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After DC Circuit reinstates fired agency board members, chief justice pauses action

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 22:37:23 +0000

Executive Branch

After DC Circuit reinstates fired agency board members, chief justice pauses action

April 9, 2025, 9:11 am CDT

The E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse on Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C., is home to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (Photo from Shutterstock)

Updated: Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily blocked reinstatement of fired board members of two independent agencies after an en banc federal appeals court ruled in their favor Monday.

On Wednesday, Roberts issued an administrative stay that paused reinstatement of Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne A. Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board, Law360 reports.

In its April 7 order, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated a three-judge panel decision that allowed Trump to remove Harris and Wilcox.

The NLRB enforces labor laws, while the MSPB considers workplace disputes by federal employees. Boards overseeing the agencies resolve appeals following decisions by administrative law judges.

The D.C. Circuit’s en banc order revived a reinstatement order by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell of the District of Columbia, Law.com reports.

The en banc court cited a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, and a 1958 Supreme Court decision, Wiener v. United States. Those decisions upheld restrictions on removal of government officials on multimember adjudicatory boards, the appeals court said.

“The Supreme Court’s repeated and recent statements that Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener remain precedential require denying the government’s emergency motions for a stay pending appeal,” the en banc majority said.

Four out of 11 en banc judges dissented.

The case is Trump v. Wilcox.

Updated April 9 at 4:17 p.m. to include information on Chief Justice John Roberts’ administrative stay.

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SCOTUS pauses return of man that Trump wrongfully deported

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:19:55 +0000

Inset: President-elect Donald Trump on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024 (NBC News/YouTube). Background: Immigration records for Kilmar Abrego Garcia (WTTG/YouTube).

Chief Justice John Roberts has paused a Monday deadline for the Trump administration to return a protected Maryland resident who was mistakenly sent to El Salvador as part of President Donald Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants back to the United States through a judge’s order after the Justice Department urged the U.S. Supreme Court to do so.

Issuing an order on Monday afternoon, Roberts temporarily halted a preliminary injunction in which U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis gave the DOJ just over three days to facilitate bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the country, referring to his deportation as “an illegal act” in her order. The 29-year-old was sent to El Salvador on March 15 in error as part of Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rush through mass deportations, which have since been blocked by a federal judge, without providing due process to those being flown out of the country.

Abrego Garcia was in the U.S. with protected legal status at the time of his deportation. His wife and 5-year-old child are both U.S. citizens. The DOJ admitted to the lower court on Friday that his deportation was an “administrative error,” leading to the suspension of a 15-year DOJ vet who made the public confession.

Roberts said Monday that the midnight deadline set by Xinis would be put on hold until the Supreme Court can come to a conclusion on whether to lift the judge’s order altogether.

“It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Tuesday, April 8th, 2025, by 5 p.m.,” Roberts added.

Instead of waiting until Tuesday, though, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys chose to file their response mere moments after the Supreme Court decision was handed down.

“This case is one of one,” wrote Abrego Garcia’s legal team. “It presents the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of the Government conceding that it erred in removing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia ‘to a foreign country for which he was not eligible for removal,”” the response said. “The Government knew about the court order prohibiting Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador, and admits that removing him in violation of that order was an ‘administrative error.’ Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, in any country. He is not wanted by the Government of El Salvador. He sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”

With just hours to go before the Trump administration was set to return Abrego Garcia, the DOJ tossed up its “Hail Mary” bid to the Supreme Court on Monday morning — asking it to put the kibosh on the efforts — after Xinis doubled down on her order Sunday.

In a 22-page opinion, Xinis said she would not back off from forcing the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who are being sued by Abrego Garcia, to return him to U.S. soil. The DOJ filed an emergency motion to stay Xinis’ preliminary injunction on Saturday with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and lower court, “given the urgency of harms to the government,” the DOJ filings said. The 4th Circuit denied the motion on Monday shortly before the DOJ filed its Supreme Court application.

In prior arguments as well as the SCOTUS filing Monday, DOJ lawyers called Xinis’ order “indefensible” and impossible to carry out on account of where he’s being held.

“The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding,” wrote Solicitor General D. John Sauer in the DOJ’s Supreme Court application to vacate the order.

“The Constitution vests the President with control over foreign negotiations so that the United States speaks with one voice, not so that the President’s central Article II prerogatives can give way to district-court diplomacy,” Sauer said. “If this precedent stands, other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business. Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”

Xinis, a Barack Obama appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s claim that the Trump administration had its hands tied with Abrego Garcia in her Sunday filing. She said the U.S. can’t prop up the prison in El Salvador as “one of the tools” in the government’s deportation shed — as Xinis said Noem has previously claimed — and then try to act like nothing can be done.

Xinis noted Sunday how the U.S. government and administration officials have repeatedly claimed “without any evidence” that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13, which it continued to do on Monday in the Supreme Court application. Even if that were true, Xinis pointed out Sunday how he was given legal protection to live in the United States because he wanted out of El Salvador due to the threat of retaliation and attacks from MS-13’s “chief rival gang,” identified by Xinis as Barrio 18. She noted how the Trump administration was housing Abrego Garcia with inmates belonging to Barrio 18.

“Abrego Garcia will suffer irreparably were he not accorded his requested relief,” Xinis said. “The risk of harm shocks the conscience. Defendants have forcibly put him in a facility that intentionally mixes rival gang members without any regard for protecting the detainees from harm at the hands of the gangs.”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said Monday in their response to Roberts’ order that they believed the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits of the case.

“Its application to this Court is built on a series of strawmen,” they said. “First, that ordering the Government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return requires ‘compel[ling] El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding.’ Second, that the district court lacks jurisdiction over this case … based on a ‘decision or action by the Attorney General to … execute removal orders against any alien.’ And third, that complying with the order requires letting ‘a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.’

“None of this is true,” the lawyers insisted.

To support their case, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed an amicus curiae brief with the 4th Circuit on Sunday, showing support from “world-renowned scholars of constitutional law” who say Abrego Garcia’s removal was “extreme” and legally unprecedented. “Not surprisingly, amici are not aware of any precedent or recognized constitutional principle supporting the government’s argument,” the statement of amicus curiae says, with it being filed by law professors Erwin Chemerinsky, Martha Minow and Laurence Tribe on Sunday night.

“If this court were to adopt the government’s position here, it would dramatically expand the Executive Branch’s power at the expense of fundamental individual liberties, and diminish both the Legislative Branch’s and the Judicial Branch’s power in unprecedented and dangerous ways,” the trio concluded. “If the government’s argument were correct, the Executive Branch would possess a shuddering degree of power — power that the President could wield in extreme and extraordinary ways, including against American citizens that the President simply disfavors.”

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Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.

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Averting immediate showdown, chief justice pauses judge’s deadline for US to restore foreign-aid funds

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:48:17 +0000

U.S. Supreme Court

Averting immediate showdown, chief justice pauses judge’s deadline for US to restore foreign-aid funds

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 27, 2025, 10:36 am CST

The U.S. government doesn’t have to comply with a federal judge’s Wednesday night deadline to restore foreign-aid funds after Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay in the matter. (Photo from Shutterstock)

Roberts issued the temporary stay late Wednesday in two consolidated lawsuits challenging a 90-day freeze in funding for foreign assistance programs. A plaintiff in one of the suits is the ABA, which had “tens of millions of dollars” in federal funding frozen for foreign rule of law and human rights programs, its suit said.

The Washington Post, Reuters, NBC News, Law.com, SCOTUSblog and the New York Times are among the publications with coverage.

Plaintiffs in the suit consolidated with the ABA’s alleged Feb. 19 that government defendants showed “brazen defiance” of a Feb. 13 temporary restraining order requiring restoration of funding.

U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali of the District of Columbia issued the Feb. 13 TRO. On Feb. 25, Ali issued a bench ruling setting the deadline at 11:59 p.m. Feb. 26 for compliance with his order requiring payment on completed contracts. The U.S. government immediately appealed.

Amir’s order appears to contemplate the immediate outlay of nearly $2 billion, according to the stay request filed with the Supreme Court by Acting U.S. Solicitor General Sarah Harris.

The government is committed to paying legitimate claims for work, and it is “undertaking significant efforts” toward that end, Harris said.

“What the government cannot do,” Harris wrote, “is pay arbitrarily determined demands on an arbitrary timeline of the district court’s choosing or according to extra-contractual rules that the court has devised. That mandate creates an untenable payment plan at odds with the president’s obligations under Article II to protect the integrity of the federal fisc and make appropriate judgments about foreign aid.”

The stay request argued that the suits amount to claims for breach of contract that should be heard by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

The cases are U.S. Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Trump v. Global Health Council.

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Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:02:46 +0000

White Collar Crime

Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 11, 2025, 3:24 pm CST

President Donald Trump with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, and Vice President JD Vance after being sworn in Jan. 20. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that that generally pauses enforcement of a law that bars companies operating in the United States from bribing foreign officials.

The Feb. 10 order requires U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to formulate updated guidelines for enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that “prioritize American interests, American economic competitiveness with respect to other nations, and the efficient use of federal law enforcement resources.”

Bondi has 180 days to work on the guidelines and has the option of extending the period for another 180 days, the order said. During that time, Bondi should stop new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations or enforcement actions, the order said. She is also required to review existing investigations and actions, taking action to restore proper bounds on enforcement. Bondi can determine whether an exception to the pause should be made in individual cases, however.

A White House fact sheet said “unpredictable FCPA enforcement” makes American companies less competitive. Overenforcement of the law also interferes with Trump’s authority to conduct foreign affairs under Article II of the Constitution, the document said.

Bondi issued a memo Feb. 5 that directs Department of Justice lawyers to prioritize Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecutions in which foreign bribery facilitated crimes of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, according to an analysis by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. The law firm also said the statute of limitations in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases “outruns the Trump administration,” meaning that a prosecution could be fair game after Trump leaves office.

Publications with coverage of Trump’s order include Reuters, CNBC, Fox News and the New York Times.

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