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White House defies judge’s order to stop deportation flights
The White House refused to halt deportation flights on Sunday, just days after a federal judge ordered an end to such flights, prompting a new confrontation over immigration policy and executive power.
The deportation planes have continued to operate since late Friday, when U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee in Los Angeles issued a preliminary injunction banning the flights, which the judge referred to as “Operation Twisted Spear.”
With the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation actively defending policies pushed by President Trump only to have them overturned in court, Gee and other federal judges are asking whether the administration’s immigration arm, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is following the law.
But with its funds designated by Congress and its leadership packed with immigration hard-liners, the agency says it believes it has the legal and financial authority to ignore the court order barring its involvement in part of a program that expedites deportations for certain Central American adults without saying whether it will do so.
In a statement late Sunday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security defended its actions to a New York Times reporter, saying the said flights recently were “involved in the protection of this nation and the communities in which we live.”
“It would put the American people at grave risk if we were to abide by this decision as a matter of course,” the statement said. “As we have in the past, we are immediately exploring every legal option available to us.”
In ordering an end to the flights, Gee stopped short of calling the program itself unlawful. Instead, she ordered the program’s main contractor, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to submit a report by Friday explaining why the government is targeting Central Americans and how it will devise a more “individualized,” case-by-case proceeding.
As of Aug. 26, the government also will have to stop requiring ICE officials to view Central American mothers as priorities for deportation simply because they arrived in the United States without authorization and did not go to immigration court within 120 days of their first apprehension, she said.
Gee, a Bill Clinton appointee, had oversight of a 2016 settlement known as the Flores agreement, which set standards for how the government must treat detained immigrant children and families. Trump’s administration reached a new settlement in the case last month that allows the government three options for handling families, including one in which parents and children may remain locked up together indefinitely.
Thanks to: Cary Gupta via PR Copyrighter.