House Republicans just passed a reconciliation bill handing ICE and Customs and Border Protection $75 billion in mandatory funding through the end of Trump's presidency, and if you thought that meant we'd finally start deporting violent criminal aliens at scale, allow Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review to splash some cold water on your face. The money is useless if Democrat-appointed judges keep ordering ICE to release the people ICE is trying to remove.
Because that's exactly what's happening. Right now. In real time. With murderers.
Horowitz lays out the problem with surgical precision: Trump has won numerous Supreme Court cases on due process, detention, and bond hearings for illegal aliens. The highest court in the land has ruled, repeatedly, in favor of enforcement. And the lower courts simply do not care. They issue injunctions, grant habeas petitions, and order releases like they're handing out parking validations.
The poster child for this judicial insanity is Judge Melissa DuBose, a Biden appointee sitting in Rhode Island federal court. On April 28, DuBose granted a writ of habeas corpus for Bryan Rafael Gomez, a Dominican national who entered the country illegally in 2022. Gomez was arrested on April 4 by the Worcester, Massachusetts police department for assault and battery, posted a whopping $500 bail, and was immediately scooped up by ICE Boston on an immigration detainer.
Judge DuBose ruled his detention was unlawful. She ordered him released.
Here's the kicker: Gomez is wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic. Interpol had a warrant out on him. But ICE told the Assistant U.S. Attorney handling the case "not to confirm or deny the existence" of the 2023 arrest warrant because ICE hadn't received "use authorization" from Dominican authorities. So the judge never knew she was cutting loose a murder suspect. The government's own bureaucratic cowardice handed the left its talking point.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Bolan later wrote, "I sincerely apologize to Judge DuBose, personally, and to the entire Court for the consequences of this lack of disclosure." Beautiful. A murder suspect walks free and we get a sternly worded apology.
DuBose eventually allowed ICE to re-arrest Gomez on May 5 and ordered an ethics probe into ICE's handling of the case. So now the enforcement agency is the one under investigation. Not the illegal alien wanted for homicide. ICE.
But Horowitz's point goes way beyond one Rhode Island courtroom. He argues that the reconciliation bill is a $70 billion Band-Aid on a gunshot wound because it contains zero policy provisions to address the real bottleneck: judicial obstruction. No defunding of sanctuary cities. No stripping lower courts of jurisdiction over habeas petitions filed by criminal aliens. No consequences for judges who defy Supreme Court precedent.
Remember Trump v. Hawaii? The Supreme Court made it crystal clear that the president has broad authority to suspend immigration and visas. Years later, lower court judges are still issuing injunctions against that same authority like the ruling never happened. Judge William Orrick blocked enforcement of Trump's executive order defunding sanctuary cities. Federal courts in Minnesota imposed orders halting targeted ICE arrests entirely.
We won at the Supreme Court. We won the election. We passed the funding bill. And some district judge in Brooklyn or Providence or Minneapolis still gets the last word.
Horowitz's prescription is straightforward: use the reconciliation bill to strip federal courts of jurisdiction over habeas claims by criminal aliens unless the individual claims to be a U.S. citizen or a case of mistaken identity. Congress has the constitutional authority to do it. Article III, Section 2. It's right there in the text.
But Republicans would rather write a $75 billion check and call it a day. Fund the machine, don't fix the machine. And then act surprised when the machine keeps breaking down because an Obama appointee in the Ninth Circuit decided that a twice-deported MS-13 member has a constitutional right to a bond hearing.
Congress funded ICE. The judges defunded it right back. And until someone in Washington has the spine to take on the judiciary, every dollar of that $75 billion is just an expensive gesture.
