Denial of asylum

President Trump’s deep, seething contempt for the notion that consequential acts of governing should be based on information gathered in good faith — rather than undertaken in willful bad faith or geared toward merely propping up his lies and obsessions — is suddenly garnering a lot more serious scrutiny.

  WaPo

Well, it's about goddamn time. What's been holding it up?

It required a jarring juxtaposition to force this into the media consciousness — Trump’s extraordinary manipulation of governing machinery to reverse-justify an error about Hurricane Dorian that was relatively minor. But this phenomenon has been long-running, and has soaked down into many areas of government.

No shit.

Now this Trumpian corruption of our government is featured in a very tough dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an interesting way. In short, Sotomayor lent support to the notion that the Trump administration is trying to ban asylum seeking at the border — a hideously cruel and radical move — in total bad faith, in the full knowledge that the facts do not remotely support their arguments, and indeed clearly illustrate that the ban will put untold numbers of people in grave danger.

Too bad the Supreme Court has been packed with Gorsuches and Kavanaughs.

Sotomayor dissented from a Supreme Court decision released Wednesday night that will allow Trump’s asylum ban to go forward while the merits are decided. That decision, which wasn’t explained, lifted a lower-court block on the policy.

It didn't have to be explained: Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Sotomayor’s dissent — joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — argued that Trump’s asylum ban represents a radical overturning of our longstanding offer of safe refuge to the persecuted, without public input. Given the monumental stakes for those turned away, she noted, this shouldn’t stand for the many months needed to resolve the legal dispute.

Trump’s new rule largely bans people from seeking asylum if they have not first applied for — and been denied — asylum in a country they passed through en route to our southern border.

Which, if you think about it, would include the country they're fleeing.

A district court in San Francisco blocked it from going into effect. To oversimplify, this is what the high court just reversed.

But as Sotomayor points out, in blocking the rule, the district court judge said Trump would in the end probably lose on the legal merits. The district court ruling gave three reasons for this.

First, the government skirted rulemaking procedure. Second, the rule is inconsistent with statute, which denotes that asylum can only be denied on the basis of having passed through another country if the United States has a “safe third country” agreement with it or if the refugee is already “firmly resettled there," neither of which applies.

Third, the district court said the rule is likely arbitrary and capricious — that is, lacking in serious justification and undertaken in bad faith.

Likely.

The district court said the bulk of information the administration itself supplied to justify the rule actually shows that in Mexico, migrants are regularly targeted by violence and don’t get asylum rights.

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[T]he district court noted that the administration apparently knows its new rule would not clear [the] threshold [of migrants genuinely having a safe third-country option], and thus would put untold numbers at serious risk, but went forward with it, anyway.

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In other words, the fact that the administration itself appears to know its rule will put untold numbers in danger itself supplies the urgent need to keep it on hold.

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All this goes directly to the heart of the ugly truth about this administration that is now becoming impossible to avoid. We’re now learning that a raging Trump pushed his staff to get the government’s top weather agency to contradict accurate official data about Dorian’s path, to prop up his falsehood about it.

Again and again, Trump and officials have pressed government resources into service to make Trump’s lies and obsessions into truths. Again and again, Trump and officials have disregarded or buried quality government information and findings when it undermined stated rationales for preordained decisions.

[...]

We don’t know what the legal relevance of this will be in the end. But it should not be glossed over that officials likely know full well that their new rule will put untold numbers at grave risk, and are implementing it anyway — with the high court’s blessing. It's almost as if the cruelty is the point.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.