We're used to judges blocking legitimate deportation orders from the government for specious reasons.  Apparently, simply being in the U.S. illegally isn't enough anymore.

OK – so what about a bunch of murderers, rapists, and other criminal aliens?  A judge in Detroit figured they, too, don't need to be deported.

Last week, DHS rounded up 100 Iraqis who either came to the U.S. illegally or committed serious crimes after getting here.  DHS ordered them deported, but a federal judge had other ideas.

Washington Times:

A federal court halted the deportation of more than 100 Chaldean Christians that Homeland Security had been poised to send back to their home in Iraq, as a judge dealt yet another blow to President Trump's immigration plans.

Judge Mark A. Goldsmith, an Obama appointee to the bench, said he feared some of the Iraqis' lives would be in danger if sent to Iraq, and said that was too much of a risk to run while he heard more extensive arguments in the case.

He issued an injunction granting a 14-day stay of deportations for all Iraqis arrested in the Detroit region recently or in the coming days.

Judge Goldsmith said the Trump administration was moving with "speed" to try to deport the Iraqis, so he felt compelled to step in to potentially save lives.

"Such harm far outweighs any conceivable interest the Government might have in the immediate enforcement of the removal orders, before this Court can clarify whether it has jurisdiction to grant relief to Petitioners on the merits of their claims," he wrote.

The Iraqis include convicted murderers, rapists, burglars and drug traffickers who are either illegal immigrants or who came legally then committed crimes that make them deportable.

But they argued that sending them back to Iraq, where the U.S. government has said Chaldeans face genocide, is akin to a death sentence. They want to have their cases reopened so they can argue that circumstances have changed in their home countries, making their previous deportation orders null.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested nearly 200 Iraqis since the start of May, including 114 in the Detroit area, which is home to a large Chaldean population. Nearly all have criminal records.

"The operation in this region was specifically conducted to address the very real public safety threat represented by the criminal aliens arrested," Gillian Christensen, an ICE spokeswoman, said in defending the arrests last week. "The vast majority of those arrested in the Detroit metropolitan area have very serious felony convictions."

Some Iraqis have been under deportation orders for years, but the Iraqi government refused to accept them until the Trump administration struck a deal with Iraq earlier this year for the Middle Eastern nation to start accepting its deportees again.

ICE didn't immediately comment on the judge's ruling Thursday.

Iraq doesn't want to accept these criminals – it already has its fair share of thugs.  But how is this a problem for the federal courts?  That their lives would be in danger if they were returned could be said about hundreds of thousands of illegals from Central America and elsewhere.  The federal courts have inserted themselves into a political and public policy question that they have no business adjudicating.

What the judge is saying in this case is that it's perfectly OK to put American citizens' lives and safety at risk by allowing these violent criminals to stay.  Better that an American gets murdered than the poor Iraqi thug who came here illegally in the first place.

With the Supreme Court ruling on the president's travel restrictions due any day, it has become apparent that the Judicial Branch of the U.S. government has taken on a vital national security role.  For a bunch of judges who are supposed to know what the Constitution says, maybe one of them could point out where it says in our founding document that judges must assume this role.