The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court block on its deportations of Venezuelan detainees Friday, taking unusually gratuitous shots in its application at the district and appellate-level judges who had already ruled in the case.
A district court quickly handed down a temporary restraining order to stop the expulsions earlier this month, after the Trump administration announced in a presidential proclamation that it was resurrecting long-dormant war powers to immediately deport alleged gang members without any hearing or process. A three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit Court upheld that lower-court order in a 2-1 ruling on Wednesday. The district court then extended the restraining order until at least April 12 in a Friday order.
With the Alien Enemies Act deportations, President Trump is attempting to exercise significant new powers, granting himself the authority to expel detainees under the thinnest claims that they might be associated with Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, which the administration has attempted to liken to a hostile government invading the U.S. Should the courts bless the effort, it’ll be a massive appropriation of power to the executive, who already enjoys wide latitude in the immigration arena.
The Trump administration has portrayed the lower court orders as a threat to national security, as the district and appellate court judges have expressed skepticism that government officials suffer harm from simply having to keep the detainees in U.S. custody for now, rather than deporting them. The administration has already sent more than one hundred detainees to an El Salvador prison infamous for its human rights abuses.
“That order is forcing the United States to harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans,” the Trump Justice Department wrote in its application. “Those orders — which are likely to extend additional weeks — now jeopardize sensitive diplomatic negotiations and delicate national-security operations, which were designed to extirpate [Tren de Aragua’s] presence in our country before it gains a greater foothold.”
The circuit court majority found that the detainees, many of whom vigorously contest that they are members of Tren de Aragua, risked much greater harm in being removed without due process to a foreign prison where they may be tortured.
The administration’s Friday filing paints the lower court judges as out-of-control activists tyrannically hamstringing the President from their courtrooms. In an ironic twist, many pages are devoted to excoriating the practice of district court judges handing down universal injunctions — rulings that bind the entire country rather than just the named plaintiff — though such injunctions were, during the Biden administration, a prominent feature of right-wing litigation challenging federal policy.
“Only this Court can stop rule-by-TRO from further upending the separation of powers — the sooner, the better,” the filing said.
Elsewhere, the application accused D.C. Circuit Court Judge Karen Henderson, a Bush appointee who authored Wednesday’s ruling, of making an “inexplicable” finding and of having “ducked” a key procedural question. It charged D.C. District Court Judge James Boasberg with furthering “a disturbing innovation in the widespread efforts of district judges to ‘govern […] the whole Nation from their courtrooms.’”
The administration in its Friday application largely echoes D.C. Circuit Judge Justin Walker’s dissent from Wednesday’s ruling. The Trump appointee argued that the detainees should be lodging individual habeas petitions rather than acting as a class under the Administrative Procedure Act. As the detainees’ lawyer pointed out during Monday’s Circuit Court oral arguments, the lawyers still do not know where all of the roughly 300 people targeted by Trump’s proclamation are being held, making it impossible to know where to file habeas petitions. Some of them were deported so quickly that their lawyers didn’t know they’d been taken from the country.
The Trump filing doesn’t linger on the protestations to the administration’s brutality in enforcing the proclamation: namely, that the detainees are being expelled without being given a chance to prove that they’re not gang members, and that they’re being sent into a particularly deadly incarceration.
“Aliens are often not entitled to drawn-out procedures to attack immediate removals,” the application handwaves.
On the deadliness of the El Salvador megaprison, it shrugs that “penalizing the United States for failing to reveal representations by a foreign government regarding how removed TdA members may be treated puts the government to the untenable choice of potentially losing its foreign partners’ trust or having courts treat the removals as unconscionable.”
The administration, in its efforts to show that the alleged gang members were identified and expelled through a “rigorous process,” seemingly confirmed TPM’s reporting on the weeks of quiet planning and orchestration that were involved to put the detainees in place to be expelled before a court could intervene. The filing described the March 15 deportations as the “culmination of weeks of work by President Trump and his Cabinet.”
The administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to move forward with its deportations under the Alien Enemies Act — or, at least, to continue deporting all detainees but the few plaintiffs named on the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, at the district level, Judge Boasberg is still sifting through one of the most alarming pieces in the administration’s startling power grab: the question of whether the government ignored his orders to halt deportations soon after the first plane took off for El Salvador — the better to expel more detainees at lightning speed.
Read the application here:
Like somebody checking their pocket for loose change.
If SCotUS doesn’t deny this application immediately and without any further discussion it only reinforces the belief that the administration can do whatever they want, without consequence.
The fact that the administration is attempting to go to SCotUS with a TRO should be laughable. This isn’t even an injunction, but these losers have such a hard-on for violating human rights they can’t stop themselves from whining they they’re the victims here.
Yeah, we’re here now …
It’s amazing how fast they want the judicial system to work when it suits them
I’m interested to see if there’s any fatigue at SCOTUS as it becomes more obvious to people that he expects them to operate as an extension of his office (I mean a number of them are, but I’m sure they’d prefer to keep that on the DL).
I have to think (because I hang on to any optimism right now) they can only run to SCOTUS after an obvious L so many times
We are now officially, publicly and performatively, the bad guys.
We use masked, plain-clothes operatives – thugs, officers, whatever, we don’t know – to snatch people off the street, bundle them into unmarked vehicles, and send them off to secret prisons. We offer no proof, no reasons, no process, no appeal.
Then we send dog-killer Barbie to make soft-core prison porn using choreographed legions of prisoners a human props for regime propaganda.
These are indelible stains. We used to be, at least in our own minds, the good guys. Of course, we weren’t, but we believed in that image. Now, we are proudly and loudly showing ourselves to be the worst.