding rejection of this administration’s anti-migrant actions or it’s evidence of the futility of the system of checks and balances. Either way, someone’s definitely keeping an eye on this and that someone is Kyle Cheney of Politico, who’s been tracking immigration-related lawsuits ever since Trump returned to office. Here’s the good news/bad news:

More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.

Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

You’d think that 10,000 adverse rulings by judges whose appointments have spanned multiple administrations would clearly signal that the current administration’s actions are wrong. But that’s undercut by the opening of the second paragraph, which delivers the bad news no one who supports constitutional rights wants to hear.

This shouldn’t be headed to the Supreme Court — the court most likely to give Trump what he wants, no matter what that means for what’s left of our rights. Just because an extremely small minority of judges have ruled in favor of unjustified detentions doesn’t make it an unsettled matter of law. If we had something approaching 10,000 rulings in favor of this administration’s actions, that might mean we need someone to make the final call.

One way or another, it will end up there, if only because the Trump administration has the unlimited budget to ensure this happens. It can appeal every single one of these 10,000 adverse rulings in perpetuity because it doesn’t have to worry about keeping its lawyers paid. The plaintiffs in these cases, however, have to deal with private sector reality day in and day out and know the least sympathetic court in the land is also the most powerful.

The administration was given the chance to address this reality. And, of course, it chose to respond like a petulant child, rather than attempting to be the adult in the room:

Trump administration officials shrug off the one-sided rebuke from the courts, attributing their losses to “the left and their activist proxies on the judiciary” and predicting that they will prevail at the Supreme Court.

“The law is not a popularity contest among judges,” a Justice Department spokesperson said.

This response is insane. It’s one thing to respond to a judicial aberration with a partisan shrug. It’s quite another to pretend 10,000 rulings from more than 400 judges is nothing more than “judicial activism” by “the left.” Reality (and, hopefully, history) is not on the side of Trump. The only thing left for it to do is hope that the court Trump stacked is similarly willing to pretend thousands of adverse rulings are nothing more than liberals trying to impose their will on the nation.

Pretending is all this administration has. Behold this “activist proxy” of “the left:”

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

What’s left of the DOJ is more beholden to Trump than his own judicial appointees. Anyone willing to speak on record does so with all the personal conviction of someone hoping to avoid the next political purge:

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare, asked about the more than 10,000 rulings against the administration, replied: “That’s great, now the American people can see how judges are putting personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.”

You know what the people are actually going to see? They’re going to see that this administration has repeatedly violated the law and is resorting to accusing Trump’s own judicial appointees of being partisan hacks. That’s not going to play well with people who actually pay attention to these things. And it won’t budge the needle at all with the Trump faithful who either can’t or won’t keep up with the autocratic overtures being pitched by their own personal Jesus.

Unfortunately, the Trump loyalists in the Supreme Court are just as willing to be deliberately ignorant of the law when the administration asks them to rule in its favor. We don’t expect average Americans to grasp the intricacies of decades of precedential rulings. But we should expect the nation’s highest court to comprehend that 400+ judges and 10,000+ rulings might add up to something it shouldn’t ignore, no matter how much the conservative majority might want to please the person they now seem to view as a king, rather than a president.

Filed Under: bigotry, constitutional rights, dhs, ice, mass deportation, mass detention, trump administration