Latest news with #legalchallenges
New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
Judges in Deportation Cases Face Evasion and Delay From Trump Administration
In case after case, the Trump administration has taken a similar approach to the numerous legal challenges that have emerged in recent weeks to President Trump's aggressive deportation plans. Over and over, officials have either violated orders or used an array of obfuscations and delays to prevent federal judges from deciding whether violations took place. So far, no one in the White House or any federal agency has had to pay a price for this obstructionist behavior, but penalties could still be in the offing. Three judges in three different courthouses who have been overseeing deportation cases have said they are considering whether to hold the administration in contempt. All of this first came to the fore when Judge Paula Xinis opened an investigation in mid-April into whether Trump officials had violated her order to 'facilitate' the release of a Maryland man who had been wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador. In a sternly worded ruling in Federal District Court in Maryland, Judge Xinis instructed the Justice Department to tell her what steps the White House had taken, and planned to take, to free the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody. And she wanted answers quickly, declaring that her inquiry would take only two weeks. That was seven weeks ago, and lawyers for Mr. Abrego Garcia say they are no closer now than they were then to understanding why their client was sent to El Salvador or what the government has done to fix what officials have acknowledged was an 'administrative error.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
News24
4 days ago
- Business
- News24
Lottery decision: South Africans deserve to know details of SA's biggest tender
There are some things that are totally predictable in South Africa. Jacob Zuma will find a reason to drag out his trial. Helen Zille will say something stupid and inflammatory. Julius Malema will say something stupid and inflammatory. Cyril Ramaphosa will be shocked. The PSL season will end in chaos. And Johannesburg's traffic lights will flake out during the summer rains. There is an argument that societies should be grateful for predictability, as it enables them to plan. If that predictability is negative, then you can work on overcoming the deficiency and, if it is in the positive, then you can work on improvements. But there is nothing good when that predictability is costly and eminently avoidable. This is the case with the selection of the operator of the National Lottery. This newly chosen entity will be the fourth operator of the lottery in the country. Each time the process for the running of what has been described as the country's 'biggest tender' is about to reach conclusion, it is blighted by a flurry of legal challenges. The challengers range from the incumbent to the line-up of fresh bidders who have invested enormous amounts of cash in the expensive bidding process for the eight-year licence that almost literally allows you to print money. The current process has been mired in the same predictable controversy, only messier. After an inordinate amount of time spent making his decision in conjunction with the National Lotteries Commission, Trade and Industry Minister Parks Tau eventually named the Sizekhaya consortium as the winner. To underline the shambolic nature of the process, Tau made the announcement just three days before the expiration of the current licence, after being forced to do so by the Pretoria High Court. Judge Sulet Potterill shot down Tau's attempt to delay the announcement by a year while the lottery is run by a temporary holder – most likely a sister company to the incumbent, Ithuba. Saying the process was 'very complex', Tau justified his decision (or indecision) on the grounds that, 'in the past, serious allegations of corruption were made in respect of the National Lotteries Commission and the way the lottery was managed. These considerations prompted me to take a very cautious approach.' Potterill was having none of it and ordered him to announce the winner by yesterday, when Ithuba's licence was set to expire. When he made his declaration, Tau left the winner with just three days to get its ducks in a row, instead of the five to six months it would need. To complicate matters, Ithuba – the only entity with the capacity to step in until Sizekhaya is ready – has been refusing to continue working for the next five months and is insisting that it will only make commercial sense if this period is much longer. With accusations of political bias whirling, the integrity of the process is in tatters. Months and even years of litigation are inevitable. Build One SA and other societal players have called on Tau and the National Lotteries Commission to disclose to Parliament, and therefore to the nation, the records of the adjudication that delivered the final outcome. 'Party connections and insider deals cannot be the order of the day,' Build One SA's Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster said this week.
CNA
6 days ago
- General
- CNA
Survivors of online harms not getting the support they need: SG Her Empowerment survey
A new study by non-profit organisation SG Her Empowerment (SHE), which surveyed 25 survivors of online harms, has found that they are not getting the support they need. The survivors cited complex legal systems, delayed platform responses and societal stigma. SHE is calling for a system that allows survivors to report to a central agency, and for harmful content to be taken down quickly. Kate Low reports.
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
A Universal Injunction Compromise
Does a single federal judge, with jurisdiction over a state or a district within a state, have the authority to stop the government from carrying on an allegedly unlawful policy everywhere in the country? The permissibility of such 'nationwide' or 'universal' injunctions is before the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA. (The case arises from several challenges to President Trump's executive order denying citizenship to U.S. born children whose parents are nonresident aliens.) From the justices' questions in oral arguments last week, it was clear all are uneasy with the idea that trial judges have the authority to act as a 'roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch,' as Solicitor General John Sauer put it. On the other hand, requiring everyone injured by an executive action to initiate his own lawsuit to gain relief seems unduly burdensome.
The Independent
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump accused of ‘catch me if you can regime' by Supreme Court justice in birthright citizenship hearing
A series of federal court rulings across the country struck down Donald Trump 's attempt to strip citizenship from newborn Americans born to certain immigrant parents. But the government argues those decisions should be limited to the individual states — and pregnant mothers — who sued him and won. During oral arguments on the issue at the Supreme Court on Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the administration's position a 'catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime,' where court orders would protect only the individuals in a case, not the millions of Americans who could be impacted. Trump's position argues that everyone would need a lawyer 'to stop the government from violating anyone's rights,' she said. 'I don't understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.' Trump is using challenges against his birthright citizenship executive order to try to make a case against the power of judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have thwarted a blitz of White House directives that judges across the ideological spectrum found unconstitutional. If the high court agreed to limit the scope of injunctions against the president's birthright citizenship order, it would cause an unworkable patchwork of constitutional rights, where children could be citizens in one state and not in another, according to legal scholars and immigrants' advocates. 'On the merits, you are wrong,' Justice Elena Kagan told Trump's legal team. 'The [order] is unlawful.' The government has been 'losing constantly' on the issue, she said. 'It's up to you to decide whether to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there is no way I'd approach the Supreme Court with this case,' she added. 'You keep losing in the lower courts.' Forcing impacted Americans to file individual lawsuits for citizenship means 'the ones who can't afford to go to court, they're the ones who are going to lose,' Kagan said. 'This is not a hypothetical,' she added. 'Every court has ruled against you.' Damning court orders from three federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state — affirmed by three federal appeals court panels — have blocked Trump's measure from taking effect nationwide. A judge appointed by Ronald Reagan called the executive order 'blatantly unconstitutional' and accused the president of treating the rule of law as 'something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.' Another judge said Trump's order 'runs counter to our nation's 250-year history of citizenship by birth.' The 14th Amendment 's citizenship clause plainly states that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.' Under the terms of Trump's order, children can be denied citizenship if their 'mother was unlawfully present' or 'lawful but temporary,' and if the father 'was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person's birth.' If allowed to take effect, the order would undo more than a century of constitutional precedent, virtually rewriting the 14th Amendment to determine who is, and who isn't, eligible for citizenship. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court 'can act quickly if we are worried about those thousands of children who are going to be born without citizenship papers, that could render them stateless.' 'If we're afraid that this, or even have a thought that this, is unlawful executive action, that it is Congress who decides citizenship, not the executive — if we believe that, why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?' she said. U.S. solicitor general John Sauer called the recent 'cascade of universal injunctions' against the administration a 'bipartisan problem' that exceeds judicial authority. 'The suggestion that our position on the merits is weak is profoundly mistaken,' he said. 'The vision of the district courts that's reflected in the issuance of these nationwide injunctions is a vision of them as a roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch.'
