The Supreme Court is poised to make Trump's human rights crisis at the border even worse

The Supreme Court is poised to make Trump’s human rights crisis at the border even worse
Trump can get much crueler, once the Court gives him the green light.
Ian Millhiser
Jun 21, 2018, 8:00 am


The Trump administration’s position in Trump v. Hawaii, the Muslim Ban case, is that “aliens outside the United States seeking a visa or initial admission have no constitutional rights at all regarding entry into the country.” Ponder that argument for a moment, as you also consider this picture of children, who were separated from their families and forced to live in a cage by the United States government.

The Trump litigation is, at its heart, a case about whether America’s borders are a civil rights-free zone. It is a case about whether the president of the United States can brag about his intention to violate the Constitution, brag about the specific pretext he will use to mask this violation in a thin veneer of legitimacy, and then get away with it because the president claims that he was acting in the interest of “national security.”

Should Trump ultimately prevail in this lawsuit — and the Court’s Republican majority appeared likely to hand him a victory at last April’s oral argument — Trump will almost certainly read the decision as a green light to commit greater atrocities against immigrants. Though there are legal distinctions between the Muslim Ban case and the arguments supporting the family separation policy Trump implemented earlier this year, the Court’s history is riddled with cases where the justices turned their back on a marginalized group — and authoritarian actors treated that decision as a license to go buck-wild.

Indeed, the Trump administration already plans to ask the courts for a broad license to detain immigrant children. On Wednesday, Trump handed down an executive order purporting that it is “the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity.”

Yet this same order also directs Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to ask a court to modify a settlement the government agreed to in 1997 — the “Flores agreement” — “in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.”

The Trump administration’s goal, in other words, appears to be a world where parents and children are warehoused together in federal detention facilities until they are convicted of a crime or deported to their home country.

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https://thinkprogress.org/supreme-court-cruel-historically-ignorant-partisans-e21e8a62afff/