5 judges who explain the courts’ rebuke of ICE detentions
Hundreds of judges have rejected the Trump administration’s unprecedented expansion of ICE detentions, fueling nearly 10,800 rulings against the administration as of May 15.
Within POLITICO’s database of those rulings, as well as our list of judges who have ruled on the issue, there are a handful of courts that have played an outsized role in shaping this overwhelming rebuke of a core Trump policy. They include judges appointed across the ideological spectrum, including Trump appointees, hailing from all over the U.S.
Here’s a look at some of the judges who have had the most significant impact on the administration’s confrontation with the courts.
Judge Clay Land: Prolific ICE detractor
Clay Land, a George W. Bush appointee based in Columbus, Georgia, has ruled against the administration more than 370 times — more than any other judge — since ICE adopted a new policy last summer saying millions of people living in the U.S. without incident for years are subject to immediate detention without bond.
Land’s preferred remedy: a bond hearing for those he has deemed improperly detained without due process.
The bulk of immigration detainees are held in Texas, California and Florida, but Land’s central Georgia region has produced a notable swath of cases. So, too, has the Grand Rapids-based Western District of Michigan, where four judges have combined to reject ICE’s mandatory detention in more than 650 cases, according to POLITICO’s tracking. They include Hala Jarbou (a Trump appointee), Robert Jonker (George W. Bush), Paul Maloney (George W. Bush) and Jane Beckering (Joe Biden).
Four of the 10 judges who have rejected the administration’s mandatory detention position most frequently are President Donald Trump’s appointees, including Jarbou, San Antonio-based Jason Pulliam, Pittsburgh’s William Stickman IV, and Jonestown, Pennsylvania’s Stephanie L. Haines.
Judge Kathleen Cardone, a George W. Bush appointee in Texas, has ruled 210 times against the administration on grounds that ICE’s mass detention policy had deprived detainees of their due process rights. Her rulings helped pave the way for other judges in Texas to order the release of hundreds of ICE detainees even after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld ICE’s mass detention policy.
Judge Kyle Dudek: The Trumpian split, personified
Judges Trump appointed during his first term have opposed ICE’s new approach by a four-to-one margin, when they haven’t been bound by a higher court. But among judges Trump appointed in his second term, 10 have ruled on the issue — and nine of them have sided with ICE.
The 10th, Fort Myers, Florida-based Kyle Dudek, forged an unusual middle path, siding with the administration in some instances and opposing it in others.
Trump’s other second-term picks, some of whom have taken the bench over the last few months, have been among the most full-throated backers of ICE’s policy. They include Kentucky’s Chad Meredith, Tennessee’s Brian Lea, and Missouri’s Cristian Stevens, Megan Benton and Maria Lanahan.
However, Dudek and some other second-term appointees can no longer continue to rule in ICE’s favor on this issue, now that their respective appeals courts — the Ohio-based 6th Circuit and the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit— have rejected ICE’s approach. In fact, about 20 of the 50 judges nationwide who have sided with ICE’s mandatory detention policy are now bound by appeals court decisions that went the other way.
Judge Leon Schydlower: Democratic appointee who ruled for ICE
U.S. District Judge Leon Schydlower, a Biden appointee, has also had his hands tied by an appeals court. He’s obligated to follow the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of ICE — and toeing that line has made Schydlower the Democratic appointee with the most rulings in favor of the administration’s mandatory detention policy.
More than 140 of them, in fact — more than any other judge.
Schydlower, unlike a long list of other judges in Texas, rejected an alternative argument that ICE detainees have made to work around the 5th Circuit’s decision: that the Constitution affords them the right to a bond hearing as a fundamental matter of due process. Though more than a dozen Texas-based federal judges — including some appointed by Republican presidents and Trump himself — have endorsed this view, Schydlower rejected it.
Only a handful of other judges appointed by Democratic presidents have ruled in favor of ICE’s mandatory detention policies, most of them, like Schydlower, hemmed in by appeals court rulings. But unlike Schydlower, the others have handled relatively few cases.
U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas, a Florida-based Clinton appointee is next on the list, having ruled in ICE’s favor nine times before the 11th Circuit forced him to to change course.
Judge Jodi Dishman: The Trump appointee with reservations
Roughly 440 federal district judges have rejected ICE’s novel mass detention policycompared to just 50 who have upheld it — when they are not bound by a higher court. Of the 50 who have independently sided with ICE, 39 are Trump appointees.
But even among Trump appointees who have ruled for the administration, there’s some palpable reluctance. Oklahoma-based U.S. District Judge Jodi Dishman made that clear when, despite siding with ICE’s legal position, she lamented the human cost of her decision.
“The Court takes no solace in the human realities on the other end of its pen,” Dishman wrote in each of her first tworulings on the subject. And in a third, she said the story of a man whose detention she upheld despite his claims of severe medical needs “weighs on one’s conscience.”
Her bottom line, however: “The Court’s first duty is to the rule of law, and to misplace that duty would undermine our system of ordered liberty.”
Dishman isn’t alone.
U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz, a Trump appointee who is based in Florida, acknowledged “humanitarian concerns raised by the Government’s approach, which forecloses the opportunity for immigrants awaiting admission to obtain a bond — immigrants in many instances who, like Petitioner, have little to no criminal history and have resided in this country for decades.”
U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor, a North Dakota-based Trump appointee, called his decision to uphold one ICE detention a “sorrowful conclusion to require an otherwise law-abiding man be detained and kept from his family.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Norris, a Trump appointee in Tennessee, openly struggled with the decision to detain a man who appeared not to be “anything other than a hardworking, otherwise law-abiding individual.”
In each case, the judges defended their rulings as required by a fair reading of the law — even if that reading led to results they view as “sorrowful.”
Judge Jeffrey Bryan: Handling Operation Metro Surge
ICE’s operations in Minnesota — during which agents killed two people — fueled the peak of public anger of Trump’s policy and the most intense pushback from federal courts.
ICE lost the overwhelming majority of detention cases stemming from Operation Metro Surge, with judges in Minnesota rejecting them roughly 385 times about 90 percent of the time since December
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan, a Biden appointee, handled more mandatory detention cases than any judge in the district, ruling against the administration in all of his 62 cases.
The rulings also reflect the explosion in cases altogether, with Minnesota’s federal judges cranking out an average of nearly 60 rulings per week at the height of the surge, compared to just a handful of rulings per week in the months before and since. That reality helps explain the exasperation and strain that Operation Metro Surge caused between the administration and the courts, with judges often upbraiding Justice Department attorneys for missed deadlines, violated orders and repeated violations of detainees’ rights.
Despite these results, the rulings in Minnesota are only part of the story. Many ICE detainees scooped up during Operation Metro Surge were quickly whisked to Texas, New Mexico and other states with detention facilities, requiring emergency lawsuits to be filed in those states’ courts.
المصدر: Politico
