No. of Recommendations: 5
One thing that is exasperating to me, is that you think that the Law of the Land means something to Trump and his cronies.
Because it does. You'll note that for all of his barrier-breaking, the Administration has generally avoided actually violating a court order telling them not to do something. They'll exploit every procedural trick and textual ambiguity to an inch of breaking....but they do not unambiguously do anything a court has expressly told them they can't do (which is why Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still in the U.S., even though they really want him not to be).
I don't pretend this is because they have an inherent, deep respect for the sanctity of the law. Rather, I think it's because they are very much legal realists. The law isn't special, in the sense that there's any deep moral or 'sacred' reason to obey it - but virtually everything that you want to do will be easier if you don't do it in a way that gets you in trouble with the law.
For example, the Administration wants to detain and deport millions of undocumented people from the U.S. It is easier for them to do that if they have ICE only detain non-citizens. Because if they detain citizens, it makes it harder to detain and deport the non-citizens - it clogs up the system with cases that will never result in a deportation, it makes all the other ALJ's and Article III judges take a little more time looking at the prima facie basis for the deportation case in the first place, it gives political opponents of the deportations more of a hook, etc. The Administration might not give a rat's patootie about whether a citizen were to get deported through inadvertence or carelessness substantively - but since a citizen deportation would probably cost them many thousands of non-citizen deportations in a given year, they have a practical reason to try to make sure that it doesn't happen.
