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Trump’s Big Sister Declared Him “Unconstitutional” [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-09
Elon Musk is not the first person to turn against Donald Trump calling Trump’s ideas a “disgusting abomination.” Under oath, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former special counsel and “fixer,” described his job as buying up women's stories of alleged sexual encounters with Trump to make sure they were never published and he arranged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s older sister who died in 2023, had a lot of issues with her brother. In a conversation taped by her daughter, Trump’s niece, Judge Barry called her brother a man with “no principles” and denounced “his goddamned tweeting and lying.” She considered him a “cruel” person who “you can’t trust.”
Trump is using a 1952 anti-communist Cold War law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, in an effort to deport former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the United States.
In 1996, in Massieu v. Reno, Judge Barry argued that the 1952 law was unconstitutional for two reasons and could not be applied. The ruling was later overturned because of jurisdictional questions, so her position on the case was never ruled on by the United States Supreme Court but will probably reach the court soon.
Judge Barry was not like the judges her brother has denounced as a “radical left lunatic” and demanded that they be removed from the judiciary. She was appointed to the Federal District Court in New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan after a lobbying campaign by Trump and was a colleague of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito who she testified for at his Senate confirmation hearing. Judge Barry was a conservative judge, not a rightwing saboteur at war with the Constitution and judicial precedent.
In her decision on the Massieu case, Judge Barry wrote that the law, as written, “confers upon a single individual, the secretary of state, the unfettered and unreviewable discretion to deport any alien lawfully within the United States” if “that person’s mere presence here would impact in some unexplained way on the foreign policy interests of the United States.”
Judge Barry argued that the law violated the Constitution because it was too vague about what actions were prohibited and it empowered the Secretary of State, acting on behalf of the President, to declare actions that happened years earlier, to be illegitimate and grounds for deportation. She wrote, “all legal aliens, whether here for a day or 50 years and visiting or resident in this country, must live in fear of the secretary of state informing them, at any time, that our foreign policy requires their deportation to a particular country for reasons unknown to them and beyond their control.” She emphasized that the law as written applied to “lifelong permanent residents” who had been in the United States for a substantial period of time and had built lives here.
Judge Barry also believed the law was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the Secretary of State because it was the responsibility of Congress, not the Executive Branch, to decide what actions were illegal and grounds for being deported.
In her ruling, Judge Barry stressed “It is a fundamental tenet of the law in this area that both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect aliens from the deprivation of life, liberty and property without due process of law.” The Fifth Amendment states “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” a provision reenforced by the Fourteenth Amendment. In both cases the guarantees go to “persons” and are not restricted to citizens.
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