I wake up to something I’ve never heard of before. When I went to bed last night court hearings were blowing up again as the Trump Regime was apparently preparing to send hundreds more to El Salvador. To nominally comply with the Supreme Court’s prior order requiring real and effective due process the Regime isolated those targeted and compelled or tricked them into signing statements saying they accepted the deportation.
At a hearing last night a D.C. judge sympathized with desperate lawyers for those to be deported but said he was powerless to stop them under the Supreme Court’s decision saying all such appeals had to be made in the district where the government was holding the people. The judge invited the Supreme Court to intervene, but it was already about 9 pm.
Well, I have never heard of this sort of thing before, but the Supreme Court, in the dead of night, did intervene. In an order dated Saturday, so it happened, sometime after Midnight (it appears to have been between 1 or 2 am) the Supreme Court issue an order that all such deportations under the Enemy Aliens Act be stopped. It was a 7-2 decision with Alito and Thomas dissenting. A written dissent by Alito is to follow because he apparently did not have time to write one yet.
Folks, that is some crazy jacked up crazy stuff there from the Supreme Court. Dark of the night full vote orders like that is not anything I have heard of before. Sometimes one assigned justice issues a late night emergency order in rare life or death situations delaying things, but this was a vote of the full court.
The good news is that the Supreme Court stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to preserve the rule of law against autocracy. The bad news is that two dissented.
