How deportation broke the courts
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Why are DOJ lawyers quitting their jobs?
Lawyers for the Department of Justice are crashing out. The Dow, the Dow right now is over... The Dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. Not Pam Bondi. That's a separate issue. No, the lawyers tasked with prosecuting immigration cases for the Trump administration are quitting, saying they have too much work. One DOJ lawyer in Minnesota got a lot of attention last week when she told a judge, quote, this job sucks. A former DOJ chief of staff tweeted in desperation.
If you're interested in being an assistant U.S.
attorney... DM me. To which someone replied, your DMs aren't open.
What impact did Trump's administration have on immigration cases?
When President Trump sent ICE into Minneapolis to run amok, his administration was bound to get sued. A bunch. The problem is he's running out of lawyers. That's coming up on Today Explained.
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Hi, this is Bella Freud. I'm the host of Fashion Neurosis. This week on the show, Esther Perel is on my couch. Erotic recovery is part of trauma healing.
God, that's interesting. It's not the reward at the end. Yeah. That's the difference.
And I think we both come together around that construct.
Yeah.
Find Fashion Neurosis on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Today Explained.
Kyle Cheney is a senior legal affairs reporter for Politico who's been reporting on a ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It's a federal court that was handed down late last week. And the court said what exactly, Kyle? So for months, the Trump administration has been mounting this aggressive, not just a mass deportation effort, but a mass detention effort where anyone they want to deport, even if these are people applying for asylum or seeking other legal pathways to remain in the United States, they're locking them up, essentially, in a way that no previous administration ever has. And the way they're doing that is reinterpreting old laws and trying to apply them in a different way.
Up until now, only recent border crossers were really subject to mandatory detention.
Then came the second Trump administration, now implementing this mandatory detention policy, saying that with very few exceptions, when a migrant is apprehended in these ICE enforcement operations, the government is compelled to detain them without bond as they fight their deportation. And courts around the country have been rejecting this over and over hundreds and hundreds of times. However, The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled on Friday that the administration's interpretation of those old laws was correct and that they could continue this mass detention campaign on top of their mass deportation campaign. What was the Fifth Circuit's reasoning here?
So it's somewhat nuanced and complicated, but the idea is whether you treat people who have lived in the United States maybe for decades, no criminal records, people who have built lives here, you can treat them as though they have just arrived in the country, essentially call them arriving aliens is the term in the law. Wow. And again, no previous administration has interpreted it this way, but it is a convoluted aspect of these old laws. And, you know, then the Fifth Circuit said that what this administration is doing may be different, but just because they're exercising power in a different way doesn't mean it's wrong. And they backed them up. OK, so the Trump administration says we're going to interpret this law differently.
Do we do we know how the Trump administration landed on the notion that they could interpret the law differently?
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