Frustrated judges 'increasingly furious' as Trump DOJ 'blows off' court rulings

Judges are growing increasingly angry at President Donald Trump's administration as it casually throws aside laws and rules without consequences.

Legal reporter Kyle Cheney wrote for Politico on Tuesday that the administration continues to nab people who've never committed a crime in their lives, throw them in cages and deny them a full range of Constitutional rights.

"But the Trump administration has slow-walked or outright defied judges’ orders demanding the release of people scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at an increasingly rapid clip," wrote Cheney.

NPR reported that one airplane enthusiast sets up in a parking garage with a telephoto lens and watches as private planes quickly whisk those captured in Minneapolis away to other states, typically Texas. There, lawyers don't have access to them, their families can't get them help, and judges can't step in.

Cheney said that the judges are growing "increasingly furious and exhausted by the Trump administration’s tactics."

Minnesota judges demanded that those taken by federal agents be released, but in many cases, those people had already been shipped off to other states, Minnesota Public Radio reported. In one case, a woman with valid paperwork tried to show the agents she was legal, but they forced her to call family members and use her as bait to arrest others, including two children.

In some cases, ICE has released people but refused to return them to Minneapolis, instead abandoning them on the street without their identification necessary to get on a commercial flight to get home. They then had no way to contact family or anyone else for help.

Minnesota-based U.S. District Judge John Tunheim had to resort to a requirement demanding that a detainee not be “left outside in dangerous cold.” He required that ICE coordinate with his lawyer to “ensure humane treatment.”

“There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” Minnesota U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said in a recent order, according to Cheney.

The report said that in some cases judges have been forced to give more detailed orders to prevent ICE from finding loopholes to ignore them. "When all else fails, they threaten to hold administration officials in contempt," Cheney said.

“These practices are deeply concerning and generally suggest that ICE is attempting to hide the location of detainees, and thus, make habeas proceedings more difficult for a petitioner and their counsel,” Minnesota Judge Donovan Frank said about the government using a “pattern of obfuscation.”

Nebraska's U.S. District Judge John Gerrard said that the Trump administration is trying “to frustrate judicial review by moving detainees around the country repeatedly.”

Cheney described a situation in which a woman taken by ICE was shipped off to Texas and then moved to New Mexico. All her lawyer could do is file quick petitions in all of the states before she could be deported.

"It’s become an epidemic — not only in Minnesota but across the country," wrote Cheney. "An overwhelmed Justice Department has simply blown off court-ordered deadlines to respond to habeas petitions or defend its detention decisions."

Some judges are concerned about what happens in the wake of their orders.

“Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it,” said U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell in a hearing last week. “The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country. They live in their communities. Some are separated from their families.”

Meanwhile, one New York lawyer who works on immigration cases described on his social media pages that the administration has appealed every case he won. They then appear to use ChatGPT to write appeals. They lose those, too. He noted that the Justice Department is doing this with taxpayer dollars.

"They're trying to exhaust resources," he said of the DOJ.

The Department of Homeland Security blamed "activist judges" who are trying to "thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”

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