Ken Cuccinelli: Judges Attack Donald Trump with ‘Open Lawfare’

Ken Cuccinelli, the top appointee in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, says progressive judges are waging “open lawfare” against President Donald Trump’s campaign promises on immigration policy.

“No president has ever suffered so many national injunctions as President Trump,” Ken Cuccinelli said in an August 13 interview (starting 20:00) on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Cuccinelli continued:

What we have seen is open lawfare by a select number of judges … I think, as an idealistic lawyer, they are embarrassing the court system. They are embarrassing the court system in how they ignore the law completely in making so many of these decisions.

The federal injunctions have been used by progressives to stall or even block many of the administration’s priorities.

These priorities include the justice department’s closure of President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty,  Homeland Security’s regulation requiring migrants to ask for asylum at the legal ports of entry on the border, and the curbs on the entry of migrants from several unstable Muslim-majority countries. The tactic is also now being used to block the oversight and reform of the H-1B and OPT guest-worker programs. 

Cuccinelli continued: 

We had just a couple of weeks ago a situation where a California judge — Judge Tigar, who has been involved in multiple national injunctions— effectively overrode a judge in D.C. who had ruled that an injunction was not appropriate on a new asylum rule that my agency had promulgated … So you get one judge in a district court — a trial judge in San Francisco — who imposes a national injunction and effectively [nullifies] a Washington judge’s ruling that an injunction was not appropriate.

So what is OK about that … overreach by the courts? We usually think of the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches, [but] we have a separation of powers [dispute] here with the courts reaching into the executive branch’s area of responsibility, and this keeps happening.

It is a very important basis for concern. It comes into play in numerous aspects of the immigration system right now whether it is TPS [Temporary Protected Status] – which the courts are not supposed to be able to review, and yet they are holding up our ability to end Temporary Protected Status. That is supposed to be purely discretionary to the executive branch.

I could go on with example after example, but what is important to keep in mind is that there has never been example after example [of injunctions] until President Trump started to actually push hard on the immigration agenda that he had promised when he campaigned.