Latest news with #appointee
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump appointee grilled in court about shuttering Homeland Security offices tasked with civil rights oversight
A federal judge said that she had concerns about being 'hoodwinked' by plans put forward in her courtroom Monday by a Trump appointee to rebuild three offices focused on civil rights oversight within the Department of Homeland Security that were eviscerated with mass layoffs set to take effect this week. US District Judge Ana Reyes said that she found the three-plus hours of testimony from the appointee, US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Ronald Sartini, to be 'credible.' The judge believed he was working in 'good faith' to come up with proposals for restaffing his office and the two others offices in the case before her, and that if those plans came to quick fruition, there would not be irreparable harm that would justify a court's intervention. The administration's gutting of those offices comes as President Donald Trump is pushing – and at times overstepping – the law in his efforts to quickly fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants. Reyes also said that a 'cynical view' of the state of play in the legal challenge was that the administration did not actually intend to restore those offices to their congressionally mandated functions, because their work might slow Trump's mass deportation agenda. She raised the possibility that Sartini's testimony was 'window dressing for the court' to head off the legal case, brought by advocacy groups that work on civil rights issues on behalf of migrants and are challenging the dismantling of those offices. Sartini, who spent 16 years in various career positions within the federal government before his May appointment as CIS ombudsman, told the judge he believed DHS leadership when it told him that the offices would be up and running again. Legal arguments in the case will continue on Tuesday. More than 300 total employees at the CIS ombudsman office, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman were put on administrative leave on March 21, in terminations that will take effect on Friday. Just a handful people – all at the executive level – are currently working across the three offices, Sartini testified Monday. He acknowledged that, particularly at the two offices he does not lead, statutorily mandated work is not being performed. Sartini, however, defended the monthslong shutdown in work that is required by Congress. There was 'nothing' in law 'to preclude' a new administration from 'taking a beat,' he said, to decide whether there was a better way for those offices to operate. Days before its workforce was put on leave, the Office of Civil Rights and Liberties opened an investigation into the controversial arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in detention while a separate court reviews the constitutionality of the administration's efforts to deport him. The challengers in the case before Reyes – the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, Urban Justice, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition – have put forward examples of complaints they've filed with the oversight offices alleging sexual assault, medical neglect, abuse of force and other alleged civil rights violations by DHS officials. The complaints prompted investigations that apparently halted with the rollout of the mass terminations, according to the court filings, or were filed around the time of the closures, including a complaint alleging due process violations with the administration's deportation of a 10-year-old citizen suffering brain cancer with her undocumented parents. Sartini was pressed Monday about statements made by the administration in March – including in the layoff notices that went out to employees – that those oversight offices were being dissolved entirely. Though he has since been told internally that the administration intended to reopen those offices, Sartini said he was not aware of DHS communicating that change of plans to the public, stakeholders or even the fired employees. He said, that before his formal appointment as CIS ombudsman, he was brought on around the time of the March 21 layoffs to review what duties those offices should be carrying out going forward. 'These offices were not the model of efficiency,' Sartini said, testifying that, before the layoffs, there was mismanagement, dysfunction and a bloated operation that duplicated work that was being done elsewhere in the agency. Sartini is prepared to present to DHS leadership a proposal for rebuilding the offices with new hires, detailees and contractors. But, he said, it would be up to leadership whether his ideas were put into action and there was no meeting scheduled yet for leadership to hear his recommendations. Reyes quizzed the official on how quickly the work could restart once his plans were presented and approved. She also asked a DHS lawyer present at the proceedings to call Sartini's point of contact in leadership mid-hearing to get a date on the books for such a meeting to happen. The lawyer later told Reyes that the leadership official, DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzara, was about to get on plane, and so the administration will be filing a response to the judge's query on Tuesday morning, ahead of more arguments on the legal issues in the case. CNN's Angélica Franganillo Díaz contributed to this report.
Washington Post
09-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can't bar its journalists
A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to restore The Associated Press' full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that the government can't retaliate against the AP's decision not to follow the president's executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico. The decision, while a preliminary injunction, handed the AP a major victory at a time the White House has been challenging the press on several levels.
Los Angeles Times
03-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
GOP thinks the court orders they used against Biden should be outlawed — because they now target Trump
The old political adage that 'where you stand depends upon where you sit' has been getting aired out in Washington. Republicans and conservatives used to celebrate judges' issuance of nationwide court injunctions to block Biden policies or progressive government programs. Now that nationwide court injunctions are being used to block Trump policies, however, onetime fans of the practice have decided that it's unconstitutional and illegal and needs to be outlawed. 'When a single district court judge halts a law or policy across the entire country,' Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote his colleagues on Monday, 'it can undermine the federal policymaking process and erode the ability of popularly elected officials to serve their constituents.' That's not untrue. But I couldn't find evidence that Jordan ever made this point before Trump came into office. I asked his committee staff to identify any such reference, but haven't heard back. The issue of nationwide injunctions — in which federal judges apply their rulings beyond the specific plaintiffs who have brought suits in their courthouses — dovetails with another widely decried abuse of the judicial process. That's 'judge-shopping,' through which litigants connive to bring their cases before judges they assume will rule in their favor, typically by filing lawsuits in judicial divisions staffed by only a single judge whose predilections are known. The combination of these schemes allowed conservative judges in remote federal courthouses to block major policy initiatives by President Biden, such as his efforts to enact student debt relief. Judges also took aim at longer-standing progressive programs, as when Judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth, a George W. Bush appointee, declared the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in 2018. The Supreme Court decisively slapped O'Connor down with a 7-2 ruling upholding the ACA's constitutionality in 2021. Ignoring the Supreme Court's signal, O'Connor subsequently ruled that the ACA's provision for no-cost preventive services was also unconstitutional. Parts of that ruling were overturned by an appeals court, but parts are now before the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this year. Then there's federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, who last year overturned the Food and Drug Administration's long-standing approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. The Supreme Court unanimously threw out that case in June. During the Biden administration, a serial abuser of the judge-shopping process was Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton. According to a 2023 analysis by Steve Vladeck of Georgetown law school, in the first two years of Biden's term, Texas filed 29 challenges to Biden initiatives. Not a single case was filed in Austin, where the attorney general's office is but where a lawsuit had only a 50-50 chance of drawing a Republican judge. Nor were any cases filed in the big cities of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio or El Paso. Instead, they were filed in the court's single-judge Victoria, Midland and Galveston divisions, where the state had a 100% chance of drawing a judge appointed by Trump; in Amarillo, where the chance was 95%; and Lubbock, where it was 67%. Republicans and conservatives raised no fuss about judge-shopping and nationwide injunctions when they targeted Biden or Obama policies. But now they're screaming bloody murder about 'rogue judges,' suggesting the judges are exceeding their authority simply because they have ruled against Trump and applied their rulings nationwide. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), for example, has introduced what he calls the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would bar nationwide injunctions. It's true that 'national injunctions are equal opportunity offenders,' as Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan and Samuel Bray of Notre Dame wrote in 2018. 'Before courts entered national injunctions against the Trump administration, they used them to thwart the Obama administration's rule for overtime pay and its signature immigration policy, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.' They were referring to injunctions issued against President Trump during his first term, but the pace has quickened during the current term. That's not necessarily because judges have become more roguish, but because Trump has given them more to ponder. In his first 65 days in office, Vladeck reported in a recent post, Trump issued 100 executive orders, besting the record set by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first hundred days, when he issued 99. Biden issued only 37 executive orders in his first 65 days, and Trump only 17 in the same span during his first term. Those orders and other Trump actions have triggered more than 67 lawsuits seeking preliminary injunctions or temporary restraining orders, Vladeck calculated; federal judges have granted some relief in 46 of those cases. There are some important differences from the litigation style of Biden's partisan opponents, however. For one thing, Trump's challengers haven't engaged in judge-shopping. With one short-lived exception, none of the 67 cases was filed in a single-judge division. The majority of cases in Vladeck's database were filed in courts where the chance of drawing a specific judge was less than 15%. The cases were filed in 14 different courts, with a plurality (31 of the 67) filed in the Washington, D.C., judicial district — not a surprise, since that's the customary venue for lawsuits challenging a government action. Judge-shopping isn't illegal, but even conservatives have found it to be sleazy. Last year, the Judicial Council of the United States, a policy guidance body headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., stated that any lawsuit seeking a nationwide or statewide injunction against the government should be randomly assigned to a judge in the federal district where it's filed. The guidance, which wasn't binding, won wide support in the federal judiciary — except in the Northern District of Texas, home to the Amarillo, Fort Worth and Lubbock divisions. There the chief judge said he wouldn't agree. During a recent appearance on Fox News, Jordan was asked by the conservative anchor Mark Levin whether Democrats are 'forum-shopping' to get cases before judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Jordan assented enthusiastically, grousing: 'You have a judge in Timbuktu, California, who can do some order and some injunction' to obstruct Trump. Jordan's reference was to U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who on Feb, 28 issued a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to cease the wholesale firing of federal employees at six agencies and return the workers to their jobs. A couple of things about that. First, I've been to the real Timbuktu, which is a desert outpost in Mali. San Francisco is possibly the one city in America least likely to be mistaken for that Timbuktu. San Francisco is a city of more than 800,000 residents, nestled within a metropolitan area of 7.5 million. Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk presides, is a community of about 202,000, within a metro area of 270,000. As for judge-shopping, Jordan might want to bring his concerns to the Trump administration itself. On March 27, the administration filed a federal lawsuit to terminate collective bargaining agreements reached by eight federal agencies. The White House filed the case not in northern Virginia, the District of Columbia or any other jurisdiction where large numbers of affected federal workers probably live and work, but in Waco, Texas, a courthouse with a single federal judge, a Trump appointee. 'It's the height of irony that the only judge-shopping we're seeing in Trump-related cases is … from Trump,' Vladeck observes. One might be tempted to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt on their crusade against 'rogue' judges, except for a couple of factors. One is their silence about nationwide injunctions when the results meshed with their anti-Biden ideology. The other is that their objections to nationwide injunctions has been couched within a broader attack on the independent judiciary. Republicans have advocated impeaching judges for rulings against Trump, a stance that drew a rare public pushback from Chief Justice Roberts. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also raised the prospect of shutting down courts that flout Republican initiatives. 'We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,' he told reporters last week. 'But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.' All that makes their position look less like a principled stand against judicial activism, and more like partisan hypocrisy.
The Hill
13-02-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Judge blocks Trump's gender-affirming care executive orders nationwide
BALTIMORE — A federal judge Thursday blocked parts of two executive orders issued by President Trump that collectively seek to restrict gender-affirming care. U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson at the conclusion of a hearing found a group of transgender teens and LGBTQ organizations that sued were likely to prevail on all of their claims that the ordersare without authority and amount to illegal and unconstitutional discrimination. 'Stopping care in the middle of receiving it, any care, really, casts doubt on whether in fact the goals are to protect the recipients of the care,' said Hurson, an appointee of former President Biden. It adds to a series of court orders across the country in recent days temporarily blocking Trump's actions, ranging from restricting birthright citizenship to transferring incarcerated transgender women to male facilities to Trump's firing of the head of a whistleblower office. Under Hurson's new ruling, various federal agencies are temporarily prohibited from withholding or conditioning funding based on a health care facility providing gender-affirming care anywhere in the country. The plaintiffs — a group of transgender teens, their parents and two organizations, PFLAG and GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality — raised alarm that hospitals across the country quickly moved to cancel appointments after Trump issued two executive orders as part of what his administration has called a crackdown on 'gender ideology.' One order, which Trump signed on his first day in office, states that 'federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.' The other, which Trump signed Jan. 28, directs agencies to ensure that institutions receiving federal dollars don't provide gender-transition treatments for people up to 19 years old. Hospital systems across the country responded by suspending gender-affirming treatment while they evaluated Trump's order, which could disrupt care for more than 300,000 transgender minors nationwide. 'That order had immediate consequences,' Joshua Block, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney representing the plaintiffs, said at Thursday's hearing. The Justice Department contested the plaintiffs' arguments, also insisting that the case was premature and should wait for additional guidance. The judge rejected those arguments, going as far to call the government's position 'disingenuous' at one point. 'When there's smoke coming out of your house, you don't know what room it's in, but you don't wait to call 911 until you know the exact location of the fire,' Hurson said. 'These plaintiffs have received phone calls stopping their care.' Thursday's hearing in Baltimore attracted a protest outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore of more than 50 people supporting transgender rights. 'The science clearly tells us that these kids know who they are, and that affirming care is critical to their mental health,' Rebecca Wald, a psychologist and mother of a transgender teen who protested, said in an interview. Emily Heinlein, who attended the protest carrying a sign with the slogan 'Protect Health Care and Democracy,' said she felt it was important to speak up. 'I'm worried that this executive order of banning health care for one group of people is really dangerous precedent,' said Heinlein. 'And if allowed to stand, what next, health care for women will be banned? Health care for any other group of people will be banned.' Hurson won't be the only judge to weigh Trump's order. Democratic attorneys general in Washington, Minnesota and Oregon are set to ask a judge in Seattle to block one of the provisions at a hearing Friday.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge to Trump-terminated ethics watchdog: You're un-fired
A federal judge reined in President Donald Trump's firing spree Monday, ruling that a federal ethics watchdog can return to his job for at least a few days while the judge receives more detailed legal arguments about the case. Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued the reprieve to Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, after he sued to contest the Friday night email he received from the White House indicating he'd been dismissed from his position. Dellinger, an appointee of President Joe Biden, is just one of various officials across the government whom Trump has tried to fire in recent days. Some of them are covered by federal statutes that limit the president's authority to dismiss them. Although his title is special counsel, Dellinger's position is different from the more prominent special counsels who prosecute politically sensitive cases for the Justice Department. Rather, Dellinger leads an independent federal agency that handles whistleblower issues and complaints about violations of the Hatch Act, which limits political activity by government employees. Trump must allow Dellinger to continue to have 'access' to the agency's resources and cannot 'recognize the authority of any other person as Special Counsel' while the order remains in effect, Jackson wrote. Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, issued what she called an 'administrative stay' restoring Dellinger to his post through Thursday night. In her brief order, she noted that he was confirmed by the Senate, is in the midst of a five-year term and that federal law dictates he "may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.' The Justice Department quickly appealed Jackson's order Monday night. Jackson said she'd refrain from a formal ruling on Dellinger's request for a temporary restraining order until the Justice Department submits written arguments in the case, which will be due by noon Tuesday. 'I am grateful to have the opportunity to continue leading the Office of Special Counsel and I am resuming my work tonight,' Dellinger said in a statement. Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jackson's order followed a late-afternoon hearing where Justice Department attorney Madeline McMahon said there was no emergency requiring that Dellinger be restored to his position and the DOJ has long maintained that 'a single-agency head is removable at will,' even if Congress attempted to make it more difficult for a president to do so.
