Bovino was dragged into court by activists who claim that his immigration agents are indiscriminately using violence against anti-Trump and pro-illegal migrant protesters in Chicago. Obama-appointed District Judge Sara Ellis ordered Bovino to give a deposition last week, but it seemed to quickly grind to a halt, as the Chicago Tribune reported.
The activist lawyers and Judge Ellis seemed far more interested in uncovering communications between ICE and Border Patrol and Stephen Miller than they were in local Chicago ICE actions.
Justice Department attorney Sarmad Khojasteh protested all the questions about Miller and said she was “sandbagged” after concentrating her preparation on what was going on in Chicago.
Khojasteh said she worked to prep Bovino on the local issues, only to have plaintiffs’ attorneys throw a “grab bag of anything” at him that had nothing to do with what was going on in Chicago.
“I mean, they asked today about communications with Stephen Miller,” Khojasteh said to Judge Ellis. “They asked today about body cam from the Los Angeles (immigration operation)… I feel sandbagged right now.”
Not surprisingly, the left-wing judge was all for the fishing expedition launched by the activist attorneys and claimed that all the extraneous questions were “relevant.”
“For example, questions about communications with Mr. Miller may be perfectly within bounds if they talked about, ‘This is how I want this operation to go,’” Ellis said. “…If Mr. Miller said that to Mr. Bovino and that was in Mr. Bovino’s mind as to justify the force being used, they can ask about that.”
The left-wing judge attempted to force Bovino to report to her every morning about his actions in the field. But an appeals court struck down Ellis’ attempt to micromanage Bovino’s work in Chicago.
A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ellis placed herself into the role of an “inquisitor rather than that of a neutral adjudicator” in forcing Bovino to report to her every 24 hours.
The appeals panel said Ellis’ order “sets the court up as a supervisor of Chief Bovino’s activities, intruding into personnel management decisions of the Executive Branch. These two problems are related and lead us to conclude that the order infringes on the separation of powers,” CBS News reported.
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