Government Lawyers Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil Won't Stop Whining

A pro-Palestine demonstrator holds a Free Mahmoud Khalil sign at a protest in New York City on May Photo Kena Betancur AFP via Getty Images One of the top job requirements for attorneys in Donald Trump s Justice Department seems to be an abundance of shamelessness A lot of legal professionals have to defend the indefensible as part of their jobs but arguing that rampant lawlessness is legal as executive attorneys now do in several of the -plus lawsuits filed against the current Trump administration requires a particular flair for impudence The effort to deport Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil offers a event in point The Trump regime abducted Khalil a green card holder in the lobby of his New York apartment building in March and has since held him in a sprawling U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana Last week the New Jersey judge hearing Khalil s habeas corpus challenge against the establishment made a simple demand Present the legal precedent Against this the majority basic directive to do their jobs the authorities s attorneys filed a whiny formal objection The Trump administration complained that it was misguided to demand it swiftly present the legal basis for its extreme actions They should know the precedents because that is part of arguing the legality of a leadership action The ruling body is trying to use an obscure provision under the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the secretary of state the power to deport people whose presence it deems to create potentially serious adverse foreign program consequences Secretary of State Marco Rubio made just such a determination in his effort to deport Khalil as well as Columbia attendee Mohsen Mahdawi who is also a green card holder and Tufts University Ph D novice R meysa zt rk Judge Michael Farbiarz s response to invocation of the obscure law seemed reasonable Last Friday morning he petitioned that the executive provide examples of other instances of the provision s use by p m that day Were the governing body s matter anything but an authoritarian gambit Justice Department attorneys would be able to present relevant precedent on demand They should know the precedents because that is surely part of arguing the legality of a establishment action And the governing body has had plenty of time to construct this argument Khalil s attorneys filed the habeas petition the night he was detained by ICE over two months ago Instead the attorneys scrambled that day to produce a bare-bones response and complained that limited staff have been searching for records in response to the Court s orders as well as managing competing litigation requests and other priorities Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent The Cabinet has made a good faith effort to comply with the Court s majority of new orders the attorneys wrote in the objection But the Regime believes that those orders are misguided and lodges this formal objection They went on Ruling body counsel has also appeared before the Court for conferences scheduled hours beforehand complaining that those instances have adversely affected the Administration and counsel s work on other cases The attorneys disclosed that the judge asking for this extremely basic information about the event s legal basis amounted to expedited discovery which Khalil s band rather than the judge should request Give Me a Break The objection means nothing for Khalil s ongoing affair but it s a telling example of the Justice Department s churlish position when it comes to offering legal justifications for governing body actions Numerous judges have now scolded regime attorneys in an array of cases from attacks on law firms to deportation cases to candidate visa removals Judges have berated shoddy work Kafkaesque arguments and disrespectful behavior from attorneys Legal work that leaves something to be desired may in part be due to a dearth of talent in establishment Hundreds of attorneys have left the Justice Department since Trump s return the department s civil rights division has seen a percent reduction in attorneys through resignations and reassignments The Trump administration has melted down the DOJ we once knew wrote journalist Piper French and used the raw material to forge a sleek machine with a unified purpose and total vision Whether the department s operations are dependably sleek is questionable Attorneys have appeared unprepared or evasive and failed to defend Trump s executive actions against full or partial blocks in courts at least times since January Give me a break scoffed one judge an appointee of George W Bush when a Justice Department lawyer tried to argue that Trump s attack on a major law firm was necessary to defend against racial discrimination The judge blocked the order I don t envy the job of defending illegal unconstitutional dreck but I don t have to do it and neither do these lawyers They ought to save themselves the embarrassment and just quit French is right The Justice Department is unwavering in its ideological backing of Trump s fascistic agenda And shamelessness when it comes to the work of defending shameful acts is no doubt a more useful quality than legal wisdom and respect for judicial processes The reason a great number of of these lawyers haven t left however is because they believe their own bullshit Those who remain along with new staff hired by Trump loyalist Pam Bondi commit themselves to the devil s work It offers only minimal comfort that they sometimes do it badly The U S legal system is hardly immune from upholding repressive laws and violently discriminatory governing body actions In Khalil s episode for example the Justice Department attorneys are arguing for a gross violation of First Amendment protections but that s no assurance that they will lose While petulant the attorneys did comply with the judge s order The lawyers proffered two short filings that listed seven examples of the law s invocation with two of the listed cases being Mahdawi and zt rk Related The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free The other five cases listed included Osama Bin-Laden s brother the leader of a paramilitary group in Haiti a Palestinian deported in who according to the cabinet was a top leader of a designated foreign terrorist organization an African national the ruling body explained had contributed to violent political activity in Somalia and the circumstance of Mario Ruiz Massieu a former assistant attorney general of Mexico Massieu was the only one to challenge his detention in court in a situation overseen by Trump s older sister the late federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry Barry ruled the deportation provision unconstitutional but that ruling was reversed on a technicality by none other than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito who was then a rd U S Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ripe for Abuse The foreign plan provision is ripe for abuse It places all too much discretion in the hands of the secretary of state in a deportation system that had little in the way of due process even before Trump got ahold of it Yet even the previous cases listed by the executive make clear that using the law to deport Khalil Mahdawi or zt rk would be an unprecedented overreach Rubio has argued that Khalil should be removed for his role in antisemitic protests and disruptive initiatives which fosters a hostile surroundings for Jewish students in the United States a reprise of the spurious link between protesting Israel and antisemitism A wealth of Khalil s Jewish friends and fellow organizers have also spoken out in aid of him Yet even if Rubio s lies were true deporting someone on those grounds alone would be an extraordinary expansion of the foreign guidelines provision s application and an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment Compared to the rare use of the provision in the last decades one of which was detected to be unconstitutional by a judge the cases against Khalil Mahdawi and zt rk appear risible additions to the list Based on the discretion granted to Rubio under the law however an immigration judge deemed Khalil deportable The post Ruling body Lawyers Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil Won t Stop Whining appeared first on The Intercept