OPINION:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. can’t come up with a consistent response to President Trump’s creative moves to end the foreign invasion set into motion by his predecessor. On Monday, the high court issued an interim order allowing the Department of Homeland Security to revoke the temporary protected status that President Biden bestowed on 350,000 aliens from Venezuela.
Two of the far-left justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, had to acknowledge that such status would be permanent, not “temporary,” if future administrations lacked the power to cancel it and return those noncitizens to their home country.
That was a win for Mr. Trump, but it was easy. Ever reluctant to give the president a clean victory, the chief justice made sure to soften the blow for the left a few days earlier by delivering the administration a loss on the Alien Enemies Act.
The Homeland Security Department has been using this statute to evict violent members of the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs, which have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Liberals fought this with a flurry of lawsuits the moment the administration began summarily deporting these thugs.
The Supreme Court chimed in to express irritation with the swiftness of Mr. Trump’s border enforcement agenda. “We decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18, and we grant temporary injunctive relief to preserve our jurisdiction while the question of what notice is due is adjudicated,” the majority wrote in the unsigned decision.
At a glance, that seems reasonable. Except to achieve this result, the majority had to throw U.S. District Judge James W. Hendrix, an appointee of Mr. Trump, under the bus because he didn’t leap into action at midnight to approve the relief sought by the gang members’ attorneys.
The failure of Judge Hendrix was that he woke up the next morning and gave administration attorneys 24 hours to respond. Suggesting this judge shouldn’t have a full briefing from both sides before deciding is an unreasonable position.
Judge James C. Ho, a member of the 5th Circuit appellate panel that unanimously backed Judge Hendrix, blasted the Supreme Court majority for implying that judges should be on call around the clock for such requests. “We seem to have forgotten that this is a district court — not a Denny’s,” he wrote on Tuesday.
His honor pointed to a 2021 case in which the high court refused to entertain the complaint of health care workers who objected on religious grounds to being forced to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said their demand for “extraordinary relief” had been filed only nine days prior and shouldn’t be heard on a “short fuse without benefit of full briefing.”
Had those nurses renounced their citizenship and joined a criminal gang, perhaps they could have enjoyed expedited consideration before the Roberts court.
“If this is not to become the norm, then we should admit that this is special treatment being afforded to certain favored litigants like members of Tren de Aragua — and we should stop pretending that Lady Justice is blindfolded,” Judge Ho opined.
This judicial blockade on the use of the Alien Enemies Act is a temporary setback for Mr. Trump’s legal team. More lasting is the damage the high court majority does to itself by contorting the law to reach desired political outcomes.
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