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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSupreme Court sides with Trump regarding a woman held prisoner to keep her from having an abortion
Some of the most helpless abortion-seekers just got bad news from SCOTUS.
IAN MILLHISER JUN 4, 2018, 10:51 AM
In case you missed it, lets briefly cast our memories back to last October, when the Trump administration literally tried to hold an undocumented immigrant prisoner in order to prevent her from having an abortion. The legal process surrounding the case was referred to by the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who served on the womans behalf as a pattern of unconstitutional overreach of power, which was finally resolved by a lower court.
But in a brief order handed down Monday, the Supreme Court has vacated that lower court order that thwarted the Trump administrations effort. Though the woman at issue in Azar v. Garza has already obtained an abortion and is unlikely to be impacted by Mondays order, the Supreme Courts decision in Garza wipes away a precedent that could have been used to prevent future attempts to imprison abortion patients until they are no longer able to legally terminate their pregnancies.
The lower court order concerned an undocumented, 17-year-old woman, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, who entered the United States unaccompanied by an adult. Under federal law, such unaccompanied minors are held in a facility run by the Department of Health and Human Services until a relative in the United States steps forward as the minors sponsor, the minor agrees to voluntarily depart the country, or the minor is deported.
Though the record in this case is limited and unclear, Doe may have been sexually abused in her home country, and her now-terminated pregnancy may have been the result of rape. The Trump administration refused to let her obtain an abortion while she was detained by the government, though a lower federal court eventually ordered the administration to permit her to have that abortion.
https://thinkprogress.org/supreme-court-sides-with-trump-regarding-a-woman-held-prisoner-to-keep-her-from-having-an-abortion-f9e395677704/
this is just amazing......................
former9thward
(32,165 posts)It was an unsigned order.
Me.
(35,454 posts)as the abortion had already been obtained and the issue will be revisited again, what was lost was a precedent
tammywammy
(26,582 posts)former9thward
(32,165 posts)Cases do not get to the Supreme Court in 9 months.
Me.
(35,454 posts)The decision is about the teens individual case and doesnt affect an ongoing class-action case about the ability of immigrant teens in government custody to obtain abortions. The justices ruled in an unsigned opinion that vacating a lower court decision in favor of the teen, who had been in government custody after entering the country illegally, was the proper course because the case became moot after she obtained an abortion.
https://apnews.com/1486c57e5a2540b1b6f13d0c520943c3
The Supreme Court sent Jane Doe's case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, with instructions for the district court that granted Doe an abortion to dismiss her claim as "moot," or irrelevant.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2018/06/04/supreme-court-vacates-decision-grant-jane-doe-abortion-months-after-already-one
MCCAMMON: So this throws out that Court of Appeals order that forced the Trump administration to allow her to go forward with the abortion. But the reason that the court gives here is that it was a moot question since the young woman had already had the abortion by the time the case reached the court. So the court isn't really weighing in here on a lot of the legal nitty-gritty or the big, larger questions at stake, like whether an undocumented immigrant has the same right to an abortion as an American citizen, for example.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/04/616790106/supreme-court-throws-out-lower-court-ruling-on-undocumented-immigrants-and-abort
Captain Stern
(2,201 posts)Here's some text from that actual article:
The upshot of Garza is that when a civil case from a court in the federal system . . . has become moot while on its way here, this Courts established practice is to reverse or vacate the judgment below and remand with a direction to dismiss.' In other words, because Does abortion eliminated the controversy between Doe and the government the Trump administration could no longer hold abortion patients prisoner to keep them from having an abortion if they are no longer pregnant the case must be tossed out, along with the lower court decisions favoring people like Doe.
As a practical matter, this is not a sweeping victory for the Trump administration. A larger class action suit, which concerns a number of abortion patients similarly situated to Doe, will still move forward, and the lower courts may very well conclude that the government may not hold these patients prisoner to prevent them from obtaining abortions.