Reporter Smacks Back at Stephen Miller for Misrepresenting His Report On How Bad Trump Admin Is Doing In Court

(Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney smacked back at White House adviser Stephen Miller for sharing a misleading screenshot of a headline from one of his articles, pointing out what the article actually revealed about the Trump administration’s struggles to defend its immigration policies in court.

Monday evening, Miller posted a screenshot from an article Cheney had written on Jan. 5, showing just the headline (“Hundreds of judges reject Trump’s mandatory detention policy, with no end in sight”) and subheading (“Judges have ruled against the administration in more than 1,600 cases.”).

“Over sixteen hundred times judges have unconstitutionally and unlawfully ordered the release of illegal aliens,” Miller wrote in the post. “No democracy can function this way.”

Cheney responded by quoting Miller’s tweet and commenting that he had only screenshot the headline of the article, which was about the courts’ “overwhelming rejection of the administration’s unprecedented new interpretation of laws governing detention of migrants.”

Cheney continued, highlighting how this was not a case of judges going rogue and “unconstitutionally and unlawfully” issuing orders, like Miller had claimed, but ruling that certain actions taken as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown efforts were illegal — even judges appointed by President Donald Trump.

“Judges say it’s illegal by a margin of 335-18,” he wrote. “Trump appointees are ruling 33-15 against it as well. And to update the stats — it’s actually more than 2,100 cases now.”

The text of Cheney’s article dug deeper into the specific issue of due process violations:

Federal judges are increasingly exasperated by the Trump administration’s effort to lock up nearly everyone facing deportation proceedings — a draconian expansion of decades-old policies that hundreds of courts have rejected as illegal or unconstitutional.

More than 300 federal judges, including appointees of every president since Ronald Reagan, have now rebuffed the administration’s six-month-old effort to expand its so-called “mandatory detention” policy, according to a POLITICO analysis of court dockets from across the country. Those judges have ordered immigrants’ release or the opportunity for bond hearings in more than 1,600 cases.

And dozens more federal judges have ordered the administration to release immigrants yanked off the street without due process or held for prolonged periods even though no country has agreed to accept them.

There has been an “overwhelming legal consensus” on the law in these cases, wrote Cheney, and judges were growing weary of seeing the administration commit the same legal violations over and over, “issuing terse, carbon-copy rulings to dispense with the deluge.”

And a big part of the reason there were so many of these cases, Cheney explained, is that most of them were “filed on an emergency basis by individuals in the hours after they’re arrested — with little time to assemble large groups that could mount a broad challenge.”

Read Cheney’s article here.

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