Nine months into the second Trump administration, the contours of the fight over immigration are starting to come into focus.
Step 1: The Department of Homeland Security tries to rendition a group of foreign nationals under cover of darkness.
Step 2: Lawyers for the immigrants race into court trying to enforce the law.
Step 3: Trial judges do their level best to force the government to obey the law.
Step 4: The Supreme Court’s six conservative ghouls leap in to put a stop to it — sometimes by inventing a new procedural hurdle for litigants to clear, but more often in a one-paragraph shadow docket order conveying no information to the litigants or the trial court.
The argument over African nationals deported to Ghana last week is following much the same script. According to a complaint filed on Friday September 12 in federal court in DC, roughly a dozen Nigerians and Gambians were roused from their beds in the middle of the night on September 4 and flown to Accra in Ghana as part of Trump’s plan to set up a system of global gulags to banish victims of torture and persecution who cannot be repatriated to their home countries. The deportees all had orders from a US immigration judge withholding their removal to their native countries — meaning that, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, they could not be sent back because they made credible claims that they would be persecuted. Nevertheless, ICE agents and Ghanaian officials stated clearly that the plan was always to send them on from Ghana to Nigeria and Gambia in violation of international and US law.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, of the US District Court of the District of Columbia, was assigned this case on Friday and worked valiantly through the weekend, endeavoring to navigate between the Justice Department’s constant misrepresentations and casual disregard of the law and the Supreme Court’s habit of blithely shredding the work of trail judges who dare to cross the Trump administration.
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