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Joyce Vance: Untangling The Deportation Cases
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/untangling-the-deportation-casesThe Trump administration wants a confrontation with the courts. Trump wants to try to break them.
That’s an essential path forward for a dictator. Like Trump’s new buddy, Nayib Bukele, whose government removed all of the Supreme Court Justices in El Salvador when they stood in his way and replaced them with more compliant ones. Or in Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, where the independence of the judiciary has been seriously compromised.
-snip-
The Supreme Court seems to have an inkling of the fix they’ve put themselves in, with Trump trying to accumulate power at the courts’ expense. Just after 1 a.m. Saturday morning, a majority of the Court (unsurprisingly minus Justices Alito and Thomas) told Donald Trump he couldn’t deport more Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court’s order followed a confusing chain of events that began Friday when ACLU lawyers learned that ICE might be transferring people out of the Southern District of Texas, where a judge had enjoined further deportations, into the Northern District of Texas, where no such order had been entered. The lawyers were concerned that detainees were being held in or moved to the Bluebonnet Detention Center in the Northern District of Texas in preparation for deportation flights to El Salvador.
There are so many deportation cases happening at once that it’s difficult to keep up. Tonight, we’ll try to separate them so we can understand what is—and what isn’t—happening here. But keep in mind that while the substance of this dispute centers on the policy goal of deporting people Trump calls criminal illegal aliens, it is also a vehicle this administration is using to undercut the ability of the courts to act as a check on the executive branch and make it easier for Trump to range beyond the authority the Constitution affords to the president.
-snip-
That’s an essential path forward for a dictator. Like Trump’s new buddy, Nayib Bukele, whose government removed all of the Supreme Court Justices in El Salvador when they stood in his way and replaced them with more compliant ones. Or in Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, where the independence of the judiciary has been seriously compromised.
-snip-
The Supreme Court seems to have an inkling of the fix they’ve put themselves in, with Trump trying to accumulate power at the courts’ expense. Just after 1 a.m. Saturday morning, a majority of the Court (unsurprisingly minus Justices Alito and Thomas) told Donald Trump he couldn’t deport more Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court’s order followed a confusing chain of events that began Friday when ACLU lawyers learned that ICE might be transferring people out of the Southern District of Texas, where a judge had enjoined further deportations, into the Northern District of Texas, where no such order had been entered. The lawyers were concerned that detainees were being held in or moved to the Bluebonnet Detention Center in the Northern District of Texas in preparation for deportation flights to El Salvador.
There are so many deportation cases happening at once that it’s difficult to keep up. Tonight, we’ll try to separate them so we can understand what is—and what isn’t—happening here. But keep in mind that while the substance of this dispute centers on the policy goal of deporting people Trump calls criminal illegal aliens, it is also a vehicle this administration is using to undercut the ability of the courts to act as a check on the executive branch and make it easier for Trump to range beyond the authority the Constitution affords to the president.
-snip-
Much more at the link.