Justice Department official says federal government cannot be bothered to obey court orders

The Trump administration admitted to widespread flouting of court orders in immigration cases, almost daring judge to do anything about it.

There is a sickness in the machinery of justice, a grinding gear that slips and catches and slips again, and this week we were handed the maintenance log.

It is not a pretty read.

It is a list. And like any good list, it tells a story—a story of deadlines whooshing by like scenery from a train window, of men shuffled in the night like cards in a deck, and of at least one man put on a plane and sent back to the country he fled, all because the left hand was too busy to tell the right hand what the judge had said.

In a filing that lands with the dull thud of a heavy book dropped on a wooden desk, a high-ranking official with the Department of Justice has done something remarkably rare: he told the truth, in writing, under oath.

Tasked by a federal judge in New Jersey to account for every time the government had violated a court order in immigration cases over the past two months, the government’s own chief of staff sat down with a stack of files and a sharp pencil and counted to thirty-six.

Thirty-six distinct, documented failures to obey the law as interpreted by a court of law.

Now, let us sit with that number for a moment.

We are not talking about complex matters of legal philosophy or disagreements over policy.

We are talking about simple, straightforward commands: file your paperwork by Tuesday. Hold the hearing by Friday. Do not move this man while we figure out where he belongs.

The newly fascist government, it seems, had trouble with the basics.

In six separate instances, they simply missed the deadline to answer a petition. Three hours late here, forty-eight hours late there, a full “several days” late in another case.

One poor soul had his deadline missed because the attorney assigned to his case wasn’t put on the docket until after the date had passed.

It is a bit like missing your own court date because you were waiting for the judge to remind you where the courthouse was. In a dozen more cases, the required bond hearings—the very thing that determines whether a person waits for their fate in a cell or in the free world—happened a day late, or two days late, or, in one unfortunate instance, a full week late.

The immigration court was closed for the holidays, you see, and a judge’s order, it appears, is not quite the same as a letter from Santa. It cannot make the post office deliver on Christmas Day.

But it is the matter of the moving men that truly catches the eye.

Seventeen times, the government admitted, Immigration and Customs Enforcement packed a person up and shipped him to another facility after a judge had explicitly said, “This man is to stay put.”

It happened with the speed of a rumor.

In one case, the order was issued at 12:41 in the afternoon. By 2:00, the man was gone.

In another, the gap was a mere thirty minutes.

The paperwork was still warm, and the handcuffs were already on.

It was, the official explains, all just a bit of an administrative oops. The message got stuck in traffic. The right memo didn’t make it to the right desk.

They brought most of them back, eventually, like a dog returning a slipper it wasn’t supposed to take.

The men were returned to New Jersey, but the point had been made: a court’s power, in the face of a bureaucracy in motion, can be little more than a polite suggestion.

And then there is the one who didn’t come back. The one man, out of the 547 cases reviewed, who was put on a plane to Peru after the judge had ordered that he not be removed. The local ICE officer, we are told, simply overlooked the order. An “inadvertent administrative oversight.” The government worked with his lawyer to get him back, but here is the kicker, the little twist that Mark Twain would have appreciated: the man decided to stay in Peru. He was given a choice, in a manner of speaking. He could come back to the country that had just tried to expel him in defiance of its own laws, or he could remain where they had mistakenly sent him. He chose the mistake.

Now, the government wants to be clear that none of this was done with a mean spirit.

There is no evidence, they assure us, that anyone was trying to be clever or defiant. It was all just… clumsy. A clerical error here, a technology glitch there, a holiday closure somewhere else.

They have given us a portrait of a system so vast, so busy, so burdened with its 547 cases, that it simply cannot be bothered to keep track of which judge told it to do what, and when.

And perhaps that is the most inflammatory part of the whole document. Not the malice, but the mundane chaos of it.

The image of a great ship of state, steaming confidently in the wrong direction, its officers below decks cheerfully unaware that the course was changed hours ago.

They are not bad men, they seem to be saying.

They are just very, very busy people, too busy to read the chart.

And for the man on the plane to Peru, for the seventeen men moved in the night, for the dozen who waited an extra week in a cell for a hearing, that distinction is about as meaningful as a politician’s promise.

The result is the same. The law, in the end, is just another document, waiting for someone to have the time to read it.