WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump on Wednesday renewed his attack on the judiciary, blasting a federal judge’s order halting the administration’s plan to roll back protections for certain undocumented immigrants.
Trump, in criticizing U.S. District Judge William Alsup for dealing him a legal setback, slammed the whole “Court System” as “broken and unfair.”
The White House, in a statement Wednesday, called Tuesday night’s ruling “outrageous.” The decision blocks the Trump administration’s plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children from deportation and allows them to work legally.
Trump has regularly responded to his administration’s setbacks in court by bashing the entire judicial system. Some of his attacks have come in cases involving his travel ban aimed at majority-Muslim countries, which federal judges on several courts, including the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, have deemed discriminatory.
Trump’s anti-court tweet on Wednesday singled out the Ninth Circuit, where judges have ruled against several high-profile cases involving his administration, and claimed the court favored “the opposing side.” The appeals court, based in San Francisco, includes several judges appointed by Republican presidents.
Trump’s incendiary tweets and rhetoric have hurt him in the courts. Lawsuits have cited his own words, such as his disparagement of Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” in attempting to prove that his travel ban and his DACA rollback have discriminatory intent.
A federal judge in Hawaii, in halting an early version of the travel ban last year, cited Trump’s anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric as “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus.”
In addition to the judiciary, Trump has harshly criticized independent government law enforcers, including his own Department of Justice and FBI.
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