Supremes vote 7-2 to pause deportations of Venezuelans

The Trump administration has been bragging that the Supremes let them deport Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which of course is a half-truth. The April 7 decision 5-4 stipulates that due process be followed, which is why they ordered 9-0 the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who didn't get it, and the Supremes this morning aren't sure that's the case either with the latest group set to be deported.

 

 U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halts deportations of Venezuelan migrants under wartime law

The U.S. Supreme Court early on Saturday paused President Donald Trump’s administration from deporting Venezuelan men in immigration custody after their lawyers said they were at imminent risk of removal without the judicial review previously mandated by the justices. ...

At issue is whether the Trump administration has met the Supreme Court’s standard for providing the detainees due process before sending them to another country - possibly to the notorious prison in El Salvador where others are jailed. ...

Their deportation would be the first since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that allowed removals under the 1798 law while specifying that “the notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” ...

On March 15, the Trump administration deported more than 130 alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Many of the migrants’ lawyers and family members say they were not gang members and had no chance to dispute the government’s assertion that they were. 

 

 

Vice President Vance misleads people when he says immigration courts conduct jury trials, even worse he's defending deporting someone to foreign incarceration without any hearing whatsoever

This guy is shaping up to be much worse than Donald Trump.

Vance must never become president.

 

Either everyone has due process, or nobody does

 

At around noon on 14 April, 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government

 On Monday Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man.

More.

What matters in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that he had an immigration judge's order protecting him from deportation and Trump violated that order

As it happens Garcia seems like he was a pretty good father, contrary to what Kremlin Karoline says, but that is irrelevant to justice, which is supposed to be blind to such things.

Trump has trampled over the entire process which allowed Garcia to remain in the United States.

What will he trample next?

 

Karoline Leavitt: Based On Media Sensationalism, You Would Think We Deported A Candidate For Father Of The Year

Trump lets the president of El Salvador do his defying of the Supreme Court for him, won't return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States

 El Salvador President Nayib Bukele says he won’t return Abrego Garcia to U.S.

... [Trump] also said he wants Bukele to accept as many criminals as possible. ...

Judge Boasberg was correct to order the flights to El Salvador to turn around, Trump administration now admits it made a mistake deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

-- Fifth Amendment

Due process exists to prevent such mistakes. Dictator Trump didn't care about following it.

Who will be his next victim?

From the story here:

 ...  The Trump administration acknowledged late Monday that it had inadvertently deported a man to El Salvador last month despite a court’s determination that he had a legitimate fear of persecution in his home country.

“This removal was an error,” a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official wrote in a statement to a federal judge.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran, was on one of three deportation flights to his home country on March 15 amid a frantic legal fight over President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke war powers to hasten the deportation of more than 100 Venezuela nationals to El Salvador. In addition to the Venezuelans subject to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act were other deportees with purported gang ties. ...

He was arrested by ICE on March 12 and sent to El Salvador on March 15, where his wife recognized him in a video showing the shackled and shaven prisoners being arrayed by Salvadoran authorities.

The Trump administration now says there’s nothing it can do to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to U.S. custody. ...

Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek is a lying sack of shit typical of the Trump administration who should be fired immediately

Dudek's reasoning below is the same level of ridiculous we saw when Trump said he wouldn't recall the deportation flights ordered by Judge Boasberg because they were already in international airspace and were therefore not subject to the order. Trump ordered the flights in the dead of a Friday night/Saturday morning a week ago to avoid detection and court intervention.

Republicans playing chicken with the lifeline for over 73 million Americans wasn't what people voted for last November, but that's what they are getting.

 

... Dudek said the court order [from Judge Hollander] is so broad that it could apply to any Social Security employee, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek told Bloomberg. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”

However, in a March 18 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Dudek said there are only 11 DOGE-affiliated individuals at the Social Security Administration. ...

Dudek assumed the role of acting commissioner in February when then acting commissioner Michelle King stepped down due to DOGE privacy concerns. ...

Reported here.

Trump's own immigration policy advisor Stephen Miller thinks Trump should be impeached for defying Judge James E. Boasberg's order to recall the deportation flights lol

 This guy's so dumb he forgot to scrub his timeline.

The constitutional crisis that many feared from a vengeful, re-empowered Trump is here

 Congress is cowed; that’s one supposedly coequal branch of government down. But federal courts are proving more resistant to Donald Trump’s trampling of laws and the Constitution. Now, just two months in office, the president has all but crossed the red line — defying a judge’s order — that for more than two centuries has separated the rule of law in this country from its undoing. ... 

The chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr., schooled both the congressman and the president, issuing a rare statement of what should be obvious: “Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

But Trump won’t be educated. ...

In effect, and denials aside, Trump and his lieutenants defied the law ...

Jackie Calmes for The Los Angeles Times, here.

Kremlin Karoline pretends Trump doesn't judge shop

 

Karoline Leavitt: Concerted Effort By The Left To "Judge Shop" To Derail Trump's Agenda, Undermine The Will Of The People 

 

... there is a concerted effort by the far left to judge shop, to pick judges who are clearly acting as partisan activists from the bench, in an attempt to derail this President's agenda. ...

 

Mahmoud Khalil still detained in notorious Louisiana detention center as case is moved to New Jersey

... Earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment building, took him to New Jersey and quickly transferred him to Jena, more than 1,000 miles away from his pregnant wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and his attorneys in New York.

Civil rights lawyers who work with immigrants locked up in Louisiana’s detention centers say they are concerned for Khalil, given the Jena facility’s unsettling history. However, they say they are not surprised that ICE transferred Khalil to Louisiana, where access to counsel is extremely limited, and where the courts skew conservative.

In a phone interview with Verite News last week, Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at civil rights nonprofit RFK Human Rights, said the Trump Administration is “forum shopping” Khalil’s deportation case — looking for the jurisdiction that will give the government the outcome it wants.

“The government has the ability to do that with immigration,” Enriquez said. “It can arrest someone in a jurisdiction where the case law is very favorable to the person arrested, and then sweep them away to another jurisdiction.” ...

Mad King Ludwig flies into a rage all because a judge told him Nay Nay

Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.

Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.

"He who is the real tyrant," said Plato, "whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind."

 

 

 

"He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles."

 

Trump's deportation fantasies hit the big brick wall of reality

 Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.

In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year. 

And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House. 

More.

They were supposed to end catch and release on day one. They can't do even that.

 

 

It's deportation theatre at Fox News: The ICE Capades

 

Trump's two-faced positioning on the H-1B Visa Program in 2024 is mirrored by his two-faced positioning on DACA from 2015

 

 Trump was NEVER all-in about his immigration positions, which went back and forth from the beginning. 

People forget that he and Ann Coulter had a knock-down drag-out fight in the Oval Office about immigration sometime in late 2017, early 2018. The newly elected president had done NOTHING about the border wall, deportations, and the Dreamers. He had used her book about immigration to distinguish himself from the numerous other GOP candidates and get himself elected, and promptly tossed her aside like all the other women he has cheated on.

Trump is nothing if he's not a user.

People also forget the blow up in August 2016 before he was even president, when Trump toyed publicly with the idea of a DACA amnesty. NeverTrump noticed:

Donald Trump ... is suddenly embracing the idea of working out a way to give legal status to undocumented immigrants who have been here a long time and have kept out of trouble. ... Trump's latest comments that it makes no sense to deport millions of people who have lived in the U.S. for a decade or more -- which constitutes two-thirds of the undocumented immigrants here now -- are a far cry from what he had been saying for the previous 14 months.

MAGA ignored this. Conservatives like Coulter were demoralized, months before they were actually betrayed. Trump only narrowly defeated Hillary. 

And few remember how he blew himself up in the 2018 elections, losing the House, in part because he used DACA as a bargaining chip in early 2018 in a failed attempt to get his wall funded, shutting down the government in the process. His lone achievements in his first two years were a modest and temporary tax cut package, and a massive defense spending bill to restore what Obama had gutted.

The legions of disaffected young men hoping Trump-Vance would bring a new era of opportunity for native born Americans over cheaper foreign workers are sadly experiencing buyer's remorse because of Trump's capitulation to the Tech Bros, discovering anew that Trump is the snake in the parable he always used to talk about on the campaign trail.

Welcome to hell part deux.

 

That 2018 border wall looks pretty cheap now by comparison lol

 

$86 billion

$25 billion

Trump appointment of seasoned former acting ICE director Thomas Homan as Border Czar is in stark contrast to Biden appointment of Harris

This is a serious appointment, unlike Biden's, whose policy was to flood the country with illegals under a novel interpretation of asylum.

In an interview on Fox News Channel's "Sunday Morning Futures," Homan said the military wouldn't be rounding up and arresting immigrants in the country illegally and that ICE would move to implement Trump's plans in a "humane manner."

"It's going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of ICE. The men and women of ICE do this daily. They're good at it," he said. "When we go out there, we're going to know who we're looking for. We most likely know where they're going to be, and it's going to be done in a humane manner." ...

"If you're here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder."

He also said: "You've got my word. Trump comes back in January, I'll be in his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen."

Reported here by CBS.

By delegating this task to Homan, Trump achieves a measure of freedom to devote himself to advancing his other objectives through the Congress.

The big if in all this is, whether illegal asylees with a piece of paper showing they have a court date may legally remain in the US.

I can well imagine a liberal federal judge intervening to stop deportations of such people, forcing the issue to be litigated. This could tie up deportations for years.

Don't count on this going the way you think it will go because Trump appointed a tough guy.

In 2018 Kamala Harris was Up Up With Education and Down Down With Deportation

 

Resurfaced Video of Kamala Destroys Her Latest Fakery on the Border 

 

 Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket in August, Harris has desperately walked back her far left policy positions through anonymous staffers and ran an ad claiming she is tough on illegal immigration. The ad featured footage of former President Donald Trump's border wall, which Harris voted against and vehemently opposed. 

 

Latest Biden-Harris move to protect Haitians in the US from deportation will bring the number to 500,000

Prepare for more cultural enrichment, whether you like it or not.

 

Deportations are 24/7 all of a sudden under Biden without a new law having been passed, which means he could have simply done this at any point in his presidency but chose to let in millions instead

All these people cut in line ahead of legal immigrants who have to wait years for green cards.

One law for them, another for these, brought to you by Democrats.