More than 100 judges have ruled against the Trump admin’s mandatory immigrant detention policy
It’s one of the most thorough legal rebukes in recent memory.
More than 100 federal judges have now ruled at least 200 times that the Trump administration’s effort to systematically detain immigrants facing possible deportation appeared to violate their rights or was just flatly illegal, according to a POLITICO review.
The rulings come from judges appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, including 12 appointed by President Donald Trump. One of those appointees took the bench just last month.
Since July 8, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement reversed 30 years of practice and determined that ICE must lock up everyone facing deportation — even if they’ve lived in the country for decades and have no criminal record — federal courts have issued increasing warnings. The new ICE policy, they note, doesn’t just subject millions more people to detention while they fight deportation, it also bars them from even asking an immigration judge to consider releasing them on bond.
“Courts around the country have since rejected the government’s new interpretation,” U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek, a Florida-based Trump appointee, ruled Wednesday. “This Court now joins the consensus.”
Other Trump-appointed judges who have ruled against the administration’s position include Terry Doughty in Louisiana, Nancy Brasel in Minnesota, J.P. Hanlon in Indiana and Jason Pulliam in Texas.
Pulliam ruled Oct. 21 that one ICE detainee, who had been held without any “individualized assessment” of his dangerousness, was deprived of his constitutional due process rights.
The onslaught of legal rejections has come in hundreds of individual cases, typically filed on an emergency basis after ICE’s targets are arrested at courthouses or check-ins with immigration officers. Though a handful of class action lawsuits have been filed seeking to block the administration’s expanded detention policy, they have advanced slowly and seem weeks — perhaps months — from resolution. One case broke through Thursday, however, when U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, an appointee of Bill Clinton, approved a statewide class for immigrants in Massachusetts who are subject to the mandatory detention policy. [Continue reading…]