Obamas lawyers are set to empower Trump
At various moments, President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to torture terrorism suspects, ban Muslims from entering the country, banish more prisoners to Guantanamo Bay and round up millions of undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration opposes all of these policies and has taken some steps to make it harder for Trump to achieve them. Yet two days before Trump’s inauguration, President Obama’s Justice Department will argue to the Supreme Court that victims of federal policies related to immigration and national security should not be able to sue government officials for damages — even if those policies were clearly unconstitutional. In the final case of the Obama administration, lawyers for a president avowedly committed to the rule of law will empower a successor threatening to demolish it.
The case, Ziglar v. Abbasi, arises out of the roundup of hundreds of immigrants in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Federal officials arrested more than 750 men from South Asian and Middle Eastern countries, often based on nothing more than vague tips from members of the public reporting “suspicious Arabs” in their neighborhoods. One man came to the FBI’s attention when his landlord called to say that she would “feel awful” if her Middle Eastern tenants were involved in terrorism and she hadn’t called. Another immigrant was detained after someone reported that the grocery store where he and other Middle Eastern men worked employed “too many people to run a small store.”
After an independent investigation into these detentions, the Justice Department inspector general rebuked government officials for the “indiscriminate and haphazard” manner in which they classified immigrants as terrorism suspects. It also found that many of these men languished in a maximum-security prison for months in highly restrictive conditions, while prison guards routinely assaulted them. Ultimately, though many had violated immigration laws, none of the detainees were found to have any connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, and none stand convicted of terrorism.
In 2002, a group of these former detainees sued then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and other officials, accusing them of treating them as terrorism suspects purely because of their race or religion, and of confining them under unreasonably harsh conditions. Nearly 15 years have passed since they filed suit, yet they still have not had a chance to prove their claims. Instead, the Obama Justice Department argues that these men should not be able to sue government officials for money damages at all, even if they have no other way of challenging their treatment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-lawyers-are-set-to-empower-trump/2017/01/05/42bb1b3e-d13a-11e6-a783-cd3fa950f2fd_story.html?utm_term=.b82ae5c27fd8&wpisrc=nl_most-draw14&wpmm=1
