Unelected, inferior court judges are looking at ways to launch a judicial coup against higher court rulings that they don’t like, Politico reported Tuesday.
“Federal judges may have found a workaround to reject the Trump administration’s mass detention policy after an appeals court backed the approach,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported.
A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the Trump administration could continue to detain illegal aliens without bond, with Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones writing for the 2-1 majority that “unadmitted aliens apprehended anywhere in the United States are ineligible for release on bond, regardless of how long they have resided inside the United States.”
“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority under [the law] does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Jones wrote. Under previous administrations, illegal aliens not detained at the border had been able to request a bond hearing, and, if they did not have a violent criminal history, they were often granted bond, Fox News reported.
But as Politico reported, two federal district court judges in Texas who are bound by the ruling said the decision “left an opening for them to continue granting immigrants’ release on other grounds, primarily constitutional arguments against detaining people who have established roots in the U.S. without due process.”
The judges reportedly believe that the Constitution permits a “liberty interest” to be accounted for.
One of the judges, Kathleen Cardone, ruled in a Monday decision that despite the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision, it “has no bearing on this Court’s determination of whether [the petitioner] is being detained in violation of his constitutional right to procedural due process.”
The other judge, David Briones, made a similar finding.
“The Court reiterates its original holding that noncitizens who have ‘established connections’ in the United States by virtue of living in the country for a substantial period acquire a liberty interest in being free from government detention without due process of law,” he wrote.
But what Politico frames as a clever legal workaround is actually just inferior court judges openly searching for ways to ignore a precedent they dislike. When judges acknowledge they are bound by a high court ruling but then immediately search for theories to evade such ruling, they’re making clear they are supporting a judicial coup.
The Trump administration has been plagued by an ongoing judicial coup by unelected, inferior, activist judges who believe in judicial supremacy. Judicial supremacy is the idea that the legislative and executive branches are not co-equal to the judicial branch, but rather, its subordinates.
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal Judge James Ho previously wrote that judges across the country are championing “judicial supremacy.”
“What we’re really seeing in the judiciary is not principle, but arrogance.”
While the Supreme Court did rule that unelected, inferior court judges do not have broad authority to issue universal injunctions, the court left gaping loopholes in the ruling.
“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote.
But, almost immediately after the ruling, an Obama-appointed district judge ruled that Trump exceeded his authority when he issued an executive order on Jan. 20 prohibiting illegal aliens who “engaged in the invasion across the southern border” from seeking asylum or withholding of removal. The judge granted a certified class status, allowing the lawsuit against the administration to proceed.
The judges highlighted by Politico are not outliers. In fact, they are emblematic of an activist judiciary that defies constitutional limits. When inferior court judges hunt and exploit loopholes to override higher court rulings, they are not safeguarding liberty. Rather, they are asserting supremacy over other branches of government.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
