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The Department of Justice offered a startling confession to a court on Tuesday, acknowledging that it repeatedly made a “material mistaken statement of fact” while defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of noncitizens at immigration court. Since August, lawyers at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had insisted that ICE was complying with an official government policy when it abducted and detained migrants as they left immigration hearings. Now the DOJ admitted that this policy “does not and has never applied” to immigration courts—meaning that its core defense of the agents’ conduct had been fabricated all along.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the Justice Department’s latest catastrophe and its potentially massive impact on ICE’s authority to continue its courthouse arrests. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Lately, it feels as if we’re talking every single week about Donald Trump’s Justice Department stepping on a massive rake. Every week it’s a more astonishing screwup, frequently without consequences for any lawyer who admits to error. And one of the reasons we keep hitting this theme, I think, is because the DOJ has historically at least pretended to behave as though it feels a commitment to tell the truth as a representative of the American people. And when that falls away—as it clearly has—judges don’t know how to find the truth. That leads us to this week’s jaw-dropper. How bad do things have to be when DOJ lawyers are telling a court, “My God, we are totally lying”?

Mark Joseph Stern: Really bad! This admission arose from a case challenging ICE’s courthouse arrests specifically in New York City. We’ve all seen the appalling videos of masked agents ambushing and abducting these migrants in the halls of New York’s immigration court as they’re leaving a hearing. Immigration advocates challenge ICE’s policy governing these arrests, arguing,........

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