For all its talk about trimming down government spending, an untold amount of money has been blown just to keep one person from getting one over on the Trump administration.
That man would be Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He became the poster boy for the regime’s bigotry when he fought back against his sudden deportation to El Salvador’s most infamous prison.
Abrego Garcia is Salvadoran. He fled that country and sought asylum in the United States. There were reasons he didn’t want to be sent back there. Not that the Trump administration cared. It just wanted him out and was willing to send him to a torture prison run by a self-admitted dictator. The administration made a lot of questionable claims about Garcia’s supposed MS-13 gang activity to justify flying him out to a receptive hellhole.
Abrego Garcia fought back. And he has proven to be a constant embarrassment for a government overrun by mouth-breathing bullies. Garcia managed to get un-ejected from the country, exposing multiple lies told by the government while doing so. For that, he was punished further. The administration brought him back just so it could throw him in an American prison, claiming he was involved in all sorts of hideous crimes.
A court reasonably found that this was vindictive prosecution. It also ordered Abrego Garcia’s release. But the government fought back with an absurd (and hideous) trial tax: Garcia could either plead guilty to the (pun intentional?) trumped-up charges or get hurled into a war-torn country where human rights are nearly nonexistent.
The Trump administration has moved to dissolve the ban on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s removal so that it can proceed with his deportation to Liberia.
In a series of filings overnight, government attorneys said that the Salvadoran native’s claim of fear of torture or persecution in the African nation was denied after he was interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last week.
The attorneys for the Department of Justice argued that the preliminary injunction blocking Abrego Garcia’s removal to Liberia should be dissolved because the government received assurances from the government of the West African country that he will not be persecuted or tortured.
Yep, that’s how it’s going in the purported Land of the Free that has spent the past few days stroking itself off in celebration of Veterans Day. American troops, who have done everything they can to prevent foreign countries from becoming what the Trump administration desires to be, are being celebrated for protecting the freedoms this regime considers to be mere privileges.
And let’s all enjoy a long disgusted LOL at the government’s assertions. Liberia’s government is corrupt AF and any assurances it might make about some rando should not be trusted. And, again, if the real reason (as stated multiple times by the administration) is to remove this “dangerous criminal” from the US, what’s wrong with sending him to Costa Rica? The government has already said it will take custody of Abrego Garcia, and it would be another “win” for the administration to add another person to its “self-deportation” column.
But we all know what’s really happening here. The Trump administration wants to punish Abrego Garcia for making them look bad. And sending him to a country he’s agreed to go to doesn’t do that. They need him to feel endangered to make it clear to others who might stand up to having their own civil liberties and rights violated, that they, too, may face similar risks. Abrego Garcia spoke out against the injustices the Trump administration rained down upon him, and for that he must pay.
This constant hate-on is considered a feature, not a bug, by the so-called representatives of the Free World. It’s abhorrent and it should be a constant stain on their legislative histories. Unfortunately, there are no adults with any semblance of a conscience left in the GOP, so we’ll get what we get for as long as people who stroke themselves off to the National Anthem continue to believe this nation’s path to greatness involves destroying everyone’s humanity, including their own.
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.
The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.
According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.
Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.
Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.
State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.
“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.
DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”
The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.
Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.
Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.
Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.
Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.
The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.
In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.
Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”
“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.
Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.
It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”
She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.
The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.
At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.
This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration’s willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide.
Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, if mandatory detention of people suspected of immigration violations is this obviously (and almost unanimously) illegal, doesn’t that mean it eventually has to end?
More than 100 federal judges have now ruled at least 200 times that the Trump administration’s effort to systematically detain immigrants facing possible deportation appeared to violate their rights or was just flatly illegal, according to a POLITICO review.
The rulings come from judges appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, including 12 appointed by President Donald Trump. One of those appointees took the bench just last month.
Any ruling against Trump and his policies receives the same response: “activist” judges are ruining America and probably love crime. That some of these “activist” judges were appointed by Trump tends to go ignored by the loudmouths engaged in PR work for the nation’s leading producer of unlawful bullshit.
And that’s the case here as well.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe,” said Tricia McLaughlin, who predicted appellate courts would side with the administration.
The Justice Department echoed DHS, saying “President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda is a top national security priority that this Department of Justice will continue to vigorously defend whenever challenged in court.”
But mandatory detention of migrants isn’t something that’s ever been considered legal, much less normal. People accused of criminal acts (rather than the civil violations most immigration offenses are) are generally able to avail themselves of their due process rights, as well as being able to return home until their cases are presented to the court.
That’s not what’s happening to migrants under Trump. Nearly everyone picked up by ICE, CBP, or any number of federal officers now expected to concentrate on civil violations rather than actual crime gets sent to a detention center, reversing three decades of immigration enforcement practice that allowed migrants without prior criminal records or who had longstanding ties to this country to remain free until their cases were called. It’s even worse than that now: ICE is using the same policy revision to deny detained migrants access to legal assistance or to ask judges to release them on bond.
This stems from the administration’s willful misreading of prior policies and previous case law. It applies the term “applicants for admission” (who can be detained until cases are heard) to any migrant its roving goon squads come across, even if they’ve already been in this nation for years and/or are already engaged in asylum requests or nationalization efforts. That’s why the DHS and DOJ are dismissing pending immigration violation hearings: to convert those seeking to remain in this country into indefinite detainees… and then into deportees to whatever country the US government feels like sending them to.
Sure, there’s still an argument to be made (albeit in extremely bad faith) that “liberal” judges are going after Trump just because they don’t like Trump. 87 of these judges were appointed by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton. But 27 judges appointed by GOP presidents have reached the same conclusions, including 12 appointed by Trump himself.
The ultimate question is whether or not this will ever matter. The Trump administration seems to feel it won’t. It’s not changing its policies and it is certainly aware that a majority of Supreme Court justices are activists who play for the “right” team. All it has to do is keep the appeals process rolling until the Supreme Court takes up the case. If it loses that one, it might be shocked. But it may also be that the clock runs out on this administration before it manages to generate precedent it doesn’t like. It still has more than three years to go. And until the upper levels of the court system step up to shut this down, its presumptively illegal actions will continue uninterrupted.
President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.
But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”
We reviewed federal prosecutions and local arrests, internal protest summaries by the Portland Police Bureau, sworn testimony from local and federal officials as well as more than 700 video clips containing hours of footage posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others. We focused on the three months before Sept. 5, when Trump made his first remarks about sending troops to Portland.
The evidence shows officers and protesters were indeed involved in incidents with varying levels of intensity on a little more than half the days. Protesters and counterprotesters exchanged blows at times. With some frequency, smoke and tear gas filled the air and shots from less-lethal police weapons could be heard.
There was no evidence of what could be termed a coordinated assault.
On most of the days or nights when officers and protesters clashed, local police and federal prosecutors ended up announcing no criminal arrests or charges — even though any number of crimes can be cited if someone commits violence against federal officers or property.
In addition, while protests continued across the summer, most of the alleged action by protesters that resulted in federal prosecution or local arrests ended two months before Trump said troops were needed in Portland.
While federal judges decide whether Portland protesters’ behavior constitutes a rebellion, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which they were inciting unrest and the role that federal officers played. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland, saying that his administration had not proven that the protests can be fairly characterized as a rebellion, a risk of rebellion or an ongoing lack of order that prevents government officials from carrying out their duties.
Last week, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the last of these three categories — a breakdown of public order so severe that ICE officials can’t do their jobs — is what unfolded in Portland, justifying the president’s decision to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.
The judge is expected to issue a final ruling this week, and the case is expected to continue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the courts go against Trump, he has another tool that could bring troops: the federal Insurrection Act, which experts say has a lower bar to being used and could involve active-duty military.
While the courts deliberate, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which protesters were fomenting unrest and the role that federal officers themselves played.
Two policing experts who reviewed videos said federal officers at times used force inappropriately, echoing a Portland police official who testified in court that federal officers were instigating the chaos night after night.
Brian Higgins, former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey, and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said some of what federal officers did in the video clips was not typical.
“My question would be, ‘If you used force, why did you not follow through with an arrest?’” Higgins said.
For instance, on Sept. 1, masked officers in combat gear responded to protesters who placed a prop guillotine on the sidewalk in front of the ICE building. The officers chased away the protesters with tear gas, smoke and other less-lethal weapons, grabbed the guillotine and hauled it inside. No criminal charges were announced.
“If there was nothing else to justify the officers coming out and doing this, you’ve got to scratch your head,” Higgins said.
Justice Department attorneys said in a court filing that the presence of the mock guillotine required federal officers “to exert physical force to keep order.” Videos show a protester blowing bubbles in the moment before federal police advanced on the crowd.
The scene of protesters dispersing and officers giving chase became the centerpiece of a Fox News broadcast on Sept. 4, the night before Trump said Portland’s protests had drawn his attention.
Our review showed that the force used against demonstrators had clearer provocation in initial protests. From the start of June to July 4, Portland police arrested 28 people, while federal prosecutors said they charged 22 with criminal offenses including arson and assault.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told ProPublica in a statement that the arson and assault charges show “this isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the Left have claimed, it’s radical violence.”
“President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop,” Jackson said.
But from July 5 through Sept. 4, the violence appeared to slow significantly. Portland police announced no arrests of protesters during this time, and federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against just three.
Only one was accused of a violent offense: felony assault for allegedly spitting in an officer’s face after an arrest for flying a drone around the building. The person pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drone offense; the assault charge did not move forward. Another person’s misdemeanor charge, alleging failure to obey an officer, was also dropped. The case against the third person, another misdemeanor allegation of failing to obey, is proceeding.
In legal filings supporting the use of troops, federal officials described a handful of additional violent incidents from July 5 through Sept. 4. They said that protesters hit an officer with a stick on July 20, threw screws on the ICE facility’s driveway on July 24, pounded fists on vehicles on Aug. 9 and 11, threw rocks and a firework over the building’s fence on Aug. 16, injured two officers in an attack on Aug. 25 and provided directions online to an officer’s home on Aug. 28. No criminal charges were announced in these cases.
Source: Federal data represents criminal charges from news releases from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Portland police data shows arrests announced by the Portland Police Bureau. Note: Incidents shown by week.
During the roughly two months leading up to Trump’s Sept. 5 remarks, videos from more than 20 days or nights show federal officers firing on, grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling or using other munitions on protesters. They deployed hissing cans of tear gas, sometimes sending clouds of the chemical irritant floating toward a nearby low-income apartment building.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of the dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
In most cases, videos from these events show masked federal officers using aggressive tactics that lack a clear reason.
On Aug. 13, an officer tackled a protester from behind. Rhein Amacher via Matthew Adams on X. Redaction in original video.
One federal officer runs and tackles an unsuspecting protester from behind on Aug. 13, causing what the man said in a legal filing was a head injury and concussion. The person was not charged with any crime.
In a clip from Sept. 6, the day after Trump’s remarks about Portland, a federal officer walking back into the ICE building turns, walks out of his way toward a protester and pushes the man so hard he falls to the ground and rolls over backward. The officer then continues inside the building.
On Sept. 6, an officer walked out of his way to push a protester so hard the person fell to the ground and rolled over. Rhein Amacher via X
Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies policing, reviewed videos from the protests at ProPublica’s request and said some of the federal officers’ uses of force looked “gratuitous.”
“Going out of your way to shove someone while you’re on the way back from arresting someone serves no purpose other than intimidation,” he said, “and intimidation is not a lawful government objective.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to emails requesting comment on its officers’ tactics.
Allegations of Protester Violence Subsided Over Time
There’s no doubt that the summertime protests were often confrontational, emotional and loud. Protesters, some dressed in black, often wore gas masks and shouted profanities at federal personnel. In June, some were also violent.
Five people faced arson charges after separate events on June 11 and 12 in which prosecutors said fires were set. One was in a trash can against the ICE building, while in another instance prosecutors said a protester used a flare to set fire to wood stacked against the front gate.
Videos from June 14 show a protester striking an officer in the head with a wooden stake that holds a protest sign. Another clip shows protesters using a stop sign as a battering ram on the front door of the ICE building.
On June 14, protesters rammed a stop sign into the ICE building’s front door. Throughout the month, protesters outside the facility were at times violent. Velly Ray via YouTube
Portland police declared a riot and made two arrests that day; federal prosecutors also said they charged three people with assault.
On June 24, a video shows someone waving a large knife at officers, being tased while running away and falling face first onto the sidewalk. Federal prosecutors filed charges against three people from that night’s protest: the person accused of wielding the knife, another accused of shining a laser pointer in an officer’s eye and one accused of hurling a gas canister back at officers, hitting one.
In addition, a Homeland Security news release from July 11 shows photos — without providing dates — of what the agency said were flyers posted in federal officers’ neighborhoods showing their names, images and addresses. The release said such information was also posted online.
Federal authorities have said protests led them to close the ICE building and work out of temporary office space from June 13 until July 7, after which the facility reopened. An analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting found that immigration bookings continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace than average for Trump’s second term.
But violence initiated by protesters mostly subsided after July 4, based on charges or arrests announced by authorities and video reviewed by ProPublica.
The summer’s last criminal allegation of protester-on-officer violence — at least for anything other than spitting — came from a large Independence Day protest that led to federal criminal charges being filed against four people. They were individually accused of kicking an officer, throwing an incendiary device at officers, graffitiing the building and destroying fiber optic cables at the facility.
Evidence of protester violence for the rest of the summer is limited beyond the two misdemeanors and one felony charge announced by prosecutors.
In addition to the instances asserted by the government in court filings but not charged criminally, the FBI recently issued statistics that suggest dozens of people may have received citations. In the federal system, these are similar to traffic tickets and are generally issued for minor offenses. But when asked for details by ProPublica, the agency would not specify how many were issued or during what time frame.
Meanwhile, the use of force by federal officers continued.
Violence Without Violent Provocation
In most of the cases where videos captured police using crowd control tactics or other elements of force on protesters, there were neither announcements of criminal charges that followed nor allegations of protester violence made in the administration’s case for sending troops.
An official with the Federal Protective Service, which polices federal buildings, testified in court last week that federal officers use a loudspeaker to warn large groups to move. If they don’t, he said, officers physically move them.
Stoughton, the University of South Carolina law professor, said officers should use tear gas and other heavy chemical munitions sparingly when dispersing a crowd.
He added that many city police departments would be very hesitant to use these munitions “if it’s going to have this completely predictable environmental contamination on people who are utterly uninvolved with the protest.” In Portland, there’s an apartment building across the street from the ICE facility.
In addition, Stoughton said, police managing crowds ordinarily would first take time to engage people verbally, face to face, to try to get them to step aside.
“You typically don’t just want to jump right to higher levels of force,” Stoughton said, “because the point is to limit the potential for escalation.”
On two occasions shown on video, aggressive moves by officers appeared to be intended at least in part to allow them to seize protest symbols: a burned American flag that officers bagged and took indoors and the Sept. 1 display of a mock guillotine, an implement that 18th-century French revolutionaries used to decapitate royalty.
Video from the event captures someone playing a song by the Oakland hip-hop group The Coup with the chorus, “We got the guillotine, you better run.” An American flag can be seen burning at the guillotine’s base.
Stoughton said municipal police departments like those in Portland know they have to balance protesters’ First Amendment rights with public safety. “There is no more protected First Amendment interest than the ability to protest government action, to criticize the government,” he said.
A guillotine “can be purely symbolic,” he said. “That can be purely expressive.”
The Federal Protective Service incident commander that night, Will Turner, said in court that agents did not know the guillotine was a prop and thought it was real at the time. “We took it as an actual threat,” he said.
Objects like the guillotine or statements from protesters telling ICE agents to kill themselves appear to be protected speech, said Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary Law School who studies public protest and the First Amendment, because they do not pose a true threat to officers.
It is “likely the sort of political hyperbole and heated rhetoric the Supreme Court has treated as protected speech,” Zick said. “The statements are likely to be considered part of a political protest.”
Notably, officers were sometimes able to clear crowds without aggressive tactics.
Footage on those occasions shows vehicles leaving the ICE compound without incident. Officers move out and onto the sidewalk, and protesters stay out of the way of the vehicles.
In one of those nonevents, as officers return to the ICE compound and the gates start to close, the thin crowd chants: “DHS — doesn’t have sex.”
A federal officer brings his hand to his mouth on the video.
He appears to blow a kiss.
What Happens Next
Trump’s order remains tied up in the courts.
Federal District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the deployment once, then again on Sunday, saying the Trump administration had “commandeered” the National Guard to quell protests that do not constitute a rebellion and had eased after a “high watermark of violence and unlawful activity” in June.
“The trial testimony produced no credible evidence of any significant damage to the ICE facility in the months before the President’s callout and no credible evidence that ICE was unable to execute immigration laws,” the judge wrote. “Protesters frequently blocked the driveway of the ICE building, but the evidence also showed that federal law enforcement officers were able to clear the driveway.”
Immergut said the deployment violated the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to states. The judge said Trump “had no lawful basis to federalize these Oregon National Guardsmen.”
Earlier in the appeals process, two appellate judges who upheld Trump’s decision said protester violence from earlier in June was a relevant concern that must be considered in the case.
A panel of judges from the 9th Circuit is expected to hear arguments from both sides next.
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 Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.
These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.
The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.
When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”
Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.
Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.
Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.
This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.
Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.
“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.
The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.
Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.
Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.
“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”
Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.
Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”
DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twiceordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.
But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.
Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.
Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.
“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)
The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.
Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.
DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.
Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.
“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.
More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”
Last week we covered how Trump’s immigration theater was pulling federal agents off child sex crimes, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations to chase landscapers and line cooks instead. Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re learning the administration is also pulling hundreds of cybersecurity professionals away from defending America’s critical infrastructure so they can help process deportation paperwork.
Employees across various units of the Department of Homeland Security have been marked for reassignments to agencies focused on Trump-era border security and deportation work, and could be dismissed if they don’t comply, according to multiple people familiar with the matter and a copy of one notice viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
In recent weeks, hundreds of DHS employees have been directed to transfer to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service and Customs and Border Protection — the main units overseeing much of President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation efforts.
The people being reassigned include staff from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the very federal agency, created during the first Trump administration, responsible for coordinating cybersecurity across federal agencies and helping protect America’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. This includes issuing emergency directives when vulnerabilities are discovered, coordinating incident response when breaches occur, and working with private sector operators of power grids, water systems, and financial networks—you know, the stuff that might actually matter for “national security.”
Compulsory reassignments have gone in recent weeks to workers within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, who had focused on issuing alerts about threats against US agencies and critical infrastructure, current and former employees said. They described the orders on condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation.
Affected CISA staffers have been shuffled to agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which received a $150 billion infusion to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown, the employees said. CISA workers have been moved to Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service, a domestic police force working with ICE and CBP on deportations.
Changes have hit particularly hard in CISA’s Capacity Building team, which writes emergency directives and oversees cybersecurity for the government’s highest value assets, the employees said. Reassignments have largely targeted senior CISA staffers, who are forbidden from joining unions because they work on national security issues, according to one person.
So we’re specifically targeting the people whose job it is to improve the cybersecurity of federal agencies and coordinate with international partners on cybersecurity threats.
Once again, the Trump admin seems to time these things to highlight how messed up their priorities truly are. We’re still dealing with the fallout from the Salt Typhoon hack and we’re only just starting to get a sense of just how bad the recent Salesforce hack really is.
But sure, let’s pull the people who deal with those threats off their jobs so they can help arrest landscapers.
What could possibly go wrong?
This fits perfectly with the broader pattern we’ve already documented, where Trump’s immigration obsession is gutting federal law enforcement’s ability to tackle actual crimes that matter. As we covered recently, federal agents are being pulled off child trafficking cases, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations so they can chase non-violent immigrants instead.
But there’s an extra layer of stupidity here, because CISA has become a target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Republicans have spent years claiming that CISA is actually a “censorship” agency rather than a cybersecurity one, because the agency had the audacity to set up a system to help local election officials alert social media companies of election misinformation around the time, place, and manner of voting.
Senator Rand Paul has been particularly vocal about wanting to eliminate CISA entirely. As Politico reported last year:
“I’d like to eliminate it,” Paul told POLITICO Thursday. “The First Amendment is pretty important, that’s why we listed it as the First Amendment, and I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online.”
Of course, CISA doesn’t actually censor content online. That’s not what the agency does. But when you’re dealing with people who think everything is a grand conspiracy, facts tend to be inconvenient.
The reality is that CISA was created in 2018 under Trump himself, and its actual mission is defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. You know, the kind of attacks that could actually shut down hospitals, banks, and power plants. The kind of attacks that represent genuine national security threats, as opposed to someone trying to mow your lawn without the right paperwork.
But with the MAGA GOP’s bizarre obsession with CISA, reassigning actual cybersecurity experts to bogus immigration jobs is hardly surprising. The weird obsession with CISA is causing all sorts of stupid decisions, including Rand Paul making sure a different “CISA” (the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) basically expired, in part because Paul seemed unwilling to recognize the two CISAs are different things:
Senate aides echoed concerns that cybersecurity industry stakeholders have also shared with Axios: That Paul is conflating CISA the agency with the information-sharing program, which shares the same acronym.
When you’re more concerned with feeding red meat to your base than actually protecting the country, these distinctions don’t matter much.
The human cost of this bureaucratic madness is becoming clear. As Nextgov reports:
The shifts could slow ongoing responses to cyber threats that have targeted the federal enterprise.
CISA personnel are addressing aCisco vulnerability— recently exploited by a hacking group potentially linked to China — that predominantly affects government networks. And over the summer, a hacker stole employee data from both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and CBP, Nextgov/FCWfirst reported.
So while CISA personnel are being reassigned to help with deportations, actual foreign adversaries are actively exploiting vulnerabilities in government networks. But I’m sure the Chinese hackers will politely wait until we’re done processing paperwork on restaurant workers.
The DHS response to this criticism is predictably tone-deaf and filled with culture war nonsense, rather than actually addressing the underlying issues:
“DHS routinely aligns personnel to meet mission priorities while ensuring continuity across all core mission areas,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Any notion that DHS is unprepared to handle threats to our nation because of these realignments is ludicrous, especially given the abject failure at the hands of CISA in the last administration.”
“CISA was adrift and was focused on censorship, branding, and electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure. Today, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission: serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure and is delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats,” she added.
Ah yes, the “abject failure” of… defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Because apparently the real threat to America isn’t foreign hackers potentially shutting down our power grid, it’s people trying to work in agriculture and construction.
This is what happens when you let people who fundamentally don’t understand how anything works make decisions about complex systems. They see an agency that viewed foreign influence attacks on elections and assume it must be part of some grand conspiracy to silence red-blooded Americans on social media.
The end result is that we’re making America demonstrably less safe in the name of political theater. When you pull cybersecurity experts off incident response and vulnerability management so they can help with deportation paperwork, you’re not making the country more secure. You’re just making it easier for foreign adversaries to exploit the next zero-day vulnerability, breach more federal systems, or potentially disrupt critical infrastructure.
But hey, at least the people cheering this on will have someone to blame when the lights go out.
This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read:
Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
That was when America was great… or at least periodically tried to be. This is who we are now:
The Trump administration is on pace to shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000 illegal aliens by the end of President Donald Trump’s first year since returning to office. Two million illegal aliens have left the United States in less than 250 days, including an estimated 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported and more than 400,000 deportations.
Are these records we want to be “shattering?” This doesn’t sound like America, the melting pot that once used to be a welcoming refuge for those subjected to violence, poverty, political/religious persecution in their home countries. Now, we’re just the nation of Get The Fuck Out, ejecting hard-working non-criminals who commit fewer crimes and pay more taxes than those blessed to be white enough to avoid this ethnic purge that’s been marketed as making this nation “safer.” Leave before ICE comes for you. The alternatives — foreign gulags, war-torn countries, perennial human rights violators — are worse than leaving for your home country before the government goons make this decision for you.
I mean, listen to this fucking bullshit:
“The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days— proving that President Trump’s policies and Secretary Noem’s leadership are working and making American communities safe,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”
This is a lie. And it’s not even a particularly crafty one. Anyone with half-assed Googling skills could prove this assertion wrong. Most immigrants don’t commit criminal acts, and those who do commit criminal acts do it at a rate that’s far lower than that of natural-born citizens of this country.
ICE pretends that it’s doing God’s work (literally pretends, lest you think otherwise) but all it’s really doing is targeting people because of their skin color and depriving them of their due process rights.
Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.
[…]
According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.
Everyone knows the government doesn’t really care whether you have a criminal record or not. The constant pressure from the administration to increase daily arrests means that being a migrant and/or having brown skin makes you a target. The message has been sent: only whites are welcome here. That’s why people are self-deporting. And that’s why the data shows ICE has long since run out of the “worst of the worst” to target:
If you combine the two non-criminal numbers (those without a criminal charge and those who have not been convicted), it’s a 2:1 ratio to immigrants who are actually convicted criminals. These are the actions of a regime that is no longer content to wrap itself in the flag while shitting on long-held American ideals. Now, it’s trying to pretend that doing the worst it can to the “least of my brethren” is doing the Lord’s work — that somehow the God that defined himself with single word in the Bible (“love”) would condone the relentless cruelty that is Trump’s mass deportation program.
We’re being robbed of a better future — not just because this administration has demonstrated the system of checks and balances is irrevocably flawed, but also because we’re actively hunting and ejecting some the most wonderful, hardest-working people in this nation: people who came to this country because it was still the Land of Opportunity. And the only thing this administration is demonstrating to people all over the world is that the United States can be just as awful as nations we can only now condemn hypocritically.
So let me get this straight. The same administration that claims fentanyl is such a dire threat that it justifies sweeping tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China is simultaneously pulling federal agents off drug interdiction duties to chase undocumented landscapers in Pennsylvania. The same political movement that built its base partly on QAnon fantasies about child trafficking is now disbanding the federal teams that actually investigate child traffickers. Meanwhile, the president who’s desperately trying to keep those Epstein files sealed… is simultaneously pulling sex crime investigators off their cases to help them process line cooks.
A federal team in El Paso that once pursued child traffickers has been disbanded. A Kansas task force focused on stemming the flow of fentanyl has been redirected. Highway checkpoints near the southwest border—some on roads long identified as major drug-trafficking routes—have gone unstaffed.
The shift reflects a broader realignment in federal law enforcement. Thousands of federal agents once tasked with investigating drug smuggling, sexual exploitation and organized crime have been redirected to immigration enforcement under President Trump’s second-term push to accelerate deportations, according to current and former officials.
Let’s pause here to appreciate the sheer absurdity. We’re talking about pulling agents off child trafficking cases—the very crimes that Trump’s base claims to be most concerned about—so they can arrest people whose biggest crime is working without the right paperwork.
The numbers tell the story of a law enforcement system being systematically dismantled in service of anti-immigrant theater:
“Screening, inspection, and interdiction suffer,” Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff, told Congress in May. He said Customs and Border Protection officers are “used to chase landscapers and line cooks 1,000 miles from the nearest border.”
The result, they say, is fewer complex investigations, less time to build cases, and a decline in prosecutions.
Federal referrals for prosecution are falling across agencies, according to data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The Drug Enforcement Administration referred 10% fewer cases between May and June. The U.S. Marshals Service reported a nearly 13% drop; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saw a 14% decline.
We already know from previous reporting that this massive redeployment isn’t even catching dangerous criminals. As we covered earlier this year, more than 90 percent of ICE detainees have never been convicted of violent crimes. So we’re literally taking investigators away from violent drug cartels and child predators to round up non-violent immigrants.
Letting the drug smugglers roam freely while bagging landscapers just trying to get by is a bizarre choice.
The human cost of this misguided prioritization is becoming clear:
Child-exploitation cases are among those affected. Several current and former agents said investigations that require subpoenas, warrants or grand-jury testimony have been postponed or canceled outright.
Informant networks are also fraying. Building trust with sources inside drug gangs or child-trafficking rackets takes time in the field, investigators say—time they no longer have. In some cases, agents said that it has become more difficult to offer the visas that once kept informants inside the U.S. Some have resorted to asking informants to be extra careful, avoid incidents that could draw attention and to call them if they get caught up in a traffic stop.
Think about what this means in practice. Agents who spent years cultivating sources inside human trafficking networks are now spending their days processing paperwork on gardeners and restaurant workers. Intelligence operations against transnational criminal organizations are being abandoned so agents can conduct highly publicized raids that generate good footage for social media but accomplish nothing meaningful for public safety.
This destruction of informant networks has consequences that extend far beyond individual cases. These sources provide the intelligence that prevents terrorist attacks, breaks up drug distribution networks, and identifies trafficking operations before they can harm more victims. Once these relationships are severed, they can take years to rebuild—if they can be rebuilt at all.
The Cato Institute has documented the scope of this diversion, noting that ICE has pulled over 25,000 officers from their regular duties. That’s not a minor reallocation—that’s a wholesale abandonment of core law enforcement functions.
And for what? To make a bunch of racist authoritarian bootlickers cheer on social media?
Even more telling is how this is affecting morale and retention within federal law enforcement:
The reassignments are driving senior officials out. In Houston, at least six top HSI agents have resigned in recent months, according to people familiar with the departures. Other resignations have come from Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston.
When your most experienced investigators are walking away rather than participate in this charade, that should tell you something about the wisdom of the policy.
The disconnect between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions is particularly stark when it comes to drug enforcement. While he’s imposing tariffs and threatening trade wars over fentanyl trafficking, his administration is simultaneously:
In Arizona and Texas, highway checkpoints run by CBP have gone unstaffed, including one on Arizona’s State Route 82, a prominent fentanyl trafficking route. Many CBP agents who used to staff them have been redirected to other states to detain migrants far from the border, said one person familiar with the situation. Ports of entry are understaffed. Some border patrol sectors are stretched thin, this person said.
So we’re leaving known drug trafficking routes unmonitored so agents can arrest people whose only crime is working in industries that Americans depend on but don’t want to do themselves.
The Trump administration’s defense of this redeployment reveals the fundamental confusion at the heart of their approach:
The strategy of the Trump administration is to address crime through immigration enforcement, said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
“They think they can take care of drug trafficking, sex trafficking and child trafficking just by deporting people,” Bier said.
This is magical thinking masquerading as law enforcement strategy. You don’t dismantle international criminal organizations by deporting line cooks. You don’t stop fentanyl trafficking by abandoning highway checkpoints. You don’t protect children from predators by disbanding the teams that investigate child trafficking.
What you do accomplish is creating a lot of sound and fury that plays well on cable news and for the bots on X while making America demonstrably less safe. When ICE agents are spending their time chasing non-violent immigrants instead of building cases against drug cartels, when FBI counterterrorism experts are reassigned to immigration sweeps, when child trafficking investigators are pulled off complex cases to process deportation paperwork—that’s not law enforcement. That’s malpractice.
For not the first time, we’re seeing what happens when fundamentally incurious simpletons who refuse to recognize any complexity in anything are put in charge. They have no idea the kind of complex work that actual law enforcement does to stop actual crime. So they assume it’s worthless, because there are brown people down at the Home Depot hoping to help you install some new flooring.
The cruel irony here is that this administration ran on a platform of being tough on crime, particularly drug trafficking and crimes against children. Yet their actual policies are making it easier for child traffickers, drug smugglers, and organized crime to operate by redirecting the very federal agents who would normally be hunting them.
This isn’t about immigration policy anymore. This is about whether we want a federal law enforcement system that actually protects public safety or one that just performs safety for political theater. Right now, we’re getting the theater while the actual criminals laugh all the way to the bank—along the unguarded, unmonitored trafficking route, as the case may be.
When your immigration enforcement strategy requires you to stop enforcing laws against child trafficking and drug smuggling, maybe it’s time to ask whether you’re actually making America safer or just making it look like you are.
In a stay order issued yesterday with zero reasoning from the majority, the Supreme Court told ICE agents in Los Angeles that yes, you can absolutely detain people based on looking Latino, speaking Spanish, working certain jobs, and being in certain locations. The only “explanation” (if you can really call it that) comes from Justice Kavanaugh’s solo concurrence—which apparently was so legally dubious that not even a single one of the other conservative justices would sign on to it. But it is the only explanation given for the majority ruling.
It reverses two lower court rulings that said, quite reasonably and clearly, that you can’t just arrest people for existing while brown. But hey, why let basic constitutional principles get in the way of a good old-fashioned roundup?
This is yet another example of the Supreme Court’s increasing reliance on its shadow docket to make monumentally consequential rulings without full briefings, oral arguments, or even basic explanations. As we’ve covered extensively, the Court has been using emergency applications to essentially rewrite major areas of law while hiding behind the fiction that these are just “procedural” matters.
The pattern is always the same: government asks for emergency relief, the Court grants it with minimal (if any!) explanation, and suddenly we have new constitutional law that affects millions of people. No deliberation, no transparency, just judicial fiat—always in favor of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism—delivered with no explanation.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent calls this out directly:
The Court’s order is troubling for another reason: It is entirely unexplained. In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially… Its interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not.
She’s absolutely right. When you’re essentially authorizing racial profiling on a massive scale, maybe you should explain your reasoning? But that would require the majority to actually defend their decision, which they apparently can’t or won’t do.
The only justice willing to put his name to an explanation is Kavanaugh, and his concurrence is a masterpiece of unsupported assertions and constitutional hand-waving:
About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States—meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million.
This is a stunning claim that goes way above most credible estimates, and Kavanaugh provides zero citation for it. Just assertions pulled from thin air to justify mass detention in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Other estimates suggest the actual number is less than half of what Kavanaugh claims.
Even more laughably, Kavanaugh suggests that being wrongly detained is no big deal for American citizens because they can just prove their citizenship and be on their way:
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.
Tell that to Jason Gavidia, the U.S. citizen described in this very case who was pushed against a fence, had his arms twisted behind his back, and whose ID was never returned to him. Did Kavanaugh not read the appeals court’s ruling that described how insufficient Gavidia’s proof of citizenship was to ICE agents?
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.
Kavanaugh’s response to that example in this very case is to say, “that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter?”
Or tell that to Jorge Viramontes, the dual U.S.-Mexican citizen who was been repeatedly harassed by ICE. As described in Sotomayor’s dissent:
In the nine days between June 9 and 19, agents returned four times, each instance in the middle of the workday. On one occasion, an agent questioned Viramontes, asking if he is a citizen and requesting that he show his ID. Viramontes replied that he is a dual U. S. and Mexican citizen and supplied his California driver’s license. The agent said the ID was insufficient, “grabbed [his] arm,” escorted him to a vehicle, and drove him to a “warehouse area” for further questioning
Brief encounter? No harm done?
And that’s just from this case. This week alone, we’re hearing reports of ICE raids at Hyundai facilities that detained people here on legal visas. While most of the coverage has been about South Koreans here (often legally), the raid also swept up some Latino workers, including those with legal work permits, some of whom are still locked up.
Kavanaugh’s fantasy that these encounters are “brief” and that people are “promptly” released doesn’t match reality on the ground, let alone the examples in this very case before him.
Here’s where Kavanaugh’s logic completely falls apart. He suggests that people falsely detained can seek remedies under the Fourth Amendment:
To the extent that excessive force has been used, the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.
But Kavanaugh himself has consistently ruled that you basically have no meaningful Fourth Amendment rights when it comes to immigration enforcement. In Egbert v. Boule, he signed onto the majority decision saying exactly that. So, he’s basically saying your only recourse is not if your Fourth Amendment rights are violated, but only in cases where “excessive force” is used. And I’m going to guess that Kavanaugh’s definition of “excessive” may be equally malleable if the victim is on the lower half of the Family Guy color chart.
It’s legal gaslighting of the highest order.
What we’re witnessing is the formalization of a “papers please” society—but only if you’re not white. As Justice Sotomayor notes in her dissent:
The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” … After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.
The “papers please” demand has historically been the hallmark of authoritarian surveillance states. It’s what we’ve pointed to as the obvious sign of an unfree society. But apparently, if you’re Latino in Los Angeles, that’s just your new reality.
The most telling part of Kavanaugh’s concurrence might be this line:
The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.
This framing gets the entire constitutional setup completely backwards. The Fourth Amendment protects “the people“—not citizens, but people. It applies equally to everyone in the US, regardless of immigration status, and for good reason: constitutional rights exist precisely to protect people from government overreach when the government suspects them of wrongdoing.
Kavanaugh’s logic essentially argues that if you assume someone is breaking immigration law, their constitutional protections become less “weighty.” But that’s the opposite of how rights work. If constitutional protections only applied to people the government had predetermined were law-abiding, they wouldn’t be protections at all—they’d just be privileges the government could revoke at will.
What Kavanaugh is really saying is: if you’re Latino, it’s guilty until proven innocent. And even setting aside the stories we keep seeing of U.S. citizens and legal residents being swept up in these raids, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t have a citizenship test and doesn’t disappear just because someone might have violated immigration law.
Sotomayor also highlights how crazy it is that the majority ruled for the Trump administration, given that they are supposed to show “irreparable harm” would occur absent such a ruling, and DHS already made clear they were ignoring the lower court orders (suggesting no actual harm from letting those orders stay in place):
Moreover, the on-the-ground reality contradicts the Government’s and the concurrence’s claim of a chilling effect. Since the issuance of the TRO, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has called the District Judge an “‘idiot’” and vowed that “‘none of [the Government’s] operations are going to change.’” The CBP Chief Patrol Agent in the Central District has stated that his division will “turn and burn” and “go even harder now,” …. Accordingly, there is no reason to credit the Government’s assertion that it will suffer irreparable harm.
If anything, the irreparable harm should be to those whose Fourth Amendment rights will now be violated:
Instead, it is the people of Los Angeles and the Central District who will suffer from this Court’s grant of relief to the Government. Immigration agents are not conducting “brief stops for questioning,” as the concurrence would like to believe…. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions. Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.
The Appeals Court ruling in this case was clear and direct: In the US, the Fourth Amendment applies to everyone, and we don’t make you a suspect because of the color of your skin or the language you speak.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority couldn’t let that stand. They had to step in immediately to ensure that ICE could continue its unconstitutional practices. No deliberation needed. No explanation required. Just pure judicial activism in service of authoritarian immigration enforcement.
As Justice Sotomayor notes in her dissent, the Court has essentially created a second-class citizenship where your constitutional protections depend on how you look:
More fundamentally, it is the Government’s burden to prove that it has reasonable suspicion to stop someone. The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely.The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.
The equities therefore lie with the plaintiffs. Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.
So here we are: what began as a meme about judging people by their skin tone is now essentially constitutional law, courtesy of a Supreme Court that won’t even bother to explain why. The only justice willing to put his name to a justification offers legal reasoning so shoddy that even his conservative colleagues won’t sign on to it.
This is judicial lawlessness masquerading as emergency relief. When the Court uses its shadow docket to authorize systematic racial profiling without explanation, we’ve moved far beyond procedural shortcuts into something much darker. The Constitution may say “the people,” but the Supreme Court has decided some people are more equal than others—and they don’t even have to explain why.
