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A lot of the current immigration debate is wondering what increasingly exotic interpretations of statutes can be made to sneak immigration reform through the backdoor without the Judicial system interfering. But this only needs to happen because the statutes the Legislative passed decades ago say specific things. Why not just pass a new bill? I wrote a post (copied to substack here) that detailed the Republican sabotage of the compromise immigration reform bill back in 2024, and a lot of the discussion was predicated on Trump winning a trifecta in November. I thought that was excessively risky... but they won! Why not do what they said now!?! Stop with the judicial cloak-and-dagger, and pass some freaking immigration reform!
Even if the bill wasn't terrible, which it was (link to previous discussion where this was fleshed out pretty well), passing that bill would have caused the GOP to soundly lose the presidency and the house because their voters wouldn't have showed up to vote for them after that deep betrayal.
Not to mention the Biden Admin would have spun up a vast hostile bureaucracy legalizing millions of recent "asylees" before Trump would have taken office.
reform which makes things worse is bad
taking all of the illegal and bad biden admin decisions which were losing in court and formalizing them into law is bad
having every legal dispute about the bill being forced into the DC Court, the same court which is currently issuing a flurry of insane nationwide injunctions, is not smart politics
Oh? Does DOGE want to fire the incredibly hostile new army of "Asylum Officers" who are rubber stamping asylee claims at breakneck pace and giving people work permits as legal residents? Well, you get to go before Judge Chutkin in the DC Court.
The other commenter's opinion is that all "universal injunctions" issued by district judges are insane. See Justice Gorsuch's views on the topic.
In the entire history of the United States, something around 90 national injunctions have ever been ordered, with Donald Trump accounting for almost 70% of all of them (and rising by the day).
No, this isn't a both-sides situation. If they were effectively banned tomorrow, it would be a large win for Republicans.
which they'll use and then the court will broaden or rule against the administration which other judges have already done in other cases
Trump already had the majority of all national injunctions ever issued in the history of the United States by the end of his first term. There is no numbers argument here; the only argument is a substantive one about the particular executive orders which I also think is wrong, but this would take a long-form high-effort post to articulate well.
In any case, this isn't a both-sides situation, it is primarily against Trump and Republicans generally that these are used.
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