Following on the heels of Tuesday’s evisceration of Trump lackey and Russian fluffer Michael Flynn, in which he lobbed a metaphorical grenade into the conspiracy-addled foxhole inhabited by Donald Trump and Fox News, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia just delivered the Trump administration another unpleasant reality check—this time on the administration’s draconian immigration policies.
A Washington federal judge declared unlawful Wednesday a set of new restrictions the Trump administration imposed on immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. on the basis of domestic violence and fear of gangs.
The judge, Emmet Sullivan of Washington’s federal trial court, said the Trump administration had run afoul of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. Sullivan permanently enjoined the U.S. government from continuing the new policies, which were announced this summer by then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and demanded the return of immigrants named in the case who he said were unlawfully deported. Those immigrants, he wrote, should receive “new credible fear determinations consistent with the immigration laws.”
In a 107-page opinion, Judge Sullivan forcefully declared the Trump administration’s asylum policies unlawful and inconsistent with the intent of Congress in passing the INA. Sullivan specifically called out the administration’s policy of automatically disregarding claims by asylum seekers—that they had fled their countries to escape domestic violence or gang violence—as contrary to the intent of the Act, which requires a threshold determination as to whether the asylum seeker has articulated a “credible fear” of persecution that would justify asylum.
Sullivan said the Justice Department’s directive “to deny most domestic violence or gang violence claims at the credible fear determination stage is fundamentally inconsistent with the threshold screening standard that Congress established: an alien’s removal may not be expedited if there is a ‘significant possibility’ that the alien could establish eligibility for asylum.”
Following the policies initiated by Sessions, immigration officials would routinely turn away such applicants, even when those same officials found their claims to be wholly credible and sincere. Under Wednesday’s ruling, however, the fear of domestic rape, abuse, and gang-spawned threats of violence and murder must now be considered in weighing asylum requests. And whether the administration wants it that way or not is irrelevant.
“[I]t is the will of Congress—not the whims of the executive—that determines the standard for expedited removal, the court finds that those policies are unlawful,” Sullivan wrote in his 107-page ruling.
Judge Sullivan’s opinion, in the case of Grace v Whitaker, is here.
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, for the record, was unavailable for comment.