Judges Blast Trump Immigration Actions

in Minnesota. My guest is immigration law expert lyon Fresco, a partner at Holda Knight Leon. There seems to be a change in tone from the Trump administration. President Trump instructed to the Homeland Security Secretary not to intervene in protests or unrested democratic led cities unless local officials formally request assistance. DHS Secretary Christi nom said today that every immigration officer on the ground will be issued body worn

cameras immediately. And of course last week we had borders our Tom Homan saying that mistakes had been made.

specific subset of people, focus on people who are criminals and people with removal orders, and don't focus on the larger population, because this make the job of ICE much more difficult in the sense that it creates these inflammatory conditions that we're seeing across the country. Number one, but number two, the agents are trained for detention and removal. They're not trained for these local police tactics, regardless of whether it's to border patrol or whether it's ICE. They're

not trained for that. They're trained for apprehension of a particular person who's a foreign national, either in their home or the workplace, or the court, bringing them to detention and removing them from the country. And the border patrol is trained to guard the border. They're not trained to interact with us. It is entered and try to make determinations as to who's here legally and who isn't in

a conflagration in a city. So that's one group. The second group the philosophies are partly focused on this concept of quotas and arrest numbers at all costs, but really what they're trying to accomplish is to create deterrents such that the conditions in the United States are so anxiety producing that people make the determination that it's better for them to self deport and to take the offer that the US government is giving them to self deport rather

than to remain in the United States and hope they can figure out a way to outlast this current administration. And those are the two theories, and those theories go back and forth depending on who is in charge at a particular moment and whose theory is being accepted at a particular moment. And the point is one is going to yield probably more numbers than the other, but at

different times. Meaning if there's a lot of court injunctions and a lot of city conflagrations, maybe you might have yielded more numbers just having this blanket immigration deportation frenzy, But at the end you won't really, because you'll get a lot of stops and starts there. Whereas it's like the tortoise and the hair, if you do things the

right way, in a slow and steady fashion. Yes it isn't this mass deportation of millions of people, but you get less injunctions, you get less orders overturning your work, and you actually get deportations. And so this is what Tom Holman has known. But to say that this is going to be the state of affairs for any extended period of time is foolish because this has changed many times and will continue to change many times during this administration.

name is Adrian Conejo Arias and his son Liam. And basically what is conceded here is that there's a detention of the father in a way where the father is separated from the child, and the detention of that father relied on an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, and was part of a broader enforcement regime driven by the deportation numbers that the administration felt that it needed to have, and not because there was an actual reason to detain

this person. Why do we say that, because this person was in the middle of the asylum process and did not have any criminal issues. So the point is, usually when that happens, they let you play out the asylum process and if you win, good, you win, and you're on your way to lawful permanent residency. But if you lose, that's when they detain you and move you into the

deportation process. They very very rarely. Something usually has to happen, like an arrest or some sort of very bad thing to just pick someone up who's in the middle of the asylum process and just put them in detention, especially when there's children involved. But that's what happens here. They separate the child from the father for a moment, they

try to give the child to the mother. The mother is terrified of Ice and is basically not allowing Ice to give the mother the child because she's worried if Ice opens the door, she's going to be apprehended. So the child and the father are taken to the Dilly

Family Immigration Processing Center in Texas. And usually the way that works is when families come in the United States, that's where families are detained and then they're led out because there's immigration decisions that don't let children be in immigration detention for longer than two weeks, So usually it works that way. But in this way, they were trying to put the child and the father in detention, hoping

they could get them on their way out. The problem is, of course, there's a pending asylum case, so you can't do anything. All you can do is just detain them for the purpose of having a new arrest number and a new detention bed occupation number, but not to actually accomplish a removal. So what happened? So these individuals file a habeas petition saying why have you detained them in the middle of the asylum process. What's the point of this?

And even though that's technically something that needs to be done as part of an immigration bond hearing, the immigration courts are currently not considering those cases because there's an opinion, that's an administrative opinion that granted courts have refused to accept hundreds of times now because many people have filed habeas's, hundreds and hundreds of them all around the country, and almost all of those habeases are successful, saying that this

blanket detention that's not being even considered for bond hearing is unconstitutional and violates the statute. And so that's basically what this court says. It says, hey, there's not a reason not to let these people out of the bond. And the arrest itself lacked constitutionally sufficient process because again it relied on administrative warrants instead of judicial warrants and was part of this broader enforcement regime driven by daily

deportation quotas, not individualized probable cause determination. And then that's when the judge started talking about eighteen oh seven cases and the Magna Carta and Blackstone and biblical references and the Declaration of Independence, and basically, in a very very scathing fashion, criticizing this administration, and so that's that's why the release was ordered. There, This judge was very up

at the government and the release was ordered. Now, ultimately there's going to be a grappling here, not in this particular case, i'd imagine, but ultimately where the Supreme Court's going to have to figure out can these habeas petitions be listened to? Did the government do the wrong thing with this blanket detention no bond order that it's issued, And that's all going to have to shake itself out.

So it is all possible, but it's just not a very sympathetic fact pattern because you have this five year old child in immigration detention, and I understand that there's definitely factual disputes about what happened during the detention and also what happened with regard to him perfecting his asylum claim.

But nevertheless, I just don't know that this is where they want to plant their flag as this being the case that ends up in the Supreme Court and having them decide whether a habeas is proper, because I think most people would say maybe this was the exact case you'd want a habeas in. They probably want the habeas in a much less sympathetic context to the foreign national. But we'll have to wait and see maybe they will pick this, or.

as a lawsuit over it proceeds. Judge Catherine Menendez on Saturday denied a preliminary injunction sought in the lawsuit file this month by state Attorney General Keith Ellison and the mayors of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I've been talking to

immigration attorney Leon Fresco of Holland and Knight. So there was another scathing opinion by a judge in Minneapolis, Judge Menendez, and she acknowledged that Minnesota and the cities have made a strong showing that Operation Metro ser has had and will continue to have profound and even heartbreaking consequences, and also found evidence that ICE and Border Patrol agents have engaged in racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other

harmful actions. But still she wouldn't stop the federal immigration operation.

also violating principles of equal state sovereignty, and also functioning as political retaliation because they chose to be a sanctuary jurisdiction, which in this case just meant that they didn't want to cooperate with ICE to do arrest. They said, you know, the ICE is on its own. We don't have to cooperate,

and so we will not. And so what the judge said is, as you said, there were a lot of things that bothered the judge with regard to racial profiling and the way immigration enforcement was being done, and she didn't decide whether that operation was lawful overall, and she certainly did not endorse the wisdom, fairness, or morality of the operation. And she did, of course, like we said,

cited the racial profiling, excessive force, and unlawful arrest. But what she decided was whether an injunction would be tenable

under this tenth Amendment and equal sovereignty theory. And ultimately, what the court said is that the plaintiffs failed to show a likelihood of success under existing Supreme Court president because the law is very narrow and undeveloped, and basically, the Court didn't have a workable legal standard for determining how many Fed agencies too many when aggressive enforcement crosses

the line from lawful pressure into unconstitutional coercion. And so even though she said it wasn't legally frivolous, she didn't see how she could have an extraordinary remedy where a judge would halt a federal law enforcement operation. And I think here there are two key points. I think it's probably not lost on the judge that tom Holman did say what he said. Perhaps the judge was concerned about after tom Holman said what he said, getting involved and

not basically letting this process play out. Perhaps if the process continued to play out in a way that was

more escalatory, you might have seen a different decision. But I think that the tom Homan discussions about dialing it down, I think were very helpful Number one, and I think number two, at the end of the day, the judge was also concerned about how there would be this basically day to day governance of the federal government in one of these contexts, and so I think the judge basically said, let's see what Tom Holman is going to be doing in Minneapolis, and then we can come back and revisit this,

but for now, this is not the time perhaps to issue this injunction.

councular processing cable. And what they're saying is these cables that basically say that the reason there's a seventy five country ban is because they're worried that the people from these seventy five countries are going to come in and use welfare benefits. That this violates the entire statutory scheme of the Immigration and Nationality Act for a couple of reasons. Number One, there's literally this is the weirdest thing. And I hate using this word literally, but here it is

the appropriate use of the word. There is literally a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that says that you can't discriminate when you're giving out green cards based on the country that someone's from. It actually says it right there in writing. And that's interesting because that's usually within the context of what the administration is not supposed to do. Is it's not supposed to say, give the

green cards to this country as opposed to another. It's supposed to be first come, first served, within the confined of after you get more than seven percent from any one country your cat. That's fine, that's a different part of the statue. But other than that, it's supposed to be first come, first serve. So they're saying, look, there's

a clear statue that says you can't do this. The problem is there's another statue which says that the president can ban whoever the president wants if the president thinks that's in the national interests of the country. And that's already been given some difference in the Trump versus Hawaii case from the first administration. So again you have these

dueling statutes. Which statute will win. Will it be the travel ban statute or will it be the statute that says you can't discriminate based on who you give green cards to. Now what was interesting is that same argument was made in the travel ban case but was rejected. But interestingly, the reason it was rejected was because the travel ban case back then was not a ban on green cards. It was a ban on all kinds of other visas, visitor visa, student visas, other kinds of temporary visas.

But it actually wasn't a ban on green cards. And so this is going to be very interesting is does this ban that's an actual ban on green cards violate the statutory language which says you can't discriminate in the allocation of green cards based on what country someone is from.

So that's number one, and then number two, the fact that the underlying fear is that the people coming will be public charges, so to speak, meaning that they will rely on the federal government and the taxpayers for money. The point there is, look Congress created a statutory scheme for this. They said that when that's true, there has to be a sponsor who is a US citizen or a lawful permanent resident, and that person has to make

a certain amount of money. And in that situation, if welfare benefits are obtained, then it's this sponsor who has to pay them back. They've agreed to do this, But that's the scheme, And the point is you can't come up with another scheme now because you don't like the existing scheme. So that's the point of the argument.

to see who wins within this context. Will they be correct that between the statutory language that says you can't discriminate on a particular country and the statutory language that says this is how you address this public charge concern that that framework means you can't have the kind of ban that the president issued, or will the President be able to again succeed relying on his blanket banning authority that allows him to basically ban any foreign national from

the United States for any reason, as long as he thinks it's in the interests of the United States. So that's the question, and this is going to be yet another instance where these dueling statutes are going to have to be analyzed.

green card. That's the language that ended the quotas. So the quotas existed until the nineteen sixties, and then in the nineteen sixties that language was put in which eliminated the quotas. And so the question is what happens now.

Can the President, through his travel ban authority, which doesn't just allow him to ban travel, but allows him to ban any any entry of any kind by any non US citizen, can he use this at such an expansive way to basic redo the quotas of the pre nineteen sixties era, or will the courts put some limitation on the president? And that is going to be a very interesting question.

protected status. What temporary protected status is, by the way, is a statutory provision that says that the president if they think there's some sort of natural disaster or some sort of pandemic or something else in a particular country, that in that situation, the president can say for eighteen months, hey, people who are stuck here in the US are not here illegally, they're temporarily protected. And then what's happened is

every eighteen months that gets renewed, renewed, renewed. And so then this question was, Okay, what happened when those eighteen months expired for Venezuela in eighty Is President Trump in some way bound to do something other than let them expire? And so there was a lawsuit saying that the Secretary of Onland Security Christinome, exceeded her statutory authority in vacating

and terminating the temporary protected status. And there's been injunction saying they had to come back, and then the Supreme Court has said it doesn't have to come back. And so one of the things that's complicated is Secretary No

didn't just let it expire, and she done that. She might have actually had a better case, but she tried to vacate the existing temporary protected status, and so by doing that, the Court said that she exceeded her statutory authority to vacate this, and then by doing that is sort of basically using that as a mechanism to extend

temporary protected status as much as possible. I don't think here the Supreme Court is ultimately going to have a lot of sympathy, especially when the time actually expires and there really is no temporary protected status left because the time has expired. And basically I don't think the Supreme Court will say that there's any judge that can require a president to renew temporary protected status. So I think ultimately this is going to end up being much ado

about nothing. But the Ninth Circuit is trying its best to keep the Venezuelan and Haitian population protected from deportation. But I don't think in the long run this is going to be successful.

degree to do that job. If you can, you can get an H one B visa. The H one B visa, however, has a cap at sixty five thousand visas per year, plus another twenty thousand if you happen to have a master's degree or above from a US university, so eighty five thousand. Let's say. Now here's what's fascinating. There are

ways to get above that cap. And the main way to get above that cap is if the person applying for the H one B visa, the company, sorry, or whatever, the petitioner is either a US university or it's a governmental institution. Those are the main ways that those institutions can exceed the cap, and so there are a lot of universities who exceed the cap and bring in a lot of people on H one B visas. What are

they bringing them in for. They're bringing them into be professors, researchers, and the biggest one, and this is where this is getting really complicated, is that you may have noticed that a lot of state universities now provide a lot of healthcare all around the country in their hospitals and their

hospital systems, et cetera. And so a lot of doctors and other medical professionals come on these H one B visas and they're doing a lot of important work where if you didn't have them, then these hospitals would be chronically understaffed. So what happens You now have states like Florida and Texas saying, guess what, we are going to ban our universities from hiring anyone on an H one B visa application, whether it's a professor, a doctor, a researcher,

or anything else. And so this is what's interesting about this. There are certainly some H one B visas that I've seen in some of these state universities that are frivolous. You know, they're hiring an athletic trainer for the lacrosse team or something like that, and it's like, well, you really can't find an athletic trainer in the United States who can do this that kind of thing. So there's some of that where you can say, Okay, look, that's

a little bit frivolous. But when we're talking about doctors and researchers and others we're not it doesn't lend itself to the political talking point that oh, these people would be hired by you know, Americans would be hired to fill every one of these positions if it wasn't for this.

And so yes, the states have it in their prerogative to ban their universities from hiring anyone on H one B. But at the end of the day, I do think there's gonna be some negative drawback from especially the healthcare fields and these universities where they say, look, we weren't there was no one we could get other than these people. What are we supposed to do now? And I think that's going to be very fascinating to see how it plays.

listening to Bloomberg. The Pulletzer Prize Committee is demanding confidential records from President Trump, including an unredacted copy of Robert Muller's report and internal communications between the Trump White House and the Uessians. The committee is asking for the documents to defend against Trump's defamation lawsuit against them. Joining me is Bloomberg Last senior correspondent Alex Ebert. Alex tell us about Trump's lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board.

with Russians during his twenty sixteen presidential campaign. That reporting combined won Pulitzer Prize in twenty eighteen, and Trump was mad about that and constantly complaining about it the Politzer Prize Board in twenty eighteen issued a statement standing by it and saying that the reporting was fine and their investigations into the awards that they're not going to change

their position. Trump said that itself was defamation, and so he brought a lawsuit in Florida State Court alleging that this defamation is harming his reputation. This was in twenty twenty two, when Trump was kind of in the wilderness and trying to come back from the January sixth debacle following the attack on the Capitol, and so he was in Florida licking his wounds and coming back, and this lawsuits persisted until today.

on the issues of stay as well. And said, no, the president can decide whether or not he wants to spend his time, you know, bringing personal lawsuits in state court, and we're not going to interfere with that decision.

done looking into those ties. We're talking about confidential state secrets here, you know that involve our spy organizations looking into things that Russians may or may not have done to interfere with our elections. Those things are not completely unredacted and publicly available. And so the Politzer Board here is saying, hey, if you want to say that it is false that your campaign had connections with Russians, then you've got to cough up these records.

secrets on behalf of the government. These are normally things where like Raytheon or Northward Drummond are arguing in state court about like who owns a piece of scientific material right, or some IP and the Justice Department will intervene in and say, hey, we can't disclose all this because some of this might be state secrets protected things that we don't want foreigners to be able to see or other

people in the United States. Those state secrets then are seriously protected, some of the most protected information by our government, and so the Department of Justice routinely intervenes to prevent

this disclosure. Here we have the head of the Executive, Donald Trump, potentially needing to disclose some of these things just so he can keep his defamation suit going in Florida, or he could throw another big wrench in here and say you're not entitled to this stuff, and then the court is left to say, do I view this in camera and let this go forward? And we have various precedent on this that say that's not really workable.

set up for that. And so there's a question of whether or not the judge and his staff would even have the sort of clearance needed to view these things in camera, not in front of the parties, in order to make sure that the secrets of the government are protected. And here we're talking about things that are routinely protected, right, sources and methods of spy agencies, you know, looking into how foreign powers are trying to influence our government and

the things we do here. So these are things that even the folks I've spoken with that are extremely skeptical of the way the government might classify things as you know, protected or confidential. They say, this might you know, strongly qualify under any standard for that sort of protection.

same conclusion. Right, if you're not going to come forward with these documents, you can't maintain this case. We even have a decision from the DC Circuit from Scalia that basically said it would be false it would be, you know, a travesty to basically trick the jury. You know, we know that there are these documents out there and they would give the defense some sort of you know, a strong position, but we're going to ignore that and just

let the plaintiff move forward. But this is twenty twenty six, and this is a unique situation because Trump is in control of those records, and so the experts we spoke with, you know, are wondering how the court is going to deal with this. You know, can they force the president to disclose this And if the president, who has the sole authority to declassify this information, doesn't do it, does the court have the right to dismiss the case. It's an open question.

this is over cases where the issue is elections. That he's won, and so there's a question of, you know, how far a president can take this strategy, and whether or not the normal defenses that you'd have in cases like defamation work in this system.

and killed people in the region where Chakda operated. The organization was taking money from Jaquita, and Chaquita was saying, this is basically a protection racket. We can't be responsible. We were, you know, basically, but in rock and hard place, we either have to pay this money or we can't operate.

And the plaintiffs were saying, no, you knew what was happening here when in the nineties, you know, mostly we had these paramilitary groups that were killing hundreds, potentially thousands of people in the region where you get all of this fruit for Chikeita. The verdicts came down and nine different individuals were found to have damages. Right, these are survivors of the victims of the people killed by the paramilitary group. And this is just a drop in this

massive ocean of potential claims. Right, this is a bell the trial, and they are about four five hundred plaintiffs suing the company, So we're looking at potentially billions of dollars of damages. But also this first of its kind verdict where these plaintiffs could potentially point to other cases and say, hey, this is a roadmap for you to sue other US corporations if they're doing dirty things abroad.

fill that gaps when we need to. And so when it came to liability here, the big question before the trial court was how do we fill the gap in Columbia law when it comes to the liability of Chakdah. And the trial court they say that they, unfortunately for the plaintiffs, decided to use federal common law when they did that instead of Florida common law. And so the question for the Court of Appeals was is that a big enough of a problem that it undermines the jury verdict here?

about extreme facts that would apply to either standard. But jakdah, and it seems like they got the ear of the judges is saying, listen, there's a pretty big difference when it comes to negligence standards. If you have a difference between causing something as the standard or being a factor in something, then that's a big gap. That's a golf

that the jury can jump through. And so they're arguing that state law would say you have to really be more of a but for cause of something to be liable here, and the federal standard is more like, oh, you have to be a factor in the deaths and that the injury of these plaintiffs family members.