The Trump administration's attempt to quietly—but massively—expand who can be detained pending their removal has been met with overwhelming pushback from a remarkably large number of district courts.
Thanks so much for this! I've been wondering the details of their legal justification so I can understand better who is at the greatest risk. (Not that immigrant of color isn't at risk in this lawless and cruel environment).
"Of course, it’s hard to imagine any Congress, let alone the current one, making it easier for servicemembers to sue the federal government." True, but that fact only highlights the ease with which Congress allowed for huge damage claims (for senators and only for senators), retroactively, when the government lawfully subpoenas phone records. Prigs!
Shira Perlmutter situation is that Slaughter's and Cook's outcomes would be implicated by the outcome of the emergency motion. Roberts won't want to startle Wall Street before he has to, and it's not clear to me whether Wall Street has "priced in" the Federal Reserve remaining independent.
Johnny Roberts may be a Royalist, but he's also the most dedicated servant to the Chamber of Commerce on the Court since pre-FDR. My guess is that he won't "overturn" the Humphrey's Executor line but will carve out a SCOTUS review based on a BS litany of factors that will turn on the unlisted factor of "political party of the President". He'll probably do the same thing on tariffs: create a complicate "is it truly an emergency test?" and send it back to District Courts to re-examine.
Both of which will inject a ton of uncertainty into the stock markets, so CJ J.R. won't show his hand early. That's why he wants to wait to dispose of Perlmutter until later, simply to not tip his hand at all.
Please explain how Perlmutter's motion could impact the other two cases, given that—as stated—it is not a Humphrey's Executor case, is brought by an inferior officer, is not asking for restoration to office, and rests on an assertion that does not depend on whether or not the president could fire the Librarian of Congress. What legal relevance do they have to each other?
("They both involve people the president wants fired" is not a legal similarity any more than federal immigration law and local loitering laws are legally similar just because they both involve someone standing on land someone else doesn't want them to.)
It is. Trump is alleging that, despite drawing her paycheck from the Legislative Branch and assisting Congress is maintaining and registering Copyrights, Trademarks, etc., Shia Perlmutter possess "executive power" and thus can be fired at will by the President, regardless of what protections may be in the law.
For a Royalist like Johnny, that's a winning argument. The "unitary executive", aka President-is-King, is gospel. If someone whose paycheck says "Paid for by Congress" can be fired by the President, the Federal Reserve is an "independent agency" that exercises considerable executive power over banking and money. So what distinction can be drawn?
Now, you are correct that Perlmutter's case was about the government's emergency request to overturn the DC Court of Appeals' stay on her termination, and that may not be directly tied Humphrey's Executor or successors. In a normal situation, the rejection of an emergency motion in this instance would be normal based on the equities involved. Those rules got tossed out the window and destroyed in all but name by the current Court. Johnny Roberts is trying to remove as much substance from Humphrey's Executor as possible, leaving only a "limited judicial role" in reserve...to prevent President Newsome from firing anyone hired under Trump.
And the last thing he wants to do is for Wall Street, anxious as it is about Trump's takeover and interest rates and inflation, to panic before everything else is in place. Basically, if Trump can fire a Congressional employee with limited decision-making capacity, he can fire a Fed Governor.
I have looked at the applications for stays from the government (and some of the responses) in all three cases, and the distinctions are that (1) the President does not claim to have necessarily fired Perlmutter—Article II authority is presented only as an alternative pleading—and (2) Perlmutter is an inferior officer who is not a member of a multi-member board and to whom Humphrey's Executor does not apply.
Trump claims to have fired Slaughter pursuant to his Article II authority (i.e., unitary executive theory).
Trump claims to have fired Cook pursuant to the Federal Reserve Act (i.e., statutory authority).
Trump claims that someone else he appointed, rather than Trump himself, fired Perlmutter, relying on the FVRA to have appointed an acting principal officer as intermediary (i.e., statutory authority from an unrelated statute to Cook's case).
In the alternative, Trump does claim that his orders to the intermediary count as firing Perlmutter directly under Article II if the Court doesn't buy that the intermediary actually held any relevant office, but this issue need not be reached if the Court is, as you assume, just going to cave to any argument Trump puts forward (such as the FVRA argument, which he'd rather like to win).
Even in the Article II argument regarding Perlmutter, Trump's argument is that "[W]hen there is no department head and the President lacks the power to designate an acting department head, Article II empowers the President to remove inferior officers in that department directly." Slaughter and Cook are both principal officers on multi-member boards to whom Humphrey's Executor might apply and both cite it; Perlmutter is an inferior officer who holds her office solo, a position which has different constitutional, statutory, and case law regarding its appointment and removal and who does not cite Humphrey's Executor.
In other words, a stay in Perlmutter's case wouldn't need to reach Article II powers, and even if it did—which is assuming that the Court bothers to write an opinion that actually explains its reasoning—that couldn't affect a primary point of contention in both Slaughter's and Cook's case (Humphrey's Executor), nor could it affect a key, completely unrelated statutory provisions at issue in Cook's case specifically (the Federal Reserve Act).
> They had rather petered out over the ensuing decade, so it will be interesting to see if the two rulings last Monday end up as outliers, or as a sign that more of these rulings are incoming.
I'd say they more fell off a cliff, around the time when Barrett joined the court. I think it was mentioned in a NYT article some years ago that she didn't like providing the 6th vote for summary judgments. (She's been rather stingy with cert grants too.)
> Frankly, I don’t get it. The underlying question in Perlmutter is a very specific, statutory question...
If Slaughter is very expansive ruling (e.g. the "one drop" version of UET, basically everything is an executive agency), that would resolve this case. See the government's brief
I know a number of green card holders from countries such as Canada and the UK, of diverse ethnicities, both with and without US-born US citizen spouses, who are now concerned about what may happen to them during their applications for naturalization. Could they too be detained and sent who knows where with no warning when they turn up for their interviews? Am I being unreasonable in trying to calm their fears, when they refer to all the previously "unthinkable" things that have become frequent news items since January 20, 2025? I went through this process in July 1976, bicentennial year, and the only thing that struck me as odd at that time was the test of my ability to speak and understand English, my mother tongue. Like POTUS today in all his cognitive and physical tests, my score was perfect.
I was asked to write down a sentence spoken by my examiner. Unfortunately her (China-origin, I think) accent was such that the sentence could have included one of two similar words. Fortunately I chose the right one. I aced the test!!!!
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁
In the postscript, does "such Meeting" refer to the once-a-year meeting required? In other words, if the Congress has already met in that year, it has fulfilled the condition and the December 1 2025 meeting is no longer mandatory, correct?
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁
Very good information
Thanks so much for this! I've been wondering the details of their legal justification so I can understand better who is at the greatest risk. (Not that immigrant of color isn't at risk in this lawless and cruel environment).
"Of course, it’s hard to imagine any Congress, let alone the current one, making it easier for servicemembers to sue the federal government." True, but that fact only highlights the ease with which Congress allowed for huge damage claims (for senators and only for senators), retroactively, when the government lawfully subpoenas phone records. Prigs!
Shira Perlmutter situation is that Slaughter's and Cook's outcomes would be implicated by the outcome of the emergency motion. Roberts won't want to startle Wall Street before he has to, and it's not clear to me whether Wall Street has "priced in" the Federal Reserve remaining independent.
difficult to know for sure but the conventional wisdom seems to be that wall street expects the fed to remain independent
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/29/business/wall-street-fed-supreme-court
Johnny Roberts may be a Royalist, but he's also the most dedicated servant to the Chamber of Commerce on the Court since pre-FDR. My guess is that he won't "overturn" the Humphrey's Executor line but will carve out a SCOTUS review based on a BS litany of factors that will turn on the unlisted factor of "political party of the President". He'll probably do the same thing on tariffs: create a complicate "is it truly an emergency test?" and send it back to District Courts to re-examine.
Both of which will inject a ton of uncertainty into the stock markets, so CJ J.R. won't show his hand early. That's why he wants to wait to dispose of Perlmutter until later, simply to not tip his hand at all.
Please explain how Perlmutter's motion could impact the other two cases, given that—as stated—it is not a Humphrey's Executor case, is brought by an inferior officer, is not asking for restoration to office, and rests on an assertion that does not depend on whether or not the president could fire the Librarian of Congress. What legal relevance do they have to each other?
("They both involve people the president wants fired" is not a legal similarity any more than federal immigration law and local loitering laws are legally similar just because they both involve someone standing on land someone else doesn't want them to.)
It is. Trump is alleging that, despite drawing her paycheck from the Legislative Branch and assisting Congress is maintaining and registering Copyrights, Trademarks, etc., Shia Perlmutter possess "executive power" and thus can be fired at will by the President, regardless of what protections may be in the law.
For a Royalist like Johnny, that's a winning argument. The "unitary executive", aka President-is-King, is gospel. If someone whose paycheck says "Paid for by Congress" can be fired by the President, the Federal Reserve is an "independent agency" that exercises considerable executive power over banking and money. So what distinction can be drawn?
Now, you are correct that Perlmutter's case was about the government's emergency request to overturn the DC Court of Appeals' stay on her termination, and that may not be directly tied Humphrey's Executor or successors. In a normal situation, the rejection of an emergency motion in this instance would be normal based on the equities involved. Those rules got tossed out the window and destroyed in all but name by the current Court. Johnny Roberts is trying to remove as much substance from Humphrey's Executor as possible, leaving only a "limited judicial role" in reserve...to prevent President Newsome from firing anyone hired under Trump.
And the last thing he wants to do is for Wall Street, anxious as it is about Trump's takeover and interest rates and inflation, to panic before everything else is in place. Basically, if Trump can fire a Congressional employee with limited decision-making capacity, he can fire a Fed Governor.
I have looked at the applications for stays from the government (and some of the responses) in all three cases, and the distinctions are that (1) the President does not claim to have necessarily fired Perlmutter—Article II authority is presented only as an alternative pleading—and (2) Perlmutter is an inferior officer who is not a member of a multi-member board and to whom Humphrey's Executor does not apply.
Trump claims to have fired Slaughter pursuant to his Article II authority (i.e., unitary executive theory).
Trump claims to have fired Cook pursuant to the Federal Reserve Act (i.e., statutory authority).
Trump claims that someone else he appointed, rather than Trump himself, fired Perlmutter, relying on the FVRA to have appointed an acting principal officer as intermediary (i.e., statutory authority from an unrelated statute to Cook's case).
In the alternative, Trump does claim that his orders to the intermediary count as firing Perlmutter directly under Article II if the Court doesn't buy that the intermediary actually held any relevant office, but this issue need not be reached if the Court is, as you assume, just going to cave to any argument Trump puts forward (such as the FVRA argument, which he'd rather like to win).
Even in the Article II argument regarding Perlmutter, Trump's argument is that "[W]hen there is no department head and the President lacks the power to designate an acting department head, Article II empowers the President to remove inferior officers in that department directly." Slaughter and Cook are both principal officers on multi-member boards to whom Humphrey's Executor might apply and both cite it; Perlmutter is an inferior officer who holds her office solo, a position which has different constitutional, statutory, and case law regarding its appointment and removal and who does not cite Humphrey's Executor.
In other words, a stay in Perlmutter's case wouldn't need to reach Article II powers, and even if it did—which is assuming that the Court bothers to write an opinion that actually explains its reasoning—that couldn't affect a primary point of contention in both Slaughter's and Cook's case (Humphrey's Executor), nor could it affect a key, completely unrelated statutory provisions at issue in Cook's case specifically (the Federal Reserve Act).
> They had rather petered out over the ensuing decade, so it will be interesting to see if the two rulings last Monday end up as outliers, or as a sign that more of these rulings are incoming.
I'd say they more fell off a cliff, around the time when Barrett joined the court. I think it was mentioned in a NYT article some years ago that she didn't like providing the 6th vote for summary judgments. (She's been rather stingy with cert grants too.)
> Frankly, I don’t get it. The underlying question in Perlmutter is a very specific, statutory question...
If Slaughter is very expansive ruling (e.g. the "one drop" version of UET, basically everything is an executive agency), that would resolve this case. See the government's brief
I know a number of green card holders from countries such as Canada and the UK, of diverse ethnicities, both with and without US-born US citizen spouses, who are now concerned about what may happen to them during their applications for naturalization. Could they too be detained and sent who knows where with no warning when they turn up for their interviews? Am I being unreasonable in trying to calm their fears, when they refer to all the previously "unthinkable" things that have become frequent news items since January 20, 2025? I went through this process in July 1976, bicentennial year, and the only thing that struck me as odd at that time was the test of my ability to speak and understand English, my mother tongue. Like POTUS today in all his cognitive and physical tests, my score was perfect.
I was asked to write down a sentence spoken by my examiner. Unfortunately her (China-origin, I think) accent was such that the sentence could have included one of two similar words. Fortunately I chose the right one. I aced the test!!!!
Thank you for this detailed information that I will pass on to colleagues.
Truly, please pass this on too!
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁
GOOD - They are breaking the law everywhere
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁
In the postscript, does "such Meeting" refer to the once-a-year meeting required? In other words, if the Congress has already met in that year, it has fulfilled the condition and the December 1 2025 meeting is no longer mandatory, correct?
Steve, thank you for shedding light on this technical, but very important corner of immigration law.
The legacy media would like you to think of these fired Immigration judges as Federal judges...independent, untouchable, and serving for life, and that is a LIE! The President has the authority to fire them, under the Constitutional authority. So why is the legacy media so outraged at this? They don't want you to know what these judges have actually been doing! NPR, which a majority leans to the Democrats/Liberals, has found that most of the judges had backgrounds DEFENDING illegal migrants before they became legal judges.
When you have a back-log of 3.7 million immigrants in the system, that is not "compassion". It is "criminal negligence"! Its gone from 1.3 million pending cases in 2020, to 3.7 million by the end of 2024! The immigration back-log has nearly tripled in the last 4 years under Joe Biden! The average wait-time for a migrant to get a court hearing is almost 4 years! In NYC, some are not slated til the 2030's! How'd it get so bad? The Left doesn't want you to know that we had judges that ruled on "ideology", and not "enforcement"! It moves at a snail's pace, and the Democrats love it, so they can declare "mass amnesty"!
It's just a stall tactic, so the Democrats can install tens of millions of new Democrat voters, keeping them in power for perpetuity! Nice try! Those judges will now be replaced with Deportation Judges, under DHS, and they'll have backgrounds in "immigration enforcement", coming from the military or Federal service! This will definitely overhaul the Immigration process, that the Democrats deliberately clogged up! The Democrats play dirty and love to cheat, and they're in panic mode over this, and are already trying to enact legislation, trying to limit WHO can serve as a temporary Immigration judge, and prevent military lawyers from taking these positions!
They know what's coming...a court system that actually works, and one that will mess with their crooked voting constituency! Too effing bad! This will prioritize deportation over delay, and enforcement over ideology. This is decades long overdue accountability, and the Liberal's have eroded our securities for far too long!😁