Posted on Friday, March 28, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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On Monday, the Trump administration struck back at the legal-industrial complex’s war against MAGA. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed an emergency request asking the Supreme Court to take a stand on the “epidemic” of national injunctions that leftist district court judges are using to halt the Trump agenda.
Trump’s lawyers said on Monday that only the Supreme Court can stop this “power grab.”
The success of Trump’s presidency could hinge on whether the court will come down hard on this cozy collusion between anti-Trump litigants and injunction-happy judges.
In Monday’s emergency application, Trump’s Solicitor General Sarah Harris challenged a San Francisco district court judge’s injunction preventing federal offices in all 50 states, including Agriculture, Defense, Treasury, and Commerce, from downsizing. In February, as the downsizing began, government unions and nonprofits sued in the Northern District of California, notorious for its leftist bias. They were immediately rewarded for their court shopping.
A sympathetic judge, William Alsup, commanded that the Trump administration hire back all 16,000 terminated provisional employees and indicated he would micromanage each reinstatement. Never mind that the public had just elected a president who promised smaller, more affordable government.
While Harris’s emergency appeal was landing at the Supreme Court on Monday, down the street at the U.S. Court of Appeals, leftist judicial militancy was on full display.
Appeals Court Judge Patricia Millett was excoriating the president’s deportation of suspected Tren De Aragua gang members using the Alien Enemies Act.
At issue was a nationwide injunction imposed by a district court judge – James Boasberg, halting the president’s deportations. The act empowers the president to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens the president believes pose a risk to the nation during war, invasion, or any enemy incursion. That includes mass invasions across the southern border.
Trump’s lawyers went to the Court of Appeals to ask that Boasberg’s injunction be lifted, calling it an “unprecedented and enormous intrusion” on the commander in chief’s authority.
Millett shut her ears to that constitutional issue and insisted instead on advocating for the 250-plus gang members already deported to an El Salvadoran prison. “There were plane loads of people. There were no procedures in place to notify people,” Millett said, chastising Trump’s lawyers. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here.”
Sorry, Judge. Cry me a river.
As Trump border czar Tom Homan said, Tren de Aragua is “a designated terrorist organization.” Homan slammed a reporter, reiterating the judge’s sob story about the deportees. “Talk to Laken Riley’s family.
What due process did she have?”
Truth is, the Alien Enemies Act does not require any regulations like Millett suggested. The president’s discretion is “as unlimited as the legislature could make it,” a federal court ruled in Lockington v. Smith. When the act was challenged during World War II in Ludecke v. Watkins, the Supreme Court ruled again that some statutes “preclude judicial review.”
Millett tried to weasel around these precedents, claiming she was questioning not the law but only the president’s implementation of it. It’s a distinction with no difference. No court has ever struck down the implementation of the Alien Enemies Act, per the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice. The law does not guarantee individualized hearings before deportation, or a burden of proof government must satisfy.
At Monday’s hearing, Millett showed herself to be a left-wing firebrand. But another judge on the three-member panel, Justin Walker, nailed the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers representing the deportees, asking why they didn’t bring a habeas corpus action in Texas, where the deportation flights originated. In response, the ACLU offered only double-talk because the truth is, they went court shopping.
Now we wait. The three-judge panel has yet to rule on whether to lift Boasberg’s nationwide injunction. Until then, deportation of Tren de Aragua using the Alien Enemies Act is on hold.
Even more critical is the Supreme Court’s response to Trump’s emergency petition. Dozens of federal judges are blocking policies – from downsizing government to ending DEI and evicting gangs – that voters chose when they elected Trump. Four justices are on the record expressing concern about national injunctions. It’s time to act.
As the lefties are always claiming – but this time it’s true – democracy is at stake.
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and cofounder of Save Our City at saveourcityny.org. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
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