A legal theme of President Donald Trump’s second term is judges not being able to trust his administration’s statements in court. This theme has been especially pronounced in immigration-related cases, where the government has taken some of its most aggressive and lawbreaking stances.
It’s against this backdrop that one of Trump’s own judicial appointees said Thursday that an official explanation offered in court “crumbled like a house of cards.”
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued the rebuke in explaining his decision to block the administration’s bid to immediately send certain unaccompanied children to their home country of Guatemala. Kelly recounted the shady operation attempted over Labor Day weekend, in which the government told the children’s caretakers “to have them ready for pickup in as little as two hours,” after which they were “roused from their beds in the middle of the night and driven to an airport, where some were loaded onto planes.”
The judge on emergency duty at the time, Biden appointee Sparkle Sooknanan, temporarily blocked the government action. A Trump administration lawyer complained that it was “fairly outrageous” for the children’s lawyers to have even filed a lawsuit because, the official explanation went, the government just wanted to “reunify children with parents who had requested their return,” Kelly wrote.
But it was that claim that Kelly, the Trump appointee who would be assigned to the case going forward, said “crumbled like a house of cards.” He noted there’s “no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return” and that, in fact, Guatemala’s attorney general said officials there couldn’t even track down parents for most of the children.
As Kelly put it, when the U.S. government “plunged ahead in the middle of the night with their ‘reunification’ plan and then represented to a judge that a parent or guardian had requested each child’s return, that turned out not to be true.”
The judge’s stern accounting wasn’t limited to the “house of cards” remark.
His 43-page opinion contains haunting details, including excerpts of declarations from some of the children who warned of dangerous fates that would await them. One of them said “the conditions she would return to in Guatemala would cause her to kill herself,” Kelly wrote.
The judge’s stern accounting wasn’t limited to the “house of cards” remark. He wrote elsewhere that Trump officials “misstate the legal standard” and that their conduct in deeming children eligible for sending to Guatemala suggested “that they are not applying their criteria accurately, consistently, or in ways that reflect good faith.” He further criticized the “rushed, seemingly error-laden operation to send unaccompanied alien children back to their home countries,” calling it one of the things that federal law seeks to prevent.
The judge wrote that officials’ conduct doesn’t “inspire confidence that they themselves are convinced that they have the authority to proceed as they would like.” If they were convinced of their authority, the judge wondered, then “why exercise it in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend with nothing but a late-night (or early-morning) notice to the children’s caretakers and advocates?” Why, indeed. At a time when the administration is bending or breaking the law across various facets of American life, Kelly’s ruling is a reminder that at least some judges have served as a bulwark, and that they stand ready to apply the law to lawless government actions when they’re challenged in court. 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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