A Biden-appointed federal judge in Chicago says he is considering forcing immigration officers to release thousands of the illegal migrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement have arrested during its “Operation Midway Blitz.”
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings claims he intends to provide “equitable relief” by ordering the Department of Homeland Security to release any criminal already on ankle monitors or other court-ordered monitoring programs, WLS-TV reported.
Pro-migrant activists claim that ICE and DHS are violating a so-called “Consent Decree” that limits how agents can make warrantless arrests of criminal illegal migrants.
The decree was signed in 2022 when President Joe Biden’s deputies agreed to accept curbs drafted by the ACLU. Judges allow consent decrees to bind future administrations.
Judge Cummings, who was appointed to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by Joe Biden, is now reportedly set to speak out on those supposed violations after he ruled that agents had gone against the decree known as the 2022 Castañon Nava settlement.
ICE reportedly agreed to the conditions of the decree, including a pre-determination if a targeted individual is in the country illegally and whether they are a flight risk. Activist lawyers say that federal officers have violated their agreement.
Immigrant activist Mark Fleming claims that as many as 3,000 migrants have been arrested against the terms of the decree.
“Our initial analysis is that it’s over 3,000 arrests,” Fleming told ABC 7. “We’ve started to dig into the case file that they produced to us, and the vast majority are violations. If they did not have a prior order of removal, in almost all circumstances, they’ve been uniformly violating the consent decree.”
DHS attorneys, though, say that Congress stripped the federal courts of any authority to release any immigrants in ICE custody.
The attorneys argue that “Congress has vested the authority to grant parole solely with the Secretary of Homeland Security… Federal courts cannot order the Department of Homeland Security to release any aliens on parole because Congress has stripped them of that authority.”
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