The July 4th weekend and Labor Day weekend had common themes: emergency litigation over Trump’s immigration agenda.
Contextualizing the important stories never takes a holiday.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on Sunday, immigration lawyers filed a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from whisking more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala. The attorneys filed a motion shortly after that suggesting that the children’s imminent deportation was two to four hours away.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan quickly blocked the children’s deportation before dawn and scheduled a hearing early in the afternoon, where she issued a temporary restraining order protecting the children, until the case is adjudicated.
In a 25-page lawsuit, the National Immigration Law Center seeks an order declaring that the children are entitled to pursue asylum claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and due process under the Fifth Amendment.
“In the dead of night”
On Labor Day, former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa and I discussed the emergency litigation as a springboard to a broader conversation about how the levers of accountability have been holding up during Trump’s second term.
A federal judge and immigration lawyers may have been working around the clock to protect the rights of these children, but the inverse also was true.
“The flip side of the fact that lawyers are working around the clock on holiday weekends is that the government is trying to do this in the dead of night on a holiday weekend,” Rangappa noted.
On Monday, attorneys from the National Immigration Law Center confirmed that every immigrant child that could be a member of their class action lawsuit had been “deplaned and returned” to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Other immigration-related emergency motions had far different results during Trump’s second term.
“Cool trust”
On March 15, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to turn around flights filled with hundreds of immigrants bound for an El Salvador prison, but the government ignored that order, setting off an ongoing legal battle over whether officials engaged in contempt of court.
Over the July 4 weekend, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration permission to whisk eight men to South Sudan without proceedings to determine whether they faced the risk of torture of death in that war-torn country.
In the wake of these precedents, Judge Sooknanan appears to be aware that the Trump administration will “exploit any kind of ambiguity,” Rangappa noted.
“When you lose that kind of social trust that exists, you move into something sociologists called ‘cool trust,’ which is where norms are replaced by formal rules,” she said.
In a nod to her Substack newsletter
, this video delves into how the case of the Guatemalan children serves as a barometer for the state of civil liberties at the end of the summer of Trump’s second term.
