Posted on Tuesday, May 20, 2025

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by Shane Harris

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When Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second time in January, Democrats launched an all-out effort through the courts, the media, and liberal state governments to frustrate the 45th and 47th president’s deportation agenda. But after some early successes, the tide now appears to be turning against the left-wing plot to shield criminal illegal aliens from accountability.

Two recent developments in particular are noteworthy on this front, as they may signal a broader collapse of the liberal crusade to effectively turn the United States into a sanctuary nation.

First, in an emergency ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court removed a lower court’s hold on a Trump administration order canceling temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan migrants.

As AMAC Newsline reported last year, the Biden Department of Homeland Security’s abuse of the TPS program allowed the previous administration to simply reclassify hundreds of thousands of would-be illegal aliens as temporary legal residents, protecting them from deportation and granting them work permits. Trump Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked that designation, but her action was blocked by a federal district judge in San Francisco in March.

Now, however, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision this week, TPS is immediately revoked for 350,000 Venezuelan migrants, while TPS for an additional 250,000 will expire in September.

Notably, the ruling was 8-1, with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. That’s a good sign for the Trump administration moving forward as scores of other immigration-related cases make their way through the courts.

The ruling was also a stark reversal of fortunes from just days earlier, when the Supreme Court extended its block on the administration’s drive to expel illegal aliens under the Alien Enemies Act. Taken together, these two rulings appear to indicate that the Court – even some of the liberal justices – may be inclined to grant the Trump administration broad leeway in reversing Biden’s immigration policies carried out via executive action, even if they are reluctant to endorse every specific enforcement measure outright.

Thus far, partisan district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions have been one of the left’s most powerful tools in running interference on deportations.

Liberals’ hope is that they can just tie every major Trump deportation move up in courts for four years and then install another open-borders Democrat in the White House who will revert back to Biden-era policies. However, that strategy relies on the Supreme Court not stepping in to overturn lower courts and allow the Trump administration’s deportation actions to move forward.

The second positive development for the White House in recent days has been the early success of “Operation Guardian Angel,” the administration’s response to California’s “sanctuary state” policies. Since California prisons and prosecutors refuse to honor detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Justice launched this new effort to “file complaints and arrest warrants to allow federal law enforcement to take as many defendants as possible into custody from state jails.”

Here’s how it works: Any time someone is deported from the United States, they are fingerprinted and entered into a federal criminal database. If they re-enter the United States, they have committed “felony re-entry” – giving ICE jurisdiction in the case.

Normally, jails in sanctuary cities and states refuse to honor ICE detainer requests for crimes committed by illegal aliens. But now, authorities with the Operation Guardian Angel task force are scanning criminal fingerprint databases every day, looking for illegal aliens in California jails who have been previously deported.

Once they find one, they seek a federal criminal warrant for felony re-entry, signed off on by a federal judge – meaning that the sanctuary jails have no choice but to hand over the offending illegal alien.

“With this operation, we’re going to be neutralizing California sanctuary state policies,” United States Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli told Fox News’s Bill Melugin. “We’re going to flood the system with warrants for criminal illegal immigrants who are in county jails. They can ignore a detainer, but they cannot ignore a criminal arrest warrant. They have no choice, they will comply, and if they don’t, if they interfere with our ability to arrest a federal felon, they can expect to face consequences for that.”

Melugin also reported that the task force believes it will arrest “40-50 aliens from local jails every week, and that if it’s successful in LA, U.S. Attorneys can use it as a model to neutralize sanctuary jurisdictions in other parts of the country.” That would be a major blow to Democrats’ efforts to thwart Trump’s deportation agenda via sanctuary city policies.

What began as a coordinated, multi-front war on Trump’s immigration agenda is now unraveling under the weight of legal defeats, public backlash, and the administration’s aggressive countermeasures. Democrats bet on a strategy of delay and defiance – but the courts are shifting, the public is siding with enforcement, and federal authorities are finding creative ways to force compliance.

Under President Trump, the era of lawless sanctuary policies may finally give way to a new era of accountability and restored sovereignty.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.