Lawrence O’Donnell brought in Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel and former chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of New York to analyze last night’s SCOTUS order.
“Let’s begin with the situation with Chief Justice Roberts intervening in this case of Mr. Garcia,” O’Donnell said.
“People should not overread this,” Weissmann said. “He is basically saying this is called an administrative stay, and it gives the court time to consider the government’s application.
“And he set a very short deadline to hear from those people. My big point to our listeners is this. What kind of government admits that they mistakenly deported somebody, that this person should never have been scooped up and sent away without any due process, and then says, ‘But we’re going to not do anything to bring him back.’
“What the level of cruelty and lawlessness is really hard to understand when you are agreeing that you had no factual or legal basis to remove this person. The lack of humanity, leave aside the lawlessness, is just, it is unconscionable. And so that’s the issue. That’s what the Supreme Court will be dealing with,” he said.
“And it is possible that, that Justice Roberts simply wants the Supreme Court to be the one that basically issues the same order that the appeals court has issued. That’s a possibility here,” O’Donnell said.
