The White House fired another broadside at the federal judiciary on Wednesday — targeting a judge in Seattle for supposedly being “at war with the rule of law” after she blocked President Trump’s plan to detain asylum seekers indefinitely while they await court dates.
“The decision only incentivizes smugglers and traffickers, which will lead to the further overwhelming of our immigration system by illegal aliens,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham asserted in a statement.
“No single district judge has legitimate authority to impose his or her open borders views on the country.”
Judge Marsha Pechman on Tuesday blocked an April order by Attorney General Bill Barr that would have denied thousands of asylum seekers a bail hearing while they awaited deportation hearings.
Pechman ruled that that was unconstitutional and issued a preliminary injunction in a class-action lawsuit brought by migrants and their advocates, the Washington Post reported.
“The court finds that plaintiffs have established a constitutionally protected interest in their liberty, a right to due process, which includes a hearing before a neutral decision maker to assess the necessity of their detention and a likelihood of success on the merits of that issue,” wrote the judge, a President Bill Clinton appointee.
Pechman said migrants seeking asylum must be granted a bond hearing within seven days or be released if a hearing doesn’t take place during that period.
Team Trump was expected to appeal her decision over Barr’s order, part of the administration’s “zero tolerance” stance on illegal immigration.
In Grisham’s statement, she referred to Pechman as “a single, unelected district court judge in Seattle” and said the injunction “prevents the government from ensuring the detention of those aliens who cross the border unlawfully until the completion of their immigration court proceedings.”
Trump has slammed federal judges — and even the Supreme Court — over rulings he doesn’t like.
He slammed the Supremes this week for not allowing a citizenship question on the 2020 US census.
“A very sad time for America when the Supreme Court of the United States won’t allow a question of ‘Is this person a Citizen of the United States?’ to be asked on the #2020 Census!” the commander-in-chief tweeted.
In 2016, he said federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding over a pair of fraud cases involving the now-defunct Trump University, couldn’t be fair to him because the judge was “of Mexican heritage.”