More Noem screwups

f you want another example of Kristi Noem’s decision to exert maximum pressure in deportations, causing a headache for the Trump Administration, consider a case that is not getting any notice. Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old woman from Iran who fled Iran to avoid being killed by the Iranian regime. No one disputes this. In 1999, a federal immigration judge in California ordered Mrs. Manaserian deported, but then federal immigration officials agreed she could stay so long as she regularly checked in with immigration agents. In 2008, federal authorities gave Mrs. Manaserian the right to work, provided she regularly checked in with immigration officials, which she has done.

In February, when she checked in pursuant to the federal orders, immigration agents arrested her at her regularly scheduled check-in. The George W. Bush appointed judge reviewing the matter, in his order releasing Mrs. Manaserian, notes,

[I]t appears that [the government] arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

By the way, before you get defensive or conclude the judge is just a lib, you should note the government does not dispute anything in this paragraph — they did not arrange her deportation, they did not give her medical care, and, in fact, lost her heart medicine, and are now offering no argument in court to keep Mrs. Manaserian detained. The judge has ordered her released. Again, and to emphasize the key point, the government is not fighting Mrs. Manaserian’s release and does not dispute that immigration agents violated their own rules and had no deportation plan before the arrest. But they would not release Mrs. Manaserian, despite that, without a court order.