Wednesday was supposed to be the Trump administration’s deadline to explain how it’s going to give due process to scores of Venezuelan immigrants it shipped to a Salvadoran prison under dubious legal authority. But a panel of judges appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump saved his administration from having to take that step toward complying with the law.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ruled last Wednesday that the government must facilitate the ability of a class of plaintiffs to challenge their removals. But he left it up to the government how exactly it would do so, giving officials a deadline of one week to tell the Obama-appointed judge their plan.
Apparently, their plan was to wait until the last minute to seek an appellate escape hatch from Boasberg’s order. A three-judge panel of Washington, D.C.’s federal appeals court obliged — at least temporarily.
Trump appointees Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao and Justin Walker granted an “administrative stay” Tuesday. They emphasized that their temporary measure “is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”
It’s true that the appeals court could rule against the government at a later point. But the practical effect of this temporary block of Boasberg’s order is that due process will at least be further delayed. Per the panel, litigation will continue over the next week, concluding Wednesday, June 18. After that, we should get a better sense of how much longer the delay will be — or whether due process will come at all. In the meantime, people are sitting in a foreign prison funded by the United States, having been sent there by the Trump administration in March without having been able to challenge their removals, under a legal authority that judges around the country have since rejected. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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