Trump’s biggest enemy is activist judges. They simply won’t let him govern.
Now Donald Trump got handed a huge legal loss that sets him back big time.
A federal appeals court just handed open-borders activists another victory and dealt a direct blow to President Trump’s deportation agenda.
The First Circuit formally dissolved a stay that had allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue third-country removals while litigation dragged on. The ruling locks in a lower-court order forcing ICE to give every illegal immigrant a “meaningful” chance to claim they would be endangered if sent to an unfamiliar country.
Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, first imposed the restriction. Now the appeals panel—stacked with more Biden judges—has made it stick. One of them, Seth Aframe, wrote that the government’s reading of the law “would deny access to that protection to a substantial swath of noncitizens who are sent to third countries with no notice of their destination.”
This is judicial nullification of the people’s will. Voters elected Trump to remove people who have no right to be here. Activist judges keep inventing new due-process hurdles so the removals never happen. Meanwhile ICE was already trying to move a Peruvian national to Ghana under the old policy. The court slammed that door shut.
Americans are tired of watching the judiciary rewrite immigration law from the bench. The administration should keep fighting every inch of the way and make the case to the public: either the elected branches control the border, or the least accountable branch does.
The pattern is now familiar. District judges issue nationwide injunctions. Appeals courts slow-walk the cases or invent new procedural rights. By the time the Supreme Court can act, months or years have passed and the illegal population has grown. Third-country deportations were one of the few tools that allowed the government to remove people who claimed fear of return to their home countries. Closing that tool leaves ICE with fewer options and the public with more illegal presence.
Murphy’s original order rested on the claim that sending someone to a country they had never seen violated due process. The First Circuit agreed. Yet the statute Congress wrote does not require the government to give every removable alien a veto over the destination. It requires protection against torture under the Convention Against Torture—something the government already screens for. Expanding that protection into a free-floating right to challenge any third country is pure judicial legislation.
Trump’s team has every reason to take this fight higher. The same courts that once blocked travel bans and wall funding are now trying to micromanage the logistics of removal. If the administration simply accepts the ruling, the message to every illegal entrant is clear: claim fear of your home country, demand a hearing on every alternative, and delay removal indefinitely. That is not the system the American people voted for.
Working-class communities that absorb the costs of illegal immigration—higher housing prices, strained schools, and increased crime—have watched this judicial interference for years. They expected the new administration to break the pattern. The First Circuit decision is a reminder that the resistance has not disappeared. It has simply moved from the executive branch to the robes. The response must be relentless litigation and public pressure until the law is enforced as written.
