In an emergency hearing before Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Aug. 31, 2025, lawyers for a group of unaccompanied migrant children from Guatemala asked her to stop the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of them back to Guatemala. Concerned that the Trump administration might not follow her order to stop, the judge emphatically repeated her order that temporarily barred the deportations. And then she said something unusual:

“I am trying to do the best I can to fulfill my obligation as an Article 3 judge …”

The Conversation’s senior politics editor, Naomi Schalit, talked with former federal judge John E. Jones III, now president of Dickinson College, about the meaning of the term “Article 3 judge,” why Sooknanan might have used it, and why recent discussions of politics and law in

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