This is an adapted excerpt from the May 17 episode of “Velshi.”
The execution of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program has been brutal, violent and deeply unpopular. The American public has borne witness to a procession of horrifying video evidence of their neighbors being mistreated by newly emboldened federal forces in mass sweeps. And now there’s a way to quantify the government’s overreach.
Court records reveal that the Trump administration’s approach has been violating some of those laws and procedures.
A team of journalists at Politico, led by senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, has been following and analyzing the thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against government officials by immigrants who have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
They created a database of those cases, and the findings from their analysis are stark: Roughly 11,600 lawsuits have been filed between July and now. The Trump administration prevailed in about 1,200 of those cases. But judges ruled against the government in the other 10,400 cases — roughly 90% of all the lawsuits reviewed by Politico.
The law grants the president broad discretion to determine how to carry out the mission of immigration enforcement, but it doesn’t give him unilateral authority to detain or deport whomever he wants. There are, believe it or not, still some guardrails in place. There are laws that protect individual rights, including those of undocumented immigrants, and there are procedures that the government must follow to ensure that those rights are protected.
But court records reveal that the Trump administration’s approach has been violating some of those laws and procedures.
More than 400 district court judges across the country have been involved in deciding these cases. Judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have ruled against this administration’s policies, including judges appointed by Trump.
Some of those losses have been self-inflicted. In a number of cases, detainees were released after the Justice Department told the judge that it did not have “an opposition argument to present.”
But the vast majority of the rulings against the government involve the Trump administration’s controversial mandatory detention policy. Previously, only unauthorized immigrants arrested at the border were held in detention for the duration of their removal proceedings.
But in July, Todd Lyons, the outgoing acting head of ICE, issued a memo that dramatically expanded who’s eligible to be detained without bond. The government now says that anyone who entered the country illegally can be arrested and held for “the duration of their removal proceedings,” a process that can take months or years.
Under that novel reinterpretation, ICE can detain any undocumented immigrant present in the country for an unspecified period of time — regardless of how long they’ve been here, whether they have a criminal record or not, or even if they have some legal right to be in the United States.
Lyons’ memo isn’t legally binding. It represents the administration’s interpretation of a particular law, which is a departure from how every other past administration interpreted its meaning. But this is what has given ICE the green light to move more aggressively to round up immigrants anywhere, at any time.
In one case out of New York, ICE detained a man who was granted Special Immigrant Juvenile status, through a program enacted by Congress that offers a path to citizenship for minors who have been abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents.
ICE arrested him without a warrant, and when presented with proof of his status, they continued detaining him anyway.
The judge in his case reprimanded the government for arresting him “simply because he looked like someone else for whom the agents were purportedly searching.” The judge added, “This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America. Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
In a case out of California, a 70-year-old Iranian woman filed a lawsuit after ICE kept her in detention for months. When her case was finally reviewed, the judge chastised the government:
Thus, it appears that Respondents [the U.S. government] arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone … then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care — and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.
At least one judge has resorted to using Greek mythology to express their frustration with this administration’s policy. A judge in Pennsylvania who had reviewed multiple ICE detention cases compared the government’s effort to that of Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill. The federal government “returns again and again to push the same theory uphill, only for courts to send it rolling back down again,” she wrote.
So what’s the point of all of this? Why go through all the trouble and waste taxpayers’ money to pursue the detention and deportation of people the courts say they can’t detain or deport?
In part, it’s because the Trump administration is testing its theory. The cases Politico has tracked are from district courts. But some cases have made it to federal appeals courts across the country, and the results have been mixed: Three appellate courts have rejected the administration’s position regarding its detention policy, while two others have ruled in favor of it. That probably means that this is headed to the Supreme Court at some point.
But ICE’s detention policy serves another purpose: fear. If the government really does want to find and deport the “worst of the worst,” it has the resources and the means to do so. Instead, the government’s actions are meant to send a message that immigrants are not welcome here, and maybe even to scare immigrants enough to leave the U.S. on their own.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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