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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
joshuajfriedman.com@bsky.brid.gy ("Joshua J. Friedman") wrote:

ICYMI, this morning's opinion by Judge Kelly (a Trump appointee!) protecting Guatemalan children from deportation after the admin's justification "crumbled like a house of cards" is worth reading. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

MEMORANDUM OPINION Just before midnight on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, several Executive Branch agencies began to implement a plan to expel from the United States certain unaccompanied alien children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and send them back to their home country of Guatemala. Those agencies told the children’s caretakers, who were hearing about the plan for the first time, to have them ready for pickup in as little as two hours. The children were roused from their beds in the middle of the night and driven to an airport, where some were loaded onto planes. Lawyers got wind of this hasty operation while it was unfolding and filed this lawsuit seeking emergency relief that Sunday at 1:00 a.m. The judge on emergency duty entered a temporary restraining order barring the agencies and their officials from removing or otherwise transporting the children from the United States. At a hearing later that day, counsel for Defendants explained why it was “fairly outrageous” for Plaintiffs to have sued: all Defendants wanted to do was reunify children with parents who had requested their return. But that explanation crumbled like a house of cards about a week later. There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return. To the contrary, the Guatemalan Attorney General reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom Defendants found eligible for their “reunificatio