A New Ruling Forces the Supreme Court to Confront the Trump Administration’s Lies Under Oath |
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The second Trump administration has forced us to think a lot about what it means—and why it matters—when government lawyers lie in open court and ignore judicial orders. This week saw a rather extraordinary version of a jurist reacting to both offenses when U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a remarkable 81-page decision rebuking and decrying the Trump administration’s so-called third-country deportation scheme. Murphy, who sits in Massachusetts, did not merely rule against the policy; he also documented the many ways that government officials lied, stonewalled, and disobeyed court orders throughout the litigation. On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed both his order and why it is vitally important for judges to do what he did. An excerpt from their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: Can you start by reminding us what this cruel and unusual policy allows for? Because I think “third-country deportation” sounds a little benign for what it actually is.
Mark Joseph Stern: It sounds antiseptic, but it’s absolutely atrocious. This is the policy the Trump administration uses to banish immigrants to countries that are not their home countries, and to which they often have no connection whatsoever. The Trump administration does this without giving people notice of where they were being expelled, or an opportunity to object to being expelled there. That clearly violates the Convention Against Torture, which bars the government from deporting people to any country in which there is substantial reason to believe they will be tortured or killed.
The Trump administration claimed it could just ignore that law and deport noncitizens to random countries as long as it received “diplomatic assurances” that deportees would not face torture or death there. But it refused to say what those........