A federal judge has accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.
Citing the deaths of Renee Judd and Alex Peretti in Minnesota, the judge said the White House had “expanded the scope of its violence against its own citizens.”
“The threats posed by executive power cannot be viewed in isolation,” US District Judge Sunshine Sykes in Riverside, California, said in her stinging decision late Wednesday.
Sykes ordered the US Department of Homeland Security to provide immigrants in detention across the country with notice of its prior determinations that they may be eligible to seek bail.
Under previous administrations, people without a criminal record generally could request a hearing before an immigration judge while their cases were in immigration court unless they were stopped at the border. president Donald Trump The White House reversed this policy in favor Mandatory detention.
Sykes, nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, Verdict in November Again in December, she said the change violated the law and expanded the scope of her decision to include immigrants across the country. However, the Republican administration continued to reject bond hearings. This has prompted thousands of migrants To file separate motions in federal court Seeking their release. More than 20,000 injunction cases have been filed since Trump’s inauguration, according to federal court records analyzed by the AP.
An email sent Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security was not immediately responded to.
Sykes said Wednesday that, in violating her decision, the administration had “wasted valuable time and resources” and deprived immigrants of their “liberty, economic stability, and basic dignity.”
She also criticized the claim that the immigration crackdown was removing the worst criminals, saying most of the people arrested did not fit that description.
“Americans have expressed deep concern about the illegal and brutal actions of the executive branch,” she wrote. “Alongside its terrorism against noncitizens, the executive branch has expanded violence against its own citizens, resulting in the deaths of two American citizens — Rene Judd and Alex Peretti in Minnesota.”