Apr 21, 2025 | Pope Francis' passing, Supreme Court's midnight block of Trump's deportation efforts

Hi everyone!
 

I was prepared to write about the Abrego Garcia case, immigration, border crossing reductions, and the latest Supreme Court ruling, which said that Trump can't use the Alien Enemies Act to facilitate deportations until further notice. Then I saw the news that Pope Francis died today in Rome. The only time I was ever in Rome was the summer after Pope Francis ascended to that vaunted office. I visited the Vatican and was awed by it, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's Pieta, and most especially the altar to Saint John the Baptist in the catacombs beneath the church.

That time spent in Rome kick-started my faith, something I had not only lost over the years but grieved for. I visited other churches, too, smaller ones across Rome, and also across the country. I found I was able to follow the Mass though I do not speak Italian. Seeing these ancient churches, ancient at least compared to the US, I was struck with the majesty of the church, how it has spanned centuries, how it ruled a continent and still holds power in the hearts of mankind.

When I came back, I was moved to become more active in my church, I taught CCD for several years and came to follow the new Pope. I didn't agree with everything he said, but I respected his mission to bring Catholics back to their faith. I was one of those Catholics coming back, I didn't feel judged, I felt welcomed. I'm very glad for that.

On Friday night, the ACLU went to three different courts to try to block the deportations of some 50 Venezuelans held in a facility in Anson, Texas. The non-profit, which has been determined to block the Trump administration at every turn, brought its case to the Northern District of Texas, the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, and the Supreme Court.

The first two courts did not respond before the Supreme Court, which released a ruling shortly after midnight on Saturday morning. "The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court," SCOTUS said. The ruling was unsigned, though Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito saying he'd release a statement later.

"In sum," Alito wrote in his scathing dissent, "literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of received the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order."

The ACLU has been going hard at the Trump administration on deportations and because the Court ruled that cases for illegal immigrants seeking to stop their deportations must be brought in the district where they are held, the ACLU has had to file multiple cases. If those who are subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act are united as one class, the ACLU would likely be able to bring one suit for all of them in an attempt to get a blanket prevention of the use of that Act to deport illegal immigrants. This would be easier for them and would be a dispositive ruling. Sauer has already argued in his ask for the Court to "dissolve" the ruling, saying that they are not a "class."

But what strikes me about this case and the others, is how desperately Democrats want to keep illegal immigrants in the country. It shows that the plan was never to send anyone home. I wrote about this in the New York Post over the weekend, "President Joe Biden brought at least 8 million illegal immigrants into the United States through an assortment of semi-legal programs. Now, President Donald Trump is seeking to do the will of the American people by deporting them, but the Democrats’ tooth-and-nail legal fight against him shows that keeping them in the country forever was always their plan."

Where was the ACLU when the border was being overrun lawlessly? Where were these judges when the Biden administration kept breaking immigration laws and using executive orders to let everyone in? "Now they claim to revere the rule of law, but for four years, the judiciary either looked the other way or helped maintain Biden’s border crisis."

Illegal immigrants weren't defined as a "class" when Joe Biden assigned everyone varying degrees of legal status, from asylum seeker to refugee, to temporary protected status, to parolee. And they're not a class now that the Trump administration is seeking to remove them.