A Trump-Appointed Judge Struck a Major Blow Against the Legality of Trump's Deportation Strategy

In September of 2017, during his first term, President Trump nominated Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He was confirmed by the Senate the following June, and by a 96-0 vote. Previously, Rodriguez had done extensive work on child trafficking, especially in the Dominican Republic. On Thursday, Rodriguez demonstrated that he was a pretty good hire. From The New York Times:

The 36-page ruling by Judge Rodriguez, a President Trump appointee, amounted to a philosophical rejection of the White House’s attempts to transpose the Alien Enemies Act, which was passed in 1798 as the nascent United States was threatened by war with France, into the context of modern-day immigration policy.

The Supreme Court has already said that any Venezuelans the White House wants to expel under Mr. Trump’s proclamation invoking the act must be given a chance to challenge their removal. But Judge Rodriguez’s ruling went further, saying that the White House had improperly stretched the meaning of the law, which is supposed to be used only against members of a hostile foreign nation in times of declared war or during a military invasion.

To his credit, and in contrast with the waffle house in the Supreme Court, Rodriguez was not shy about attacking the fundamental absurdity of the administration's reliance on a law designed to foil the designs of consul Napoleon Bonaparte and which drew the wrath of Thomas Jefferson. Migration is not invasion, he decided, and a street gang is not an army.

“The court concludes that as a matter of law, the executive branch cannot rely on the A.E.A., based on the proclamation, to detain the named petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country,” Judge Rodriguez wrote. He also found that the “plain ordinary meaning” of the act’s language, like “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” referred to an attack by “military forces” and did not line up with Mr. Trump’s claims about the activities of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang, in a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

“In the significant majority of the records, the use of ‘invasion’ and ‘predatory incursion’ referred to an attack by military forces,” Judge Rodriguez wrote, adding that those terms “involve an organized, armed force entering the United States to engage in conduct destructive of property and human life in a specific geographical area.”

Rodriguez's finding only affects those people detained and scheduled for deportation in the district covered by his court. It's always dangerous to read a judge's mind from half-a-continent away, but it seems logical that Rodriguez's work with the International Justice Mission, a faith-based, non-profit fighting human trafficking, might well have made him acutely aware of what the administration is up to, and of the suffering of its victims. At any rate, he knows more about human trafficking than anyone around the president does, and he certainly cares more about the faceless people in Stephen Miller's ledgers.