On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was processing the family of Mohamed Soliman — the radical Islamist who allegedly set Jewish demonstrators ablaze in Boulder on Sunday — for removal from the country. Then came the order from a rogue judge blocking the administration.
Judge Gordon Gallagher’s two-page order halting the removal of Soliman’s wife and five children — all illegal aliens, according to Stephen Miller — isn’t merely a misapplication of justice. It is a direct assault on the executive branch’s constitutional authority. And if President Donald Trump continues to treat these rogue judicial decrees as legitimate, he not only cedes national security to ideological partisans in black robes — he permits a full-blown constitutional crisis to fester unchecked.
On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “have taken the family of suspected Boulder, Colorado terrorist, and illegal alien, Mohamed Soliman, into ICE custody.”
But within hours, Gallagher issued an order stating the Trump administration “SHALL NOT REMOVE Hayem El Gamal and her five children from the District of Colorado or the United States unless or until this Court or the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacates this Order.”
But if a president cannot remove from the country illegal aliens with direct familial ties to a suspected terrorist charged with a federal hate crime and attempted murder on U.S. soil, then he is merely administering policies subject to veto by any unelected judge who decides to intervene.
For the past six months, unelected judges — members of the inferior judiciary — have taken it upon themselves to claim powers the Constitution never granted them: the power to dictate national security decisions, override immigration enforcement, and effectively paralyze the executive branch. The Founders foresaw such a constitutional crisis — which is why they created a government of three, co-equal branches. But if one branch needs approval from another branch for everything it does, then that’s not a balance of power, it’s judicial supremacy.
Thomas Jefferson said in an 1804 letter to Abigail Adams that “nothing in the constitution has given them a right to decide for the executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them.”
“[T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature & executive also in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch,” Jefferson said.
Jefferson later expressed concern in an 1819 letter to Virginia Judge Spencer Roane that the Constitution, if misinterpreted, could become “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
And yet Gallagher, nominated by a political opponent of the president, is now essentially dictating immigration and national security policy. Gallagher has assumed the authority to overrule the president of the United States — who was elected on a mandate to restore national sovereignty — and shield the family of a terrorist who attempted mass murder against Americans.
But this country cannot afford a presidency that defers to lawless rulings issued from the bench of an inferior court.
When Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway asked Press Sec. Karoline Leavitt about how the administration would rein in “rogue lower court judges” and whether “there [is] an actual effort by this White House to tackle this issue in a comprehensive way, and if so, what is it?” Leavitt would not provide specifics, simply stating there “is an effort …”
Upon a follow up from Hemingway, Leavitt said the administration “is operating under the directive given … from the president that we need to comply with the court’s orders,” and that the White House intends “to fight them in court, and we’re going to win on the merits of these cases, because we know we are acting within a president’s legal and executive authorities.”
As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood wrote, “In other words, Trump and his administration have no current plans to end the judicial coup at all. They’re going to continue abiding by these rogue lower court judges’ overreaching edicts, thereby giving legitimacy to the unconstitutional effort crippling Trump’s presidency and America’s separation of powers.”
To be clear, Trump is not being asked to disregard the judiciary as a whole. But he is being called upon to refuse obedience to a faction of activist judges who are attempting to seize powers never granted to them. A president who submits to such overreach isn’t preserving the rule of law.
There is a judicial coup underway in this country. The presidency cannot remain functional — and the Republic cannot remain sovereign — if its core powers are subject to the whims of rogue, lawless judges.