Thomas H. Dupree Jr., who was principal deputy assistant attorney general in former President George W. Bush's Department of Justice (DOJ), told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur that judges from respectable conservative backgrounds are increasingly sounding the alarm on Trump’s unconstitutional actions.
“I guess one thing that has surprised me in all of this, in all the legal back-and-forth, is that there are some very conservative judges… who clerked for Justice [Antonin] Scalia who have spoken out very explicitly about this,” said Dupree, speaking of Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz (a George W. Bush appointee), who has expressed growing frustration with the Trump administration’s tactics in court.
“The court’s patience has run out,” Schiltz wrote in an order on Monday, demanding that Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), appear in his courtroom to explain why scores of people arrested by immigration agents have been held without an opportunity to challenge their detentions.”
“The chief justice in Minneapolis has said this has gone too far. So that gets my attention. When you see people with impeccable conservative credentials saying this has gone too far, that gets my attention.”
“And on the warrant issue, the other thing is conservatives love the sanctity of the home, right? That is the place you can defend. It is your property. And conservatives view the Constitution and the law as protecting the home from intrusion by the government,” Dupree added. “And so I think that, too, is something that gets the attention of conservatives and conservative judges. They say, ‘look, if we permit a workaround, the Fourth Amendment, in the context of seizing criminal illegal aliens, what comes next?’ Once you start chipping away at those protections that have been so long embedded in our constitutional structure, conservatives get worried.”
Dupree went on to reference Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announcing that if gun owners “bring a gun into D.C. even if it's legal, then you are subject to arrest.”
“I mean, this used to be the Republican Party, but this administration was all about the Second Amendment. We love the Fourth Amendment, and we love the Second Amendment. And what we have heard lately are people justifying deviations from those constitutional protections in the name of immigration,” Dupree said. “Our founders recognized that there are going to be times in our country's history where the government is going to try to push on those boundaries and invade the home without a warrant and seize firearms, that sort of thing. That's why those constitutional protections are so strong. It's precisely for moments like this when the government is pushing those boundaries.”
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