by Jeff Childers:
“The border is now everywhere.” Yesterday, CNN ran a powerfully good story headlined, “Appeals court greenlights Trump admin policy of detaining undocumented immigrants without opportunity to seek release.” So-called ‘catch and release’ is over.
For over thirty years, when ICE arrested illegal aliens living inside the country —not on the border, but in places like Minneapolis or Houston— those detainees could slow deportation down to glacial speed by requesting a “bond hearing” to argue for their release on bail. Nobody really knew why; it was just how things were done. Norms and customs.
But the Trump Administration took a fresh look at the statute and said, hey, wait a minute, the law says people “seeking admission” to the United States don’t get bond hearings. It just says “shall detain.” Shall. It also says that, if you’re here illegally, you’re still considered to be ‘seeking admission’— you just skipped the line. In other words, a person who never bothered to apply for citizenship doesn’t magically get more rights than someone who at least tried.
The Fifth Circuit agreed, 2-1. Judge Edith Jones (Reagan appointee) wrote that “the text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of prior Administrations,” essentially ruling that thirty years of doing it wrong doesn’t numinously make it right. The dissenting judge, Dana Douglas (Biden), fussily complained that, under the literal reading, “the border is now everywhere.”
Everywhere, Judge Douglas? Walmart? (Well, okay.) Is it on the Moon? In Roblox? At Dave & Buster’s? The line for Space Mountain? Burning Man? The Matrix? Olive Garden? The comments section of the New York Times??
Actually, if you think about it, Judge Douglas was unintentionally right. If you’re here illegally, the border is everywhere, because you never lawfully crossed it. You just dragged it with you.
🔥 The decision might sound technical, but the practical implications were huge. Now, if an alien crossed illegally and ICE finds them —wherever they are— they’re done. They won’t walk American streets freely again unless they win their removal proceeding (which is highly unlikely). In the meantime, they must stay in detention. They can’t go home to get their things. They are simply done, and the longer they fight, the longer they remain in detention.
Their choice now is to either agree to deportation, or cool it in detention while their lawyers waste time on futile filings. Then they get deported anyway when they lose.
After this decision, many more illegal aliens will simply surrender their frivolous court fights and accept deportation, which will both relieve court backlogs and also help convince many more illegal aliens to self-deport and avoid the trouble. (Thanks and h/t to Will Chamberlain’s cogent analysis.)
🔥 Either way, Judge Douglas’s dark warning that “the border is now everywhere,” frankly sounds less like a legal argument and more like something you’d hear from a cannabis-infused indigenous rights major musing at 2am. “Dude! What if … the border … is inside of us?” To paraphrase the majority’s response: “the border is wherever illegal aliens are, which is in fact how borders have worked since approximately forever.”
When Judge Jones correctly wrote that “the text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of prior Administrations,” she was reading the law instead of vibes. Imagine that. The dissent complained about “thirty years” of contrary practice, as if repeatedly misreading a statute eventually makes it correct. By that logic, I’ve been mispronouncing “quinoa” for so long it’s now legally KWIN-oh-ah.
However you say it, what kind of infernal substance is quinoa, anyway? Oh, never mind.
by Neil Munro
President Donald Trump’s lawyers scored big on Friday when a Texas-based appeals court allowed officials to hold arrested migrants in detention so their migration cases can be quickly decided.
“ENORMOUS Immigration win for President Trump,” said Eric Wessen, the Solicitor General in Iowa’s Attorney General’s Office. He added:
The Fifth Circuit, the first federal court to address President Trump’s expedited removal efforts, sides with the administration. Illegal aliens may be detained and removed!
The 2:1 decision “is a big deal,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer at the Manhattan Institute.
“After reviewing carefully the relevant provisions and structure of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the statutory history, and Congressional intent, we conclude that the government’s position is correct,” the three-judge court decided.
One Biden-nominated judge argued that the policy is unfair because prior presidents did not use the law:
The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that “seeking admission” is like being an “applicant for admission,” in a [1996] statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.
The decision is a big blow to the many pro-migration lawyers who are using sympathetic judges to impose a catch-and-release burden on ICE enforcement. So the decision helps Trump implement his campaign promise to deport millions of illegal migrants, partly because they are a huge economic burden on ordinary American families.
“AWFUL news for due process,” complained Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer with a pro-migration advocacy group, adding:
Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are already detention black holes. [Migrant] Release will be more difficult than ever. As more [migrants] are locked up, ICE will increase the pressure on those who are detained to give up. The goal is an assembly line of coercion with no day in court.
This decision puts even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond [release]. This decision will wipe out the availability of release through bond for tens of thousands of people detained in or transported to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi by ICE.
In Minnesota, for example, more than 700 “habeas corpus petitions” have been filed by pro-migration lawyers seeking to spring long-term migrants from ICE detention. Judges have justified many migrant releases by citing pro-release policies from prior administrations. This week, for example, progressives cheered when a judge ordered the quick release of an Ecuadorian economic migrant — and the child he brought from Ecuador — from detention in Texas.
The releases are prompted by a huge number of lawyers who work for pro-migration groups, said Bill Glahn, at the Center of the American Experiment in Minnesota. Their strategy is “just flood the zone, overwhelm the system, and then … you win,” he told Breitbart News.
DHS officials say that detention is important because it allows them to quickly decide each migrant’s legal claims and then to safely and cheaply deport them.
The court’s decision only applies to migrants detained in the district overseen by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Texas. But a similar lawsuit is pending in the Eighth Circuit, which stretches from Arkansas to North Dakota and Minnesota.
by Sundance
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has made a massive ruling in favor of President Trump and the ICE removal process [pdf Ruling Here]. In short, throughout the nation 360 immigration judges had previously ruled that illegal aliens (applicants for admission) should be granted bond and released during the removal proceedings.
The Fifth CCA has now ruled the aliens can be detained as they go through the removal process. This means ICE captures the illegal, holds them in detention and then rapidly deports them. The ruling, which will likely be appealed to the supreme court, fast-tracks the removal.
(VIA POLITICO) – […] At the heart of the issue is a 30-year-old immigration statute that requires the detention — without bond — of all “applicants for admission” to the United States while they are “seeking admission” to the country. For decades, administrations of both parties applied this to people who had newly arrived in the country, perhaps by crossing the southern border.
Those residing in the country’s interior, often for years, were categorized under a different statute that allowed them to seek a bond hearing before an immigration judge before ICE could lock them up.
But in July, ICE Director Todd Lyons adopted a new interpretation of the law, declaring that anyone targeted for deportation by ICE would be treated as an “applicant for admission,” subjecting them to mandatory detention. That decision was backed up in October by the Board of Immigration Appeals, a panel of immigration judges who set national policy for executive branch-run immigration courts that handle deportation proceedings. (more)
This issue was a big deal during the 2012 “Unauthorized Alien Children” influx, when President Obama and DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson began releasing all the captured illegal aliens with a bond hearing. Thousands of temporary judges were assigned and NGO’s provided tens of thousands of lawyers for everyone so the illegal entrants could quickly exit ICE custody.
