A San Francisco federal judge was lambasted by conservative legal commentators as “lawless” after she ordered a halt to the removal of temporary immigration protections for more than 60,000 migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal. The liberal judge does not have the authority.
US District Judge Trina Thompson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, ordered the planned elimination of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from the three countries pushed back until Nov. 18, when she would hear arguments on the Trump administration revoking the program. “The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek,” Thompson wrote in her Thursday order. “Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood. The Court disagrees.”
“I was trying to think of a knock-down hypo[thetical] of a district court order that everyone of right reason would agree the President has no duty to respect, because it is so obviously not-law on its face,” said Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule.
“But I’m not sure I can do better than ‘you can’t repeal temporary protected status because something something the Atlantic slave trade.’” “The craziest thing about Judge Trina Thompson’s ridiculous TPS ruling isn’t the weird prose comparing ending TPS to the transatlantic slave trade,” added Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the conservative Article III Project focused on the federal judiciary.
“It’s that there’s a statutory jurisdictional bar to even hearing the case and she just breezed right past it,” Chamberlain said, noting that some footnotes by the judge contained “nothing but citations to academic sociologists.” “People are making fun of this moronic opinion for being written at the level of a 9th grade essay, but I’m just glad it clearly wasn’t written using AI,” snarked Jeff Blehar, an attorney and writer at National Review Online. “Call me Mr. Brightside.” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller slammed the ruling as the product of “judicial tyranny,” while Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called the order “completely lawless.”
”The legal rationale here is ‘I think Trump is a racist’ therefore to hell with the law,” Kirk added on X. “Black robe tyranny is a scourge on this land. Such egregious rulings by bad judges MUST start to come with consequences, or it won’t stop.” Hondurans and Nicaraguans had been given the legal status to emigrate and get work permits as a federal response to humanitarian issues following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when the storm hit both countries, killing almost 7,300 people.