Latest news with #Scalia
Newsweek
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
NPR Uses Conservative Supreme Court Justice's Words Against Donald Trump
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A lawsuit filed Tuesday by National Public Radio (NPR) against the Trump administration quotes words scribed by former conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia nearly 40 years ago. Why It Matters The lawsuit, which includes three Colorado public radio stations as plaintiffs, challenges President Donald Trump's executive order signed on May 1, which called for ceasing congressionally approved federal funding for NPR and PBS. "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayers' dime," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Newsweek on Tuesday. "Therefore, the president is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS. "The President was elected with a mandate to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and he will continue to use his lawful authority to achieve that objective." What To Know On the sixth page of the 43-page suit, plaintiffs cite the words of Scalia from his dissent in the June 1988 decision Morrison v. Olson: "It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. 'But this wolf comes as a wolf.'" People participate in a rally to call on Congress to protect funding for US public broadcasters, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), outside the NPR headquarters in Washington, DC, on March 26,... People participate in a rally to call on Congress to protect funding for US public broadcasters, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), outside the NPR headquarters in Washington, DC, on March 26, 2025. More SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images That case determined that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, a federal law passed after the Watergate scandal, was constitutional. Scalia argued for the separation of powers, claiming the law deprives the president of "exclusive control." "Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis," Scalia wrote in his dissent. "But this wolf comes as a wolf." Plaintiffs argue that Trump's executive order "violates the expressed will of Congress and the First Amendment's bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, and also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information." The three Colorado-based news stations are Aspen Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT Public Radio. Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., a partner at Gibson Dunn and counsel for NPR, told Newsweek on Tuesday that Trump's executive order "is blatantly unconstitutional." "It contravenes the will of Congress and violates the constitutional rights of NPR and its member stations," Boutrous said. "The Public Broadcasting Act and the First Amendment both protect the editorial independence of NPR and local public radio stations that receive federal funding from precisely this kind of governmental interference. "And, by seeking to halt federal funding to NPR, the executive order harms not only NPR and its member stations, but also the tens of millions of Americans across the country who rely on them for news and cultural programming, and vital emergency information." The suit references Trump's past statements about NPR and PBS, including that their news and other content is not "fair, accurate, or unbiased." The president has also said that they spread "radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.'" NPR CEO Katherine Maher, in a statement issued Tuesday, called Trump's executive order an "affront" to NPR and its 246 locally owned, nonprofit, noncommercial member stations across all 50 states and territories. Attorney Bradford Cohen, who has represented Trump as a client, told Newsweek that lawsuits against Trump traditionally fall by the wayside and "for the most part" are unsuccessful against him and his policies. "I think the lawsuit lacks substance and teeth and is most likely for press purposes. ... I believe with the current case law this lawsuit is ripe for a motion to dismiss," Cohen said. "I am sure the president is apprised of the lawsuits filed against the administration, and the DOJ takes a very aggressive stance in terms of dealing with them. "I wouldn't be surprised if NPR ends up in a worse legal position than they are currently facing." Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani views the suit differently, saying that the First Amendment argument at the core of the litigation is probably NPR's best legal avenue forward. "I do think NPR does have a very strong argument," Rahmani told Newsweek. "These similar cases have been winning in the courts, and I expect NPR to win as well." He said other factors that could impact the case include the appropriations clause in the Constitution, which essentially states that Congress has "the power of the purse." What People Are Saying President Donald Trump on Truth Social in April: "NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO 'DAMAGE TRUMP.'" THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!" Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR, in a statement on Tuesday: "This is retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times over the past 80 years that the government does not have the right to determine what counts as 'biased.' NPR will never agree to this infringement of our constitutional rights, or the constitutional rights of our Member stations, and NPR will not compromise our commitment to an independent free press and journalistic integrity." PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger, earlier this month: "The president's blatantly unlawful executive our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years." What Happens Next The lawsuit seeks to dismiss Trump's executive order as unlawful and unconstitutional. Earlier this month, it was revealed that episodes of the longtime popular PBS children's show Sesame Street will begin airing on Netflix later this year.
CNN
09-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
In pictures: Supreme Court Justice David Souter
Souter, right, leaves the US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Castle, New Hampshire, in 1969. At the time, he was the assistant attorney general of New Hampshire. AP Souter was born in Massachusetts, but he grew up and attended grade school in New Hampshire. He went on to attend Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Ken Williams/Concord Monitor/AP Souter signs documents after being sworn in. With him, from left, are Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, Thurgood Marshall, Anthony Kennedy, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens. Ken Heinen/Pool/AP Souter works with a group to promote civics education in New Hampshire schools in 2009. In a break with today's norms, Souter retired from the Supreme Court that year, seeking a return to his contemplative life in New Hampshire. Souter was only 69 when he stepped down – far younger than most departing justices. He never married, and he was never fond of the Washington social scene. Jim Cole/AP Souter, second from left, stands with members of the Supreme Court before a procession marking Harvard Law School's bicentennial in 2017. Standing with him, from left, are Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Neil Gorsuch. Jessica Rinaldi/The
Wall Street Journal
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
A Savory Tart So Delicious, Your Guests Will Happily Help Make It
What makes one party stand out from another? I can only say with confidence that this pissaladière, served with a biting glass of Champagne, definitely helps. This onion-anchovy-olive tart from the South of France is the blueprint for elegant offhandedness. Turn up to a friend's house with a big tin of Scalia anchovy fillets, four packets of Dufour puff pastry, a basket of onions and a few jars of Kalamata olives. That's what our friends Laurent and Anne-Laure do every year for our Bastille Day bash. We cook a lot of delicious French food for this feast, but year after year, the pissaladière is the star.
Atlantic
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's El Salvador Scheme Is Cruel and Unusual Punishment
As the Trump administration rounds up people it alleges to be illegal aliens and gang members, deports them to El Salvador, and pays to imprison them there without convicting them of any crime, constitutional challenges have focused on the Fifth Amendment; the administration appears to have deprived many deportees of liberty without due process. Scarce attention has been paid to another relevant part of the Bill of Rights: the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on inflicting 'cruel and unusual punishment,' a limit on state power that applies regardless of whether the target is a citizen. Intuitively, an Eighth Amendment challenge seems promising. El Salvador's prison system is notoriously cruel: Dozens of inmates have died 'as a result of torture, beatings, mechanical suffocation via strangulation or wounds,' according to a 2023 report from the human-rights group Cristosal, and Human Rights Watch says that it has documented 'torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention,' and more. Sending deportees to a country other than their own and paying for them to be imprisoned among violent criminals, with no fixed sentence or release date, is highly unusual, if not novel, in American history. High-ranking U.S. officials have explicitly stated that their intent is to inflict punishment for illegal entry and other alleged crimes. After visiting El Salvador, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said that she wants to incarcerate even more deportees in the country so that they 'pay the consequences for their actions of violence.' Yet when I recently consulted roughly a dozen legal experts, including Eighth Amendment scholars and defense litigators, even those who agreed with me that the deportees' Eighth Amendment rights are being violated said that focusing on due-process claims is a safer legal strategy. Partly, El Salvador's de facto control of the prisoners raises complicated jurisdiction issues. But there's another, more fundamental reason. Under long-established Supreme Court precedent, mere deportation is not considered a punishment for Eighth Amendment purposes. And though the Trump administration is not merely deporting people—it is paying El Salvador to incarcerate them—the Supreme Court has been reluctant to recognize cruel and unusual treatment as punishment, even when that treatment is inflicted by an agent of the state, unless the treatment was imposed as a penalty after a criminal conviction. For example, the Court has held that corporal punishment in school settings does not constitute punishment, nor does the detention of severely mentally ill people in rehabilitative institutions. The late Justice Antonin Scalia captured this distinction in a 2008 interview with the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. When Stahl asked Scalia whether the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment would apply to a prisoner at Abu Ghraib who was brutalized by American law-enforcement officials, Scalia replied, 'To the contrary. Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don't think so.' Torture is intended to extract facts, not to punish, he argued, so the Eighth Amendment would not apply. This notion that 'Eighth Amendment scrutiny is appropriate only after the State has secured a formal adjudication of guilt,' as a 1983 Supreme Court case put it, creates a perverse incentive for the government. If the state deprives purported criminals of their due-process rights and imprisons them without charging or convicting them, as the Trump administration is now doing, that makes it easier to deprive those individuals of their Eighth Amendment rights, too; any cruel and unusual treatment that the government inflicts isn't technically considered punishment. As a result, under the status quo, people convicted of no crime at all have less Eighth Amendment protection than criminals convicted of the most heinous acts. To remedy that unjust and despotic disparity, the Supreme Court should clarify that the government cannot subvert any part of the Bill of Rights by skipping trials and sentences. Given a claim by a deportee, it should rule to protect their Eighth Amendment rights. Both the original meaning of 'cruel and unusual punishment' and some of the most frequently cited modern Eighth Amendment jurisprudence would bolster a claim by the deportees, according to several of the experts I spoke with. The Constitution's protection against cruel and unusual punishment has its roots in a British common-law tradition: Judges were understood not to make law, but rather to discover it by identifying customs and precedents that gained legitimacy through enduring acceptance. In an essay titled 'Originalism and the Eighth Amendment,' the University of Florida law professor John F. Stinneford explains that in the 17th and 18th centuries, cruel was understood to mean 'unjustly harsh,' and unusual meant 'contrary to long usage.' When adopting the same language, early American lawmakers were expressing the view that 'because the common law was presumptively reasonable, governmental efforts to 'ratchet up' punishment beyond what was permitted by longstanding prior practice were presumptively contrary to reason,' Stinneford writes. The death penalty, for instance, was seen as reasonable due to its long usage in England and the colonies. But new 'significantly harsher' varieties of punishment were not, especially when they were seen as disproportionate to the offense; the examples Stinneford cites from England and America include whipping and pillorying as a punishment for perjury and excessive floggings as a punishment for illegal gambling. By those standards, originalists should find the Trump administration's actions highly suspect. Being transferred to a brutal prison system where one has no recourse or rights, no matter how badly one is treated, with no apparent limit on how long one might be held, is a fate significantly harsher than what has long been customary for, say, a Venezuelan who enters the United States illegally and joins a gang. President Donald Trump's policy is precisely to ratchet up the effective punishment. Turning to case law, Trop v. Dulles, an influential Eighth Amendment case decided in 1958, offers a highly relevant precedent. Albert Trop was a private in the U.S. Army during World War II. In May of 1944, while serving in Casablanca, Morocco, he was confined to a stockade for a breach of discipline, escaped, and wandered, cold and hungry, until the next day, when he decided to turn himself in. Convicted of desertion, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor. Years later, when he was back in the United States and applying for a passport, he was told that, per a provision in the Nationality Act of 1940, his desertion in wartime had triggered the loss of his citizenship. David A. Graham: Due process for me, not for thee Ultimately, the Supreme Court restored his citizenship, finding that 'denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment.' Although Trop hadn't suffered 'physical mistreatment' or 'primitive torture,' denationalization inflicted the 'total destruction' of his political existence, leaving him stateless and without rights in whatever country he might find himself. 'In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights,' the Court reasoned, and is subject to 'a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated.' Notice that Trop was never forcibly expatriated. Fear and distress at the mere possibility of being 'without rights in whatever country he might find himself' was sufficient to meet the threshold for cruel and unusual punishment. Today, the bulk of the deportees to El Salvador, most of whom are Venezuelans, are already at the mercy of a country not their own. President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele have claimed that, once the United States transfers a prisoner to Salvadoran custody, neither president can grant his release. To echo the Court's Trop ruling, the deportees know not what abuses may be directed against them. The majority of the Court in Trop also objected that 'the punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community,' which is arguably the case for the Venezuelan nationals imprisoned in El Salvador. A large body of more recent Eighth Amendment case law has focused on prison conditions. And although those rulings also seem to be highly relevant to the harsh prison system in El Salvador, they might be trickier to apply, because U.S. courts lack the ability to investigate or issue orders abroad. Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, told me that although the Eighth Amendment ordinarily wouldn't apply to a prison in another country, it 'very well could' apply to the situation in El Salvador. 'The Trump administration has said that it is paying El Salvador to detain these men; it is, for all intents and purposes, a joint U.S.-El Salvadoran incarceration program,' Berger wrote by email. Publicly available information about the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT—the prison where the deportees from the United States first arrived and where most of them are presumed to be incarcerated—is limited, because outside visitors are closely monitored, and inmates are rarely if ever released and able to tell their stories. Regardless, Salvadoran officials may transfer any prisoner anywhere at any time; they have already transferred the deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a different prison. So long as that is possible, conditions in the Salvadoran prison system overall—about which more is known—are relevant to the fate of the deportees. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that deliberate indifference to a prisoner's serious illness constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. In El Salvador's prison system, 'former detainees often describe filthy and disease-ridden prisons,' Human Rights Watch reports. 'Doctors who visited detention sites told us that tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive issues were common.' And in the 2011 case Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court ruled that California had to release duly convicted inmates to alleviate overcrowding in state prisons. Overcrowding in El Salvador is reportedly worse than in California, with past detainees telling human-rights workers of cells so packed that inmates had to sleep standing up. Transferring people from the United States into El Salvador's prison system shows, at best, deliberate indifference to harmful conditions, as documented by multiple organizations. Some of the Supreme Court watchers I spoke with noted that the current right-leaning justices have tended to interpret the Eighth Amendment more narrowly since Plata, showing more reluctance to grant relief to inmates. In recent years, Eighth Amendment doctrine has been 'so stripped down' that 'even egregious, morally indefensible treatment can easily pass constitutional muster,' Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at UCLA, told me by email, 'and recent cases indicate those protections may well shrink even further, so that only prisoners subjected to intentionally brutal treatment (i.e. treatment that ' superadds terror, pain and disgrace') would even have a chance of prevailing.' (That language comes from a majority opinion that Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a death-penalty case.) Still, in Dolovich's estimation, El Salvador's prison system 'would most certainly' meet even that high threshold of superadding terror, pain, and disgrace. What if, in the near future, Trump decides to act on his repeatedly expressed desire to send Americans who commit especially heinous crimes to prisons in El Salvador? He has speculated that he could fill five prisons with such Americans. 'If they're criminals,' Trump said during a meeting with Bukele in the Oval Office, 'if they hit people with baseball bats over the head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn—yeah, yeah, that includes them.' Several of the scholars and litigators I consulted said that they believe an Eighth Amendment challenge to that policy would arise. 'If Trump really meant what he said about sending American citizens convicted of crimes to prisons in El Salvador as part of their punishment,' the Harvard law professor Carol Steiker wrote to me, 'that clearly would be subject to Eighth Amendment limitations.' That is so not because the people involved would be citizens, but because when the state convicts a person and then orders them imprisoned, the Supreme Court already recognizes that that constitutes 'punishment.' That conclusion is reassuring—even an Eighth Amendment that's been interpreted more narrowly than I would prefer still confers some protection against cruel innovations in punishment. But it also highlights a core injustice of the prevailing jurisprudential approach: Administration officials would be subjecting convicted Americans and unconvicted aliens to the same treatment. The same president with the same motives might even pay for them to be locked up in the same prison cell. And yet, absurdly, the Eighth Amendment would protect the heinous criminals while offering no protection to their cellmates who were never convicted of anything. Treating every deportation as a form of punishment would go too far. But so does presuming that no deportation can qualify as punishment, even when it includes transfer to a cruel and unusual prison system. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the best test for what constitutes a punishment. But any reasonable threshold is met when federal officials justify imprisoning people by alleging criminality, imprison them alongside a foreign country's most dangerous criminals, and make public statements that convey a punitive intent. I hope that an Eighth Amendment claim on behalf of deportees coaxes the Supreme Court to reconsider its precedents on what constitutes punishment. If the Trump administration responds by arguing that it is not acting with punitive intent, as the scholars I spoke with predict, the Court should probe the publicly available facts rather than deferring to whatever the administration might claim. Meanwhile, the rest of us should understand that, even if the fate of deportees to El Salvador is never found to violate the Eighth Amendment, that isn't because they are being spared cruel and unusual treatment, but because the judiciary declines to classify much that is clearly cruel and unusual as a 'punishment.' The El Salvador policy, however it is classified, is unusually and needlessly cruel, rendering it evil, an affront to human dignity, and beneath America.
CNN
01-04-2025
- Politics
- CNN
What rights do immigrants have, and what do they not have?
In a 2014 joint interview, former Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were asked a pressing legal question about immigrant rights. Do the five freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment – freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition – apply to undocumented immigrants? 'Oh I think so, I think anybody who's present in the United States has protections under the United States Constitution,' said Scalia, the reliable conservative voice. Ginsburg, the stalwart liberal, agreed. 'When we get to the 14th Amendment, it doesn't speak of 'citizens.' Some constitutions grant rights to 'citizens,' but our constitution says 'person,'' she said. 'And the 'person' is every person who is here – documented or undocumented.' Over a decade later, that bipartisan view faces a stiff test in the legal battles over the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts. The deportations have targeted undocumented immigrants from Venezuela for alleged gang affiliations based on limited evidence as well as students whose visas or green cards have been canceled in connection to pro-Palestinian protests. These migrants have been rounded up on the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and tossed into a labyrinthine detention system, far from their attorneys and families. CNN spoke with several experts in immigration law to better understand what rights immigrants do and don't have and what legal recourse migrants at risk of deportation have. As Scalia and Ginsburg noted, immigrants do have the fundamental civil rights enshrined in the Constitution, including due process rights. 'A permanent resident and a non-permanent resident, somebody on let's say an H-1B visa or some other type of temporary visa … has due process rights,' David Leopold, the former president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said at a press briefing with immigrant rights advocates in mid-March. 'Everybody is covered by the United States Constitution. Everybody's protected by the United States Constitution inside the United States.' However, immigrants' presence in the US is generally considered to be a 'privilege' rather than a right and can be revoked for certain reasons laid out in federal law, such as a serious crime. 'There is this idea in US immigration law that dates to the very early Supreme Court decisions that treats immigration as a privilege,' explained Nayna Gupta, policy director of the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration non-profit group. 'In other words, if you're a non-citizen, you are being given the privilege of being here in the United States, and since you have the privilege of being here, we're not obligated to extend the full range of constitutional rights and protections we might extend to a citizen.' Despite these protections on paper, permanent residents and visa-holders have been frightened by the speed and ferocity of the Trump administration's crackdown and its bulldozing of due process rights, said Neil A. Weinrib, an immigration attorney for more than four decades. 'The level of terror that I'm seeing is just incredible,' Weinrib said of his clients. 'I've never seen anything like this before. It's a new level. It's unprecedented and changes every day, and not for the better.' Trump administration officials have repeatedly argued in court and in public statements that immigration is a privilege, and said the federal government has the power to choose which non-citizens can stay and which must leave. 'A visa is a privilege not a right,' a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in defending the removal of Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University assistant professor and doctor. 'A green card holder, even if I may like that green card holder, doesn't have an indefinite right to be in the United States of America, right?' Vice President JD Vance said in a recent interview with Fox News. 'If the Secretary of State and the President decide, 'This person shouldn't be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here,' it's as simple as that.' This view is most evident in the Trump administration's move to revoke visas and green cards from the non-citizens who engaged in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses over the last year and a half. The administration has been relying on an obscure section of US law which gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio authority to revoke a person's immigration status if their 'presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.' Rubio said the government may have revoked more than 300 visas for the 'lunatics' who were 'creating a ruckus' during campus protests. 'Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn't,' he said. The idea that a visa or green card is a privilege is generally true, but that does not mean that a migrant's legal status is solely based on the whims of those in power, immigration law experts said. It's not altogether unusual for the government to revoke a migrant's green card for legally prescribed reasons, Leopold said at the press briefing last month. 'I think a lot of people were stunned that somebody with a green card, a lawful permanent resident, could be subjected to arrest and possibly deportation, but that happens all the time,' he said. 'So, a green card holder at the end of the day – and the Supreme Court has made clear since back in the Cold War era – they're guests, legally speaking, in the United States.' Even so, in previous administrations, deportation efforts were based on serious criminal conduct like felony charges. The Trump administration has focused on deporting people for petty offenses or even political positions, Weinrib explained. 'We're on the verge of a much more aggressive governmental intrusion in terms of exercising free speech for green card holders,' he said. 'It's a whole new era in enforcement that we've never seen before.' Further, migrants detained in the immigration system still have due process rights to challenge their detention and the evidence against them. 'We're deeply concerned that the Trump administration here is abusing the vague and overbroad provision of US immigration law,' Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs for the ACLU, said at the press briefing last month. 'What's clear to us is that non-citizens are entitled to due process, especially for something as serious as revoking a green card.' The other key difference in rights afforded to citizens and non-citizens is in the court venue. While criminal courts are part of the judicial branch, immigration courts are administrative civil venues under the umbrella of the executive branch's Department of Justice. Defendants accused of an immigration violation do not have the same rights as defendants accused of a crime. That means immigration court defendants are not granted the right to an appointed attorney; the courts do not follow the federal rules of evidence around hearsay; and there is no right to cross-examine accusers, according to Gupta. A 2016 study by the American Immigration Council looking at deportation cases from 2007 to 2012 found only 37% of immigrants secured legal representation, including just 14% of detained immigrants. 'In a criminal setting, everybody in that setting gets those set of rights,' Gupta said. 'But in the immigration civil system context, those rights are significantly less.' Even for defendants with attorneys, the government can make their accessibility difficult. For example, the Trump administration moved Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University grad student and pro-Palestinian activist, from New York to a facility in Louisiana, making it harder for him and his attorneys to be in contact. Similarly, Weinrib said one of his clients, a man from Tajikistan applying for asylum, was apprehended at a standard check-in in New York and moved to central Pennsylvania. 'Part of the problem is they can be picked up and moved around like chess pieces, and that goes back many years,' Weinrib said. 'They've always done that deliberately.' On its website, ICE states that detention is 'non-punitive.' 'Once an alien is transferred to ICE custody, the agency makes a custody determination,' the agency says. 'ICE uses its limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States.' There is also no limit to how long people can be held in detention, Weinrib said. 'It's like a purgatory. Once you're in the system, your rights are really quite limited.' In sum, the question of what rights immigrants do and don't have is one that has changed just in the last few months and is likely to continue doing so. 'Every day we're hit with a different decision, and we just don't know how to make sense of it,' Veronica Cardenas, the former assistant chief counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN in mid-March. 'Us immigration lawyers are really experiencing the lack of due process circumventing immigration courts, and so it's been a very difficult time.' CNN's Priscilla Alvarez, Catherine Shoichet, Jennifer Hansler and Maria Prieto Aguilar contributed to this report.
