A federal judge said that she had concerns about being “hoodwinked” by plans put forward in her courtroom Monday by a Trump appointee to rebuild three offices focused on civil rights oversight within the Department of Homeland Security that were eviscerated with mass layoffs set to take effect this week.
US District Judge Ana Reyes said that she found the three-plus hours of testimony from the appointee, US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Ronald Sartini, to be “credible.”
Reyes also said that a “cynical view” of the state of play in the legal challenge was that the administration did not actually intend to restore those offices to their congressionally mandated functions, because their work might slow Trump’s mass deportation agenda. She raised the possibility that Sartini’s testimony was “window dressing for the court” to head off the legal case, brought by advocacy groups that work on civil rights issues on behalf of migrants and are challenging the dismantling of those offices.
The challengers in the case before Reyes—the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, Urban Justice, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition—have put forward examples of complaints they’ve filed with the oversight offices alleging sexual assault, medical neglect, abuse of force and other alleged civil rights violations by DHS officials.
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