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As pressure ramps up on President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is attempting to reinterpret federal law to prevent lawmakers from visiting certain Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities amid allegations of inhumane and unsanitary conditions. 

Also, the Senate parliamentarian recently knocked out several parts of Trump and the GOP’s megabill, including a provision that would have made it financially untenable for ordinary people to go to court to assert their rights against the government.

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Catch up quickly 

• A former Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney alleged in a whistleblower complaint that Emil Bove, a senior department official and one of Trump’s judicial nominees, suggested that the DOJ should tell courts “f*** you” and ignore their orders, while plowing ahead with Trump’s aggressive deportations.
  
  
• Without providing an explanation, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to countries they are not from with minimal notice. The ruling, one of the most troubling yet of Trump’s second term, drew a scathing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the court was rewarding lawlessness.
  
  
• A three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Trump administration to return another man it deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order. It marks the fourth time in as many months that a court has ordered the government to return immigrants who were deemed illegally or improperly deported.

DHS tries to put congressional oversight on ice

Since the start of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, congressional Democrats have been repeatedly barred from ICE facilities — and at times arrested — while exercising their constitutional authority to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

Amid allegations of inhumane and unsanitary conditions in ICE facilities, DHS is taking further steps to continue skirting congressional oversight. 

In new guidelines released this month, ICE claimed that lawmakers cannot conduct oversight at ICE field offices and requested that members of Congress give at least 72 hours' notice before they visit an ICE facility.

“ICE retains the sole and unreviewable discretion to deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit,” the agency claimed.

Federal law prohibits DHS and its sub-agencies from denying members of Congress access to “any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens” when they are conducting oversight.

DHS said that federal law can’t apply to ICE field offices because they are not detention centers and do not hold detainees. However, immigrants are routinely temporarily detained at field offices, and federal law makes no distinction between ICE field offices, large detention centers or correctional centers. 

Members of Congress also do not need to give prior notice before visiting ICE facilities under federal law.

ICE’s new guidelines come as top Democrats have vowed to continue conducting oversight on its facilities.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) recently said she and four other members of Congress were able to inspect an ICE facility outside of Los Angeles last week and found conditions “horrifying.”

“They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” Chu said, adding that many detainees have been unable to contact legal representation or family members.

ICE locked Chu and other lawmakers out of the same facility earlier this month.

Currently, ICE is holding a record 59,000 people in facilities across the U.S., almost half of whom do not have criminal records, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News.

The data indicates that ICE is more than 140% over capacity, as Congress last allocated ICE funding for only around 41,500 detainee beds.

Amid this effort to dodge congressional oversight, the Trump administration has admitted in court documents that some holding facilities are over capacity.

In a filing earlier this month, a Department of Homeland Security official told a court that Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil could not be transferred from Louisiana to an ICE detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because it was over capacity by more than 50 detainees at the time.

Khalil, who was released on bail late last week after more than three months in an ICE detention center in Louisiana, told NPR that conditions in the facility were “very dire.”

“The food is inedible. It was very cold,” Khalil said. “You have no privacy whatsoever, sort of sleeping with over 70 men in the room, and no one explaining to you what's happening or what will happen.”

Children, too, are being held in unsafe and unsanitary conditions in ICE detention facilities, according to a court filing from immigrant and children advocacy groups last week. The filing included accounts from children and adults being held in two family detention centers in Texas who were recently interviewed by legal monitors visiting the facilities. 

Detainees said adults compete with children over fresh water, that they are routinely denied adequate medical care and that children often refuse to eat the available food or get sick from eating it.

The immigrant rights organization RAICES said one family it represents has a nine-month-old baby who lost over eight pounds over a month’s time in one of the Texas facilities. Another family it represents has not been able to attend medical appointments for their young son with cancer.

The details were included in a motion challenging the Trump administration's ongoing attempt to terminate a nearly 30-year-old federal settlement that requires the government to provide basic rights and protections to immigrant children in its custody.

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Parliamentarian hammers Trump’s megabill

The Senate’s nonpartisan referee rejected several key portions of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” meaning Senate Republicans won’t be able to avoid the filibuster if they include the provisions in the bill.

The provisions blocked by the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, included one that heavily curtailed court orders that often block Trump administration policies. Were it to become law, the provision would greatly reduce judges’ power and make it harder for people or groups to defend their basic rights in the courts.

The provision was similar to a measure in the House’s version of the reconciliation bill that would make all unbonded court orders unenforceable. However, while the House’s provision would let the federal government skirt court orders, the Senate’s version would prevent orders against the government to begin with.

The Senate’s measure seeks to prevent federal judges from issuing temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions against the federal government unless challengers post a potentially enormous bond. 

It further specifies that judges can only consider the potential costs and damages the government may incur when determining bond amounts. Courts couldn’t, for example, consider a plaintiff's ability to pay a bond in the first place. 

Under this arrangement, only wealthy plaintiffs would be able to receive quick judicial relief through lawsuits against the government. 

The parliamentarian found that the provision violated the Byrd Rule, which bars policy matters from being included in the budget reconciliation process.

To include these provisions in their behemoth bill, the Senate GOP would have to motion to waive the rule. Doing so would require a three-fifths vote (typically 60 senators), which is extremely unlikely in the 53-47 chamber.

In addition to the injunction provision, the parliamentarian also blocked the GOP’s attempts to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, strip civil service protections for new federal employees, cut federal food aid payments and sell off millions of acres of public land.

To do list

• Later this morning at 10 a.m. ET,  the Supreme Court is set to release some of its 10 remaining cases. We at Democracy Docket are awaiting its decisions on the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional map and the power of federal district judges to issue nationwide injunctions.

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