The alibi du jour for what the president* said about immigrants on Wednesday is that he was talking only about members of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that somebody told him about once, because he doesn’t know anything about anything.

This is belied by the context of the exchange; the president*’s comments were an answer to a question from a sheriff about the “possibility” of MS-13’s overwhelming of the sheriff’s town, and the president* clearly conflates MS-13 with all immigrants seeking to come into the country because that’s the way he thinks. (This thread from the electric Twitter machine from Julian Sanchez explains why that excuse is moonshine.)

And, if you’re wondering about how this attitude might filter down into how the president*’s policy wishes are carried out, a federal judge just explained it in depressing detail. From Slate:

What may be most remarkable about Martinez’s decision, though, is its blunt repudiation of ICE’s main claim—that Ramirez is “gang-affiliated.” The judge did not simply rule against ICE. He accused the agency of lying to a court of law. The facts of Ramirez’s case are extremely disturbing. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump unleashed immigration agents to amp up arrests and deportations, ICE agents went to Ramirez’s father’s house in Seattle to arrest him. (The father is undocumented, and brought Ramirez to the U.S. illegally as a child.) While there, they encountered Ramirez and asked him whether he was “legally here.” He responded that he was—a truthful statement given his DACA status, which he had renewed the previous May. Yet ICE officers detained him anyway. They took him to a processing center, where, once again, he told them that he had a work permit. “It doesn’t matter,” an agent responded, “because you weren’t born in this country.”

The judge heard the whole story. The judge went up the wall.

Martinez, a George W. Bush appointee, was plainly incensed by the agency’s lies. ICE’s “conclusory findings,” he wrote, have “been contradicted by experts and other evidence.” The government “produced no evidence” to contradict multiple experts’ testimony discrediting ICE’s bizarre interpretation of Ramirez’s tattoo. And its claims are “completely contradictory to the government’s own previous findings after extensive background checks that were meant to uncover evidence of ‘known or suspected gang association.’ ”

“Most troubling to the Court,” Martinez continued, “is the continued assertion that Mr. Ramirez is gang-affiliated, despite providing no evidence specific to Mr. Ramirez to the Immigration Court in connection with his administrative proceedings, and offering no evidence to this Court to support its assertions four months later.” Martinez concluded that ICE had violated Ramirez’s rights by depriving him of “his constitutionally protected liberty and property interests without due process of law.” The judge also found that ICE had violated federal law by stripping Ramirez of his DACA status in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner without any “rational explanation for its decision.” Accordingly, he barred the government from terminating Ramirez’s DACA benefits, shielding his right to continue living and working in the U.S. And he prohibited the government from “asserting, adopting, or relying in any proceedings on any statement or record … purporting to allege or establish that Mr. Ramirez is a gang member, gang affiliated, or a threat to public safety.” In other words, he ordered ICE to stop lying.

This is the logical end to all those rallies that cable television so lubriciously carried into the country for two years. This is what the presidential campaign on the Republican side unleashed on the country. There’s been a lot of activity recently concerning the financial and ethical corruption of that campaign, and we’ll deal with the past week of it tomorrow, but that should never obscure what its success continues to do to the country. There are lives being ruined. There are things breaking that are beyond repair.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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