Congress doesn’t give ICE nearly enough resources to deport all illegals, so it has to prioritize. This is done by the agency’s political bosses in Washington D.C.
In fact, a federal law explicitly makes Department Homeland Security (DHS) secretaries responsible for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.”
As a Vox article says here, that’s so “immigration enforcement agencies such as ICE are under the control of a senior political official who is responsible to an elected president.” How hard is that to understand?
Accordingly, DHS secretaries issued memos in 2000 and 2005 (when Bush was president), 2011 and 2014 (under Obama), 2017 (Trump), and 2021 (Biden) establishing in general terms ICE’s deportation priorities.
This is for transparency, so the public knows what ICE is doing. Federal courts, including past Supreme Courts, have ruled there’s nothing legally wrong with these memos.
The latest one, by Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, gives priority to illegals and others who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”
No-brainer, right?
Despite the fact these memos are specifically authorized by federal law, and well-supported in caseload, including Supreme Court rulings, that didn’t stop Texas federal judge Drew Tipton (photo, left; bio here) from ruling that Mayorkas’ memo is illegal.
Upstairs, the Fifth Circuit upheld him, as they did after he messed with Biden’s border policy in 2021, which didn’t especially surprise court watchers given that the Fifth Circuit is a rightwing cesspool.
Now, the Biden administration’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to stay Tipton’s order, not because they trust the rightwing justices to reaffirm that presidents not third-rate judges supervise the federal government’s executive functions, but because they think this might be too much overreach even for them.
But maybe not. Apart from a general urge among conservatives to harass Democrats, all of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees came from the Federalist Society, a collection of lawyers devoted to the notion that the United States is a loose collection of more or less independent states. That’s where a third-rate judge from a Texas aggie college and a Texas night law school might be a useful tool for furthering their own objective of stripping the federal government of power.
So we’ll see whether the Supreme Court’s “Gang of Five” seizes this opportunity to declare that Texas, not the United States of America, runs U.S. immigration policy in Texas. It’ll be interesting.
As for whether Judge Tipton thinks he’s president, or is incompetent, I’m inclined to say “both.” Any federal judge who acts like he’s president is, by definition, incompetent.