10,000 Losses (and Counting)
The Trump administration has been repeatedly rebuked by the courts, to little avail.
POLITICO (“10,000 rulings: The courts’ overwhelming rebuke of Trump’s ICE policies“):
Ten thousand losses.
That’s the Trump administration’s track record in court as federal judges grapple with the way ICE agents have swept through major U.S. cities and detained thousands of people in support of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
POLITICO is tracking the tens of thousands of detention cases that have flooded the system since ICE adopted its detention policy last July. Today we are releasing a full database of those rulings, giving the public an opportunity to see under the hood of our reporting — which has documented the courts’ lopsided results, ICE’s tactics for defying judges’ orders and the rising tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration.
The trend is clear from every angle. The administration has lost nearly 10,400 of the cases that have been decided, and prevailed in about 1,200. While some judges have heard more cases than others, the overwhelming majority of judges — more than 425 — have reached the same conclusion. Even a majority of Trump-appointed judges have sided against the administration.
That the policy has been overwhelmingly ruled illegal in thousands of cases stretching over a year would seem to be a clear indicator that it is, in fact, illegal. Normally, one would expect a presidential administration to take a hint and modify the policy. Rather obviously, that has not happened.
This continues to be a major problem with our system of checks and balances. On the one hand, it’s highly problematic to give a single district court judge the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Especially since it’s so easy for litigants to forum shop under our system, essentially guaranteeing the outcome. On the other, it’s simply outrageous for 11,600 individuals caught up in the system to have to litigate this independently. That’s doubly true in this case, where few of them have the means to effectively do so.
The Supreme Court only hears a relative handful of cases each year, and it typically takes years for them to agree to resolve a dispute. Rather clearly, we need some sort of Constitutional Court to expedite this process to reach quick consensus on federal policies that violate the Constitution and/or federal law.
