Trump suffers double blow in court as ‘the dam has broken’

The Trump administration suffered two losses in one day, with a Trump appointee delivering one of the blows, per a legal reporter.

According to Politico senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney, the Trump administration’s “unprecedented mass detention policy” aimed at immigrants suffered its fifth straight appellate court loss hours before a Trump appointee handed it a sixth.

“The dam has broken,” Cheney wrote in a post on X reviewing the losses so far. “Six federal appeals courts in a row have now shot down ICE’s mass detention policy, along with a 469-54 split against the administration among district judges.”

The latest loss came from the California-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 2-1 against the Trump administration’s mass detention policy carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Trump-appointed Judge Daniel Bress wrote the opinion in “the most significant rejection yet of the Trump administration’s unprecedented mass detention policy,” as Cheney described the ruling in his reporting for Politico.

According to Cheney, Bress found that the Trump administration had misconstrued a 1996 immigration law to justify its mass detention policy. The Trump administration’s interpretation “has resulted in detained aliens filing thousands of habeas petitions in federal courts across the country, seeking bond hearings and possible release from detention,” Bress wrote.

The other setback came from the Illinois-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled 2-1 and found that the Trump administration “defied logic” to justify mass detention. Biden appointee Judge Joshua Kolar noted the volume of prior judicial writing in his opinion, stating, “We add but a few more drops of ink to the gallons already spilled.”