“A Question of Remedy, not Redressability”
Proclamation 10888, issued by the President on his first day in office, purported to:
“prevent anyone who crosses the southern border of the United States at any place other than a designated port of entry, as well as anyone who enters anywhere else (including at a designated port of entry) without a visa or without extensive medical information, criminal history records, and other background records, from applying for asylum.”
Plaintiffs challenged the Proclamation on statutory grounds, alleging that it violates a number of statutes governing the granting or withholding of asylum, and, “most fundamentally,” that the President is not authorized to unilaterally reform the Congressionally-structured asylum system.[1]
Yesterday, the DC district court, in RAICES v. Noem, Â granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on all claims, vacated the Proclamation, and entered an injunction “precluding the Agency Defendants[2] from implementing the Proclamation.”[3]
It is, I believe, the first decision in a case in the new, post-Casa world, a world in which “universal injunctions” are, basically, no longer available to federal district courts, and it is [one hopes] a harbinger of how these challenges to unlawful Administration action will be handled going forward.
To many people – and I include myself here – the Casa decision seemed, at first glance, to sound the death knell for any hopes that the legal system could provide any serious impediment to Trump’s inexorable march to one-man rule. Without the ability to enjoin federal agencies from acting unlawfully as to anyone other than the plaintiff(s) to the action before the court, how could courts, as a practical matter, keep the Administration inside legal boundaries?
Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion took this question head on. The sky, he asserted, is not falling:
“[I]n the wake of the Court’s decision, plaintiffs who challenge the legality of a new federal statute or executive action and request preliminary injunctive relief may sometimes seek to proceed by class action under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2) and ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide, or even nationwide.”
“And in cases under the Administrative Procedure Act, plaintiffs may ask a court to preliminarily “set aside” a new agency rule. 5 U. S. C. §706(2); see, e.g., West Virginia v. EPA, 577 U. S. 1126 (2016); see also Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors, 603 U. S. 799, 826–843 (2024) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).”
Moreover, the Supreme Court will always be available to keep the Executive Branch in line – it is not limited in its declaration of nationwide-binding legal judgments.
Article from Reason.com
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