Let’s hear it for the district court judges
Frontline federal jurists from across the political spectrum are defending the rule of law
This newsletter regularly takes note of federal district court judicial rulings that boldly defy the Trump administration’s onslaught on the rule of law.
It’s an astonishing record of legal and moral resistance.
And in the past several months, judges have been getting more pointed in the rulings. Just in my two prior newsletters, for instance, I wrote about a number of forceful statements from judges who:
Blocked part of Trump’s executive order attempting to make over the election process. (“Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”)
Blocked the mass deportation of 350,000 legal Haitian immigrants. (“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedures Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the [Temporary Protected Status] program.”)
Ordered federal agents to stop arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota who were lawfully admitted to the United States. (“At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty. We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.”)
Dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Michigan over the state’s refusal to give it an unredacted list of registered voters. (“The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”)
Excoriated ICE for defying almost 100 court orders in the previous month. (“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law.”)
Raged against the way DHS treats people with civil violations as hardened criminals. (“This is not what civil enforcement looks like in a humane system of government under law.”)
Now comes Reuters, with an astonishing report that more than 400 federal judges -- in 4,421 separate cases -- have ruled since the beginning of October that ICE is holding people illegally as it carries out its mass-deportation campaign.
“The decisions,” Reuters wrote, “amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown.”
Most of the rulings have found that Trump’s “mandatory detention” policy is unconstitutional. For the past six months, the administration has insisted on indefinitely detaining immigrants without due process, when historically they have been able to be released on bond and return to their families pending a final court ruling.
And yet, as Reuters notes, these rulings haven’t stopped the conduct in question. Indeed, the administration received a green light just last week when two far-right judges on a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled that Trump did in fact have the authority to continue the policy.
But the district judges may yet win out. (History will certainly vindicate them.) Other appeals courts are likely to address the issue in the coming weeks. There might be an en banc hearing in the Fifth Circuit. And Politico reports that even within that circuit, some district judges have found a workaround. Eventually, it will likely be up to the Supreme Court.
It’s important to note that the district court judges defending the rule of law against Trump come from across the political spectrum, including judges appointed by Ronald Reagan and by Trump himself.
The same cannot be said of Republican-appointed jurists serving on the appeals courts and the Supreme Court, who have routinely rubber-stamped even the administration’s most extreme actions.
The Hits Keep on Coming
Meanwhile, those district court judges continue to rule against Trump, vociferously. Just in the past week:
A judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Pentagon from punishing Sen. Mark Kelly for urging troops to reject unlawful orders. Leon wrote: “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” Leon also used 14 exclamation points in his ruling, including for such phrases as “Horsefeathers!” and “Please!”
A Pennsylvania judge ruled that the Trump administration must restore a slavery exhibit it removed from a historic site in Philadelphia. Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
The chief judge of the D.C. District Court, who previously found that the Trump administration had denied due process to Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador last March in defiance of his court order, has now ordered the government to start allowing them to return to the US for immigration proceedings if they choose to. Judge James E. Boasberg expressed frustration with the government’s unwillingness to ensure the men had hearings on their habeas corpus claims. He wrote: “Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.”
A Minnesota judge ordered the Trump administration to stop blocking detainees being held at the Whipple federal building from calling attorneys to obtain legal representation. Judge Nancy E. Brasel wrote: “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.”
A Massachusetts judge blocked a Trump policy that would have given the Department of Homeland Security free rein to conduct raids and enforcement actions at and around houses of worship. Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote: “The prospect that a street-level law-enforcement agent—acting without a judicial warrant and with little or no supervisory control—could conduct a raid during a church service, or lie in wait to interrogate or seize congregants as they seek to enter a church, is profoundly troubling.”
An Illinois judge ruled that the Trump administration could not rescind $600 million in public health grants previously allocated to four Democratic-led states. Judge Manish S. Shah wrote that using funding to execute an unrelated policy objective is “likely unlawful.”
A Maryland judge ruled that ICE cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because it has bungled its attempts to deport him thus far. The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success,” District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. “From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
And for good measure, two immigration judges terminated deportation proceedings against two Columbia University -- Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi – who Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed posed a threat to foreign policy because they advocated for Palestinian human rights.
Against Warehousing
Resistance continues to grow in localities where ICE is planning to buy warehouses to use as massive detention centers. (See my Feb. 4 newsletter: “NIMBY, but for concentration camps.”)
And the wins keep on piling up.
The Dallas News reports:
The owner of a Dallas County warehouse that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had planned to use as a mega detention center said Monday it will not sell or lease the property to the federal government.
“God answered our prayers,” Hutchins Mayor Mario Vasquez said after learning of the company’s decision.
Platform Ventures, the development company that owns a south Kansas City warehouse that federal agents toured last month to consider for an immigrant detention center, announced today that it is not moving forward with the sale.
Opposition is revving up in Berks County, Pennsylvania, after ICE spent $87.4 million on an empty warehouse to use as an immigration detention center.
Spotlight PA reports:
In the days since the sale became public, local leaders, as well as Democrats Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, have criticized the move. They’ve voiced many of the same concerns as residents, citing a lack of transparency and existing infrastructure, as well as the damage it could do to the local tax base.
“It is a bipartisan issue,” said Debra Fisher. “It doesn’t matter your affiliation. If you live here, you’re going to have to deal with it.”
ICE also purchased a 1.3 million square-foot warehouse in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County for nearly $120 million.
The state government “is warning federal officials that it will not issue required state permits for two planned immigration detention centers if initial reporting about the facilities is accurate,” Spotlight PA reported.
There’s even resistance to letting ICE set up new office space. Michigan Advance reports that Southfield, Michigan, residents and officials are pushing back against ICE plans to open a new office for administrative and legal purposes.
“As ICE moves into this new office space, this legal and administrative office, some might argue that it’s just administrative,” Rabbi Nate DeGroot told the Advance. “‘What’s the harm,’ they might say. To which I would respond, abductions can only happen with coordination coming from offices like this one right here, a murder can only be covered up by lawyers working in offices like this one right here, a presidential paramilitary force can only operate with a command center like this one right here.”
Student Walkouts Continue
The student walkouts I wrote about last week continue to sweep the nation – in Asheville, North Carolina, and Palm Beach County, Florida, and McHenry County, Illinois, and Norman, Oklahoma, and Burlington, Vermont, and Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Shawnee, Kansas, and the Chicago area, and the University of Oregon, and Stanford University. You get the picture.
The New York Times has now taken note of the movement, with a special focus on how Texas students continue to walk out despite threats from Gov. Greg Abbott,
A Community Rallies After Kids Go Running From ICE
The video, which went viral, is horrifying. Fourth- and fifth-grade students in South New Jersey were waiting at their bus stop when ICE launched a raid nearby, and the students fled in terror.
The community rallied the next day for an anti-ICE protest, as NBC10 reported.
And another viral video emerged from that rally, showing neighborhood resident Joseph Zobel getting emotional about the significance of what he had seen.
“I’ve never protested before in my entire life, but” – and he starts to tear up – “I watched fourth- and fifth-grade kids run away from our own government. I never want to see that again. And I’m not going to stand by and watch my neighbors run away scared.”
As columnist Will Bunch wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the two videos “revealed how both the terrorizing tactics of masked immigration cops and the powerful reaction from often nonpolitical Americans, dubbed ‘neighborism,’ are spreading far beyond the Minnesota tundra where this battle was initially met.”
As for Minnesota…
It’s too early to say for sure whether border czar Tom Homan’s pledge to remove almost all federal agents from Minnesota will be fulfilled. There are mixed reports.
But J. Patrick Coolican, editor-in-chief of the independent news organization Minnesota Reformer, thinks it’s not too early to celebrate. He wrote:
What happened here will be studied by social scientists and historians as one of the great victories of nonviolent resistance in recent times. Minnesotans showed that brutality and sheer numbers could not overcome communities that were united in their opposition to the usurpers.
Meet the Singing Resistance
Writer and organizer Micah Sifry wrote on Monday:
Last week, over the course of two nights, about six thousand people logged into a Zoom seminar to learn how to join Singing Resistance, a grassroots network of local groups showing up in the streets, at faith centers, and outside ICE buildings to sing out against rising authoritarianism. On the weekend of February 28/March 1, we will see the first fruit of their efforts. My gut tells me this could be big.
As many as 2,000 people gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel housing ICE agents on Feb. 1, singing their hearts out. The Singing Resistance group explained in an Instagram post:
We’re inspired by Otpor!, the Serbian civil resistance movement who overthrew dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Otpor! members were regularly arrested and beaten by police, after which, they would show up to police stations and officers’ houses chanting “You may not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow”. In the final hours of their revolution, hundreds of thousands of people from across Serbia marched on Belgrade. Milosevic ordered the police and military to fire on massive crowds of protestors, and they refused. They were done being on the wrong side of history.
Here are some more examples from Minneapolis. And it’s spreading. WISHTV reported from Indianapolis, where about 200 people gathered on Sunday to sing in what they called a “love letter” to Minnesota and immigrant communities.
Want to start your own group? Here’s a toolkit and the songbook, which contains simple tunes with original lyrics. One song goes like this:
Ooh it’s okay to change your mind
Show us your courage
leave this behindOoh it’s okay to change your mind
And you can join us
Join us here anytime
No Kings Update
The map for March 28 No Kings events is now live. Find one near you.