It seems the issue was that a lower court tried to force DHS to enforce laws which Texas and other states argued he was not doing and a judge agreed. The SC struck that ruling down and said the states lacked standing and courts can't order the executive to enforce the law. To me that's kind of a weird outcome. I think that gets at what I am talking about. There's a letter and a spirit of the law. Under legalistic procedural reasoning it is totally normal and not illegal at all that at least 8 million people turned up and were able to claim asylum. However, it is authoritarian to make an administrative error that causes someone to not have exhaustive hearings.
I think that gets to my point here which is whether it's possible for lawyers to launder an agenda through legal procedures. Yes, Trump's admin violated rights but the overall big picture is that lawyers can create a system where 1 administrative error is a severe problem but 8 million parolees is not and they can stop a president from enforcing the law with excessive hearings. I don't think it's a policy problem. We don't really have policy anymore. Once a year we vote on a budget. We have something like judicial precedence and outcomes for things like immigration and immigrant rights are determined entirely by lawyers.
When you suggest "lawyers can create a system where 1 administrative error is a severe problem but 8 million parolees is not," or that they can "stop a president from enforcing the law with excessive hearings," it seems to imply that the legal processes designed to protect rights and ensure lawful executive action are themselves the issue. But these processes, including "hearings," are the very mechanisms through which checks and balances are supposed to function. They are how we try to prevent "administrative errors" from becoming unchecked abuses of power and how we ensure that even in a crisis, the government is bound by law.
Side note, do you have a source on the 8 million figure, the closest thing I can find is that cumulative "border encounters" over several years in the Biden administration, which just means every interaction. The same person could generate several border encounter statistics on the way through the asylum seeking process, and many of those encounters result in people being turned away or deported.
But, regardless of the figures, the idea that the sheer volume of asylum seekers might somehow justify or make acceptable the executive branch ignoring court orders or constitutional safeguards for anyone is why people are freaking out.
Who decides 8 million encounters is the number where we can't give asylum seekers due process anymore before deporting them to supermax prisons for life? I am not a immigration lawyer but I don't think the legislature has ever made such a law. And it certainly wasn't the court system. If it's 11 million border encounters does this mean the executive gets powers to send "home growns" to oversees prisons as the president has suggested he wants to?
The constitutional order and the Bill of Rights are designed to protect individuals from the government, especially when it's complicated or inconvenient for the government. If the constitution can be set aside by a branch of that government, because of the current state at the border is determined to be a crisis by that branch of government alone, it implies that the individual rights America is known for are actually contingent on the policy of that branch. Which means in practice they do not bind that government branch at all.
I think we should not suspend rights at any point. There should be due process. What I am opposed to is excessive/disproportionate litigation over due process. The type of thing that seems like dragging of feet rather than assuring due process.
I personally suspect the lawyerly class of people might be sympathetic to less stringent immigration laws. Another thing I think is demonstrably true is that in constitutional/civil law, meaning the cases that greatly impact the country involving the government, the top law schools seem to have much more voice. So for example Garcia's lawyer is a Yale law grad well known in the NGO sector and his cases have been heard in front of high courts like the SC who themselves are usually Ivy grads. So it's quite likely such people are not an independent group but may share a lot of opinions. I don't think that's a stretch to say. If they collectively lean towards making immigration easy and deportation hard, we might see that reflected in legal cases.
So we had a situation where asylum was granted on a broad class basis like with the CHNV program that granted asylum to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela without a hearing. Trump attempted to revoke that status and the courts ruled he could only revoke it on a case-by-case basis (https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-trump-revoking...).
I will also add that it's very unlikely Trump's mass deportation materializes because it's too logistically and legally costly. He said something about how it would take 200 years to complete the deportation hearings. This is the disproportionate situation I am opposed to. If it's easy in then it should also be easy out. So in short I am accusing lawyers of laundering an agenda through the courts. Originally asylum law was meant specifically in the context of WWII but it has expanded so that people fearing crime in their home countries are also included. This was done by courts through trials.
You don’t have rights without a way to enforce them, and the courts are what our laws provide for the enforcement of rights against the government.
Due process already doesn’t need to be costly, Bush, Biden and Obama all deported millions and processed millions of asylum claims using administrative processes invented for this. Trump’s admin either doesn’t want to or is incapable of doing the work of governing by the book; so they attempt to trample people’s rights and effectively deputize random border security with the power to detain you or even throw you in CECOT for life. This worries some foreign conference visitors. Because it’s not clear that any law actually prevents it from happening to them in practice, they’d rather not visit the US and interact with those border agents. It’s that simple, there is no conspiracy of the “lawyer class” or “excessive litigation” “dragging our feet” or a “media invention”.
There has to be some due process or we have nothing enforcing our rights. There are no fast and easy solutions here, and I don’t think it is worth sacrificing it all to enable a strongman who can’t rise to the task otherwise. Let’s have a higher bar for the highest office in the land.
I think that gets to my point here which is whether it's possible for lawyers to launder an agenda through legal procedures. Yes, Trump's admin violated rights but the overall big picture is that lawyers can create a system where 1 administrative error is a severe problem but 8 million parolees is not and they can stop a president from enforcing the law with excessive hearings. I don't think it's a policy problem. We don't really have policy anymore. Once a year we vote on a budget. We have something like judicial precedence and outcomes for things like immigration and immigrant rights are determined entirely by lawyers.