The Justice Department fired up the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. This court has been sitting dormant since 1996. Thirty years of collecting dust like your Robinhood account after that first options trade.
Judge James Boasberg says this is the natural forum for national security deportations. Natural. As if there's anything natural about a court system so obscure it makes FISA warrants look like traffic court. The thing was created during the Clinton administration and has never heard a single case. Not one. Congress built an entire judicial apparatus and then forgot about it like a gym membership.
The court was designed to deport suspected terrorists using classified evidence the defendant can't see. You get accused. You can't view the evidence. You get a lawyer with special clearance who also can't tell you what the evidence says. It's like getting margin called but the broker won't tell you which positions blew up your account.
Boasberg is the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He's suggesting they use this other secret court instead. We've got so many secret courts now they're starting to compete for cases. Free market principles applied to constitutional violations.
Nobody has tested whether this court is even constitutional. Three decades on the books and zero case law. But sure, let's activate it now. What could go wrong with rushing an untested judicial system that operates in complete secrecy and denies defendants access to the evidence against them?
The Justice Department looked at the entire federal court system and said no thanks, we'll use the one that's never processed a single human being. That's the legal equivalent of a retail trader ignoring SPY to go all-in on a penny stock with no revenue and a CEO who tweets in broken English.
Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash
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