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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to lift the order on the executive to "facilitate" the return of Abrego Garcia and I recommend reading it

It's written up by judge James Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee and Bush era short list candidate for the supreme court and he's quite well respected in the legal profession. This guy has been a conservative for longer than many people here have even been alive, and the stance of seasoned judicial figures like him with old style "respectable" political ideologies are an interesting way to see the change in the rest of politics.

Most importantly in that it incidentally addresses many of the questions and concerns people have about this whole situation.

Like does it matter whether or not the executive's allegations against Garcia are correct?

The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal). Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or "mistakenly" deported. Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?

What does the Supreme Court's decision actually say?

The Supreme Court's decision remains, as always, our guidepost. That decision rightly requires the lower federal courts to give "due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs" Noem v. Abrego Garcia, No. 24A949, slip op. at 2 (U.S. Apr. 10, 2025); see also United States v. Curtiss-Wright Exp. Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 319 (1936). That would allow sensitive diplomatic negotiations to be removed from public view. It would recognize as well that the "facilitation" of Abrego Garcia's return leaves the Executive Branch with options in the execution to which the courts in accordance with the Supreme Court's decision should extend a genuine deference. That decision struck a balance that does not permit lower courts to leave Article II by the wayside.

The Supreme Court's decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing. It requires the government "to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador." Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2. "Facilitate" is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 ("[T]he Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps."). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government's argument that all it must do is "remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia's] return," Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court's command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.

An interesting difference between the role of the executive and the rule of the judiciary

And the differences do not end there. The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

Are the claims that this could be used on citizens valid?

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive's obligation to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8.

On the contradictions between both government's public claims of authority and/or responsibility.

Today, both the United States and the El Salvadoran governments disclaim any authority and/or responsibility to return Abrego Garcia. See President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of El Salvador, WHITE HOUSE (Apr. 14, 2025). We are told that neither government has the power to act. The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.

Are there previous major examples of an executive following a court order it did not like?

It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower's sage example. Putting his "personal opinions" aside, President Eisenhower honored his "inescapable" duty to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools "with all deliberate speed." Address by the President of the United States, Delivered from his Office at the White House 1-2 (Sept. 24, 1957); 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that "[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts." Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive's own words, "[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result." Id.

And if you're wondering "Why do the courts even get a say here to begin with about the executive's actions?", here's a basic primer.

What makes this case so deliciously ironic is that the only reason that Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal in 2019 was because his life was in danger due to rampant gang activity. The thing that actually solved the problem was locking up all the gangsters with little to no due process.

This kind of thing is exactly why trust in institutionalism is collapsing. I originally thought that this was a stupid hill for the administration to die on. It may still turn out to be a bad idea, but Trumps instincts have once again shown a method to his madness.

Maybe the longer term play is to create so much political spite around this that the next Democratic president will be forced to return all the exiled gang members from CECOT to the US, instead of merely to stop paying for them or something. This of course will be disastrous for the local community and also be quite unpopular politically.

I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal. The guy is an El Salvadorean citizen, was not in the US legally, and could have been deported to any country (besides El Salvadore) and then, from there, immediately deported again to El Salvadore and this would have somehow been fine. But because some braindead or politically captured bureaucrat rubber stamped his paperwork where he claimed he'd be in danger if he returned to his own country they granted a targeted stay of deportation, which precipitated this entire clusterfuck.

The guy was married to a US citizen ("Jennifer Vasquez Sura", okay...) who had filed a restraining order against him. Not exactly Elite Human Capital. The wife had two children from a previous relationship who are "disabled". Garcia's own child is also "disabled". This context is supposed to engender some kind of sympathy, I suspect, but as someone who actually interacts with people of this socioeconomic strata I am more inclined to believe they were scamming government benefits, and the wife's current PR blitz is a consequence of her smelling blood in the water chasing a fat legal payout.

I will freely concede that it would be alarming if the Trump administration deployed this "strategy" to consign innocent American citizens to a third world gulag without legal recourse or due process, but I don't think Trump is "based" enough to do that. (No, the off-hand comment he made to Bukele about sending "homegrowns" does not count, as it was clearly about -- legally -- sending convicted criminals to serve out their sentences more cheaply than can be done domestically.) This attempt to force the executive to (presumably, temporarily) return one particular illegal comes across as political theater and legal chicanery. Frankly I'm hoping Trump makes a show of retrieving Garcia on Air Force One, landing in the US for a photo op, then clasping him in chains and loading him back on the plane, to dump him in Argentina or somewhere else -- from where he'll be repatriated straight into El Salvadore's "black site prison", hopefully for life.

There was some minor procedural error, therefore we must make an elaborate show of correcting it, at great expense, to achieve an outcome that will immediately collapse back to the current status quo. This is your brain on legalism.

This attempt to force the executive to (presumably, temporarily) return one particular illegal comes across as political theater and legal chicanery.

You see, you do understand. But that's not the only goal. The other goal is to establish the supremacy of the federal judiciary (where the Left is still enjoying a lot of power) over the actions of the federal executive. The strategy is death by the thousand of TROs. If the admin is forced to ask consent of every leftist federal judge for every action, not a lot of actions can be performed - even if SCOTUS works overtime to shut down all the overreaches (which is in no way guaranteed), it will still take time, and if every action that could take a day takes months instead and costs a lot of paperwork and lawyertime, which is limited even for the feds, then doing things becomes much harder. In the first Trump admin, the Left managed to neutralize a lot of his agenda by putting him under the shadow of suspicion of being the Russian agent. Now this does not exist anymore, so they need another leverage. Making everybody in the admin constantly look over the shoulder for a federal judge to intervene in their actions is a good leverage.

But because some braindead or politically captured bureaucrat rubber stamped his paperwork where he claimed he'd be in danger if he returned to his own country they granted a targeted stay of deportation, which precipitated this entire clusterfuck.

Another Art II bureaucrat would have rubber stamped the dissolution of that order had this government had their shit together enough to even know it existed.

It's not the minor procedural error that stings, it's the not even knowing.

"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents." - Bob Ross

Can you name another time when you've been incensed over a 1-in-100,000 procedural error rate?

Can you name a government process or department with a lower error rate?

I would happily concede this is all fine if the error rate is indeed 1/100K. Will you concede that it's unacceptable to be 1/5k?

And yes, I think the CBP does not incorrectly turn away more than 1/10K people at the border.

Will you concede that it's unacceptable to be 1/5k?

Nope. I don't find the actual error in question to be particularly meaningful. This dressing down to ignorant children who didn't do their homework sums up the state of discourse fairly well.

If you're going to say 1/5k is unacceptable, then I hope to see you advocating for burning down the entire government. The error rate for Medicaid payments seems to be something like 1 in 20. The Child Care & Development fund is bouncing between 9 and 13%. Apparently our own government can't even retire employees in a reasonably timely manner because almost 30% of the applications have errors

A majority of states are not processing food assistance applications on time and making too many payment errors, according to the federal government.

The IRS makes mistakes when taxing people less than 1% of the time... which is still 50 times worse than your "unacceptable" rate for "deporting people who were definitely supposed to be deported, but missing a step in the paperwork".

There's too many cites to bother linking them all, but I'm seeing false conviction rates ranging from 1-12%... including a purported 4% rate of executing innocent people that is in a paywalled National Geographic article I can only see a preview of.

Want to talk about drone strike error rates?

So, no. I'm not going to concede that a functionally irrelevant-to-outcome paperwork snafu happening in 1 in 5000 deportations is "unacceptable" in any meaningful way. That's actually wildly better than anything else I expect from our government and everyone who cares so, so, so deeply about processes apparently ought to be worshipping Tom Hooman and begging to put him in charge of other parts of the government, too.

Your link quotes things like

The 17 Year-2 States found that half of the cases with improper authorization for payment errors were due to missing or insufficient documentation.

Yeah, if you fill out your documentation wrong, it causes it to be denied. That's hardly the kind of error we're talking about

The IRS makes mistakes when taxing people less than 1% of the time... which is still 50 times worse than your "unacceptable" rate for "deporting people who were definitely supposed to be deported, but missing a step in the paperwork".

You mean removing people to a country for which they had a legally binding order withholding removal.

That's not a "step in the paperwork" kind of mistake.

There's too many cites to bother linking them all, but I'm seeing false conviction rates ranging from 1-12%... including a purported 4% rate of executing innocent people

Are you seriously quoting some left wing boogeyman that 1/25 executions being of the innocent? That's absurd enough not to even merit further investigation.

The withholding order was literally a bureaucratic technicality. It should have been removed before deportation as a matter of procedure, but it wasn't. The withholding order was based on threats that no longer exist. If it had been removed first, then the ONLY substantive difference between the present situation and the one where the government didn't make the error is that maybe Garcia's deportation to El Salvador would have been briefly delayed. Somehow I don't think that would satisfy critics. Neither does this error, which was rather peculiar to Garcia's cirumstances, set any kind of dangerous precedent that applies to other people, and certainly not citizens.

The only real argument here is that it the US is essentially outsourcing its prison sentence to El Salvador, and this means they can send people to a prison in another country without charging or convicting them of any crime. While this probably does not violate any law, it is very much against the spirit of the justice system and due process. The Trump administration can wash its hands of responsibility and say that they're just sending these people to El Salvador, and it's all on El Salvador to decide what to do with them from there. However, we all know the actual arrangement; we know they are for all practical purposes being sent to prison by ICE.

All that said, I don't really care, Marge. The treasonous failure to secure the border for almost my entire adult life, the literal conspiracy to import as many people as possible, resulting in millions of illegals and quasi-legals fundamentally warping and perverting the economy and culture of the country, is a far greater wrong. Unfortunately, the scale of this problem is so huge that only swift and aggressive action can possibly address it, and so there will likely be many more edge cases, errors, and happy little accidents. Personally, I'm okay with that. It's priced in. For this, I blame the people who created the problem in the first place, not the people who are now trying to fix it.

the ONLY substantive difference between the present situation and the one where the government didn't make the error is that maybe Garcia's deportation to El Salvador would have been briefly delayed.

Sure. And the only difference between executing Tim McVeigh in 1997 after his conviction instead of 1995 after his arrest was a delay. It's not like there was any chance of him being acquitted.

The withholding order was based on threats that no longer exist.

This claim is probably true, but it doesn't matter because that argument was never actually brought up.

The only real argument here is

That is not the only real argument.

Unfortunately, the scale of this problem is so huge that only swift and aggressive action can possibly address it

I think you are going to quickly find that there are between 0-2 votes on the Supreme Court for that, and that the only way to actually tackle the problem is to have a competent and diligent program of enforcement. One that I have consistently been in favor of (which is a nice thing about posting histories) for years before this administration decided to do it in a spectacular incompetent fashion.

What folks like you fail to comprehend is that trying to achieve a goal incompetently is not directionally correct -- by negative association is makes the goal even further away. You are just delaying (if not destroying) any ability to actually reckon with the scale of illegal and temporary immigrants.

You mean removing people to a country for which they had a legally binding order withholding removal.

That's not a "step in the paperwork" kind of mistake.

Yeah, it is. There's a process for removing that order based on obviously changed relevant facts. AIUI, it doesn't even require a judge. The basis for his withholding order was no longer valid. Ergo, it's a step in the paperwork.

I mean, the IRS can look at my tax paperwork and begin enforcement proceedings against me. That doesn't require a judge either (until I take them to tax court).

That doesn't imply that they can just freeze my bank accounts while skipping that step. The step is important, even if it wouldn't change the outcome in this specific case.

More comments

Do you not believe the woman he married is a "US citizen"? What basis do you have for that?

You seem to have strange assumptions about people's state of mind when the first thing you think of when someone engages in PR to help return a family member from a notoriously violent prison to the country they were illegally deported from is that they are "chasing a fat legal payout" instead of maybe wanting to help out their family member who had an injustice done to them. Of course her children having quoted "disabilities" is further evidence for this somehow, alright.

This attempt by the executive to pay to imprison a man in a foreign country after making an administrative error that they now refuse to admit is what actually comes across as theater and (il)legal chicanery.

Apparently it is "my brain on legalism" to demand due process and rule-following from the authority that governs everyone's lives and controls untold power. The founders would be seizing in their graves.

You seem to have strange assumptions about people's state of mind when the first thing you think of when someone engages in PR to help return a family member from a notoriously violent prison to the country they were illegally deported from is that they are "chasing a fat legal payout" instead of maybe wanting to help out their family member who had an injustice done to them. Of course her children having quoted "disabilities" is further evidence for this somehow, alright.

Did you miss the details where the wife in question filed a restraining order against him for repeatedly beating her to the point of injury? That seems to have ended in dismissal when she didn't show for the final hearing, so maybe she was just playing games.

Apparently it is "my brain on legalism" to demand due process and rule-following from the authority that governs everyone's lives and controls untold power. The founders would be seizing in their graves.

"Brain on legalism" is a nice way to say "I think a lot of people are full of self-serving shit". Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?

I didn't miss it. And your pointing out that she didn't go through with the full process, I don't see how this is supposed to update my view. Perhaps she recanted her view of the domestic situation, perhaps she cares too much about him, perhaps it was too much hassle, perhaps it was a fake complaint in the first place. Perhaps she was threatened. Only the last would suggest more strongly to me that her concern about him is fake.

I am not routinely incensed at that because I don't see it come across my feed, which I am sure can be taken as evidence that I'm being a hypocrite, but if you'd like to point to an example I'd be more than happy to call it out if it seems like an egregious abuse/neglect of the system to me. I do get routinely incensed at whatever trampling of civil process I see exercised by those in power, of course mediated by the channels I follow.

Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?

In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.

On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.

Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.

slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists

The guy wasn't "disappeared", he had multiple days in court, this whole thing is about accidnetally missing a page of paperwork that would have had no material impact on the sequence of events.

By comparison, we crossed the "murder American children by drones with no due process" threshold over a decade ago.

Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.

Yeah, that would have been a decent example for anyone in this thread to bring up as an example of the non-partisan civil libertarian bonefides.

Instead of what they've actually provided.

Which is literally nothing.

Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?

There are two more?!?!?! tears of joy

Then you recognize that we have not in fact been operating under "rule of law" previously?

Do you believe that enforcing "rule of law" here will increase its enforcement elsewhere? If so, why do you believe that?

If you do not believe that, why is one form of selective "rule of law" preferable to another?

Violations of the rule of law don't cancel each other out - us "three genuinely principled civil libertarians" don't "tap the sign.*

Law is a social construct, and as a social construct it depends on consensus and common knowledge for its function. It works if people believe it works, that "rule of law" actually functions in some reliable fashion.

Undermine that belief sufficiently, and people stop believing in it, and "rule of law" stops functioning in specifically the way that you are now observing: people stop honoring appeals to the rules, because they've seen those rules bent or broken in too many other cases and so no longer trust them.

I do not accept your appeals to the rules, because I have long since observed that my appeals to the rules are systematically ignored. I do not expect the rules to protect me when I need them to, so I have no incentive to expend effort or value to ensure the rules protect you when you need them to. I too used to make appeals to "rule of law"; I did so for many years. Now I don't do that any more, even when the law is purportedly on my side, because I understand that it is pointless.

Enforcing the law is costly. People bear the cost willingly when they believe that all bear it equally. When they no longer believe this, they generally stop being willing to bear the cost.

Law is a social construct, and as a social construct it depends on consensus and common knowledge for its function. It works if people believe it works, that "rule of law" actually functions in some reliable fashion.

Hence violations not cancelling each other out.

I do not accept your appeals to the rules, because I have long since observed that my appeals to the rules are systematically ignored. I do not expect the rules to protect me when I need them to, so I have no incentive to expend effort or value to ensure the rules protect you when you need them to.

Is "you" in reference to me, specifically, or a rhetorical device?

More comments

Surely the only way to increase the enforcement of the rule of law is to... increase the enforcement of the rule of law? I very much understand and support advocating for the full rule of law in all spheres of life, but if you want to do that, you should, well, do that. Which would include advocating for it here. It's not hard.

No, this just ends up with rule of law being selectively used to constrain those who accept this argument, while not constraining actions against them. That's what I mean by "chump".

So I understand "they defected so we have to defect". That's what you have to do if you're stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma with a repeat defector.

But the question then is - how do we get out of this mutual defection spiral?

More comments

Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?

I certainly am. I feel politically homeless because neither party seems particularly interested in protecting civil liberties they find inconvenient. Meanwhile, the libertarian party is run by pants-on-head crazy people. The whole situation makes one want to scream into the void.

Oy! You got a license for that void?!

Ah. My sympathies. I've been there. If anything, I think you're understating the magnitude of the problem.

I don't agree with much of meduka's perspective, but if it's true that the wife had "filed a restraining order against him" as claimed, then it's easier to see why you might not want to take her concern about Garcia's well-being at face value.

I think it's reasonable to take this as evidence that their personal relationship maybe isn't the greatest, that they have significant problems, etc. What I don't think is reasonable is a) taking this as evidence that her concern about him is definitely performative or fake. It's quite common, even in situations where domestic abuse of some significance has occured, that the people involved still have strong feelings for each other, care about each other, and likely would not want that partner deported illegally to a violent prison. This might seem contradictory but I think it's actually more the norm than the exception, and blithely assuming that abuse victims don't care about their abusers (married with children, especially) is a bit of a miss in my opinion.

And b) denigrating a person who has been accused of this as "not elite human capital" and therefore not worth caring about. First of all, the procedure was never finished, so this is tantamount to assuming guilt before innocence in legal proceedings. Secondly, assuming he had done the violent things he had been accused of, it would make not one whit of difference as to whether his deportation was valid or not, and the government should not be able to waive correct processing because someone is sufficiently 'bad'.

I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal.

A quote of the ruling in the comment you replied to:

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive's obligation to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8.

What's unclear about it?

If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?

The answer is that there is no such assurance from the legal system and never has been, and that it's the "lawcucks" who have fooled themselves into believing their fortresses of sand were ever strong enough to stem the tide.

Then let's have the DOJ say that in open court.

If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?

This is the load-bearing part. The latter has already happened, and the former is carefully ignoring that deporting obvious ancestral Americans comes with massive political consequences that deporting an illegal, already-slated-for-deportation immigrant from El Salvador does not.

the former is carefully ignoring that deporting obvious ancestral Americans comes with massive political consequences that deporting an illegal, already-slated-for-deportation immigrant from El Salvador does not.

Trump is clear about wanting to try sending Americans to El Salvador. At what point should we ask if they'll be returned?

When evidence exists of efforts to try and send them.

Until such time that Trump attempts to deport American citizens without due process, claims or insinuations that he's about to if everyone doesn't oppose him over [news cycle of the week] can be appropriately dismissed as cries of wolf.

The question was about the problem of returning them:

...what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?

You can't ask a surgeon about possible complications, after the anesthesia's kicked in.

The question was about the problem of returning them:

And the answer remains the same: it can start being considered a relevant concern when there is evidence that it is a relevant concern.

You can't ask a surgeon about possible complications, after the anesthesia's kicked in.

This would be an excellent reason to establish that there is condition justifying surgery before demanding that someone be placed under anesthesia on a table before a surgeon.

Demanding the surgery be carried out, just because an eager surgeon has already started applying anesthesia in anticipation despite the lack of present condition, is mere malpractice.

I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal.

That's fair, which is why I think it's good to look at what the seasoned legal system is doing to get an idea at what is important and why. In this case, there's a reason the Supreme Court went 9-0 (with a reminder three of them were appointed by Trump himself), there's a reason why the appeals here was 3-0, there's a reason why the Trump admin keeps getting ruled against so much on this case in general.

These are experienced judges, many of whom have deep histories of conservative sided judicial idealogy.

There was some minor procedural error, therefore we must make an elaborate show of correcting it, at great expense, to achieve an outcome that will immediately collapse back to the current status quo. This is your brain on legalism.

Maybe it will just collapse back to the status quo, doesn't really matter. That's not the concern of the courts anyway. The court system doesn't really need to care what happens as long as it's not unconstitutional or against a constitutionally valid law, it does care how it happens if it breaks those though.

Edit: As was written after all

If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal)

from where he'll be repatriated straight into El Salvadore's "black site prison", hopefully for life

Honestly, why the cruelty? I confess, I don't understand it. If some guy, at the age of 16, invaded my very own home and lived in my basement for decades without my knowing, siphoning my electricity and water or whatever, I would not wish this on him.

If you think that prison is cruelty, you are just propagandized. Most people housed in that, or US prisons actually, would historically have already have been executed.

As an excuse for torture, "well, at least we haven't killed them" is not any kind of gotcha. Unless you think torture is never 'cruel' because at least it's not murder, it's a meaningless argument.

Most of the people in that prison deserve a worse fate if half the accusations against them are true.

"Worse" is a confusing term in this context. There is a sense in which being killed is "a worse fate" than being tortured - but torturing someone is a worse thing to do, and a worse thing for a society to condone. I can respect someone who's killed a man, even if I didn't approve of his actions. I couldn't really, fundamentally respect a torturer even if he'd committed torture as part of some trolley-problem with a terrorist and a ticking time-bomb with which I could find no logical fault. By the same logic, I do not want to be part of a society, or indeed, if at all possible, species, which condones torture as punishment, ever, for any reason.

I do not think it wise to empower the state to torture people, but that's not because nobody deserves to be tortured.

My post was intended to be agnostic on the question of whether some people abstractly 'deserve' to be tortured. What I am sayng, what feel in my gut, is that the act of torturing is wrong. Not just "a power we shouldn't give to the state" - wrong. Torture is depraved, an act which stains anyone who commits it. "This sinner deserves Hell", even if it's true, is no excuse to become the Devil yourself.

(I am also against the death penalty for the same reason. But my moral sentiment that killing is wrong is nothing next to my burning certainty than torture is wrong, wrong, WRONG.)

I think people underestimate the badness of US prisons in comparison to El Salvedoran prisons.

US prisons were and probably still are horrendous: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html

Because of the high prison population in the United States the country has become probably the first and only in the world where rape of men is more common than of women

In other countries prison is bad because the guards are bad and don't care about the prisoners.

In the U.S. the prisons are bad because they are filled with American prisoners. Somehow this is often worse. Additionally in the U.S. guards are frequently prevented from "managing" the prison which can cause unnecessary problems.

If some guy, at the age of 16, invaded my very own home and lived in my basement for decades without my knowing, siphoning my electricity and water or whatever, I would not wish this on him.

And what if your parents spent your entire childhood making it extremely clear that they love the random basement hobo more than you, because frankly, they hate your guts? And then they change their will so that he gets the house, and tell you that they hope you end up on the street in a cardboard box because that’s what you deserve. How would you feel about the basement hobo then?

NGL I'd still hate the "parents" more, in the "if I only had two bullets, I'd shoot the traitor twice" sense. I don't really get being angry at illegals unless they're a major drain on society.

NGL I'd still hate the "parents" more

Think a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment is rightists taking out their anger at blacks, Jews, feminists, and white liberals on illegal immigrants because the latter are a more socially acceptable target.

I think this has gone a bit beyond what one could claim with a straight face to be a good analogy for the American illegal immigration situation. And even so, I would not wish the basement hobo were sent to a harsh, overcrowded prison for life. I would resent him and my parents for sure, I'll give you that.

I think you’re failing to decouple two separate penalties here.

They are being deported for being illegal; they are being sent to prison in El Salvador for being a member of MS13.

Yes, I agree that it is cruel to imprison an individual in harsh conditions for entering a country illegally, but it is probably both reasonable and necessary, by some measure, to do so if they are a violent gang member.

Yes, I agree that it is cruel to imprison an individual in harsh conditions for entering a country illegally, but it is probably both reasonable and necessary, by some measure, to do so if they are a violent gang member

Yeah, if they are a violent gang member. He hasn't been convicted in a court of law. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. The US shouldn't have sent him straight to a foreign gulag without a conviction.

Actually he was determined by two court rulings to be ms-13

Not true.

I would expect gang member conviction to carry a higher burden of proof than asylum proceedings, personally...

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Deporting him is one thing, but sending him straight to the gangster's prison for the worst people imaginable because he wore a chicago bulls hat is a bit much. They should at least ask Bukele to let him out.

The guy is a wifebeater and a gangster himself.

You need to actually back up assertions like this, or why you believe it. Not just drop one liners as rebuttals.

Two different judges deemed him part of MS13, the court papers also clearly state he is a wife beater.

https://theworldwatch.com/videos/1629701/dem-senator-denied-meeting-with-ms-13-member-after-flying-to-el-salvado-wife-beater/

Cool. When we tell people not to make low effort assertions without evidence, we are not saying "I don't believe you; prove it to me. We are saying that when you assert things with low effort one liners, proactively provide the evidence.

gangster himself.

Pics or it didn't happen.

because he wore a chicago bulls hat a confidential informant of purportedly verified reliability named him as a ranked member of the gang.

Also, he got stopped doing what looked rather like human trafficking in 2022, but the Biden FBI told the locals to let him go.

confidential informant

Very likely a criminal.

"Human trafficking" in this case being a scare term meaning "He was an illegal alien driving around a van with other illegal aliens".

Transporting 8 illegal aliens from Texas to Maryland in a way that seems suggestive of organization and planning. I think coyotes hiding people in the frames of vehicles to sneak them across the border is a reasonable use case of the term. Carpooling to the Home Depot parking lot, OTOH, is very much not. This case seems somewhere in the middle, probably a bit closer to the former.

Is there a better term you'd suggest instead?

To meet the definition of trafficking, the people being trafficked have to be being forced in some way. There's no evidence of that here; these people could be illegal aliens who paid to get across the border, workers on a traveling contsruction crew, gang members coming back from a gang meeting, or any number of other things without it being "trafficking".

I don’t think traffic implies forced. Coyotes traffic people across the border because the people want to get across the border.

Trafficking does imply forced. Coyotes are involved in human smuggling, but not necessarily human trafficking.

Human trafficking, also known as trafficking in persons, is a crime that involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services, or to engage in commercial sex acts. The coercion can be subtle or overt, physical or psychological. Exploitation of a minor for commercial sex is human trafficking, regardless of whether any form of force, fraud, or coercion was used.

Debt peonage counts, so if the coyotes are taking people across and requiring them to work off the cost of their passage, that's "human trafficking". But if they just pay to get across, it is not.

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as a ranked member of the gang.

In a city in which he has never lived?

Also, he got stopped doing what looked rather like human trafficking in 2022, but the Biden FBI told the locals to let him go.

Source?

In a city in which he has never lived?

I'm not sure the inter-national criminal gang is super strict about territoriality. But sure, adjust in a slightly less probable direction.

Source?

Here

Abrego García was pulled over because the vehicle was observed “speeding and unable to maintain its lane,” according to the documents. Abrego García had an expired Maryland “limited term temporary driver’s license,” which is provided to individuals who are not U.S. citizens, authorities said.

The officer identified eight other individuals in the vehicle and Abrego García advised that he was driving them from Texas to Maryland, according to the documents. None of the passengers had any luggage and all provided the same home address, which was Abrego Garcia’s address, authorities said.

Abrego García allegedly pretended to speak less English than he was capable of and attempted to confuse the officer by responding to the officer’s questions with his own.

Sounds a fair bit like international-criminal gang coyote type work. So maybe re-adjust in a more probable direction.

Re-adjust a bit, but not too far given that the source is The Daily Caller.

It was the first result when I searched. The incident is being reported elsewhere as well. If it's verified, are you going to adjust in favor of the Daily Caller being more reliable, and many other media sources engaging in deception by omission?

Yes, actually, I will.

Oh, lovely. I'll "readjust a bit" about the guy even existing, given that the source is the modern media.

...is that it?

This point on facilitation, for example-

"Facilitate" is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 ("[T]he Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps."). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government's argument that all it must do is "remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia's] return," Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court's command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.

-does not actually provide a definition that serves as an alternative to the administrative agency on what 'facilitate' means. Saying "Facilitate is an active verb" does not say what sort of verb, which is required for a categorical basis to say that no facilitation has occurred.

Without criteria, it would seem the only proof of facilitation the court would accept is the successful return of Garcia.

However, that would seem to contradict this position on executive versus judicial role.

And the differences do not end there. The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

This claim reverses what the previous lack of specificity implies. A position that the government must facilitate the return without specifying the means is an argument of ends, not means. The court in this quotation is again not addressing what actual means are required to constitute facilitation short of achieving an ends- i.e. the return- which is, per this section, the focus of the Executive.

Put another way, the court in question is demanding an ends, without accepting there a means that legitimately constitutes facilitation but is insufficient to achieving this end. This is a direct inversion to the self-declared role of the judiciary of concerning the means, even if it frustrates the executive's ends.

Similarly, your choice of moving quotation has a notable case of bolted horses and barn doors.

If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive's obligation to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8.

The answer is presumably related to the same assurance that relates to the war on terror programs taken by (both of) Trump's predecessors that allowed targeting of actual American citizens, up to and including killing them abroad, without requiring assurances that it would never happen again.

This is notably not factoring in the security state abuses against political opponents that actually did occur during previous administrations, which to my knowledge neither judge or prior administration conceded were improper, let alone offered assurances.

Now, if this judge in question would like to argue that those mean the obligation has already lost its meaning, then well and good. You cannot lose meaning if meaning was already lost. But if the judge maintains that the meaning is currently held despite prior and reoccurring abuses, the judge needs to explain why this case, which does not involve an American citizen, is more concerning than prior cases involving American citizens.

This connects to the authority and/or responsibility issue, which the court similarly doesn't actually seem to address.

Today, both the United States and the El Salvadoran governments disclaim any authority and/or responsibility to return Abrego Garcia. See President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of El Salvador, WHITE HOUSE (Apr. 14, 2025). We are told that neither government has the power to act. The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.

This is not a contradiction. The US does not have the authority to demand a sovereign state turn over its citizens to the US, absent some bilateral agreement between states enabling it. The court does not identify a basis of authority to demand sovereignty over this over El Salvador's objections. In turn, El Salvador has no legal responsibility to turn over Garcia, regardless of the US mistake in deporting him. The court does not identify any basis of a legal responsibility to turn over Garcia.

The consequence of this- that Abrego Gardia has no recourse to US law- does not imply that the US government or judiciary has jurisdiction over him. Garcia's legal prospects in El Salvador also have no implication on US legal jurisdiction. If the court wanted to cite US law that Congress passed to provided the president or even the courts jurisdiction, it certainly could... but if it can't, because no law exists, then prior court precedent recognizes the implication. When Congress can provide authorities in an area, but does not want to, that is indicative of Congressional intent.

The confusion of the limits of american national law to non-American citizens in foreign states has been a consistent theme of the critiques of the judges to date, and this is no different. Appeals to Eisenhower and a domestic internal policy issue furthers the apples-to-oranges comparison.

This is not a contradiction. The US does not have the authority to demand a sovereign state turn over its citizens to the US, absent some bilateral agreement between states enabling it. The court does not identify a basis of authority to demand sovereignty over this over El Salvador's objections. In turn, El Salvador has no legal responsibility to turn over Garcia, regardless of the US mistake in deporting him. The court does not identify any basis of a legal responsibility to turn over Garcia.

I think this whole thing stems from a common misunderstanding of the court system and how it works. There's this often understood idea of law being entirely about saying the correct magic words in the correct way to get technicalities and while it's certainly true that's a large portion of it, judges have always had the freedom to look into things a bit past that as well in determining if orders are being carried out in good faith. You can be held in contempt (and it happens pretty often) when people are caught "officially" following the rules, but admitting they aren't elsewhere.

The court system is not intended to be blindly idiotic. It's the reason why Eisenhower, despite his disagreement with the rulings actually executed on it, instead of playing games pretending to. You can still do that mind you, they tend to give lots of leeway but the court system would have to be blind to not see how the Trump admin is purposely sabotaging efforts. And again, the court system is not intended to be blind. That's part of why we have multiple judges (for example this ninth circuit ruling had three judges) and so many appeals processes to begin with, because there is room for interpretive and judicial idealogical differences.

When I can buy and carry a gun in New Jersey, or better yet any state in the union, I will listen to demands to respect the ultimate authority of the court system from the left. Not until then. Yes, Eisenhower executed on rulings he didn't like. He turned out to be a chump to do so, because it meant the left got the benefit of favorable court rulings in all circumstances, whereas the right got them only when the enforcement and the lower courts were ALSO controlled by the right.

"until the courts rule the exact way I want, I shouldn't have to respect them" is to be quite frank, anti-American. Not just in disrespecting our legal system as a whole, but in disrespecting one of the fundamental values America and western democracy is built on, the rule of law and proper legal process.

Yes, Eisenhower executed on rulings he didn't like. He turned out to be a chump to do so,

Eisenhower despite his different views on racial segregation still agreed in this fundamental principle of the American system and faithfully executed on the rulings because of that, not because he was a chump.

"until the courts rule the exact way I want, I shouldn't have to respect them" is to be quite frank, anti-American.

Many of us have spent a considerable amount of time and effort cataloguing the ways in which Blue Tribe has done exactly this for literally decades. Guns, illegal immigration, and drugs have all demonstrated the pattern of victory through sustained refusal to recognize rule of law. The comment you are replying to is pointing out that multiple Supreme Court victories over more than a decade were categorically ignored when Progressives found it convenient to do so, and so appeals to lesser court decisions in favor of progressives hold no water.

When a Tribe systematically breaks the rules, they don't get to appeal to those rules any more.

"America" is dead, and has been for some time. The current situation is not America dying, but the rotting of the national corpse.

Not just in disrespecting our legal system as a whole, but in disrespecting one of the fundamental values America and western democracy is built on, the rule of law and proper legal process.

This is probably a very persuasive argument for people who do not have an extremely long catalogue of previous "rule of law" violations to point to, and who do not have a working understanding of the phrase "manipulation of procedural outcomes" or "isolated demand for rigor".

I do not believe that Blue Tribe can credibly offer "rule of law" because I have observed them violate the principle too many times without significant consequence. Guns, drugs, illegal immigration, "no justice, no peace", tenure for communist terrorists, a long history of government corruption... the list of objections is quite long. You are appealing to phrases that lost their meaning for many people a long time ago. And maybe you are the sole remaining principled Progressive, but you are not the Pope of Blue Tribe, and if your bespoke principles do not generalize at the population level, of what use are they?

People have been pointing out for a long time that the principles you appeal to were not sustainable without significant reform. Reforms were rejected, and now those principles are no longer being sustained.

Eisenhower despite his different views on racial segregation still agreed in this fundamental principle of the American system and faithfully executed on the rulings because of that, not because he was a chump.

You will not get any more Eisenhowers, because post-Eisenhower events built durable common knowledge among Red Tribe that Eisenhower was, in fact, a chump. None of this is new; we've been debating this for about a decade at this point, and the point of view you're arguing against is supported by quite a bit of solid evidence.

When a Tribe systematically breaks the rules, they don't get to appeal to those rules any more.

"America" is dead, and has been for some time. The current situation is not America dying, but the rotting of the national corpse.

Yeah if you just make up stuff about all the evils the "enemy" is doing where they're just straight up ignoring court orders over and over then I guess it would look like the country is dead.

People have been pointing out for a long time that the principles you appeal to were not sustainable without significant reform. Reforms were rejected, and now those principles are no longer being sustained.

None of this is new; we've been debating this for about a decade at this point, and the point of view you're arguing against is supported by quite a bit of solid evidence.

Hey if Americans agree with you on this specific point, start pushing for politicians to write a new amendment! We have a process established since the founding fathers for this and it's been done 27 times already. Start a movement to electorally challenge politicians that won't cooperate with it. We're in a democracy, use your voice and convince your fellow citizens. If they don't agree, then tough shit.

Yeah if you just make up stuff about all the evils the "enemy" is doing where they're just straight up ignoring court orders over and over then I guess it would look like the country is dead.

And if I have a large amount of evidence showing Blue states and federal regimes have in fact made a habit of ignoring court orders and otherwise flouting rule of law, then would you agree that the country does in fact appear to be dead from your perspective as well?

Hey if Americans agree with you on this specific point, start pushing for politicians to write a new amendment!

What would be the point of such an approach?

I used to argue that the Constitution was whatever five Justices said it was, but now it is not even that. We won multiple Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment over the past few decades. Blue states and their circuit courts ignored the rulings, and then we got to observe how unified defiance from "subordinate" legislatures and courts shapes Supreme Court jurisprudence, as the Justices refuse to take cases or deliver decisions that would spark further defiance. And it's not as though Federal law worked any better. We decided that Tribal interests should be protected by law. We won elections, drafted laws, and passed them by the legitimate process. Then Blue Tribe simply ignored them, and the courts have let them do it.

Start a movement to electorally challenge politicians that won't cooperate with it. We're in a democracy, use your voice and convince your fellow citizens. If they don't agree, then tough shit.

Blue Tribe could have done this with immigration. Red Tribe offered them a compromise, an amnesty for existing illegals, paired with actual border enforcement. They took the amnesty and then not only failed to deliver any border enforcement, but spent decades actively undermining what enforcement existed and thumbing their noses at the law. They did the same with narcotics laws. They did the same with laws aimed at protecting freedom of religion.

The funniest part, though, is that you don't recognize that we are in fact following your advice. We have not rioted nation-wide. We are not actively fomenting assassins. We are not burning down the homes and offices of people we don't like. We organized and won an election, and now we are playing the game according to the existing rules.

The funniest part, though, is that you don't recognize that we are in fact following your advice. We have not rioted nation-wide. We are not actively fomenting assassins. We are not burning down the homes and offices of people we don't like. We organized and won an election, and now we are playing the game according to the existing rules.

That doesn't make any sense given the rest of your argument is "it's ok to ignore the rules".

It's also an interesting question in general, if one is so willing to abandon a principle simply because they believe others don't follow it, then was it really a principle of theirs to begin with? Perhaps those people are simply against the classic American values to begin with and they are seeking an excuse to abandon it.

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"until the courts rule the exact way I want, I shouldn't have to respect them" is to be quite frank

The Supreme Court has ruled. Several times. In favor of my side. I still don't get my gun, because there has been resistance all down the line, including lower Federal courts, state courts, state legislators, and governors. What is most likely to happen is the Supreme Court will note that it has made an order it cannot enforce and modify or reverse that order to maintain the appearance of its own authority. At which point the anti-gun side will have won, not by obeying the system but by defying it. So clearly this is an acceptable tactic on the part of the same people crying about the sanctity of (lower!) court decisions now, and I should reject their appeals to said sanctity.

Eisenhower despite his different views on racial segregation still agreed in this fundamental principle of the American system and faithfully executed on the rulings because of that, not because he was a chump.

His counterparts on the left did not agree with that fundamental principle of the American system and did not faithfully execute on rulings that went against them. So Eisenhower was, indeed, a chump, though perhaps he could not have known at the time. It has been 17 years since Heller and 3 since Bruen... when do citizens of anti-gun states get their right to keep and bear arms enforced?

The Supreme Court has ruled. Several times. In favor of my side. I still don't get my gun, because there has been resistance all down the line, including lower Federal courts, state courts, state legislators, and governors.

You either misunderstand the specifics of the rulings (like Heller and Bruen do allow for some restrictions or "Shall-issue permitting" for instance) and fail to pass those lawful restrictions, or you have a great court case in your hands and there are plenty of gun groups and lawyers who would be willing to fund and help your case if they believe it's likely to win.

New Jersey while more restrictive than other states still has 20% of homes with a gun in it so I have to wonder why you don't have a gun if you're wanting one so bad.

Do you have a felony? A conviction for domestic violence? What is it that's restricting you but not 20% of homes?

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New Jersey's "shall issue" purchase permit requires anyone who wants to buy a gun to submit the names of two adults, who have known the applicant for three years, and will vouch for that person. While the statute itself only requires those adults to be unrelated for carry permits and does not require those adults to be NJ residents, many jurisdictions will reject purchase permit requests not matching these 'rules' (sometimes as explicit policy). This is not a trivial ask for a large portion of people working in New Jersey, given that the state has gone out of its way to smother gun culture and slaughter the hostages; if you don't work in police or military sectors, you may not have any gun-friendly people among your coworkers or neighbors.

If you've ever seen a mental health professional, you're required to provide their contact information. Don't know it, or a shrink you saw twenty years ago happen to be antigun? Gfl. This includes not just involuntary commitment -- the recent A4769 explicitly prohibits purchase permits for anyone who's ever had a "voluntary commitment", and the permit form itself now asks if applicants have ever "attended, treated or observed by any doctor or psychiatrist or at any hospital or mental institution".

In all cases, failure to provide accurate information has been used to reject later applications with correct info, even where a genuine mistake occurred. There's a still-used "To any person where the issuance would not be in the interest of the public health, safety or welfare because the person is found to be lacking the essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted with a firearm" prong that many jurisdictions have been throwing for pretty much whatever reason they want.

All of these things are readily discoverable through a quick google search. And The_Nybbler has mentioned most of them here, in ways that can be discovered by doing an author:the_nybbler "new jersey" search. Instead, you've thrown allegations of a felony or domestic violence condition, and pointed to a survey run by an explicitly antigun policy outfit, which gets numbers that are wildly out of line with every other analysis and the state's own estimates.

Similarly, New Jersey's response to Breun's explicit text that :

But expanding the category of “sensitive places” simply to all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement defines the category of “sensitive places” far too broadly. Respondents’ argument would in effect exempt cities from the Second Amendment and would eviscerate the general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense that we discuss in detail below. See Part III–B, infra. Put simply, there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a “sensitive place” simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.

hasn't been quite as bad a tantrum as Hawaii declaring multiple islands a sensitive place, but it's pretty close.

There are a few challenges to these laws pending, but they have threefold problems:

  • It takes the better part of a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit with even a chance of success, in the ideal situations. There's places doing it, like ANJRPC, but there aren't many, they can't fund every case, and for a variety of reasons they have to very selective about what cases they do bring.
  • SCOTUS has been overwhelmingly willing to let these cases percolate, even where defiance of the upper court ruling is pretty explicit.
  • It's very easy to moot specific as-applied challenges, without making large-scale changes to the law or its application. That's especially true for carry permits, but courts have bucked normal proceedural rules to find cases with even live monetary damages moot.

And that's ignoring the 'special cases' bullshit, like Koons taking seventeen months (and counting) from oral args before a decision was released, or Bianchi having a judge sit on a dissent long enough to have a separate case she was also sitting on conflict with it to block the majority of judges from publishing an opinion.

Instead, you've thrown allegations of a felony or domestic violence condition, and pointed to a survey run by an explicitly antigun policy outfit, which gets numbers that are wildly out of line with every other analysis and the state's own estimates.

No, I asked you why you are unable to access a gun when 20% of households can and a common answer in the population is being a criminal so it's a pretty likely possible reason for it.

New Jersey's "shall issue" purchase permit requires anyone who wants to buy a gun to submit the names of two adults, who have known the applicant for three years, and will vouch for that person.

Do you not know two adults who will vouch for you? That seems a red flag on its own.

If you've ever seen a mental health professional, you're required to provide their contact information. Don't know it, or a shrink you saw twenty years ago happen to be antigun? Gfl. This includes not just involuntary commitment -- the recent A4769 explicitly prohibits purchase permits for anyone who's ever had a "voluntary commitment", and the permit form itself now asks if applicants have ever "attended, treated or observed by any doctor or psychiatrist or at any hospital or mental institution".

20% of household have guns, I doubt 20% of households have never seen a doctor ever so it seems like there's a misunderstanding on your side. Either that or it is violating rights and there is really just a large portion of people who have never seen a doctor before.

Somehow they've been able to do it and while I don't know the specific of state law if they're specifically violating court rulings there are processes to punish them for it in court. Either they're "skirting' the rulings by doing something not yet ruled against, you misunderstand the rulings in question, SCOTUS is compromised by gun haters (despite as you say ruling in favor of the 2nd amendment multiple times), or you're in the middle of a legal correction and are just frustrated that procedures can take time.

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Yeah, yeah, there's always some excuse that the victory of my side doesn't count. Nevertheless, I still cannot lawfully get a gun in my home state of New Jersey or any other state, if I had a legal gun I could not carry it, and further restrictions on guns keep getting past and either upheld by the lower courts or simply shielded from scrutiny. Having seen my advocates go through the process the whole way TWICE (Heller and Bruen), winning both times, and the situation on the ground not changing, I do not believe this process actually works, except in a very selective manner.

Nevertheless, I still cannot lawfully get a gun in my home state of New Jersey or any other state,

So you are a violent felon or something? I hope you understand why even most gun advocates, including in Republican states are fine with limiting you having access to firearms.

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I think this whole thing stems from a common misunderstanding of the court system and how it works. There's this often understood idea of law being entirely about saying the correct magic words in the correct way to get technicalities and while it's certainly true that's a large portion of it, judges have always had the freedom to look into things a bit past that as well in determining if orders are being carried out in good faith.

Judges do not have the freedom to invent jurisdiction.

Nor do judges have the freedom to define good faith with their preferred results of foreign affairs.

You can be held in contempt (and it happens pretty often) when people are caught "officially" following the rules, but admitting they aren't elsewhere.

The Trump administration is not admitting they have jurisdiction over Garcia elsewhere.

There are motivated partisans who are claiming that payments to El Salvador amount to administrative control and thus jurisdiction over Garcia, but alas the fungibility of money does not actually demonstrate either jurisdiction or even administrative control.

The court system is not intended to be blindly idiotic. It's the reason why Eisenhower, despite his disagreement with the rulings actually executed on it, instead of playing games pretending to.

Did the Eisenhower case entail individuals over which the United States government executive branch no longer had jurisdiction?

If not, the continued attempts to appeal to the Eisenhower case are indicative of bad faith that intends to ignore the non-applicability of dissimilar cases to the legal issue at hand. And that legal issue is the jurisdiction issue.

You can still do that mind you, they tend to give lots of leeway but the court system would have to be blind to not see how the Trump admin is purposely sabotaging efforts.

Why is a natural consequence of a loss of jurisdiction being treated as proof of sabotage?

The nature of deportation is that it removes an individual not only from a country's territory, but it's governance. The court's order to 'facilitate the return' of Garcia is a demand for an result of governance if it does not acknowledge that 'facilitation' can acceptably not delivere a preferred result. However, the nature of sovereignty under international law is that government of a separate government does not have jurisdiction over the affairs of another country absent criteria that would allow a claim of jurisdiction. These criteria generally hinge around citizenship, which does not apply.

And again, the court system is not intended to be blind. That's part of why we have multiple judges (for example this ninth circuit ruling had three judges) and so many appeals processes to begin with, because there is room for interpretive and judicial idealogical differences.

What does the number of judges and appeals processes matter if those judges and appeals do not have jurisdiction over a foreign citizen in a foreign country?

Well if you think you're right, you're welcome to volunteer your service as legal counsel to the Trump admin. Maybe you'll be the one to convince the judges on the Supreme Court and Fourth District that they don't understand the process of law.

Can't answer the sovereignty and jurisdiction issues, eh?

I'm sure your position will get stronger if you try to avoid it for another last word.

Many of those things have already been answered by the courts or are in the process of being answered.

I'm sure your position will get stronger if you try to avoid it for another last word.

Do you not understand how the legal system works? It's not "I think it should work like X" or "I believe it'd be better if it was Y". The courts do not have jurisdiction over El Salvador, the courts are not claiming to have that. They claim to have jurisdiction over the US, which they do. And as for their rulings in the US, there is no answer you or I could give because it's not our calls as individuals, that is the role of the judicial branch. If Americans don't like it we have official mechanisms to change things like writing new laws, impeaching judges or even making a new amendment in the constitution. It might be rarely changed but it is a living document and Americans when they agree have been able to change it 27 different times.

It is possible, go out and convince your fellow voters to push locally and federally for a new amendment that takes power away from the court system.

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Many of those things have already been answered by the courts or are in the process of being answered.

No, they haven't. Hence your forced resort to repeated appeals to non-equivalent cases that don't apply to the relevant issues of foreign citizens in foreign countries, while dodging the lack of criteria that were already raised. Hence also why, when repeatedly challenged to this, you conduct an appeal to authority whose limitations are the subject of question. And whose argument already failed by past actions of previous administrations.

Unsurprising, but I'm sure the demands of bad faith partisans will improve if you ignore it for another attempt at a last word.

Hence also why, when repeatedly challenged to this, you conduct an appeal to authority whose limitations are the subject of question. And whose argument already failed by past actions of previous administrations.

If you fundamentally don't like how the US legal system makes the courts the decider, then that's fine. You can have that view. But it doesn't change how the system works.

Nothing changes because you keep saying "bad faith, bad faith!" to someone explaining that your feelings don't make facts.

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Exactly what due process do people think was missed? The guy had multiple days in court, and had a standing deportation order, no? If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed? If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?

How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants? There was certainly no due processes when they came in; can we hold the entire Biden administration and Democrat party in contempt?

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?

This great man expressed his unflagging belief that "[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts." Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive's own words, "[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result." Id.

Let whosoever among you has demanded prosecution for Blue State governors who ignore the clear and plain SC rulings on the 2nd Amendment be the first to speak up.

If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?

Yep, I'd be pretty satisfied by this outcome. My objection to this deportation is pretty much the same as (and milder than) the objection I have to, as @Dean pointed out above, the intentional killing of American citizens without a trial.

If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?

Maybe not anymore but I don't think this would have blown up like it did if the place he was shipped to wasn't somewhere we were specifically prohibited from sending him.

How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants?

I mean you're talking about 1 in 30 people living within the US, who came here over the course of decades. It's not reasonable to expect for them to all be deported over the course of months. The number of illegal immigrants in the US has stayed pretty constant over the past couple decades, so I expect that just enforcing existing laws and executing existing processes will be enough to reduce the number of people living here without legal status. And I don’t see any particular reason this has become an emergency that needs to be resolved this year, and historically the executive granting itself emergency powers to deal with an ongoing slow-burning problem has not gone well.

The number of illegal immigrants in the US has stayed pretty constant over the past couple decades,

...?

Which numbers, specifically, are you thinking of?

Generally when I hear this argument, it refers to articles like this one, which presents arguments like the prominant graphic one that the 'undocumented' migrant population has remained relatively constant in the US since 2008 (~12 million.)

However, they tend to bury the categorization schemes like this-

Arrivals of undocumented immigrants are offset by many hundreds of thousands of departures from the undocumented population each year, including those that emigrate voluntarily, are removed by DHS, adjust to legal status, or die. Reliable statistics are not available to measure these four ways of leaving the undocumented population.

However, one of these categories is notably not like the others. 'Adjust to legal status' is a legal category shift, not a departure (or death) of the person.

If you provide a temporary legal status to a million illegal immigrants, your country's population has still increased by a million people, even if you offset that number by a million legal-category grants. This is a false equivalence of categories that avoids dealing with the implications and insinuations of absorbing a million peoples who arrived illegally, mostly by handwaving the numbers away as no longer counting.

Further, even the 'removed by DHS' category is subject to statistical chicanery. Or as a former president once admitted, "a little deceptive."

During the Obama administration, for example, the Obama administration's deportation statistics conflated different actions that made the number of deportations appear high even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US decreased. That sort of mismatched occurred because at- or immediately-within border returns were publicly equated to deportations. Moreover, the Obama administration counted removals that previous administrations wouldn't have. This was a recategorization that let Obama claim a hard-on-illegal-immigration reputation even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US- i.e. deportation of people who got past the border crossing phase- dropped by 40%. This practice resumed with the Biden administration

So when the (often pro-migration) studies make claims that the migrant population is generally steady, it's always important to see how they address the issue of re-categorization of migrants (redefining illegal arrivals as legal residents no longer tracked) and the conflation of deportation types.

If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.

Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.

The number of illegal immigrants in the US has stayed pretty constant over the past couple decades

Why do you think this is true? There was a huge spike in illegal and quasi-legal immigration during the Biden administration.

Huge relative to the number of illegal immigrants already in the country? I will repeat the question I asked Dean:

If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.

Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.

Speaking as likely the only person in this forum who has ever dug ditches alongside illegal immigrants, I would expect it to be much, much lower. If you've been here for 11 years and the best you've got is waiting outside Home Depot, you probably utterly suck.

And that's beside the point. The number of people who are estimated to have come in during the last 4 years is comparable to the total prior illegal population.

Do you think all of the previous ones dipped during the Biden administration?

The number of people who are estimated to have come in during the last 4 years is comparable to the total prior illegal population.

I expect this statistic double-counts people, because I find it quite doubtful that the median length of time that people have been living here illegally is 4 years or less (which it would have to be, if more than half of the people who are currently living here illegally came in the last 4 years).

I don't dispute that Biden's immigration policy was bad BTW. I specifically dispute the claim that before Trump I illegal immigration was not an emergency, but between the end of Trump I and the start of Trump II, it became such an emergency that it now requires resolution within months, and so we must set aside rule of law and due process concerns.

because I find it quite doubtful that the median length of time that people have been living here illegally is 4 years or less

Why? Is there literally anything you're hanging this on aside from raw hope and vibes?

I live in California, I interact with people who are not here legally on a quite regular basis. Thinking about e.g. the people I know who have a new partner/housemate, or got a new nanny/gardener, and then filtering down to those that are not here legally, they're mostly people who have been here for a while. Substantial selection effects, obviously.

But also census data says, of foreign-born non-citizens, the distribution of dates of entry as of 2023 was

Entered 2010 or later: 12.8M (56%)
Entered 2000 to 2009: 4.9M (21%)
Entered 1990 to 1999: 3.0M (13%)
Entered before 1990: 2.1M (9%)
Total: 22.9M

As of 2021 the same data was

Entered 2010 or later: 10.2M (48%)
Entered 2000 to 2009: 5.3M 24.79%
Entered 1990 to 1999: 3.3M 15.66%
Entered before 1990: 2.4M 11.32%
Total 21.2M

So that's an increase of 1.7M non-citizen immigrants in the 2 year period from 2021 to 2023, with an increase of 2.6M who entered after 2010 (and a decrease of ~900k non-citizens who entered before 2010 over the same time period, who left/died/gained citizenship). And keep in mind that in a normal year 700k to 1M green cards are issued. So I don't see space for half of illegal immigrants to have come over later than 2020.

Where are you getting your data, aside from vibes?

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Land of opportunity standards have been dropping though. I know a bunch of illegals who came over 15-20 years ago, and a lot of them have their own lawnmowing/landscaping/general services businesses now. (God knows how they manage the finances.)
But now the new guys coming over don't have as many niches left to fill, except being cheap labor for the last cohort. I see a lot more of them going for dead end jobs and never climbing out

Exactly what due process do people think was missed?

Lucky for us that was provided "If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal)."

If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed

From a legal perspective, yes. There's a reason why the courts (including this Reagan appointed Bush supported conservative judge) have been so consistent here.

How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants? There was certainly no due processes when they came in; can we hold the entire Biden administration and Democrat party in contempt?

This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of government. Due process applies to government taking action, it is a limit on the ability of government to do what it pleases to people in its jurisdiction.

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

Courts are lenient, but they are not intended to be blind. They can easily see through the obvious and barely hidden ruse that if Trump really wanted to, he could help facilitate Garcia's return quite easily. One easy way to help for instance would be to stop paying El Salvador to hold him there.

This isn't unique to the Trump admin, judges have always been able to consider a wider context in their decisions. This can even happen with normal citizens in criminal/civil court. There is a reason why the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on this, despite judicial disagreements they're all seasoned experts just like Wilkinson and they understand this well.

Courts are lenient, but they are not intended to be blind. They can easily see through the obvious and barely hidden ruse that if Trump really wanted to, he could help facilitate Garcia's return quite easily. One easy way to help for instance would be to stop paying El Salvador to hold him there.

You do understand that the Trump administration maintains that they are not paying El Salvador to hold Garcia, right? I'm pretty sure I have replied to you before indicating that.

Maybe Félix Ulloa was lying when he said the Trump admin is paying them to house the deportees, but it's weird to imagine that they accepted a deal to house them without anything in return. So if it's not the money, what shady deal is going on that they're trying to cover up?

He's an El Salvadoran citizen, which means El Salvador is obligated to accept him back, without payment. Venezuela's relations with the US are already bad enough that they can shirk this obligation without much trouble, but Bukele wants a good relationship with the US so he won't do that. He's in CECOT because Bukele thinks he's a member of MS-13 and that's where Bukele wants members of MS-13.

There are multiple meanings to "US Government is paying to house prisoners in ES". One is that the U.S. is basically paying hotel fees per prisoner to have them housed in an El Salvador prison. In this case, sure you could simply stop paying the fee and presumably El Salvador might feel obliged to release him. Another is that the U.S. is providing a block grant or something else of value of the privilege of having the repatriated nationals accepted by El Salvador at all, or as general compensation for the fact that many need to be imprisoned by El Salvador. In that case, it's not a simple matter of procedure but actual foreign policy to threaten to cut off funding over the disposition of a single individual.

So if it's not the money, what shady deal is going on that they're trying to cover up?

First thing that comes to mind: what was the level of tariffs set for El Salvador during the recent drama?

Lucky for us that was provided "If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal)."

So if they do this tomorrow via zoom call, you're going to switch sides on the debate and boldly battle the people claiming that bad things have happened?

From a legal perspective, yes. There's a reason why the courts (including this Reagan appointed Bush supported conservative judge) have been so consistent here.

I'm excited just imagining all the consistency!

Due process applies to government taking action, it is a limit on the ability of government to do what it pleases to people in its jurisdiction.

The government took many actions that it pleased to people in it's jurisdictions in facilitating the 10-30 million.

One easy way to help for instance would be to stop paying El Salvador to hold him there.

Do we have any evidence that this is the case beyond Van Hollen claiming that the ES VP told him this? Given the TdA people we are paying for, that seems like a situation with a high likelihood for misunderstandings.

So if they do this tomorrow via zoom call, you're going to switch sides on the debate and boldly battle the people claiming that bad things have happened?

It might be surprising to hear that some people care about the rule of law instead of just partisan "Lawbreaking I agree with = good, lawbreaking I don't like = bad" but yes.

I recommend looking up people like John Locke and William Blackstone to get a basic idea of the foundational values our modern western legal system operate on.

Great. I'm sure you have a large backlog of posts making this same point at progressives, right? Are you familiar with the concept of an "isolated demand for rigor"?

Are you implying that you a stranger, not knowing everything I talk about by the nature of being a complete stranger have any means whatsoever to accuse me of hypocrisy here?

If you're gonna argue with the made up vision of other people you don't know that you have imagined in your head, then enjoy yourself.

Just for the record, going to someone's userpage by clicking on their handle does, in fact, allow you to see everything that person's posted on theMotte. Also, theMotte is small enough that some people (though not me) do read basically everything.

That's still incredibly flawed to assume reading through my limited postings on a single website make you meaningfully less of a stranger who does not know me or what I believe/have previously done.

This is no excuse to conjure up an imaginary strawman of a conversation partner and make unfounded allegations against them because of the mismatch between reality and strawman.

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Unless they have a private account of course, which I've noticed is never a good sign.

accuse me of hypocrisy here

I'm heavily hinting at it, while offering you every reasonable opportunity to demonstrate that the accusation is inapplicable.

Needless to say, I shant be holding my breath, and absence of evidence is very much Bayesian evidence of absence.

"if you don't entertain my made up accusation of a stranger I don't know anything about, then it must be true" is an interesting way to look at the world

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Exactly what due process do people think was missed? The guy had multiple days in court, and had a standing deportation order, no?

And the result of his days in court was the right to not be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador, specifically a prison in El Salvador. So I'd say "The part where the government complies with the order (or goes through the process of reversing it)" was missed.

If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?

Whether the millions of people hearing about this will all be happy, well that's statistically impossible. But you've described one of the legal routes, alongside finding a different country to send him to.

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

An actual attempt at diplomacy? Not giving them money to fund said prison? The expectation here is only for the Administration to behave in a manner as if they were reasonably attempting to get him back, which it's blatantly obvious they are doing everything they think they can to try to defy the order.

How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants?

As much as the law says. If that's too much, change the laws. The government does not get to ignore laws and court orders because they feel like it. And no, I don't care about those times that you subjectively feel that Democrats got away with it. Right here and right now Trump is trying to do so and the court is trying to stop him from doing so.

Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?

Yes, actually. A unanimous opinion from a conservative Supreme Court appears to agree on this.

Arguments surrounding the guy's immigration status are irrelevant here. At no point has the administration argued that its obligations would be any different were he an American citizen; it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government. Period. If the court sides with the administration, there's nothing preventing Trump from deciding that it's easier to send a high-profile citizen criminal to El Salvador than to provide the due process the law affords him. And who is going to argue? After all, there was certainly no due process provided to the victims of his crimes. At that point, 200 years of constitutional law will go down the toilet. Every citizen is entitled to due process, unless the government decides he isn't is not the hallmark of a free society.

it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government.

This wouldn't be a sustainable precedent generally, though: if the judiciary can compel specific actions in international relations, even returning American citizens generally, how do you bound that power? Should we have invaded Venezuela to free the Citgo Six? Or Italy to free Amanda Knox? Congress explicitly allowed the executive to invade The Netherlands in 2002 in such a hypothetical situation, so I don't think you can just wave off "by any means necessary, but not those means."

I never said that the court should require "any means necessary". I think that there is a certain bar above which you can say that the administration is making satisfactory efforts to facilitate his return, and that courts are qualified to determine where that line is. The problem here is that the administration has made clear that they have no intention of doing anything; indeed that their preferred outcome is that the deportee remain imprisoned in El Salvador. If the administration at least tried to give the appearance that they were making minimal efforts to secure the guy's return, I'd be more sympathetic to the government's argument. But they're making a public show of doing nothing.

If the Court has a better plan, then they should order it and get it over with.

The district court order the government is appealing requires them to provide updates and outline steps being taken to effectuate his release. The government is arguing that they aren't required to do that. I don't think anyone is under the impression that El Salvador wouldn't return him if the Trump administration were serious about getting him back.

Sorry, this is about the principle. Do you think the courts can generally demand the executive make specific foreign policy actions, requiring specific ends in direct contradiction to the logic in the legal decision upthread? Can you elaborate exactly what the limits of this judicial power are? Remember, we're all being DEEPLY CONCERNED about slippery slope precedents - can you show us exactly where the judges have explicitly claimed that they CANNOT order the executive to overthrow foreign governments? I mean, if they can order Trump to do this here, then there is NO LIMIT on them ordering him to do literally anything, no matter how insane and evil!

Right? That's how the arguments elsewhere in this thread have gone.

Remember, we're all being DEEPLY CONCERNED about slippery slope precedents - can you show us exactly where the judges have explicitly claimed that they CANNOT order the executive...

I think there's a decent argument to claim that Marbury v. Madison has been a slippery slope to such judicial overreach. As evidence, I'd actually point to Roberts' preference for judicial restraint: he seems aware that there isn't an inherent limit on what powers the judicial branch would claim (who would overrule them?) as long as the other branches are keen to follow along. The corollary there is that if the Court were ever to truly "reveal its power level," it might well find out it's not as high as it thinks it is. I was listening to the Louisiana v. Callais oral arguments yesterday, and it seemed like there was an implicit awareness that redistricting precedent at least in theory allows the judiciary to destroy the districts of arbitrary members of Congress, and that it needs to balance its rulings WRT the Voting Rights Act (which are IMHO not sustainable as defined mathematically) and the states' inherent political powers.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to write a legal opinion outlining any proposed limits of judicial interference with executive action. What I will say is that from a practical perspective, it doesn't matter. You can propose all sorts of scary scenarios you want where the president is required to wage nuclear war based on a court order for something seemingly trivial, but I'm not moved by them for the simple reason that such a system is vastly less scary than the one we're currently presumably operating under. Per the government's arguments, the president—one man—could achieve any of these insane and evil ends on a whim, with no check whatsoever other than the courage of subordinates to defy orders. The argument in favor of this position is that the president is at least elected, and thus reflects the will of the people. But leaving it to the courts is the safer option. If the courts did order the president to overthrow a foreign government it would only be after several levels of review that requires at least some consensus among multiple people. I'm not arguing that the court should necessarily have this much power, or that the president shouldn't have a large amount of discretion, but even if we take the slippery slope all the way to the bottom, I still don't see what the huge concern is relative to the existing structure.

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If the issue under debate is due process, how can his immigration status be "irrelevant"? His immigration status is what determines how much process is due.

His immigration status is what determines how much process is due.

It may do, but even the Trump administration admits that the result of the due process he was entitled to has simply been ignored and now they say it doesn't matter because they have no obligations to someone in a foreign principle. The point is that the same logic could apply to citizens. Say a domestic citizen criminal is due to be deported to be held in a foreign prison, the judiciary decides this is not legal, but then the executive decides to do it anyway, the exact same logic Trump uses ('you can't compel us to take any action related to foreign policy') still applies and the citizen never returns.

result of the due process he was entitled

What exactly does this mean to you? I feel like everyone arguing this is just treating "due process" as an incantation. The part of the process that was missed was that they were supposed to fill out an extra form before doing exactly what they did.

I feel like everyone arguing this is just treating "due process" as an incantation.

I'm fairly certain that this point "due process" has become "enough layers of review until my desired outcome is reached, and no more." Which isn't to say that due process isn't a good idea generally, but maybe we need pre-commitment to what the process should be, like we've started registering scientific studies to prevent cherry-picking results.

The issue under debate isn't due process. The government made no argument in its motion about the amount of due process, if any, should have been afforded to the deportee. It was simply about whether the courts can compel the executive to take a particular diplomatic action.

Arguments surrounding the guy's immigration status are irrelevant here. At no point has the administration argued that its obligations would be any different were he an American citizen; it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government. Period.

I'm sorry, but this seems so stupid it's hard to take it seriously. Are you somehow under the impression that orders for deportation are routinely assigned against American citizens?

Does every legal document regarding the sentencing of a convicted criminal to prison have a clause specifying that the government is NOT claiming the ability to randomly throw innocent people in jail? Or do we just assume that people aren't completely retarded?

it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government.

Yes? Obviously? Do you think the courts can, e.g., force the executive to take any and all actions necessary to effectuate the release of, say, Britney Griner?

If the court sides with the administration, there's nothing preventing Trump from deciding that it's easier to send a high-profile citizen criminal to El Salvador than to provide the due process the law affords him.

Are you claiming there are absolutely no legal restrictions on the US government kidnapping and black bagging citizens?

Every citizen is entitled to due process, unless the government decides he isn't is not the hallmark of a free society.

We already live in a society where the government can have minor citizens obliterated from the sky with no due process.

And you ignored all of the questions I asked. I'm inclined to think you don't actually have any kind of a real theory of the law here, and are just flailing out of raw oppositional sentiment.

take any and all actions

There are some intermediate stages between 'any and all actions necessary' and 'publicly approve of and pay for his foreign imprisonment'.

Neat. When are the courts going to clarify how much power they have to drive foreign policy like that?

Exactly what due process do people think was missed?

They don't. They are simply lying. Yes, it is my belief that to say Garcia was "denied due process" is a lie.

I spent the first few days or so believing that the Trump administration had simply picked up someone off the street who looked brown enough to be an illegal immigrant and sent them off to El Salvamo without so much as a leaf of paperwork. No due process. No oversight.

I was lied to, and the lies had their intended effect of planting a false understanding of the facts into my mind. "This could happen to any citizen!" Please.

I'm most disappointed in myself. After eight years of this shit I still haven't learned to assume every negative thing I hear about Trump is an outright lie until I see it with my own eyes.

They don't. They are simply lying. Yes, it is my belief that to say Garcia was "denied due process" is a lie.

Okay, coming in to this late because I was hoping someone else would address it.

This is really skirting the line. You may sincerely believe that literally no one actually believes Garcia was denied due process. If so, you are engaging in a complete failure to extend even a little bit of charity or theory of the mind to people who think differently from you, including (obviously) people here in this forum. Even if you didn't directly address them, you're clearly addressing this at them. Coming as close as you think you can get away with to "Anyone who disagrees with me on this is a liar."

Besides obviously being intended as a slap delivered to anyone arguing the opposite, it's simply very poor argumentation. You don't have to steelman every argument you disagree with, but you should at least keep in mind that very often people really do believe the things they say they believe, and saying "No, you can't actually believe that, you're just lying" is a cheap dodge to avoid defending your own position or addressing theirs. It never produces good discussion, and here it just inevitably leads to clusterfuck threads where people are trying to get their digs in to express how much contempt they feel for the other side.

Note that I am not trying to rule on the object level claim here- I have read the same breakdowns of the Garcia case as everyone else and the situation is, at best, fuzzy. I am sure there are people arguing in bad faith. I'm sure there are people who really believe what they say, regardless of how well-founded their beliefs are.

Despite all the upvotes, you also got reported six times and the "volunteer janny" banner seems to agree with me that this post was borderline, since it keeps alternating between "bad" and "not bad."

In my opinion, this is a bad post because while the rest of it was fine, the very first sentence was its purpose, and that purpose was just to tell off your enemies because you're angry.

ETA: and to @UrgentSloth and @Thoroughlygruntled, who were so thoroughly disgruntled that I modded the "Fuck you" in response to this post but did not mod this post. My initial opinion on this post was that it was borderline. I don't like people calling other people liars, but you are allowed to believe that other people are lying. You are allowed to have negative opinions about your opponents. You have to be civil about it, no matter how uncivil you are actually feeling, but this was borderline.

I did not mod @HighResolutionSleep right away because I kind of wanted another mod who hadn't already intervened in this thread to make the call. But three days later it's still sitting in the queue with six reports and a controversial vote count so someone had to say something, or just dismiss it, and well, I wanted to say something because I agree that "Everyone who disagrees with me is a liar" is not good discourse. So don't do that. Also, don't tell someone off with a "Fuck you" because they are not engaging in good discourse. ESH.

The same 90 seconds I need to be able to say "I'm a fucking citizen, please stop these thugs." Garcia didn't get his

You have been lied to. Garcia did, in fact, get the opportunity to prove he was allowed to be here twice.

Fuck you.

You may not have been here long, but I'm sure you know better than that.

One day ban.

What about the lazy "everyone who disagrees with me is lying" swipe he was responding to?

This mod is deliberately crafting an echochamber.

That's what I believe, and this mod has no problem with people baselessly asserting their insulting beliefs.

  • -10

Your belief is ignorant and incorrect.

Do not tell people "Fuck you" because you are offended.

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Anwar Alaki’s innocent kid didn’t get 90 seconds to say shit. Instead he and his fellow cafe members were droned to death because he “should’ve picked a better father.” Yet Garcia who already had multiple court cases establishing that he was in fact removable is taking up orders of magnitude more air time. I wonder why that is?

As I recall the Anwar Alaki case actually got quite a lot of airtime, at least in the circles I inhabit.

To be clear I was talking about his kid. And it was nothing like with Garcia.

I wonder why that is?

Two reasons:

  1. You may think that killing someone is the worst thing someone can do to them, but as a litigator, I can assure you that is not the case. Any case with a live victim who can testify and enjoy the proceeds of the suit directly will collect more than a wrongful death action where the injury is determined by extrinsic evidence and the proceeds go to the family. Garcia is currently in jail and the administration (presumably) has the power to get him out, and there is action in the court system almost daily. It has implications for the administration's policies going forward. Alaki wasn't in the news until several years after his death, and while the surrounding circumstances certainly had implications for policy, they weren't as salient.

  2. Criticism of the Obama administration came mostly from Democrats, and internecine wars aren't going to make the news as much as wars that have cross-party intrigue. The media outlet furthest to the right condemning the attack was the New York Times editorial board. Fox News, on the other hand, was going so far in the other direction that even the administration was telling them to stop. If the country is roughly split half and half R/D, and only half the Ds are making a controversy about something, it's not going to catch on, especially if see No. 1.

I don't know how old you are or the social circles you run in, but among left-of-center people at the time there was definitely a fatigue about Obama setting in. The whole Clinton–Kerry foreign policy machine seemed like a continuation of the failed Bush policies, or for that matter the 20th Century foreign spook shit writ large. And then on the other side, you had Republicans who said he wasn't being aggressive enough. I'm beginning to suspect that the whole turn toward what would become wokeness in late 2014 was largely an attempt to reconnect with a leftist base who had largely become frustrated with his schtick.

I don’t think anything you write there is the true reason. First, wrongful death suits are pretty much orthogonal to how the public thinks about these things (ie most people would be more concerned about the government having the ability to summarily execute them as opposed to jailing them). Second, the killing of Alwaki wasn’t years old; it was prominent. If memory serves Rand Paul filibustered over it.

No, I think the true reason is that progressives and their media allies don’t really care about due process; it is used as a weapon. They don’t like Trump deporting illegals so they brought up this case where there is a silly argument over due process (nobody disputes the core underlying fact that he ought not be in the US) and are trying to use it to paint with a wide brush.

So yeah I dont think progressives in toto are being honest here though that doesn’t mean the person I’m responding to is being dishonest.

We can quibble about the timeline, but, Rand Paul (whose speech was in 2013) aside, Progressives were, by and large, the only people arguing for Awlaki's civil liberties. Again, it would help if I knew how old you were at the time, what media you were consuming, and what kind of company you kept, but as someone in his late 20s who listened to either NPR or Democracy Now! on his way to work but would occasionally switch over to right wing talk for a change of pace and whose friends were (mostly) Democrats, NPR and Democracy Now! were regularly running segments talking about how much of a travesty Alwaki's death was. Right wing talk radio, in a rare move, defended Obama's actions, while at the same time criticizing him for not being aggressive enough. They thought the standards the administration used to determine the guys was sufficiently dangerous to merit extrajudicial execution were too high.

I was in college at the time. Regardless, I think practically it was a relatively small story.

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I don't know how old you are or the social circles you run in, but among left-of-center people at the time there was definitely a fatigue about Obama setting in.

I still remember people calling Glenn Greenwald a closet rightwinger for pointing this sort of stuff out, and if "fatigue" is an appropriate response to a citizen being sentenced to death without a trial (and the execution resulting in the death of his underage son that wasn't even given a process-free death sentence), than I think shrugging and moving along should be a valid reaction to sending a non-citizen back to his country, even if it violated process and resulted in him being thrown into a prison.

I’m pretty sure the kid was assassinated in a separate drone strike in a cafe.

Damn, I always thought he just got hit by the same bomb as his dad.

Sorry, I did a bad job of explaining what I meant there. I wasn't using fatigue as a justification for lack of interest. What I meant was that this execution, combined with a bunch of other shit Obama did on the foreign policy front, let to a fatigue with the administration among more progressive voters, particularly younger ones. Obama was elected largely on the promise that he'd back away from the aggressive war on terror policies of the Bush administration. In the '08 GOP primaries you had people like McCain and Fred Thompson who were doubling down on this position. Then Obama comes in and while he was eventually able to get out of Iraq, he doubled down on Afghanistan without making any progress, invaded Libya, wasn't able to close Gitmo, drew lines in the sand in Syria, oversaw an NSA domestic spyiung program, and was now droning US citizens. He was able to make up some of this ground by moving to the left on social issues later in his second term; this ended up being good for him personally, but it wasn't enough to save Hillary Clinton, whom millennials didn't like to begin with and was largely seen as the architect of some of these adventures. The fatigue that I'm referring to is the fatigue with the entire Democratic establishment that led to Bernie Sanders almost giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016, a fatigue that was largely the result of the Obama administration's more conservative views on civil liberties.

Garcia didn't get his, and you or I may not get ours (respectively, depending on who wins '28).

If that's supposed to sound scary, you should probably stop your side from using "due process" as a weapon to begin with.

Due process is never a weapon.

I completely disagree with this. Knowingly dragging an innocent person through the court system in an attempt to intimidate or punish him for his lawfully taken actions is a weapon, and has already been used. Cool! I get my "day in court", several in fact! I get to spend from tens up to hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the feds, and if my lawyers slip up, I'm getting locked up. Yay "due process"!

It's the due process that gives you your several days in court, however taxing they may be, rather than just, say, being disappeared to a banana republic's prison system.

Sure. I'm not saying all systems with no due process are better than systems with due process, or that they're better on average, or anything like that. I'm saying fixating on the idea leaves you open to Goodhart’s Law, a failure mode that seems to be more and more frequent in western liberal democracies. If you want an extreme example, the Soviet Union had due process as well.

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Say there is a powerful government official who wants to do these things to you.

Would you rather live in Earth 1 where there is due process, or Earth 2 where there isn't?

It depends on many factors, and there might indeed be cases where I'd opt for Earth 2.

It's not "due process " which is costing you hundreds of thousands. It's the bad government official, and due process is protecting you from them, even if it sucks.

This assumes the government official would do something more egregious to me given the choice, and I see no reason to grant that. If you start sweeping people off the street and sending them to gulags, that's the kind of action that is plainly visible to my fellow citizens, and it comes at a cost to the person who ordered it. Maybe they're as powerful as Stalin and they can afford such ruthlessness, but if we're talking about something roughly analogous to modern American, if nothing else he'll have to be careful about what will happen to him, if his party loses the elections. This is where due process helps people like that. You can ruin someone's life without exposing yourself to threat of retaliation.

Keep in mind, if you want to say that, all things considered, you'd prefer to live in a country with due process than without - that's fair enough, it's a completely respectable position. All I'm saying is that your original position of "due process is never a weapon" is clearly false, and that it's been abused to the point that your original implied threat isn't necessarily so scary.

You'd rather get locked up instantly? UrgentSloth was commenting on the dichotomy between "due process" and "locked up without", not between "due process" and "unmolested".

You'd rather get locked up instantly?

Depends for how long. Also, the obvious injustice of it might paradoxically help me retain my standing in my community.

UrgentSloth was commenting on the dichotomy between "due process" and "locked up without", not between "due process" and "unmolested".

Then maybe he should have said that, instead of saying "Due process is never a weapon. The denial of it is the weapon."

It's not quite true to say that he was "denied" due process, but there is definitely a sense in which his due process was "violated"

Say you are accused of a crime. You are put on trial. The trial proceeds as normal and results in a judgement of aquittal. The cops throw you in prison anyway. Were you "denied" due process? You technically got a trial. The issue is that the due process didn't actually do anything. Despite the aquittal, you were still imprisoned.

Every indication is that every effort was made to give this man due process, and that a procedural shortcoming prevented the third opinion from preventing the deportation.

If the cops pick me up and toss me in jail because they have a warrant for my arrest they didn't know was cancelled, my due process rights are not being violated. I am a victim of a procedural deficiency. To say that my right to due process has been violated would be incorrect.

When you combine this with the sensational rhetoric of "this could happen to anyone" etc, this incorrectness becomes undeniably malicious. It is a lie.

People are telling this lie because they want to paint the image of the Trump administration as an unhinged and tyrannical force. People getting the wrong idea when hearing these lies is a feature, not a bug.

This is highly fact pattern specific.

Sure, which is why the example you've provided is completely irrelevant to the case at hand. Sure, if a cop went and pulled me over and shot me in the head because he thought he was Judge Dredd, that would be a pretty hideous denial of due process.

But if that cop brought me in front of a court that deemed me guilty two times, and a third wound up putting a temporary stay on my arrest to a particular jail that never made it to the cop before I was put there, that's a completely different category of error.

So now due process requires us to wait to deport people? How long?

Honestly the fact that this is the worst (or most sympathtic depending on your framing) case they (the anti-Trump/pro-illegal-immigration advocates) could find actually increases my confidence that the folks at ICE/DHS are trying to do thier due diligence.

this is the worst case they could find

Not necessarily. Being controversial or borderline increases social media virality because both sides can angrily post about it. Toxoplasma of Rage and all that.

The hairdresser case is probably just as bad tbh, at least from an optics perspective.

If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?

Yes, I think that would be amazing. The guy came to the country illegally, and he was also deported illegally, by the government's own repeated admission, given the withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador. If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?

I think that would be also be a dramatic improvement, for obvious reasons.

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

Given that we are paying El Salvador to hold him, presumably we have some say in this. For starters, we could stop paying.

I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?

And I'm honestly surprised to read this, since I could say the same about those putting forward technical arguments in defense of the government. It frankly did not really occur to me that the government might actually believe in or care about the legal merits of its case.

Perhaps we can agree that the vast majority of people on either side of this are using legal arguments as soldiers, and that the real disagreement is about something else - something to do with whether we ought to have any sympathy for this man and whether the US has any obligation to him, morally.

Yes, I think that would be amazing. The guy came to the country illegally, and he was also deported illegally, by the government's own repeated admission, given the withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador. If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

Is the number of people who think this way above 100 in the country? The judge who has issued many orders to Trump certainly is not in this camp. That judge intends, once Maryland Man is back in the US, to keep him here forever. As do his lawyers. His wife, maybe, maybe she prefers whatever monetary payment she thinks the judge will order for her. But still she doesn't expect the result you are talking about.

What everyone expects to happen is that, if this person returns to the US, he will never leave the US. Or, if he does, it will be after a decades long legal process where Amy Coney Barret and John Roberts issue multiple rulings where they clearly articulate that they are sick of hearing cases about Mr. Garcia, but also are completely unclear about the remaining portions of their ruling.

Edit: so if there's already 2 in this tiny space, I'm guessing there are at least 10s of thousands of us.

Nah, this community is specifically a locus for principled civil libertarians - or at least it was before they started getting black-pilled by the isolated demands for civil principles. The presence of such people here is not indicative of their popularity in wider society.

Count me as a third. That many of our interlocutors are having trouble conceiving of this as a good-faith position is itself revealing of something about which I probably shouldn’t speculate.

I'm not having any such trouble. I can name a handful of people who hold this as a good-faith position, I just have huge doubts many people posting here are among them.

The thing it's revealing is a familiarity with the concept of "isolated demand for rigor". For example, if this were a truly good faith position, I might expect ameliorating statements along the lines of "Missing one administrative step in 100,000 cases is actually very impressive. Even with this screw-up, this is vastly better than expected for ANY government action."

The relevant sample size is "at least one of 278", not "at most one of 100,000". But honestly if it was "we fucked up on this one of 278, but we're making a good faith effort to fix our fuck up" I think that would be fine. It's the "we fucked up, we admit we fucked up, we totally could fix it, but we won't and you can't make us" that is getting people up in arms.

Why? This fucker is substantively guilty and the only reason this is an issue is a BS asylum claim.

If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

So we can clean all this up with a quick Zoom call then? Don't even need to actually get him out of the prison.

Given that we are paying El Salvador to hold him, presumably we have some say in this. For starters, we could stop paying.

So judges have the authority to detonate international agreements like this? Our foreign policy is determined by any district judge who feels like weighing in?

So we can clean all this up with a quick Zoom call then? Don't even need to actually get him out of the prison.

Not necessarily.

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/reference-materials/ic/chapter-4/7

except that evidentiary hearings on the merits may only be conducted by telephone conference if the respondent consents after being notified of the right to proceed in person or through video conference. See INA § 240(b)(2), 8 C.F.R. § 1003.25(c)

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