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babylonsister

(172,207 posts)
Sat May 3, 2025, 09:06 AM May 3

Trump-Appointed Judge Foils Stephen Miller's Grand Plan [View all]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/heather-digby-parton/113751/trump-appointed-judge-foils-stephen-miller-s-grand-plan

Trump-Appointed Judge Foils Stephen Miller’s Grand Plan
by Heather Digby Parton | May 3, 2025 - 5:35am

— from Salon

Finally. Due process for the Trump administration's immigrant detainees has been the single most important issue for the courts to address. While it was a relief that the Supreme Court weighed in with an order that all detainees must be allowed the right of habeas corpus, until this week, no judge had ruled on the underlying applicability at the heart of the policy: Trump's invocation of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act. On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge ordered all deportations in his district to stop. Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a federal judge in Texas and member of the Federalist Society, ruled that it's ridiculous to define the presence of Venezuelan gang members in the country as an “invasion” or “predatory incursion."

snip//

A video went viral via the Rupert Murdoch media empire in August, with Fox News and The New York Post hyping footage of armed men in the hallways of an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. As New York Times reporter Jonathan Weissman recounts, it "metastasized into grandiose stories of whole buildings, whole sections of town and, in Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole city of Aurora being taken over by migrants carrying weapons of war." It turned out that the story was made up by the slumlord who owned the building to excuse his neglect and some of the locals who had pumped up the story later recanted.

But that idea of armed migrants carrying weapons of war was the hook Miller had been looking for and soon Trump was talking about the Alien Enemies Act at his campaign rallies, saying that the gang had “invaded and conquered” America, which he called an “occupied state." He spent the rest of the campaign building up this idea of America being invaded by criminals.

snip//

The United States is not El Salvador, then or now. We are not at war with Venezuela or any country. Crime has been going down for years now, especially violent crime. (We do have a sickening amount of gun violence but that's the last thing Trump wants to curb, and it's hardly an immigrant problem.) 350 million Americans are not clamoring to be "liberated," at least not from some obscure street gang that nobody had heard of until Stephen Miller and Donald Trump made them into poster boys for their anti-immigrant crusade.

One would hope that the Supreme Court will rule that this misuse of the Alien Enemies Act is illegal, as anyone who can read English can see. If their past behavior is any guide, I'd guess it's going to be a while before they do it. But at least we have one judge, who nobody can claim is a biased lefty, finally saying the obvious. It's about time.
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