Here’s the thing, good people: Republicans lie, Democrats lie — numbers don’t.
Sure, statistics can be manipulated, and the figures often don’t tell the full story, regardless. Still, a court record, for example, is a court record, and it indicates to us that a legal dispute occurred. And even if you’re a person who has little to no confidence in the U.S. justice system (*timidly raises hand*), you’d have to admit that if a person lost 90% of the court cases they and their organization were involved in, it’s likely they think they’re above the law and are being shown they are not.
Unless you’re a MAGA supporter and the perpetual court case losers were President Donald Trump and his administration, in which case no amount of L’s taken in court will convince you that your 34-time-felon-in-chief is as criminally corrupt as he is woefully incompetent.
Anyway, the Trump administration has lost upwards of 10,000 court cases over its immigration enforcement policies, meaning federal judges have rebuked Trump’s mass deportation agenda in 90% of the cases his administration has been taken to court for. Specifically, we’re talking about thousands of cases in which human beings were detained, arrested and/or scheduled for deportation unlawfully.
From Politico:
More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
POLITICO is tracking the tens of thousands of detention cases that have flooded the system since ICE adopted its detention policy last July. Today we are releasing a full database of those rulings, giving the public an opportunity to see under the hood of our reporting — which has documented the courts’ lopsided results, ICE’s tactics for defying judges’ orders and the rising tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration.
See there? You’re not being asked to interpret stats; you just need to look at the court record on file and the information regarding how it was adjudicated.
Of course, we spent months reporting daily about the many abuses, lies and unlawful behavior of ICE and Border Patrol agents, as well as the Department of Homeland Security officials who routinely lied and spread misinformation in an effort to cover up those abuses, lies and that unlawful behavior. We’ve reported plenty on how the administration is flat-out lying when it says the overwhelming majority of undocumented migrants being arrested are violent criminals, when, in fact, the overwhelming majority of those arrested have no violent criminal histories to speak of at all. We’ve reported that, in Chicago, a federal judge released numerous videos that proved federal agents and their DHS handlers had been lying about agents being attacked by protesters, while, in reality, they were actually the ones initiating and escalating the violent clashes. We’ve reported on Trump officials blindly calling anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota “domestic terrorists” while provably lying about the circumstances under which protesters and others were shot. We’ve reported on the multiple judges who have had to block Trump from targeting documented immigrants. And, of course, we have reported on all of the racial profiling, warrantless arrests, using children as bait to lure out adults, and the numerous times federal agents violated rulings by federal judges, prohibiting the use of tear gas near schools and residential areas, as well as other brutal tactics.
I say all that to say: We been told y’all.
Unfortunately, no amount of court records will convince Trump loyalists and MAGA cultists that their golden calf isn’t a lawful, “tough on crime” saint. Otherwise, they would have known something was up when federal judges kept ruling his National Guard deployments were unlawful, or when the Supreme Court ruled his tariffs were unconstitutional, or all the times his withholding of federal funds from various “woke” or “DEI” institutions were deemed illegal, or when Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential race was rigged against him got laughed out of dozens of state and federal courts, or the fact that virtually all of the Trump administration’s retaliatory lawfare cases against political rivals have crumbled before his sleepy, little, beady eyes.
At what point will Trump supporters be able to admit they have thrown their support behind a corrupt grifter who thinks he’s above the law and would be a true authoritarian if all of these pesky federal courts didn’t keep getting in his way?
They can’t all just be “rogue judges,” can they?
SEE ALSO:
Trump Scales Back Mass Deportation Effort, ICE Arrests, Lawsuits Decline
Trump’s White House Posts Parody Jet2 Video Making Light Of Mass Deportations
