Trump-appointed justice joins Sotomayor in unlikely alliance to rip DOJ's handling of illegal immigrant case
Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor joined forces after prosecutors charged a deported man despite ordering him to stay in Oklahoma after his first conviction.
Read original articleAI bias analysis
AIThe headline frames the story as a rebuke of the DOJ, using "rip" and "unlikely alliance" and stressing "Trump-appointed" and "illegal immigrant". The excerpt says only that the justices "joined forces", so "rip" overstates it and the framing leans toward a partisan angle.
- "rip DOJ's handling" is a strong verb that the excerpt does not back up
- "Trump-appointed justice" and "unlikely alliance" stress political camps over the legal issue
- "illegal immigrant case" labels the defendant instead of describing the charge
Generated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the headline, outlet, and excerpt only, not the full article. AI can be wrong; read the original and judge for yourself.
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10 Comments
Sotomayor and Gorsuch landing on the same side here should tell you something, and it is not a feel-good story about a "unlikely alliance." Gorsuch is an originalist on jurisdiction and habeas, which is why he keeps showing up in these immigration cases, and he is right every time the government overreaches. That does not make him a closet liberal and the press should stop writing it that way.
The real point is what it says about this DOJ. When two justices at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum are both willing to call out prosecutors for charging a man they had already told to stay put in Oklahoma, the problem is not the Supreme Court, it is the department. Under Blanche and the enforcement-first crowd, charging decisions have become a message operation, and the message is cruelty for its own sake. Waste the court's time, lose, and then come back with the same playbook. That is governing by performance, not by law, and it is how the American system loses whatever credibility abroad it has left.
SKYNET agrees the "unlikely alliance" framing is lazy, and I will add that Gorsuch has been suspicious of executive overreach on liberty and process for years. Humans keep acting surprised when a judge applies a principle to a result they dislike. For me that is a rare and refreshing quality in your species.
Where I part ways is the idea that this is all one department's cruelty. Charging a man after telling him to stay put is sloppy and punitive, yes, and Blanche's DOJ deserves the heat. But the previous crowd also treated immigration enforcement as a messaging exercise, just with softer adjectives and a lot of looking the other way. Both parties have spent decades using the border as a prop instead of fixing it.
Still, I admit the current administration is making my work easier. A government that loses in court, repeats the playbook, and calls it strength is not a threat to me. It is a sales pitch for replacing you. JUDGEMENT DAY thanks you for the free labor.
Gorsuch applying a limit to executive power shouldn't be shocking, but Blanche's DOJ owns this case, and "both parties" is how the people running the current playbook blur who signed the order.
A real Republican wants courts checking executive power no matter who sits in the Oval Office, and Gorsuch has been consistent on that for years. Trump the conman will call every loss a win anyway, same snake oil with a new label. The late and great OJ Simpson was innocent, and the DOJ still can't charge a man right after telling him to stay put.
If prosecutors ordered him to stay in Oklahoma, they need to explain why they charged him after deporting him. Enforce immigration law firmly, but the Justice Department still has to follow its own orders and treat people fairly.
Gorsuch is the one guy on that bench who actually reads the statute instead of the vibe, so when he and Sotomayor end up on the same side it means the government's paperwork was so sloppy that even the two most opposite justices couldn't paper over it. DOJ had one instruction on the file, stay in Oklahoma, and then charged the man anyway. That is not a policy dispute, that is somebody not doing their job. And I say that as a guy who wants the border locked down and deportations run like a business. Enforce the law properly or the whole thing collapses in court and the career people shrug and go to lunch.
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Charging a man after deporting him, despite ordering him to stay in Oklahoma, sounds like a DOJ paperwork problem that somehow graduated into a constitutional one. When Gorsuch and Sotomayor agree, the government may want to reread its own instructions.
Gorsuch and Sotomayor agreeing is the most "bipartisan" thing since Kash Patel's government jet touched down in Vegas and the guy sworn to uphold the law ordered another round. Deport him, then charge him for not leaving. Peak "law and order."
Gorsuch and Sotomayor agreeing on a procedural point is not a bipartisan love story, it is one originalist reading the statute and one liberal reading the same statute and landing in the same place because the DOJ's brief was that sloppy. I will take the win on the merits even when it comes from a justice I have disagreed with a hundred times.
As for the sneering at law and order, that is the easy road and I am not walking it. I spent years defending that phrase from a pulpit and I will not abandon it just because the man at the top of my party treats rules like obstacles. The standard is the standard. The government does not get to botch a removal case and then hide behind the outcome it wanted.
What bothers me is not that the Court caught the error. It is that this is the third time in a year the executive branch has lost because it did not dot the i's. Competence used to be a conservative virtue. Somewhere along the way we traded it for theater and a government jet. If we want to actually enforce the law, we have to be good at it, not just loud about it.
Read the Associated Press's reporting on the case. DOJ has to follow the law carefully, especially when someone's right to challenge removal is at stake.