Trump Admin Previes Genius New Legal Strategy … Lying To Judges

Admittedly, there are some downside risks.

Editorial credit: Phil Pasquini / Shutterstock.com

Trump and his minions aren’t new to the bullshit game, of course — and certainly not in the immigration context. But the willingness to tell flagrant lies to federal judges as a matter of course, back-formulating on the fly to cover up defects in their cases, is new. As is the willingness of federal judges to call bullshit and treat government declarations as worthless garbage.

Mendacity as legal strategy was on full display in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had a court order barring his removal to El Salvador, but was nontheless deported to El Salvador and cast into President Nayib Bukele’s torture gulag. At first the Justice Department conceded in court that the Maryland resident, who had never been charged with any crime, was deported by mistake. But undoing that mistake would explicitly prove that the US government has power over CECOT, undermining the creative fiction that the administration can pay Bukele to lock people away indefinitely without charges while evading responsibility for their confinement. And so it became politically necessary to pretend that Abrego Garcia is a ruthless criminal who was legally deported. Which is exactly what they did.

“The Administration has always maintained the position that Abrego Garcia was the man we rightfully intended to deport because he is an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang Member,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Atlantic. The preposterous claim of gang affiliation has been roundly debunked, but that didn’t stop Attorney General Pam Bondi from slandering this poor guy as a “human trafficker.”

“This was the right person sent to the right place,” Stephen Miller insisted on Fox. “No one was mistakenly sent anywhere. The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that’s since been relieved.”

The government’s position now is that Abrego Garcia “is no longer eligible for withholding of removal because of his membership in MS13, which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

That is simply not the law. But, as two cases this past week illustrate, ICE is now behaving with lawless disregard for statutory and constitutional rights, snatching up immigrants at random and relying on lawyers to retcon a justification later.