EWTN Video Screengrab / YouTube
An Obama-appointed judge who blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order denying federal funds to jurisdictions refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials also protected the abortion industry by barring the release of undercover videos exposing the sale of aborted baby body parts.
“Defendants and their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and any other persons who are in active concert or participation with them ARE HEREBY RESTRAINED AND ENJOINED from directly or indirectly taking any action to withhold, freeze, or condition federal funds from the Cities and Counties,” wrote U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick of San Francisco in an April 24 ruling.
“Here we are again,” Orrick said, citing his prior ruling blocking Trump’s executive order defunding sanctuary cities during the president’s first term.
“The Cities and Counties have also demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm,” the judge continued. “The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the Cities and Counties and the communities they serve.”
The day after Orrick’s ruling, George Washington University law professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley told Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that Orrick has “created one of the most ‘problematic’ cases challenging the president’s authority.”
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly said they want to stop national injunctions,” Turley commented to guest host Kayleigh McEnany, as reported by the Daily Caller. “The one in San Francisco, I think, is very problematic … I think the judge pulled the trigger too fast.”
Turley in a Monday column elaborated that in Trump’s executive order titled Protecting the American People against Invasion, the president ordered his attorney general and secretary of Homeland Security to “evaluate and undertake any lawful actions to ensure that so-called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions, which seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of Federal law enforcement operations, do not receive access to Federal funds.”
“Orrick noted that the term ‘sanctuary jurisdiction’ was not defined and dismissed the express reservation that such actions can only proceed to the extent that they are allowed under law,” Turley observed.
“The irony is that the opinion itself is overly broad and imprecise,” he noted. “There are indeed cases limiting the ability of the federal government to ‘commandeer’ states and cities into carrying out federal functions. However, there are also cases upholding the right to withhold federal funds that contravene federal laws and policies.”
“The operative language in the order is the focus on sanctuary policies that ‘interfere’ or prevent federal enforcement,” Turley asserted. “There must be some accommodation for the federal government in refusing to pay for the rope that it will hang by.”
Orrick’s rulings siding with those who are protecting illegal immigrants come a decade after his decisions backing the abortion industry when undercover journalists exposed industry officials and abortionists discussing the sale of the body parts of aborted babies.
Speaking as an individual to CatholicVote, undercover journalist David Daleiden, project lead of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), said Monday that Orrick’s “pro-abortion activism has been on display in his courtroom for years.”
“I will never forget the day he ruled against me because he said I failed to produce evidence of Planned Parenthood’s wrongdoing—after he had already ruled that my attorneys were not allowed to introduce evidence of Planned Parenthood’s wrongdoing,” the pro-life activist recalled.
In June 2017, as Breitbart News reported at the time, attorneys for Daleiden filed a motion requesting that Orrick be disqualified “on the grounds that there is evidence of bias in favor of the plaintiff and prejudice against the defendants.”
Just a month earlier, Orrick had ordered links to CMP’s videos exposing the sale of the body parts of aborted babies, as well as references to the identities of members of the National Abortion Federation (NAF), to be removed from the internet. Subsequently, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and other platforms deleted the videos from their sites.
Peter Breen, special counsel with the Thomas More Society – which represented Daleiden at the time – told Breitbart News the motion to disqualify a federal judge is “a very serious matter.”
“It’s not something that you do lightly, but in view of the evidence that has now come to light, we as attorneys are duty bound, at this point, to bring the motion to disqualify,” Breen said. “In fact, it would be malpractice for us not to. We believe the law requires disqualification.”
The evidence Breen cited during the interview at the time included:
- A Planned Parenthood affiliate that was a member of the National Abortion Federation held out Orrick “as an emeritus member of their board.”
- Orrick’s wife, reportedly pictured with her husband on Facebook, had also posted public comments that were supportive of Planned Parenthood and critical of the defendants in the case.
- In a document reported to contain Orrick’s responses to the Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees, Orrick indicated he introduced, in June of 2009, Kamala Harris at a fundraiser for her campaign for the post of California attorney general. Additionally, he wrote, “I raised money and sponsored an event for the campaign of Kamala Harris for Attorney General in 2009, before I joined the Department of Justice.”
“Before joining the federal bench,” Daleiden told CatholicVote, “Judge Orrick helped open, fund, and operate the Planned Parenthood abortion referral clinic in San Francisco that sent pregnant migrant women to the exact Planned Parenthood abortion centers exposed on my videos for harvesting baby body parts.”
“Somehow, these same Planned Parenthood harvesting centers ensured that their lawsuit to ban the release of more undercover footage ended up in front of Judge Orrick,” Daleiden continued, “and he wasted no time ordering me and anyone who had seen the unreleased tapes to keep silent about what was on them.”
As CatholicVote reported January 28, the state of California agreed to drop all charges against Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt for their undercover exposé that began a decade ago when it was launched against the pro-life activists by then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Daleiden and Merritt reached a plea agreement with the attorney general’s office in California.
“Now ten years later, the public can see what Judge Orrick let Planned Parenthood cover up this whole time—top Planned Parenthood abortion directors giggling about selling late-term baby livers for $1,500 a piece, and scheming to cover up partial-birth abortions for organ harvesting by ripping off ‘a leg, or two’ from babies being born alive,” Daleiden said.
Footage from Daleiden’s investigation can be found here.