Caravans, Congress, and the Courts

Aiding and abetting a breakdown of law and order — will the incoming Mexican government save the day?

John C. Wohlstetter November 27, 2018

President Trump has threatened to permanently close the U.S.-Mexico border if he cannot strike a deal with the incoming Mexican government, under which migrants will await in Mexico the outcome of court fights in the U.S. If he succeeds, the immediate danger that the caravan would simply overrun the border as the courts paralyze the administration will be averted. Mexico’s new government comes to power December 1. The deal would double the U.S.’s migrant processing capacity and would alleviate applicant pressure at U.S. ports of entry. The failed effort of 500 massed migrants, some hurling rocks at U.S. border patrol agents, to force their way over the border, stopped by volleys of tear gas, signals dramatically the threat posed by such caravans. The Mexican government plans to deport the migrants who rushed the border. A Honduran migrant was quoted as saying that 20,000 migrants will assemble in Tijuana to march north on the highway and then cross the California border en masse. He called U.S. asylum applicant processing procedures “a waste of time.”..............

Growing use of this extraterritorial extension of jurisdiction by federal courts was criticized by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an October 2018 address. Sessions noted therein that in the first 175 years of the American constitutional republic no federal judge had asserted nationwide jurisdiction. In the ensuing 65 years that such rulings have been made, their use accelerated sharply during the first 21 months of the Trump administration, with 27 such rulings. This does not include rulings like Judge Tigar’s, made in the five weeks since mid-October.

Sessions also cited two other practices, what he termed “encroachments” by the judicial branch, on the powers assigned by the Framers to the legislative and executive branches: (a) ignoring traditional doctrines of “justiciability” (jurisdiction — the kinds of cases courts have power to decide), and “standing” (who may bring a given lawsuit); and (b) inquiring into the motives of executive branch officials, rather than whether actions taken by such officials were lawful. Of jurisdiction, Sessions stated:

Indeed, courts are even ignoring explicit congressional directives that strip them of jurisdiction to decide certain questions. For example, with respect to the designation of Temporary Protected Status, Congress has provided that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection.” Yet, after the Secretary justifiably decided to terminate the designation for individuals from four countries, a federal district court held it does have jurisdiction to review the decision..........To Read More.....

My Take - I think it's probably important at this point to state that the Constitution gives the Congress the right to determine the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, and all federal courts are creations of the Congress with the exception of the Supreme Court, which was created by the Constitution.  Congress can, and has, eliminated a federal court when it got out control.  The reason why the federal judiciary seems to keep forgetting this is.....they probably don't care ............because most of these "judges" are nothing more than political hacks.