Adam Kinzinger, former Republican member of Congress, writes an always interesting blog. He wrote yesterday that the Trump administration is harassing legal immigrants by failing to process their applications for green cards and work permits. The immigrants affected come from those countries on Trump’s restricted travel list. They have done nothing wrong. They are here legally. U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, Ohio, ordered the administration to resume processing their paper work.
Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart green card and work permit applications it had frozen. The freeze targeted immigrants from countries on the President’s travel restriction list. These are people already living here, many of them for years.
The case was brought by 25 of them. A hospital pharmacist. A nurse doing cancer research on federal funding. College graduates with job offers in science and engineering. Young couples raising kids. They all followed the process, and they all watched their paperwork freeze with no end date.
The Judge wrote that the administration was treating a person’s home country as a “significant and negative factor” in whether their case moved at all. He even named the President and the Vice President, writing that both men have “publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants.”
This is the second time in a month a federal judge has thrown out these freezes. A court in Rhode Island did the same in June.
The ruling does not hand anyone a green card. It forces the government to make a decision instead of leaving people in the dark. And the administration could not tell the court how making a nurse who already lives here wait longer keeps a single American safer. Because it can’t.
Here’s what I know after spending more than a decade in Congress. The Republican talking point was always the same. We are not anti-immigrant, we are anti-illegal immigration. Come the right way. Get in line. Well, these people got in line. They did everything my old party claimed to want. And this administration is trying to get rid of them anyway. The talking point was never true. It was just cover. They never wanted any immigrants here at all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
”The talking point was never true.”
Kinzinger suggests that he knew as a party insider that the GOP had never been serious about their talking points. I like Kinzinger, and generally agree with him on a lot of what he says. Still, this statement makes me think he was unaware of this duplicity when he was in the party or was indeed aware of it, and it was not enough to break with his party. This is a problem. It indicates either naivety or cynicism.
In any case, Kinzinger has become a constant voice against the Trump Criminal Family. So I am with him.
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I read Adam Kinzinger regularly. I recall that only he and Liz Cheney had the courage to join the Jan. 6 Commission. By doing so, they burned their bridges with Trump and the supine GOP.
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Ya gotta remember that Trump’s role model for his presidency is Andrew Jackson, who approximately said when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him on the issue of dragging Indians off the land they held under a U.S. treaty: “Well, the Court has made its ruling — but the Court and what army are going to enforce it?”
Jackson then proceeded to violently drive the Indians from their legal lands and sent them on a death march known in history books as “The Trail of Tears”.
The courts today are no different than they were in the time of Jackson: The courts have no enforcement power, except to ask Trump’s Department of Justice to send DOJ Marshals out to enforce court rulings. Does anyone actually think that Trump’s DOJ is going to send Marshals against Trump? Trump, like his role model Jackson, knows that the courts are powerless.
America is teetering on the crumbling brink of the bottomless chasm in which the rule of law dies. By empowering Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court has given away the only power it ever had.
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