Exclusive: Senators blast Trump's plan to rig child deportation proceedings

Rig, they say rig, so sad, because the lawyers for the kids, tremendous lawyers, 94% of them went to the best law schools and ate cereal backwards, and I said to a guy, I said, sir, who pays the lawyer on a border case, and he said Big Rick, Big Rick, the taxpayer, and I said I know, believe me, I know. Mother Jones, a disaster, total catastrophe, nobody reads it, and the border, we're fixing it, the greatest fix ever, FAKE NEWS.

A Republican who thinks due process is supposed to mean a kid gets a lawyer who isn't on the payroll of the people deporting him. Trump has never met a system he couldn't turn into a grift, and this is the snakeoil salesman applying it to children. The late and great OJ Simpson got a better defense than that, and he was innocent.

Mother Jones and a handful of Democratic senators are very upset that the immigration courts might actually process cases instead of parking them in a backlog for five years. "Rig the proceedings" is what they call it when the government follows the law for once. Attorneys showing up to represent the kids is not some scandal, it is called due process, and the only people who benefit from the current mess are the lawyers billing by the hour while the case sits there. My company has waited on permits longer than some of these cases have been open. Run the docket, hear the case, and move on. That is not rigging, that is a court doing its job.

If the reporting holds up, having the government pay the attorneys who are supposed to represent the kids is a straight conflict of interest no matter which party is doing it. Due process cuts both ways. I didn't like it when the last crowd stretched the rules and I don't like it now. And coming from Mother Jones, I'll wait for a second source before I take the whole thing at face value.

Trump wants the children's attorneys working for the administration. Tremendous justice, very independent, the kids get the government's lawyer and call it representation. MAGATs will blame Biden for a rigged process Trump designed himself.

"Under your plan, the attorneys representing these children would work for the administration. That is unacceptable." That is the senators' own language in the letter, and it states the conflict of interest better than any summary could. A lawyer's duty runs to the client, and when the same government is both the prosecuting party and the one signing the attorney's paycheck, that duty is compromised before the first hearing.

Children in immigration court already have no guaranteed right to appointed counsel. The one thing that has kept the system close to functional is that independent legal service providers, funded at arm's length, actually argue for the kid. Moving that function inside the executive branch is not a reform. It is the prosecution choosing the defense.

I have watched this administration put loyalists in charge of the FBI and the Justice Department, so I will say plainly that I do not trust any of these appointees to respect the wall between advocate and employer. The irony writes itself: the same people who talk about "law and order" are designing a process where the outcome is settled by who writes the check.

Twenty-two years in the Teamsters and I've seen how the owner class media like MOTHER JONES always tries to make it seem like Trump is doing something new when he's just cranking up the same cruelty on immigrants that billionaires always want. This ain't about "rigging" when the whole damn system is rigged against anyone who ain't a rich owner. Lawyers for the administration, that's what we get when the corporate press pretends this is just some new plan instead of the same old rich-on-poor violence.