It was just last month that Brett Kavanaugh gave his explanation for why it was perfectly okay for Homeland Security goons to profile brown people and detain them based on nothing more than the color of their skin. While his cowardly colleagues in the majority on that shadow docket decision refused to explain their thinking, Kavanaugh actually wrote a concurrence that was so out of touch with reality as to be embarrassing. But at least it was an explanation.
The key bit from him that has stood out is this:
Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status.If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.
It’s this weird, privileged, out-of-touch statement that if ICE or CBP stop you for being brown, they’ll let you go as soon as you show them that you’re an American citizen. Of course, we knew at the time that wasn’t true. Hell, there were details that Kavanaugh ignored in that very lawsuit, which Justice Sotomayor called out in her dissent. But literally in this very lawsuit was the documentation of how it wasn’t so simple:
To give just one example,Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angelesand identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].”The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.”The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.”He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
Drexel law professor Anil Kalhan quickly dubbed these bullshit pretextual stops of US citizens as “Kavanaugh stops” and the name has stuck.
While there is an effort to challenge these further in court, for now the goon squad known as ICE is unleashed even more than usual. We now know that there are at least 170 US citizens who have been held by immigration officials, and there are probably even more not yet accounted for.
It feels like every day we hear about another few:
ICE violently detain father & son walking to school—teenage boy had to be rushed to hospital."I was just going to school," kid cries out. "I'm underage!"The 16-year-old star athlete is a U.S. citizen—agents sent him to the hospital with severe injuries to his back & neck.Houston, Texas.
These Kavanaugh stops are a stain on the American concept of civil liberties and due process, and they should be a stain on Brett Kavanaugh’s legacy. Legal journalist Chris Geidner just ran a piece on 50 days of Kavanaugh stops, and what a shameful moment this is of American bigotry.
Geidner has directly submitted questions to Kavanaugh to see how he feels about all of these Kavanaugh stops that show his claim of “brief encounters” with law enforcement were bullshit:
I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 14, “Do you have any comment on the ICE stop of Maria Greeley, a U.S. citizen, who was reportedly stopped, ziptied, and told she didn’t ‘look like’ a ‘Greeley’ despite being a U.S. citizen?“
On both occasions, I also asked Kavanaugh whether he still thinks he was correct when he wrote that these stops are “typically brief” and that all of this is fine because “individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Finally, I asked Kavanaugh if he was aware of the “Kavanaugh stop” terminology and whether he had any comment on it.
[….]
So, I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 16, “Do you have any comment on the Pro Publica report that found ‘more than 50 Americans who were held after [immigration] agents questioned their citizenship’ during 2025. ‘They were almost all Latino,’ per the report.“
In addition to the other questions previously raised, I also asked Kavanaugh whether “the possibility of after-the-fact ‘excessive force’ claims” is “a sufficient answer to this ongoing, regularly occurring problem?”
Did you guess what happened? Of course you did!
I have not received a response from him or his chambers.
You can already see the horrific legacy that is forming around the concept of Kavanaugh stops. This is a legacy that doesn’t go away easily. It’s like the Dred Scott decision, the Korematsu decision, or Buck v. Bell. Supreme Court decisions that nearly everyone now looks back on in horror.
These are all horrible, hateful decisions by out-of-touch bigots, who can’t even fathom a world in which those less fortunate themselves even matter, and thus their rights and dignity are barely given a second thought.
The Supreme Court still has a chance to fix this, since Kavanaugh stops were only defined by Justice Kavanaugh in a shadow docket concurrence. While those other cases all took decades for everyone to realize how fucked up they were, this one we can see in real time what a stain it is for anyone who believes that America respects basic civil liberties like due process and concepts like probable cause.
But, for now at least, that stain should stick to Brett Kavanaugh. He’s justified this. He’s insisted these kinds of stops are no big deal, even as there was evidence then, and even with more mounting evidence now, that immigration officials don’t give a shit if you are an American citizen. If you’re darker skinned, they can treat you like shit, lock you up, beat you up, ignore your protestations and even evidence of American citizenship.
It is a deep, dark stain on America as a supposed land of freedom, and it should be tied up with Brett Kavanaugh’s legacy forever.
When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public. Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government.
Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is primarily used by governments.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I’m observing how the government is increasingly pulling together data from various sources, and the political and social consequences of combining those data sources. Palantir’s work with the federal government using the Gotham platform is amplifying this process.
Gotham is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is deceptively simple: take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components and then connect the dots. Gotham is not simply a database. It takes fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms it into a unified, searchable web.
The stakes are high with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software enables law enforcement and government analysts to connect vast, disparate datasets, build intelligence profiles and search for individuals based on characteristics as granular as a tattoo or an immigration status. It transforms historically static records – think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages – into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.
These departments and agencies use Palantir’s platform to assemble detailed profiles of individuals, mapping their social networks, tracking their movements, identifying their physical characteristics and reviewing their criminal history. This can involve mapping a suspected gang member’s network using arrest logs and license plate reader data, or flagging individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status.
The efficiency the platform enables is undeniable. For investigators, what once required weeks of cross-checking siloed systems can now be done in hours or less. But by scaling up the government’s investigative capacity, Gotham also alters the relationship between the state and the people it governs.
Shifting the balance of power
The political ramifications of Palantir’s rise come into focus when you consider its influence and reach across the government. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone has spent more than US$200 million on Palantir contracts, relying on the software to run its Investigative Case Management system and to integrate travel histories, visa records, biometric data and social media data.
These integrations mean that Palantir is not just a vendor of software; it is becoming a partner in how the federal government organizes and acts on information. That creates a kind of dependency. The same private company helps define how investigations are conducted, how targets are prioritized, how algorithms work and how decisions are justified.
Because Gotham is proprietary, the public, and even elected officials, cannot see how its algorithms weigh certain data points or why they highlight certain connections. Yet, the conclusions it generates can have life-altering consequences: inclusion on a deportation list or identification as a security risk. The opacity makes democratic oversight difficult, and the system’s broad scope and wide deployment means that mistakes or biases can scale up rapidly to affect many people.
Beyond law enforcement
Supporters of Palantir’s work argue that it modernizes outdated government IT systems, bringing them closer to the kind of integrated analytics that are routine in the private sector. However, the political and social stakes are different in public governance. Centralized, attribute-based searching, whether by location, immigration status, tattoos or affiliations, creates the capacity for mass profiling.
In the wrong hands, or even in well-intentioned hands under shifting political conditions, this kind of system could normalize surveillance of entire communities. And the criteria that trigger scrutiny today could be expanded tomorrow.
Gotham’s capabilities may enable government agencies to carry out similar operations on a much larger scale and at a faster pace. And once some form of data integration infrastructure exists, its uses tend to expand, often into areas far from its original mandate.
A broader shift in governance
The deeper story here isn’t just that the government is collecting more data. It’s that the structure of governance is changing into a model where decision-making is increasingly influenced by what integrated data platforms reveal. In a pre-Gotham era, putting someone under suspicion of wrongdoing might have required specific evidence linked to an event or witness account. In a Gotham-enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns in the data – patterns whose importance is defined by proprietary algorithms.
This level of data integration means that government officials can use potential future risks to justify present action. The predictive turn in governance aligns with a broader shift toward what some scholars call “preemptive security.” It is a logic that can erode traditional legal safeguards that require proof before punishment.
The stakes for democracy
The partnership between Palantir and the federal government raises fundamental questions about accountability in a data-driven state. Who decides how these tools are used? Who can challenge a decision that was made by software, especially if that software is proprietary?
Without clear rules and independent oversight, there is a risk that Palantir’s technology becomes normalized as a default mode of governance. They could be used not only to track suspected criminals or terrorists but also to manage migration flows, monitor and suppress protests, and enforce public health measures. The concern is not that these data integration capabilities exist, but that government agencies could use them in ways that undermine civil liberties without public consent.
Once put in use, such systems are hard to dismantle. They create new expectations for speed and efficiency in law enforcement, making it politically costly to revert to slower, more manual processes. That inertia can lock in not only the technology but also the expanded scope of surveillance it enables.
Choosing the future
As Palantir deepens its government partnerships, the issues its technology raises go beyond questions of cost or efficiency. There are civil liberties implications and the potential for abuse. Will strong legal safeguards and transparent oversight constrain these tools for integrated data analysis? The answer is likely to depend on political will as much as technical design.
Ultimately, Palantir’s Gotham is more than just software. It represents how modern governance might function: through data, connections, continuous monitoring and control. The decisions made about its use today are likely to shape the balance between security and freedom for decades to come.
The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.
The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.
Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.
Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.
Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.
“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”
The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.
The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.
The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.
The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.
“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.
A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.
The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.
In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”
A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.
Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.
“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”
“I Lost Everything”
In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.
Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.
He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.
Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.
“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.
Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.
Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”
“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.
Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.
“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.
Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.
William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.
“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”
Trapped in Group Homes
South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.
After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.
The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.
South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.
Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.
Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.
“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.
South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.
After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.
South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.
His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.
Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.
“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”
First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was “allowed” to do whatever Trump’s DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do… like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never been seriously threatened by anyone anywhere since its inception.
Whoever didn’t get fired for not being all-MAGA, all the time decided it was time to call it a career. Anyone who forgot to lie to courts or failed to push abject bullshit past federal judges was shown the door. And with the Civil Rights division (or CRT in DOJ parlance) down to just the Trump loyalists, it would have made sense to do as little as possible with these extremely limited resources.
The Justice Department is soliciting staff within its Civil Rights Division to take reassignments to fill vacancies in areas related to education, employment and voting, with leaders citing the “deep need” created by significant vacancies.
The requests come as the division has shed hundreds of employees—or more than 60% of its workforce—since January and the Trump administration has assigned attorneys to tackle new priorities. The department is now scrambling to fill vacancies it has incentivized employees to leave through the extended paid leave program known as “deferred resignations,” early retirement and other offers.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with a suddenly renewed interest in investigating abusive law enforcement agencies or otherwise trying to restore and uphold a whole lot of severely bruised civil rights. No, this scramble for litigators is entirely propelled by the Trump administration’s undying interest in making America worse again.
This version of the DOJ CRT is missing nearly three-quarters of its legal team thanks to Trump. And somehow the DOJ thinks the priorities of the Trump administration will attract some litigators who have left as well as convince others doing less heinous things (maybe!) this shift in focus will be good for their careers, even if it won’t do much for their souls.
The head of CRT, Harmeet Dhillon, has a list of priorities that all sound pretty good in theory: education, employment, and voting. In practice, it’s an absolute horror show.
In May, for example, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche created the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to investigate any recipient of federal funds that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, allows antisemtism—which the administration has increasingly defined as college campuses that enable protests against the Israeli government—supports transgender women playing women’s sports or other perceived violations of administration policy.
[…]
Under its new mission statement, the voting section is now focused on ensuring accurate voter databases and eliminating fraud. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said in a report he issued last week on the changes taking place at CRT that the section has gone “from protecting voting rights to restricting voting access.” The employment section has recently shifted away from pursuing cases in which organizations allegedly engaged in race-based pay discrimination.
Yep, these positions are open to anyone willing to help the DOJ censor students, mistreat transgender kids, support voter suppression efforts, and let companies get away with paying people less just because they aren’t white.
There’s nothing involving civil rights happening here, at least not in a positive way. Instead, the DOJ is hoping there are still enough lawyers left in the building to assist Trump in ideological lawfare efforts that most voters — even many of his own — don’t support.
This is an entire administration consumed with a undying passion for punching down. No one here is seeking to elevate anyone but themselves. The only thing we might be able to enjoy — at least for the time being — is that they’ve fired so many people they don’t have enough people left to help them with their punching.
The mass renditioning of migrants hasn’t gone exactly as planned. Sure, it’s resulted in extreme amounts of stupid cruelty, which is very much on-brand for Trump administrations, but the mass deportation efforts have also met with considerable resistance from federal court judges.
The administration hoped to keep the courts from doing anything to protect migrants and their rights by invoking the Alien Enemies Act to strip them of whatever minimal protections they had. But you kind of need a war to justify utilizing the AEA and Trump sure as shit doesn’t have that. Not only are the standards used to declare detainees sloppy and tainted by massive amounts of confirmation bias, but there’s absolutely no evidence available anywhere that the Venezuelan government is directing the actions of any actual Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members detained by ICE and CBP. With each passing day, the “we’re at war with TdA” excuse is further undercut by reports crafted by intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement agencies.
The main leverage point for suing the government over deportations are writs of habeas corpus. These motions demand the government bring the detained person to court and prove their impending deportation and/or ongoing detention is justified. Naturally, the Trump Administration is angry this right afforded to everyone in the United States, whether they’re here legally or not, is slowing down its mass exodus of brown people.
Enter Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security advisor. Miller made a statement to reporters that is the normal Trumpian blend of lies, half-truths, and implied threats towards co-equal government branches. Here’s the whole thing, as posted by The Bulwark on Bluesky:
Stephen Miller: "The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at."
Here’s everything that fell out of Miller’s mouth during his response to reporters:
Well, the Constitution is clear. And that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So … that’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration Nationality Act which stripped Article III courts, that’s the judicial branch, of jurisdiction over immigration cases. So Congress actually passed what’s called jurisdiction stripping legislation. It passed a number of laws that say that the Article III courts aren’t even allowed to be involved in immigration cases.
Yikes. Here’s a top Trump official saying — out loud! — that if there are rights standing in the way of its deportation scheme, the administration will just go about the business of eliminating those rights, rather than continue to do deportation business within the confines of the Constitution.
I know there’s a lot going on, and that Miller says lots of incendiary (and blatantly false) stuff. But this strikes me as raising the temperature to a whole new level—and thus meriting a brief explanation of all of the ways in which this statement is both (1) wrong; and (2) profoundly dangerous.
It’s one thing to be wrong and, subsequently, mostly impotent. Being wrong and profoundly dangerous is possibly the worst combination.
As Vladeck notes, the Suspension Clause was added to limit abuse by the government, not encourage it. That’s where Miller is wrong.
To casually suggest that habeas might be suspended because courts have ruled against the executive branch in a handful of immigration cases is to turn the Suspension Clause entirely on its head.
He’s also wrong about the courts in general. There is no “jurisdiction stripping” in immigration cases. Changes to the law funnel more immigration cases directly into immigration courts, but nothing in the law forbids federal courts from handling cases in the first instance. And federal Article III courts have always been the landing spot for appeals of immigration court decisions.
Here’s where Miller is dangerous:
Miller gives away the game when he says “a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” It’s not just the mafia-esque threat implicit in this statement (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”); it’s that he’s telling on himself: He’s suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it’s not the judicial review itself that’s imperiling national security; it’s the possibility that the government might lose.
[…]
[S]uggesting that the President can unilaterally cut courts out of the loop solely because they’re disagreeing with him is suggesting that judicial review—indeed, that the Constitution itself—is just a convenience.
The Suspension Clause can only be used in extreme cases of insurrections or invasions that threaten the public’s safety. No one invoked this Clause when an actual insurrection attempt took place. And there’s absolutely zero credible evidence that even remotely suggests the mere presence of foreign gang members on US soil constitutes an “invasion.”
Miller’s statement is just another play call from the Trump playbook: yet another option it may try to deploy to deny even the most limited form of due process to detainees slated for deportation. Trump and his officials want nothing to do with the things that actually make America great, because those things stand in the way of them doing everything they can to make America an autocratic shithole.
Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself.
Now that he’s back in office, he’s back to pretending he cares about law and order. His recent executive order echoes one issued during his first term: one that demands people start respecting cops (even if he and his followers won’t during insurrections) and suggests there’s a police state ahead of us because they nation can’t be saved without trampling all of our rights.
But it’s not just about cops or law and order demagoguery. What Trump really wants is zero accountability across the board. That’s why his DOJ has revamped its Civil Rights division to protect only the rights Trump actually cares about. Say goodbye to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Say hello to protecting the Second Amendment and shutting down anything the administration thinks might protect the rights of anyone but the whitest, male-est US citizens.
The Marshall Project has published a round-up of the DOJ’s actions during Trump’s ignominious return to the ultimate position of power: Leader of the Free World. To be sure, Trump doesn’t actually want a “free world” any more than he wants free and fair elections. What he does want is the erasure of everything he doesn’t like, even if it means doing considerable amount of damage to the country he claims to be making great again.
The good news is… well, I guess there’s not really any of that.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi cancelled hundreds of Department of Justice grants centered on crime prevention to shift its focus toward illegal drug enforcement and the eradication of DEI policies. On Monday, the president signed executive orders to limit police reform and rescind consent decrees that hold police agencies accountable. And recent reporting details how the department’s Office of Civil Rights is transitioning from enforcing civil rights laws to bringing cases against universities and cities passing liberal policies, leading hundreds of attorneys to resign in protest and effectively gutting the division.
If Trump were an unknown quantity, one might suspect he was trying to get fired or, possibly, take down the government from the inside. But Trump loves Big Government architecture and its insular qualities. That’s why he’s converted its sharper edges to weapons to be deployed against all the stuff he hates.
His blind thrashing at anything “woke” is just brain stem responses to stimuli, at least as far as Trump himself is concerned. The bigger problem is that blindly lashing out has resulted in the erasure of American history, at least in terms of women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ citizens. This is by design, but probably not because Trump is such a savvy operator. It’s collateral damage, but damage his supporters are not only willing to embrace, but leverage.
The first line of the quoted paragraph, however, highlights the hypocrisy that the Trump Administration seems to believe is one of its virtues. This president has spent a considerable amount of time claiming this country is constantly under attack by violent criminals. Yet, when given the chance, he has chosen to strip funds from crime prevention programs. Worse, he stripped federal funds meant to help crime victims, as well as police personnel actively engaged in providing this assistance.
The U.S. Justice Department is terminating $811 million in grants, including some impacting victim service programs ranging from trauma centers and sign language interpretation for domestic violence victims to police training, according to internal documents and two sources.
Every cut is designed to favor cops, eliminate accountability, eradicate transparency, and allow people with access to power to abuse it.
Say goodbye to prison rape reporting efforts because Trump doesn’t care about incarcerated people and data shows a sizable percentage of this rape is committed by prison staffers. Funding for gun violence studies has also been cut off.
And, while demanding the DOJ do better at tracking national crime rates, the administration has decided criminals who happen to wear cop uniforms shouldn’t be subject to the same sort of background checks regular people endure pretty much any time they go looking for a new job.
In 2022, the Biden administration created the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a central place for police departments to search for information about federal law enforcement officers with criminal convictions and misconduct violations. Trump decommissioned the database on his first day in office.
What’s truly insane is that this wasn’t even a public-facing database, so it wasn’t as though journalists and activists were using this to propel an anti-cop narrative. This was solely for use by federal and local law enforcement agencies to ensure they weren’t just hiring troublemakers who’d already been shit-canned for violating rights or engaging in egregious misconduct. Now, these agencies are going into the hiring process blind. And while many might be fine with that, this gives the worst agencies that are willing to hire the worst ex-cops all the plausible deniability they’ll need to respond to criticism of their hiring processes.
This is the America Trump wants and one his fans are willing to support, right up until they feel the need to bash a cop’s head in with a fire extinguisher or whatever. And while it may work for them (until it doesn’t), the rest of us are going to be forced to live with it and its consequences for years, if not decades, to come.
What’s he interested in? Harassing companies that don’t adequately bend the knee to Trump. And harassing companies that aren’t suitably racist or sexist enough for the Trump administration’s liking.
Carr’s already announced he’s launching phony “investigations” into Verizon and Comcast for not being racist and sexist enough (read: having some bare-bones inclusivity efforts on a website). He’s doing this by leveraging looming approvals for potential shitty mergers to bully these companies into submission. And because these companies are routinely stocked with abject cowards, it will probably work.
And Carr continues to expand his anti-civil-rights campaign on the taxpayer dime. Last week he announced he’s also “investigating” Disney/ABC for not being racist and sexist enough. From NPR (which Carr is also “investigating” for being insufficiently deferent to christofascist clods):
“In a letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger, Carr said the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau will review whether Disney or ABC have violated any FCC equal employment opportunity regulations. He added that the probe will apply to both past and current policies.”
As with all of these investigations, Carr is pulling his legal justifications entirely out of his ass. He’s basically trying to claim that marginal efforts to be more inclusive are themselves in violation of anti-discrimination rules and laws. Rules and laws they’re trying to destroy. It’s circular logic gibberish designed to give a thin veneer of legitimacy to pointless bullshit harassment. Sayeth Carr:
“Numerous reports indicate that Disney’s leadership went all in on invidious forms of DEI discrimination a few years ago and apparently did so in a manner that infected many aspects of your company’s decisions.”
In telecom, Carr has tried to re-interpret language in the Communications Act designed to prevent discrimination to attack efforts against discrimination. It will never hold up in even the shittiest of courts, but Carr of course doesn’t care about that. He wants the publicity generated by the fake investigations to do the bullying. He wants to scare companies with fake, costly inquiries into nonexistent violations.
Disney, like most feckless U.S. corporations, has been happy to oblige so far, scrubbing their websites and earnings reports of references to equality and inclusion, shortening warnings on Disney+ about how older Disney content may feature racist stereotypes, and shuttering already flimsy programs designed to help marginalized populations.
Of course the U.S. press, many of them keen to avoid harassment or get tax cuts and merger approvals, have proven appropriately feckless in their news coverage of Carr’s weird zealotry.
Authoritarian propagandists have hijacked the term “DEI” to help sanitize and normalize sexism/racism, and conflate half-assed corporate inclusivity initiatives with popular civil rights. Instead of saying Carr is “being racist,” “being sexist,” “embracing resegregation,” or “attacking civil rights,” they’re quick to adopt the more sterile “he’s investigating DEI” nomenclature:
And if you read through pretty much any coverage of these sham investigations, you’ll find they all go out of their way to frame Carr’s racist and sexist harassment of companies as serious adult policymaking. Because that’s what you get when you let journalism consolidate at the hands of feckless trust fund brunchlords who are more interested in tax cuts and access than serving the public interest.
Carr’s a weird zealot launching baseless investigations into companies because they’re not being suitably racist and sexist enough for his king’s liking. It’s pathetic, and the collective press and corporate response so far has been equally so.
The Trump administration shut down three watchdog agencies in the Department of Homeland Security on Friday, gutting the offices responsible for conducting oversight of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The cuts affect the civil rights branch of D.H.S. and two ombudsman offices: one overseeing immigration detention and another responsible for scrutinizing the administration’s legal immigration policies, according to five current and former government officials. More than 100 people at the civil rights office alone are losing their jobs.
This just makes sense, at least in Trumpian terms. The administration is already all but daring the federal court system to stop it — something that came to a head when a bunch of people were deported to El Salvador despite being ordered to cease deportations by a federal court. Since then, the administration and its DOJ lawyers have argued — among other things — that some flights were in “international waters” when the order was issued and therefore not subject to US court orders (extremely laughable but also extremely evil) and that even if the judge blocked the last flight that took off, he failed to put it in writing (similarly laughable/evil).
The DOJ’s questionable assertions in court were backed by Trump’s calls to impeach the judge handling the case, something that actually managed to push Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to temporarily set aside his personal “conservative views” to remind the president that the proper response to an injunction Trump doesn’t agree with is the appellate courts, not batshit crazy demands that judges be put of out business.
This is just more of the same for Trump, DOGE, and his army of sycophants in Congress. By the end of January — less than 10 days after he was sworn back into office — Trump had shut down the DOJ’s civil rights division, which is pretty much the last thing standing between US citizens and abusive police departments around the nation.
While it’s clear to everyone (and that includes Trump supporters, despite their bad faith deflections) the real reason for this shutdown of oversight is to keep anyone from looking too closely at this administration’s immigrant expulsions, federal spokespeople continue to claim this is just about eliminating inefficiency from the federal government under Elon Musk’s DOGE.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the decision was meant to “streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement.”
Odd how all the “inefficiencies” being identified by DOGE just happen to be things Trump doesn’t like, rather than a cross-section of multiple departments and directives that might be redundant or of limited utility.
No one believes anything the Trump administration is saying in defense of eliminating anything that might protect the rights of all citizens, rather than just the citizens Trump and his congressional fanbois like. But this administration operates wholly without shame. And now it’s pushing forward with its plan to operate without any form of internal oversight. The almost-nonexistent pushback from Democrats has been ineffectual at best, and disgustingly subservient at worst. This nation is being taken down from the inside. Trying to pretend this can be undone following the next election assumes there’s going to be another presidential election, which isn’t something I’d be willing to put my money on given how things are going now.
Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or market competition, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in office abusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration’s ass. A cornerstone of those efforts has been to leverage merger approvals to get companies to support core administration policies like… being more racist.
All three companies have something in common: they’re hoping the FCC approves planned mergers and further (usually harmful) market consolidation. Verizon’s looking for approval for its $20 billion merger with Frontier. Comcast is broadly rumored to be eyeing a merger with either T-Mobile or Charter (or both). CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval of its $8 billion merger with Skydance.
Carr’s been pretty cocky since he got into office. Normally if you’re going to abuse government power like this you’d apply a little subtlety to it. But in this case Carr is openly crowing to the press that they have to bow to Trumpism if they want their (often pointless and shitty) mergers to be approved. Again, for now that mostly involves demands that they be more racist:
“Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
U.S. media giants, hopeful of getting tax cuts and deregulation and merger approvals (and afraid of losing access), are more than happy to oblige. That involves cheerfully couching a blatantly racist attack on popular civil rights under the nomenclature of “DEI”:
Trump authoritarians hijacked the “DEI” term because they’re hoping to conflate the elimination of bare-bones corporate inclusivity initiatives with the elimination of popular civil rights reforms. It allows them to normalize their bigotry and disguise it as an act of essential efficiency. And our biggest consolidated media companies, looking for favor, access, deregulation, and tax breaks, are more than happy to comply.
All three investigations into all three companies are utterly baseless harassment. Not a single one of the three have actually done anything wrong. But when you read through any major outlet story on this subject, that’s not made clear, and Carr and the Trump administration’s racism are framed as ordinary and valid complaints. The normalization is on display pretty much everywhere you look, and it’s embarrassing.
Carr of course tries to pretend all of this bullshit is serious, legal, adult policy making, and the press is generally happy to play along. See how Deadline frames the issue, for example:
“Under the law, Carr said, the FCC can only “move forward and approve a transaction if we find that doing so serves the public interest,” Carr said. “If there’s businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don’t see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest.”
That’s where a useful journalism organization would indicate that Carr doesn’t really have a history of “serving the public interest.” He’s generally been the textbook definition of regulatory capture, constantly rubber stamping the policies of the giant companies he overseas (like AT&T) and undermining consumer protection. It’s also where a functional journalism industry would point out that Carr’s claim that civil rights reforms are “invidious discrimination” are bullshit, and the motivation is rank bigotry.
Instead, they cower like little frightened deer, much to Carr’s delight. It is a conscious choice for media organizations and journalists to parrot bad-faith clowns entirely unskeptically and frame their actions as “serious policy.”
As I predicted repeatedly, unconstrained by re-election and more fully propped up by our broken court system, Trump 2.0 is so much, much worse than Trump 1.0.
Trump 1.0 involved “boring” old captured regulators rubber stamping all manner of shitty mergers (usually without reading or caring about the actual market harms). Trump 2.0 involves approving those same mergers, but not before abusing the approval process to demand companies be even shittier than they already were. Feckless giants like Comcast will be particularly happy to oblige.
Like many big companies, Verizon eagerly signed up for Trump 2.0 excited to get tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, attacks on organized labor, and oodles of unaccountable subsidies.
But as is often the deal with authoritarian zealots (and force-wielding intergalactic warlords with deep-rooted mommy issues), the deal you think you struck can and will routinely get worse.
This week Verizon is finding itself at the receiving end of an “investigation” by FCC boss Brendan Carr over the company’s “diversity practices” (read: an already pretty flaky support for foundational civil rights). Carr clearly wants to leverage Verizon’s hopeful $20 billion merger with Frontier to bully the company into supporting the Trump administration’s ham-fisted assault on foundational civil rights:
“In order to aid the FCC’s resolution of these matters, please reach out to the agency personnel that have been working on Verizon’s pending transactions at the FCC,” Carr wrote. “They are the FCC personnel most familiar with Verizon’s operations due to their merger review activity.”
Carr is also “investigating” Comcast for its diversity initiatives, leveraging rumors that Comcast is hopeful to merger with T-Mobile or Charter during the second Trump administration. The Communications Act does have several references to avoiding discrimination; Carr is abusing the law to pretend that embracing diversity is itself a form of discrimination:
“Carr said in his letter to Comcast earlier this month that the commission would take “fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act… including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI.”
Right wing propagandists hijacked the term DEI to use it as a bogeyman. Their hope is that the press and public will conflate their racist assault on civil rights with half-assed corporate inclusivity initiatives, in order to normalize racism and frame their bigoted removal on popular and hard-fought civil rights protections as an issue of “efficiency.”
Usually regulators will leverage telecom merger approvals in order to gain something actually beneficial to the public like expanded broadband deployments or some free perks for poor Americans. In Carr’s case, he’s weaponizing government to bully large companies into being more racist.
We’ll see if either Verizon or Comcast (historically close GOP allies) have the actual backbone to stand up to the baseless fake inquiries, or if tax cuts, merger approvals, and union busting are more important than basic human rights (knowing both companies well I have my suspicions).
This is, of course, the exact sort of radical abuse of government power big companies like Verizon (and the “free market Libertarian” think tanks they fund) have long accused progressive reformers of engaging in (often falsely). Here you have a government official actually engaging this kind of behavior while Verizon — and most of its proxy anti-government policy tendrils — sit like quiet little church mice.
There’s no limit of consumer, cybersecurity, and other issues that plague U.S. telecom (U.S. telecoms just suffered the worst Chinese hack in U.S. history). That Carr’s top focus is dismantling foundational civil rights and recent FCC discrimination reforms is a bright, ugly spotlight on a historically pathetic lack of character.
