I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS
Remember how I told you just this morning that Judge Schiltz had ordered Acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons to appear in court on Friday to answer *exactly why* ICE had not complied with a very specific order of the Court, which was to immediately release ‘Juan T.R.’ from ICE detention?
One of the terms of that order was that Lyons could avoid showing up on Friday if Juan T.R. was released (I know his name, but as *he* didn’t put it in his pleadings, I’m going to respect that even though some media outlets are sharing his full name).
Well, the good news is that it worked: Juan T.R. was released.
The bad news is that now we have been deprived of what promised to be a fun spectacle of a very annoyed Judge Schiltz raking Lyons over the coals.
Some of my colleagues argue that this is a bad result as it allows ICE to simply fail to follow court orders until they have pushed the Court to this point. I disagree, I think that this is exactly the result that one wants from this sort of order; the Court wanted Juan T.R. released, and now he is. The fix for the issue that my colleagues point out (and they’re not wrong) is for the Courts to write their original orders so as to give defendants such as ICE a *much* shorter leash. Basically, up until now the Courts have given ICE and their ilk the benefit of the doubt, while also giving them enough rope to hang themselves. I suspect that orders issuing from the Courts in these cases will now make that rope much shorter.
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