The federal jurist who excoriated Michael Flynn this week isn’t done with the Trump administration just yet.
Judge Emmet Sullivan on Wednesday struck down a Trump-backed Justice Department policy seeking to gut asylum protections for immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang brutality.
Sullivan said the Trump administration violated immigration law and demanded that asylum seekers who were deported after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted the rules must be returned to the U.S.
The federal judge held that the DOJ policies, instructing asylum officers to “generally” deny domestic violence and gang violence-related claims, violated the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
In his ruling, Sullivan noted that “there is no legal basis for an effective categorical ban” and said it was the “will of Congress—not the whims of the Executive—that determines the standard for expedited removal.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of a dozen asylum seekers, some of whom “endured extensive persecution in the form of sexual and physical violence,” the group said in a statement.“This ruling is a defeat for the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the rights of asylum seekers. The government’s attempt to obliterate asylum protections is unlawful and inconsistent with our country’s longstanding commitment to provide protection to immigrants fleeing for their lives,” said Jennifer Chang Newell, managing attorney of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued the case.
A day earlier, Sullivan delayed the sentencing of Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, after threatening to send the disgraced Army general to prison.
Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was repeatedly chastised by Sullivan, who told him, “Arguably, you sold your country out.”
