'Wow!’ Expert stunned as judge exposes Trump admin's bid to skirt detainee's rights

President Donald Trump was called out by a federal judge explicitly for trying to deny basic due process rights to a detainee under his deportation dragnet — and a legal expert was stunned by the brazenness of it all.

The case in question concerns Badar Khan Suri, an Indian-born researcher at Georgetown University who was working legally in the United States before being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March and transported from Virginia to a facility in Texas ahead of a planned deportation — a move that some obvservers decried as a "government abduction."

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles of Virginia tore into this move in a blistering opinion, writing that the transportation to Texas, which the administration had claimed was about bed space, was a blatant attempt to prevent Suri from exercising his legal rights.

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"Drawing all inferences in favor of Petitioner, the Court infers that Petitioner's transfer to Texas was not about bedspace," wrote Giles. "The second issue — Petitioner's NTA — also suggests that Respondents' design was to forum shop and spirit Petitioner away from this District before his counsel could file a petition."

American Immigration Council attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick delivered a blunt summary of Giles's findings.

"WOW. Judge Giles concludes that ICE’s decision to transfer Badar Khan Suri out of Virginia to Texas was intended 'to make it difficult for Petitioner's counsel to file the [habeas] petition and to transfer him to the Government's chosen forum,'" he wrote. "Judge Giles says that ICE’s claim that it sent Mr. Khan Suri to Texas because there wasn’t enough bed space in Virginia is not believable. [She] emphasizes that ICE issued a Notice to Appear listing an address as a Texas detention center BEFORE he even got to the field office!"

The Trump administration has grappled with an avalanche of lawsuits over their deportations, accusing them of ignoring due process rights — something which administration officials deny even exists for people they summarily deem to be here illegally.