The Legal & Political Challenges To Trump's Deportation Plans

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I'm not going to lie. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.
I'm Jimena Bustillo and I cover immigration policy. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben.
I cover the White House. And today on the show, a challenge to the Trump administration's efforts to carry out mass deportations.
A federal judge ruled the administration is likely in criminal contempt for its actions related to deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act. Ximena, why don't you start by telling us what this ruling said? So Judge James Bozberg, he is a judge in the U.S.
District Court of D.C., and he ruled on Wednesday that there is, quote, probable cause to find the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for violating his order last month. That was in order originally to immediately pause and turn around any fights related to deportations or, you know, folks being moved out of the country under the Alien Enemies Act.
Okay, so what happens next here? So the order was pretty scathing. You know, it used certain words like obstructionism, stonewalling, you know, he really is trying to put out there that there was some sort of effort to not comply with the orders.
Yeah. He did give the government kind of two options.
One, the government could move to allow the people deported to challenge their deportation orders or to give up the names of individual government officials that are then potentially in contempt of that original order. Now, what happens next? You know, with that, there is a little bit of uncertainty because like in all the other cases that we've seen, the government has appealed.
OK. Well, Danielle, can you tell me how the White House has been responding? What have they said about all this?

Well, they plan to appeal. In responding to Judge Boesberg's decision, Stephen Chung, who is the White House communications director, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, quote, we plan to seek immediate appellate relief.
The president is 100 percent committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country. So the Trump administration, as it always has, is really leaning into insisting that people in the U.S.
illegally are dangerous, even though, to be clear, multiple studies have found that they're not more dangerous than or even less dangerous than natural born U.S. citizens.
And we should say all of this comes against the backdrop of obviously the continuing case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who members of the Trump administration admit was wrongfully deported to El Salvador. Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador yesterday to try to check on Abrego Garcia, but he said he couldn't see him or talk to him.
Obviously, this case is getting deeply politicized. Let's start, Danielle, with what the White House has said about Chris Van Holland's trip to El Salvador.
How are they talking about all this? Well, you're right about the Trump White House, of course, politicizing this. Deporting people was Trump's number one thing on the campaign trail last year.
And fighting illegal immigration, deporting people has always been at the forefront of Trump's policy agenda throughout his political career. But yesterday, we got a really stark picture of how the White House is politicizing this.
And it was with an event at the White House late in the afternoon. What happened was mid-afternoon, the White House announced to reporters that there would be a 4.30 briefing with a surprise guest.
So a bit after 4.30,

Press Secretary Caroline Levitt came out, and as she often does, she excoriated the press. She said this first about Abrego Garcia.
The Democrats in the media in this room have continually and wrongly labeled Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a Maryland father. There is no Maryland father.
Let me reiterate, Kilmar Ebrego

Garcia is an illegal alien

MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist who was deported back to his home country. Now, first of all, to fact check her here before we go on, those are allegations she's talking about.
He has always denied being an MS-13 gang member. His lawyers deny it.
He also was protected by a judge from deportation to El Salvador, and he had been checking in with DHS regularly. So there's that.
This ended up not being a briefing. Caroline Levitt then brought out the special guest, who was Patty Morin.
This is the mother of a woman really brutally murdered by a man in the U.S. illegally from El Salvador.
This happened in Maryland, and this man who killed Rachel Morin was convicted this week. So Patty Morin got up.
She told a very graphic and detailed story of her daughter's rape and murder at the hands of this man. But then it became clear that the White House was trying to link this horrific case with Abrego Garcia, who again has never been convicted of a crime.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the kind of thing that the Trump campaign did a lot during his run for the White House again. I remember stories like this in at least a handful of events that he held.
And Trump has long brought out family members of people who have been killed by people who came to the U.S. illegally.
If you remember, he has at times called them angel families, angel moms. He would talk about them being family members who were, as he put it, permanently separated from their family members who had died, who had been killed.
This is very much an emotionally affecting tactic that Trump uses in his fight to deport people in the U.S. illegally.
In general, how are Democrats handling what's going on with immigration these days? Right. So Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen went down to Seacott, that mega prison in El Salvador where Abrego Garcia is being held.
Chris Van Hollen, to be clear, is the senator from Maryland. This is not just some member of Congress.
This is the home senator from the state where Abrego Garcia had lived for 15 years. He was not allowed to talk to C.
Abrego Garcia. But now there's been reporting that other Democrats want to organize a delegation down to El Salvador.
Democrats are very much talking about all of this as a due process issue, as a constitutional issue. Now, the question is, can they get in? I mean, Van Hollen was denied.
And also, President Bukele of El Salvador really likes

Trump. They are buddies, as we saw at the White House earlier this week.
And we have seen Republican

members of Congress get into that prison, take photos of themselves in front of cells full of

prisoners. Kristi Noem, the secretary of DHS, has also done that.
So the question is, does Bukele show some sort of political favoritism towards one side or the other? All right. Well, let's take a quick break.
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And we're back. Ximena, you have new reporting on how proceedings in immigration court may change.
First, can you explain how immigration court hearings are different than other hearings we may be more familiar with? So there are a lot of similarities between the regular court setting that everyone knows, maybe even watches on TV, and immigration court. But there are a couple key differences.
The first is that immigration courts are within the Justice Department. They're not under the judicial branch.
So that's one difference. The second is that although people have a right to have their case heard in court, they do not have the right to an attorney.
So a vast majority of people who do end up in immigration court actually do not have legal representation. And so, you know, that can pose many challenges.
It can also set people in a way up for failure, a lot of advocates say, because understanding the very complex nature of immigration law, even for immigration attorneys, can just be really complicated. Yeah.
And correct me if I'm wrong, because those courts are under the Justice Department and not part of the regular judicial branch, they are subject to more like political influence, like they could change depending who's in the White House, right? In a way, yes. So there's the Executive Office for Immigration Review, EOIR, or EOR, as some people call it.
And it has the judges that oversee immigration court. And that was put in the Justice Department to at least create a bit of a separation from the Department of Homeland Security so that, you know, wasn't like everyone that was creating the detentions and the arrests were also the ones adjudicating the cases.
However, you know, you're right. They are under the president, depending on who is president, that has changed ultimately the policies that these judges are required to adjudicate under.
And now the Trump administration is moving to fast track cases in these immigration courts by encouraging judges to drop what they deem, quote, legally deficient asylum cases without a hearing. Yeah.
And Danielle, as you mentioned, the president has obviously campaigned on the idea of carrying out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
How do you think these changes could potentially help him in that endeavor? Well, it would certainly seem that it would make deportations easier, right? Because as Ximena has reported, there are a lot of people waiting for hearings before these Eeyore judges. There's a backlog of 4 million people.
So if the Trump administration is saying, clear the decks and deny a lot of these people asylum or the right to stay in the U.S., then yeah, you can deport a whole bunch of people. Now, one other thing that I think is notable here, there's another route that a president could take here, and it's hire more judges to get rid of this backlog, maybe expand the effort to hear more people make their cases.
So they are simply saying, you know what, the way we're going to do this is allow you to fast track the process. I think that there's kind of like two big changes to kind of be watching for.
The first is, you know, the recent directive that was given within the Justice Department asking adjudicators that if they get an asylum application that they decide in those physical pages is, quote, legally deficient, don't even give them a hearing. It doesn't count.
Toss it out. That 4 million case backlog that Danielle talked about, 1.5 million of those are asylum requests.
And so there's a really clear directive to try and get rid of as many of those as possible. And a lot of immigration lawyers are really concerned because, again, very few people are actually represented by lawyers.
And so the hearing is an opportunity for someone to literally make their case before a judge. And then the second change is, like Danielle said, over 100 people were fired or they took that fork in the road offer given to federal employees at the start of the administration with no plans to backfill them.
And so, you know, that 100 people included staff, interpreters and even judges. Each judge could review between 500 to 700 cases in a year.
So, you know, multiply, let's say, 700 cases by about the 15 judges that were laid off. You know, you do the math.
How many cases are now not going to be heard? And so that raises questions over what the due process system is going to look like now in immigration courts. Now that there's a push to streamline cases and there isn't a push to bolster the part of the immigration system that is supposed to rubber stamp many of these deportations.
Yeah. An open question has been like how the public perceives all this.
And we are getting somewhat of a picture. Polling suggests the public is evenly split on how Trump is handling immigration.
A poll from APNORC has Republicans strongly backing his policies, but independents and Democrats are largely against. What will you both be watching for in terms of the political response to what's been happening? I think a lot of the polling has been pretty much split along party lines this entire time in terms of what the responses are.
You know, I think that it still kind of remains to be seen how people will respond to a continued escalation of these tactics. You know, we're starting to see, you know, different folks be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the way that they haven't before.
Folks who have green cards, people who are married to U.S. citizens, people who have lawful permanent residence status, like a lot of those folks used to never, ever be considered as potentially at risk for a mass deportation effort.
But they are right now and it's actively happening. And so I think that there's still a bit of a ways to go to see how the public will react to that.
But the policies right now are really pushing further than what even I think a lot of polls have asked about before. The one thing I would add is, you know, you're seeing on social media, some videos of these halls that some Republican members of Congress are having where they are facing pushback from some of their constituents.
I saw a couple of videos this week where Iowa longtime Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had constituents asking, are you going to bring back a Brago Garcia? Now, in and of themselves, is one town hall going to cause a lot of movement? Who knows if there's enough? I mean, my question on this is same as my question on tariffs, which is what does it take, if anything, for Trump's very solid wall of Republican support in Congress to crack? Do Republicans continue to back him entirely or not? We don't know. Yeah.
And we will, of course, be watching all of this in the weeks to come. Thanks for bringing your reporting to the pod today, Jimena.

You're welcome.

All right. Well, that's all for today.
I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.

I'm Jimena Bustillo, and I cover immigration.

And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Transcription by CastingWords many advanced breast cancers.
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