Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.
As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.
The cuts stretched across the public safety landscape: community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued that the grant programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping to keep Americans safe.
In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after a few years of probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed some leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.
Funding cliffs
The funding cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts, as billions of dollars provided by President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan run out on Dec. 31, 2026.
Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.
And now? A double funding cliff with the sudden cancellation of DOJ grants, paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money.
In Chicago, this cliff has already forced a 43% cut to the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 – even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.
Larger and more targeted
Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory identifies a direct relationship between increased strain – economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support – and higher risks of criminal behavior.
Historical precedent reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal across-the-board spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year. The capacity of the FBI and related agencies was slashed by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents.
Between 2014 and 2016, the violent crime rate climbed 7%.
The 2025 cuts are substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.
Equal Justice USA, a national organization working to end the death penalty and reduce violence through community-based interventions, shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants.
“What shocked me the most … was what feels like the utter cruelty of it,” said Adam Rosenberg, who runs the center, referring to the cancellation of the funds.
As of April 2026, the DOJ has not paid out $200 million in approved grants to assist victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
This comes after the department last year allowed more than 100 grants for human trafficking survivors to expire, affecting more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.
Community members trained in conflict mediation help extinguish tensions before they turn lethal. Youth programs provide alternatives to street economies. Forensic labs process the evidence that solves cases. Reentry programs keep people from cycling back through the system. With each serving a distinct function, together they form the infrastructure of public safety.
As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.
For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of that mattered to the MAGA ecosystem, of course, which continued to treat a handful of out-of-context sternly worded emails from Biden officials as the greatest censorship regime in American history.
Then the Trump administration came in, and a funny thing happened. The same people who’d built entire careers around the supposed horrors of government pressure on tech platforms suddenly had nothing to say when the Attorney General of the United States went on Fox News to brag — brag! — about demanding Apple remove an app and Facebook take down a group, both because their content was critical of ICE enforcement.
On Friday, Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois granted a preliminary injunction against DOJ and DHS, finding that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the government violated the First Amendment by coercing Facebook and Apple into suppressing protected speech. The ruling is short and direct in an almost embarrassingly straightforward way — largely because Pam Bondi and the rest of the government handed the plaintiffs most of their case on a silver platter, then held press conferences to make sure everyone knew about it.
We covered the DOJ’s demands on Apple back in October and FIRE’s subsequent lawsuit in February. As we explained then, the case seemed quite straightforward, and now the district court has agreed.
The plaintiffs are Kassandra Rosado, who ran a Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” with nearly 100,000 members, and Kreisau Group, which made a phone app called “Eyes Up” for documenting ICE enforcement activity. Both services existed well before the government got involved. Both had been reviewed by the platforms and found compliant with their respective policies. In fact, as the ruling notes regarding the Facebook group:
Prior to October 14, out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments made in the Chicagoland Facebook group, Facebook’s moderators found and removed only five posts and comments that purportedly violated Facebook’s guidelines. … When Facebook removed those posts, Facebook advised Rosado that the posts were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group” and that “groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”
Then Laura Loomer — a person whose entire public identity was built around suing Facebook and other tech companies for moderating her own posts, and who once argued that content moderation was literal RICO — tagged Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem in a social media post demanding they do something about the Chicagoland group. Because apparently the First Amendment only constrains Meta when Loomer herself is being moderated; when she wants other people silenced, she calls in the actual federal government.
Two days later, Facebook disabled the group. That same day, Bondi posted this to X:
Today following outreach from [the DOJ], Facebook removed a large group that was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago.
Noem followed up with her own X post taking credit for the DOJ’s “leadership” in getting Facebook to act, adding the observation that:
Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement. … We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.
On the Apple side, Bondi went even further, telling Fox News Digital directly:
We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so.
A few days later, she added that “we had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps” and — in a sentence that should probably be framed and hung in every law school’s First Amendment classroom — followed it with: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.”
Apple promptly removed Eyes Up too, informing the developer that “law enforcement” had provided “information” indicating the app violated Apple’s guideline against “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” — the same guideline Apple had independently reviewed the app under just two months earlier, when it found no such problem.
The legal framework here is familiar territory for Techdirt readers. Bantam Books v. Sullivan from 1963 established that “thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings” against parties who don’t come around to the government’s preferred speech outcomes violate the First Amendment. 2024’s NRA v. Vullo reaffirmed and sharpened that principle, holding that “[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test, per Vullo, is whether government conduct, “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff’s speech.”
That’s what was missing in the Murthy case — but was clearly present in Vullo. And here.
Judge Alonso applies this framework step-by-step. On causation — the element the Murthy plaintiffs famously failed on — he identifies three facts that, taken together, make it overwhelmingly likely the injuries trace to government coercion rather than independent platform judgment:
First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content.
Unlike in Murthy, where it was all vague speculation disconnected from reality, the causal chain here is pretty clear, helped along by a Trump administration that simply can’t resist bragging about suppressing the rights of Americans.
Bondi and Noem’s inability to resist a Fox News hit really made this case super easy. In Murthy, the Supreme Court found that plaintiffs couldn’t even establish the Biden administration had caused the content moderation decisions they were complaining about, because platforms had their own independent reasons for their policies and had often rejected government requests outright. Here, the government has publicly, repeatedly, and proudly announced that it caused the removals.
On the coercion analysis itself, Alonso walks through the Seventh Circuit’s Backpage.com v. Dart framework, noting that government officials don’t even need direct regulatory authority over the target to cross the line. What matters is “the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” And here, the court finds, Bondi and Noem demanded rather than requested, and made clear there would be consequences for non-compliance:
Bondi and Noem also intimated that Facebook and Apple may be subject to prosecution for failing to comply with Bondi and Noem’s demands. For example, after stating that we “had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps,” Bondi further stated: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.” … And in the same social media post where Noem wrote that “[p]latforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement,” she added: “We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.” … Although these statements may not be direct threats to prosecute Facebook and Apple, they are intimations of a threat. And thinly veiled threats such as these constitute sufficient evidence on which Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim.
The quote from Bondi about not stopping “at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets,” paired with her public announcement that she’d forced Apple’s hand, is about as textbook a Bantam Books fact pattern as you’re going to find. The Supreme Court’s warning in 1963 was that “[p]eople do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Sixty-three years later, here is the Attorney General of the United States describing the process of coming around, and taking credit for it.
Of course, as you know, Bondi was fired by Trump earlier this month for insufficient commitment to his vindictive fantasies, and Noem has also been replaced. Both are automatically substituted out in the litigation under Rule 25(d) for their successors, Todd Blanche and Markwayne Mullin. The people who orchestrated the censorship may be out of power, but it’s not like their replacements are any less likely to violate the free expression rights of Americans. This injunction binds these replacement-level cabinet members all the same.
But still, in all of this, it’s astounding that we’ve heard nothing from the vocal crew who insisted the Murthy case was the quintessential example of American government censorship. The same people who were trumpeting a faux settlement in that case just weeks ago seem to have zero to say about a court finding actual censorship here.
For years, the people who built entire media careers around the supposed Biden jawboning scandal insisted — against all available evidence — that private platforms making their own moderation decisions after receiving polite feedback from the government constituted the greatest assault on free speech in American history. They refused to accept the distinction between persuasion and coercion, dismissed every platform executive who explained that moderation decisions were independent, and treated the Supreme Court’s rejection of their standing arguments in Murthy as a miscarriage of justice rather than an accurate assessment of what the evidence actually showed.
And now, confronted with an actual, documented, judicially confirmed case of government coercion — where the Attorney General literally said the word “demanding” in a Fox News interview, where the Secretary of Homeland Security publicly warned platforms they “must be PROACTIVE” and threatened prosecution, where a federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction applying the exact legal framework they claimed to care about — the response from the usual suspects has been… crickets.
Turns out they didn’t actually care about jawboning as a principle — they just cared which way the pressure was pointed. They didn’t want government neutrality about platform moderation decisions; they wanted government pressure in their preferred direction. The First Amendment, in their functional view, prohibits making life difficult for people they like and permits — encourages, even — making life difficult for people they don’t. And sure, they’ll claim this censorship was justified because it was “necessary” to “protect ICE from harm.” But that’s not how the First Amendment works, it’s wrong as a principle, and — perhaps most importantly — that same logic would have applied to the censorship they (falsely) claimed was happening under Biden regarding COVID information, which was also, in theory, done to protect American lives.
Alonso’s ruling is a reminder that the First Amendment doesn’t care about your political team. Bantam Books and Vullo don’t have political valences. Bantam Books was an 8-1 decision. Vullo was 9-0. Coercing platforms to remove speech the government disfavors is unconstitutional regardless of which administration is doing the coercing and regardless of whether the speech in question is popular with any particular political faction. But you have to actually show the coercion! A court applying the law honestly to the facts here couldn’t reach any other conclusion, because Bondi and Noem made the facts unmissable. They said the quiet part loud, on camera, to Fox News, in tweets they pinned to their profiles.
The supposedly monumental Missouri case had none of that — which is exactly why the Supreme Court rejected it. And yet it’s still held up by many as some sort of evidence of censorship, by the very same people who seem to have zero interest in this far more direct and documented example.
The takeaway is simple: if you spent five years insisting that jawboning is a grave constitutional offense, you don’t get to cheer when your team does the exact same thing. Or, well — you can, but the rest of us are going to notice. And maybe say something about it.
Everyone else gets to file this ruling away for the next time someone starts ranting about Murthy. This is what the law actually looks like when the facts are there. And the facts, in this case, were provided by the government itself, free of charge, on national television.
In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.
The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.
In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.
But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.
Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.
The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.
In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”
The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.
The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.
Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.
“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.
The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.
Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.
“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.
A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”
The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.
The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.
Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.
The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.
“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”
Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.
“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”
Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.
Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.
Drugs
As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”
He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.
“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”
The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.
National Security
Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.
The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.
“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.
Labor
The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.
Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.
A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”
The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.
White-Collar Crime
The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.
The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.
Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.
The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.
Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.
Promises Kept
The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.
Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.
The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.
This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.
It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.
But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.
Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.
Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.
Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.
The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.
But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.
Last week, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri got into a heated exchange during a Senate hearing with Stanford’s Daphne Keller. Schmitt, who, as Missouri’s Attorney General, originally filed the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, was berating Keller over Stanford’s supposed role in helping the Biden administration censor social media during the 2020 election (see if you can spot the time-space continuum problem with that sentence). When Keller pushed back on his characterization of events, Schmitt got increasingly agitated and told her she could “read all about it in Missouri v. Biden.” Keller’s response was instant and devastating: “The one you lost?“
He did not take it well, immediately throwing an embarrassing Senatorial temper tantrum.
And so maybe it’s not surprising that just a week later, Schmitt was doing a victory lap over a “settlement” that his friends in the Trump administration very conveniently worked out with the remaining plaintiffs in the case. The framing, of course, was triumphant. From his post on social media:
Shorter version:
We just won Missouri v. Biden.
As Missouri’s Attorney General, I sued the Biden regime for brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence Missouri families — censoring the truth about COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, the open border, and the 2020 election. They tried to turn Facebook, X, YouTube, and the rest into their private speech police, labeling dissent “misinformation” while they pushed their narrative on the American people.
Missouri struck first—and Missouri won big.
And the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented many of the plaintiffs, was even more grandiose in its description of the settlement:
The federal government’s social media censorship was the most massive suppression of speech in the nation’s history, it was profoundly important to resist it.
Even the Washington Post editorial board got taken in, writing about the settlement as a “forceful affirmation of First Amendment principles.” Reclaim the Net went even further, claiming the decree represented a “formal, court-enforceable admission: the federal government pressured social media platforms to silence protected speech.”
There’s just one fairly big problem. None of this is true. The case was a dud. While it is true that the district court hyped it up as (what the NCLA repeated) “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” literally no one else found the same. The Fifth Circuit saw that most of the claims were flimsy and cut back nearly the entire injunction, and the Supreme Court threw it out completely (“the one that you lost”) not only pointing out five separate times that there was “no evidence” to support the claims of censorship, but also calling out the district court’s findings, noting that they “appear to be clearly erroneous.”
It’s quite a misleading victory lap to quote the judge who both higher courts called out for misreading the evidence to say things that the evidence clearly did not say (it was actually worse: the judge fabricated quotes to make it sound like there was evidence when there was not).
As for this “settlement,” anyone who actually reads it would realize that it doesn’t support any of the claims making the rounds.
Now the reason Schmitt claims he didn’t “lose” the case is because, technically, the Supreme Court rejected the case on “standing” grounds — meaning the plaintiffs hadn’t shown they had a legal right to bring the case. But the reason they didn’t have standing was devastating to the plaintiffs’ entire theory. The opinion methodically dismantled the conspiracy theory at the heart of the case:
We reject this overly broad assertion. As already discussed, the platforms moderated similar content long before any of the Government defendants engaged in the challenged conduct. In fact, the platforms, acting independently, had strengthened their pre-existing content-moderation policies before the Government defendants got involved. For instance, Facebook announced an expansion of its COVID–19 misinformation policies in early February 2021, before White House officials began communicating with the platform. And the platforms continued to exercise their independent judgment even after communications with the defendants began. For example, on several occasions, various platforms explained that White House officials had flagged content that did not violate company policy.
The Court further called out how the lower courts had built their case on lies and misrepresentations:
The District Court found that the defendants and the platforms had an “efficient report-and-censor relationship.”… But much of its evidence is inapposite. For instance, the court says that Twitter set up a “streamlined process for censorship requests” after the White House “bombarded” it with such requests. The record it cites says nothing about “censorship requests.” Rather, in response to a White House official asking Twitter to remove an impersonation account of President Biden’s granddaughter, Twitter told the official about a portal that he could use to flag similar issues. This has nothing to do with COVID–19 misinformation.
In other words, the Supreme Court looked at the actual record, found a pile of conspiratorial nonsense, and told the lower courts they got played. This was a loss. A clear, unambiguous loss.
But of course, with Trump back in office and the same crew of ideologues now running the government, it was time to manufacture a win. And so we get this “consent decree.”
On paper, it sounds dramatic. The NCLA breathlessly announced that the settlement “prohibits the U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected speech.” Schmitt claimed the decree means “no more threats of legal, regulatory, or economic punishment. No more coercion. No more unilateral direction or veto of platform decisions.”
But if you actually read the consent decree (and I encourage you to do so, because clearly many of the people celebrating it haven’t), you find something remarkable: the decree prohibits conduct that the Supreme Court found no evidence was happening, while explicitly carving out everything that actually was happening.
First (and most importantly), the decree only applies to three remaining individual plaintiffs (Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Jill Hines, and Jim Hoft) and two states, and only on five specific platforms. It doesn’t protect anyone else. If you’re a random American whose content gets moderated on social media, this decree does absolutely nothing for you. That certainly doesn’t match what Schmitt claimed.
Second, and more importantly, paragraph 24 of the decree is where the whole thing collapses:
This prohibition does not extend to providing Social-Media Companies with information that the companies are free to use as they wish. Nor does it extend to statements by government officials that posts on Social Media Companies’ platforms are inaccurate, wrong, or contrary to the Administration’s views, unless those statements are otherwise coupled with a threat of punishment within the meaning of the above provision.
That paragraph basically describes exactly what the Biden administration was actually doing — and declares it fine. The government can still share information with social media companies. It can still tell companies that content on their platforms is wrong or inaccurate. It can still express displeasure. It just can’t couple those statements with threats of punishment.
Which is… exactly what the First Amendment already requires. And exactly what the Supreme Court found was not happening in the first place. The consent decree literally codifies the Biden administration’s actual conduct as permissible while grandly prohibiting a phantom version of events that the Supreme Court found no evidence of.
Even better, paragraph 17 of the decree says the quiet part out loud:
The parties acknowledge that this Agreement is entered into solely for the purpose of settling and compromising any remaining claims in this action without further litigation, and, except as stated explicitly in the text of the Agreement, it shall not be construed as evidence or as an admission regarding any issues of law or fact, or regarding the truth or validity of any allegation or claim raised in this action or in any other action.
So the decree is explicitly not an admission of anything. It cannot be construed as evidence of any wrongdoing. The government didn’t admit to censorship. Reclaim the Net’s headline — “US Government Admits Pressuring Social Media Platforms to Censor Protected Speech” — is directly contradicted by the text of the document they’re supposedly celebrating. Did they not read it?
Yes, the preamble quotes Trump’s executive order making grand accusations about Biden-era censorship. But that’s a political document, not a finding of fact. The Trump administration saying the Biden administration did bad things is hardly the same as the Biden administration admitting it did bad things, or a court finding that it did bad things. In fact, the only court to substantively examine the evidence — the Supreme Court — found no evidence to support these claims.
So what we have here is a neat little trick: the Trump administration negotiates a settlement with friendly plaintiffs (some of whom had to drop out of the case because they joined the Trump administration), quotes Trump’s own executive order as if it were established fact, and everyone involved pretends this vindicates the original claims — despite the Supreme Court (and a clean reading of the evidence) having rejected them.
Speaking of those former plaintiffs, let’s talk about the delicious absurdity of how this case ate itself. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the original individual plaintiffs who claimed he was censored by the Biden administration, had to drop out of the case because he was confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health — the agency he claimed (without evidence) had “censored him” even though his lawyers somehow forgot to add NIH as a defendant. Dr. Martin Kulldorff similarly withdrew because of his new role within the Department of Health and Human Services. The supposed victims of government censorship are now running the very agencies they accused of censoring them. And, again, I have to reinforce, that the Supreme Court called out the lack of actual “censorship” for either of these guys.
Both Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were mad that Facebook restricted access to the Great Barrington Declaration, a document they co-authored. But they fail to mention that the person running the Great Barrington Declaration website has publicly revealed that the reason Facebook blocked it was anti-vaxxers mass reporting the site — because they misread the declaration as supporting “forced vaccinations.” (There are more details at the link above).
So naturally, despite all this, the fact that they became top officials in the Trump administration should raise questions about how suddenly the administration worked out a friendly settlement with their friends who were still plaintiffs. What a coincidence.
But the real tell is what’s happening right now, while MAGA is celebrating: the Trump admin is doing far worse than anything Biden was even accused of. Yes, while the Trump administration and its gullible friends are busy patting themselves on the back for supposedly defending free speech from the horrors of the Biden administration sharing information with social media companies, it is engaged in conduct that is far, far worse than anything alleged in Missouri v. Biden.
As you’ll certainly recall, the Trump administration’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr went on a podcast and explicitly threatened Disney with regulatory retaliation over Jimmy Kimmel’s monologues, telling them “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Hours later, the show was pulled. That’s textbook coercion — exactly the kind that the Supreme Court in both Murthy and Vullo said would violate the First Amendment if proven. Unlike the conduct in the case that just settled, where the Supreme Court found no such proof.
And then we have the even clearer violation: Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice demanded that Apple and Google remove the ICEBlock app from their stores… and bragged about it! That’s the federal government literally ordering private companies to suppress an application. Not sending mean emails. Not sharing information platforms are free to use as they wish. An explicit demand for removal.
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they removethe ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi added according to the Fox report.
Where’s Schmitt’s outrage? Where’s the NCLA lawsuit? Where’s Philip Hamburger’s condemnation of “the most massive suppression of speech in the nation’s history”?
Nowhere. Because this was never really about free speech. This was about building a narrative that the Biden administration censored conservatives, manufacturing a legal document that appears to vindicate that claim (despite explicitly saying it doesn’t), and then using it as political cover while engaging in an even more extreme version of the conduct you claimed to oppose.
This perfectly matches the pattern Renee DiResta documented in her Lawfare review of Schmitt’s book — which he subtitled “how to beat the left in court” — where she noted his habit of presenting cases he lost as if he won them. The book apparently describes multiple lawsuits where Schmitt failed to achieve his stated legal objectives but then spun the results as massive victories for the narrative benefit. Missouri v. Biden is the crown jewel of this approach: lose at the Supreme Court, negotiate a meaningless consent decree with a friendly administration, declare total victory.
Even the Washington Post editorial board, which gave the decree far more credit than it deserved, couldn’t quite look away from the obvious:
The unfortunate catch is that the settlement only applies to the specific plaintiffs in this particular case. In other words, only the people who initially sued the Biden administration, and public officials from Louisiana and Missouri, will enjoy the court-ordered protections from government censorship. It’s unlikely the current administration would target right-leaning individuals or states, but the consent decree will apply for 10 years.
The settlement also applies only to government pressure on five companies: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Linkedln and YouTube. That means, for example, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s efforts to bully broadcasters to toe the administration’s political line will be unaffected.
So even the Post recognizes that the decree does nothing about actual, current, obvious government coercion of media companies. But somehow this is still a “forceful affirmation of First Amendment principles”? How so? A consent decree that protects three specific people from conduct that wasn’t happening, while the government signing the decree is actively coercing media companies in ways that obviously violate the First Amendment?
The consent decree is a press release disguised as a legal document. It prohibits First Amendment violations the Supreme Court found no evidence of, permits everything the evidence shows the Biden administration was actually doing, and was signed by an administration currently engaged in the exact conduct the decree pretends to prohibit.
This judge ain’t fucking around. Earlier this month, we covered New Jersey federal judge Zahid Qurashi’s response to the actions of Trump’s DOJ, which begins with lots of illegal appointments of prosecutors and runs right through these prosecutors’ inability to defend the administration’s actions.
To wit:
The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.
And:
Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.
Courts have been flooded with immigration cases and vindictive prosecutions targeting Trump’s enemies. They’re fighting back, but even a massive consensus seems incapable of slowing Trump’s roll.
This case — brought to our attention by Owen Barcala — involves the sort of serious crimes the administration has put on the back burner so it can flood the immigration enforcement zone. While the administration focuses on ejecting all non-white foreigners from this country while claiming they’re simply seeking out the “worst of worst,” the (alleged) worst of the worst are pretty much being ignored.
Thanks to the massive amount of turnover at the DOJ, there are not a whole lot of qualified prosecutors left to do the government’s (increasingly) dirty work. In New Jersey, (illegal) appointee Alina Habba (a former Trump PAC spokesperson/advisor) has already voluntarily stepped down, proving she’s more capable of reading the writing on the wall than her former employer.
In her place, Mark Coyne (in a made-up position meant to shield him from being booted for being illegally appointed) has stepped up to wrap up a child pornography prosecution. It’s not going well for Coyne, as the New York Times reports:
A federal judge threw a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom during a sentencing hearing this week and demanded that the office’s leadership testify about who had authority over their actions, according to court documents.
The rapid sequence of events on Monday in the courtroom of Judge Zahid N. Quraishi was the latest indication of growing tensions between the Justice Department and the federal judiciary in New Jersey. It came during the scheduled sentencing of a man who last year agreed to plead guilty to possession of child pornography.
The hearing did not go as prosecutors had planned. Judge Quraishi grew frustrated with the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, who had not formally disclosed that he would appear, and fiercely interrogated a more junior prosecutor about whether the former interim U.S. attorney, Alina Habba, still had some role in operating the office.
Judge Qurashi referenced an order issued by federal judge Matthew Brann earlier this month, which declared the three-prosecutor hydra cobbled together by Pam Bondi to be a trio of unlawfully elevated prosecutors. That decision made the court’s displeasure explicit, using emphasis in the ruling to point out that the Trump administration cared more about who was running the New Jersey prosecutors’ office, rather than whether it was legally capable of running at all.
There are plenty of wonderfully quotable moments in the transcript of the hearing that ended with the government’s prosecutor being removed from the proceedings by the court.
It starts like this:
THE COURT: Mr. Coyne, did you file a notice of appearance in this case? MR. COYNE: I did not. THE COURT: Are you here for moral support? Because you’re not going to speak. MR. COYNE: I would ask — THE COURT: No. MR. COYNE: — that the Court allow me to speak. THE COURT: Nope. That’s not the representation made by the Government.
And then the court continues to riddle his body with bullets:
THE COURT: I’m not going to hear from you, Mr. Coyne. If you want to sit there for moral support or hand Mr. Rosenblum Post-its or whisper in his ear, I’ll let you do that as supervisor.
You’d think a corpse would keep its mouth shut. But Mr. Coyne apparently didn’t realize he was already dead.
The judge asked whether or not the three people Judge Brann had ruled were appointed unlawfully were still running the NJ US Attorney’s office. Mr. Rosenblum claimed he only knew what he’d been told by Mark Coyne, which apparently was nothing more than to shut up and claim ignorance. Unsatisfied with these non-answers and dodgy quasi-denials, Judge Quraishi pressed Rosenblum hard enough that Coyne — who had been directly ordered to sit this one out — felt compelled to respond:
THE COURT: What role does Alina Habba have currently in operating your office? MR. ROSENBLUM: None that I’m aware of. THE COURT: None that you’re aware of. MR. ROSENBLUM: None. THE COURT: All right. So she could be operating the office. MR. COYNE: She is not. MR. ROSENBLUM: She’s not. MR. COYNE: She is not. THE COURT: Sit down, Mr. Coyne. If you speak again, I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak. MR. COYNE: Your Honor — THE COURT: You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside the Court and do whatever it is you guys want to do. So if you continue to speak, you can leave. MR. COYNE: Your Honor — THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: — if — THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: If a notice of appeal– THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: -is entered– THE COURT: I’m directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coyne.
And with that, Mr. Coyne exits the court. Voluntarily, according to the transcript, but only voluntarily in the sense that court officers didn’t have to physically restrain him and remove him from the court.
But it’s not like the DOJ prosecutor left in the court room gets to skate by just by being less of an ass that Mark Coyne. Judge Quraishi refers to the order from Judge Brann from earlier in the month — one that specifically warned that if the DOJ kept the same “triumvirate” of illegally appointed US attorneys in that office, that it did so at its own peril.
The closing of the transcript says what so many federal judges think, but have also said in hearings and on the record in rulings and orders: the Trump DOJ has managed to completely destroy the reputation of the Department of Justice, despite having controlled it fully for barely over a year.
THE COURT: Here is your risk. This is your risk.
So your authority to operate is while [Judge Brann] has stayed the opinion, when he says literally on the last page, you don’t even have to go through all of this. All you have to do is turn to the back and it says “If the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk.”
What you’ve told me today, what your representation is, which I don’t believe by the way. I won’t believe it until you testify. That is what happened to the credibility of your office.Generations of U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy within a year.
This damnation isn’t unique. The DOJ is painting itself into a corner all over the nation. Hundreds of judges are no longer willing to take the government at its word. And that gives the government a handful of choices, none of which could be considered “wins.” The DOJ is going to have to dump prosecutions. Or it’s going to have to send its top prosecutors to testify under oath in court (which is way different than simply submitting sworn declarations). Or it’s going to have to go back to respecting the law, starting with the ousting of every illegally appointed US attorney.
The final option, however, isn’t generally considered viable, but it’s the one the administration is most likely to put in motion: ignoring every entity that opposes it while simultaneously telling Americans whose rights it’s trampling that this is the only way to make America great again.
Not a day goes by that its hypocrisy isn’t exposed. Here’s the latest, which certainly isn’t the last: the DOJ’s insistence that government employees be given preferential treatment in court.
Multiple bullshit prosecutions are underway, with AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ hoping to convert regular protest stuff into long-lasting federal felony charges. This hasn’t gone well for the DOJ, which tends to find itself rejected by grand juries when not getting its vindictive prosecutions tossed because they’ve been brought by prosecutors who don’t have legal claim to the positions they’re holding.
While the government continues to make social media hay by tweeting out wild allegations and the personal information of people who have yet to have their day in court, it simultaneously claims it should be illegal to identify federal officers and post their information to social media.
And while that’s just the government being hypocritical in terms of social media blasts, it’s engaging in another level of hypocrisy that’s not as easily dismissed. As Josh Gerstein reports for Politico, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s personal participation in this form of hypocrisy is not only inexcusable, but it’s also on the wrong side of the law.
Two federal judges have raised concerns about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s use of social media to publicize a wave of arrests last month of people charged with interfering with federal officers during an immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.
When the government seeks protective orders to shield the details of cases from the public eye, the order applies to the government as much as it does to the defendants. But since Bondi can’t keep herself from scoring internet points on behalf of the Trump administration, she’ll be lucky to keep these particular prosecutions going.
That’s the upshot of this court order [PDF], handed down by Minnesota federal judge Dulce Foster:
As a threshold matter, the government’s claimed concern about the victim/agents’ “dignity and privacy” and the risk of doxxing is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. On January 28, 2026, at 12:53 p.m., Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly posted a tweet on X announcing, to a national audience, that Ms. Flores was arrested along with 15 other people as “rioters” who “have been resisting and impeding our law enforcement officers.” […] In publicly posting that information, the government failed to respect Ms. Flores’s dignity and privacy, exposed her to a risk of doxxing, and generally thumbed its nose at the notion that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The post also directly violated a court order sealing the case (ECF No. 6), which was not lifted until the Court conducted initial appearances later that day (see ECF No. 7).
If the argument is that it’s dangerous for federal officers to be publicly identified but perfectly fine for random citizens to be exposed to threats of violence, the argument is deeply flawed. At worst, it’s the most powerful people arguing that the least powerful people should be exposed to the same sort of stuff they claim federal officers might be exposed to if their names are made public.
At best, it’s a tacit admission that more people are opposed to this administration’s actions than are opposed to the actions of those who engage in protests. If the DOJ really believed what the government is doing was good and supported by a majority of the public, it wouldn’t seek protective orders preventing the release of personal information.
But that’s not the case it made in court. And courts are now refusing to pretend the government is operating in good faith when it says some personal information is more equal than other personal information.
This determination was echoed in another court decision dealing with a Minneapolis-based prosecution:
At a hearing in a separate Minneapolis case last week, another magistrate judge, Shannon Elkins, directed prosecutors to “address whether the public posting of photographs violated the Court’s sealing order.” The government missed a deadline Tuesday to respond. Elkins later agreed to extend the deadline until Monday.
In the first case, the judge gave the government what it wanted, but applied those desires to both parties in the prosecution. If the defense team is barred from publicly revealing information about the government officers, the government is likewise barred from making information about the defendants public. It doesn’t get to have it both ways.
While it would have been somewhat refreshing to see the court allow the defendants to release whatever information they’d gathered about the federal officers to, I guess, make things even, I also recognize “two wrongs make a right” is no way to run a judicial system. I do say that very hesitantly, however. After all, we’re being governed by people who believe that even if they purposefully do wrong, there’s no power that can stop them. But there’s little that’s more satisfying than beating cheaters at their own game while playing by the rules. Hopefully, this great nation will be able to weather the constant attacks on what makes it great by people who are seeking to destroy it from the inside.
The Trump administration is purposefully cruel. That much cannot be argued, not when it has deliberately sent deportees to foreign torture prisons, dumped them in war-torn countries with histories of human rights abuses, and stranded people its has been ordered to release far from home without their IDs, phones, or money.
This regime loves to inflict pain. Its desire to erase as many minorities from this country as possible has led it to do things no competent government would ever do, especially not one that serves a nation long known as a land of hope and opportunity. The people who first landed here were escaping religious persecution. (They then went on to eradicate the people who actually lived here, but stick with me for a moment.) People seeking the same refuge from persecution are now being ejected from this country as quickly as possible.
The good news is that a federal court has at least pumped the brakes on one such DHS effort. In Minnesota — where Trump has used benefits fraud allegations as justification for a “surge” that has resulted in two murders committed by federal officers (so far!) — a federal judge has just told the administration it can’t just suddenly declare an end to refugee status.
The longtime government policy has been that refugees — vetted and legally admitted individuals — who are yet to adjust to lawful permanent resident status cannot be detained on that basis alone.
With Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), the Trump administration wants to change that.
In a pair of memos issued in December 2025 and February 2026 — which Law Dork has covered extensively — the Department of Homeland Security has purported to change that policy by rescinding and re-rescinding the 2010 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that most recently enunciated that policy for applying the relevant provision — 8 U.S.C. 1159 — of the Refugee Act of 1980.
What used to be a normal part of the “give me your tired, huddled masses” ideal that once represented this Land of Opportunity is no longer. The Trump administration is now claiming it can simply pretend existing law no longer matters. And while it is true that Congress could decide to rewrite or overturn the 1980 law, it cannot simply be ignored just because the DHS sent out a couple of memos telling federal officers they’re free to ignore existing law.
Fortunately, this Minnesota court isn’t going to sit by while the administration pretends the only interpretation of the law is the one it recently wrote for itself. From the opinion [PDF]:
When the clock strikes 12:00 a.m. on the 366th day after a refugee was lawfully admitted to the United States, according to the Government, 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a) gives Department of Homeland Security officials the power to arrest and detain that refugee with no limits on the length of detention. Because § 1159(a) provides no such power, the Court will issue a preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from arresting or detaining refugees in Minnesota on the basis that have not yet been adjusted to lawful permanent resident status—which, by law, cannot occur until one year has passed. The Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled.
You see the obvious evil here, right? A refugee — at earliest — cannot secure lawful permanent status until after one year has passed. Trump’s DHS says refugees applying for permanent residence can be arrested and detained indefinitely 24 hours after they’ve been here for a year. The court is right: this not only flips the law on its head, it completely destroys an American ideal that made this nation of a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world.
Decades ago, as a nation, we made a solemn promise to refugees fleeing persecution: that after rigorous vetting, they would be welcomed to the United States and given the opportunity to rebuild their lives. We assured them that they could care for their families, earn a living, contribute to their communities, and live in peace here in the United States. We promised them the hope that one day they could achieve the American Dream.
The Government’s new policy breaks that promise—without congressional authorization—and raises serious constitutional concerns. The new policy turns the refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.
A government that retains any notion of serving the public good would never have attempted to enact this policy. Only a government filled with unjustified hatred of “others” would dare to destroy the American Dream. And only a regime so laden with craven bigots would dare to drape themselves in the flag while shitting on what actually makes this country great.
And, it must be noted, this is only a temporary block. The court is going to allow the government to defend its actions. I don’t think the government will win, but it will certainly kick this up the ladder to the appellate level. That’s fine, so long as the restraining order stays in place while the government cooks up a defense for its blatant racism. With any luck, this will stick all the way to the Supreme Court… and then hopefully after that review as well. No one who truly loves America would back this effort. And no one who only claims to love America while strip-mining it of its greatness should be allowed to turn this great nation into a “dystopian nightmare.”
It’s all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them.
This simply isn’t working during Trump’s second term in office. The rules and laws (and the oft-referenced “rule of law”) are still in place. But they don’t mean much when there are no meaningful methods of enforcement.
Trump continues to staff the DOJ with prosecutors who have never been subjected to the legally required confirmation process. To be fair, it’s always been a struggle to staff Trump’s DOJ. Those who haven’t quit because they refuse to engage in vindictive prosecutions are being fired because they either won’t engage in vindictive prosecutions or they’re simply not doing it as hard and as fast as Trump would like.
Plenty of people who used to serve Trump personally as his attorneys have been elevated into top-level prosecution roles, despite their complete lack of relevant experience. None of these people have been appointed legally.
Judges have been pushing back, which has led to Trump’s former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan being unceremoniously ousted from her role as a US attorney. Alina Habba spent most of a year generating massive conflicts of interest after being quasi-appointed to the position of US Attorney. She did this while still employed by Trump as his personal lawyer. Last December, she resigned from the position she never held legally and is now just another Trump lawyer who gets to hang around in the West Wing.
John Sarcone — Trump’s former campaign lawyer — was disqualified by a judge in January because he, too, had not been legally appointed to his position because Trump (and AG Pam Bondi) decided anyone who Trump wanted to be a US attorney could be one, even if that meant skipping the confirmation process entirely.
That didn’t bode well for Trump’s revenge fantasies. Sarcone being benched by the bench meant that all of his subpoenas targeting NY state attorney general Letitia James were no longer valid.
If the president decides he doesn’t want to subject his prosecutorial appointees to the confirmation process, that’s fine. But they only get to serve for so long (120 days) before they have to be replaced with a confirmed nominee. If that doesn’t happen, the court system gets to appoint a prosecutor to the now-open position.
The White House on Wednesday evening fired a new interim U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District less than five hours after a panel of federal judges had appointed Donald T. Kinsella to the position.
The swift termination of Kinsella, a former longtime federal prosecutor, underscored the ongoing tensions in federal districts where the administration of President Donald J. Trump has clashed with judges who have declined to appoint his interim appointments of U.S. attorneys who have not been confirmed by the Senate.
That’s insane. It probably took more time to discuss the appointment than it did for Trump to fire Kinsella. Kinsella was the court-appointed placeholder — one that could only be replaced by a nominee confirmed by the Senate.
But that’s not happening here. Not only did the administration fire Kinsella, but it immediately declared John Sarcone was still the acting US Attorney, no matter what the court had declared. And rather than caution the administration against ritually abusing the process to keep former Trump lawyers in positions of government power, Trump’s high-level officials got up on the socials to make sure everyone knew this president is actually a king.
On Wednesday evening, after the Times Union first reported Kinsella’s appointment as well as his subsequent firing by the White House, the U.S. deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, posted on X: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”
Hopefully, the court will just appoint someone else and force the administration to keep showing its autocratic ass until one of the White House bumblefucks says or does something that can’t be walked back. Attrition is the name of the game here. And I think there are more than enough qualified prosecutors available to outlast Trump’s revolving door of personal lawyers willing to accept government positions in lieu of a personal check from Trump.
Sarcone ran for Westchester County district attorney as a Republican in 2024 but lost to eventual winner Susan Cacace, a Democrat. He was later nominated by the Trump Administration to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, which covers the Capital region, North Country, Central New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. But neither the U.S. Senate nor federal judges confirmed him, so the Trump Administration made him a special attorney for the region, devoid of term limits and traditional oversight.
Questions were eventually raised about his residence, since he had lived and campaigned in Westchester just a year before being named U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. The Times Union reported that Sarcone’s listed address was a boarded-up building. Following that report, Sarcone ordered his staff to remove Times Union journalists from the office’s press distribution list.
That’s who Sarcone is. And that’s who he is going to be. If the courts are serious about standing up to abuses of executive power, it might be time to engage in a war of attrition.
I seem to recall a years-long freakout among MAGA folks about the Biden administration pressuring social media companies to remove content. You may have heard about it.
Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of Kassandra Rosado, who ran a 100,000-member Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” and Mark Hodges, who created the Eyes Up app for documenting and archiving videos of ICE enforcement activity.
The suit alleges that Bondi and Noem coerced Facebook into disabling the group and coerced Apple into pulling the app from its App Store, in direct violation of the First Amendment. Because, you know, government officials calling social media companies and demanding they remove content is… bad.
The legal theory is straightforward, the evidence is overwhelming, and perhaps most remarkably, the government handed FIRE much of its case on a silver platter. In other words, for all the talk of “censorship” during the Biden admin, which went nowhere due to the lack of any actual evidence, here there not only is evidence, it was eagerly and readily provided by Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem themselves. In public. Repeatedly. Proudly.
Let’s start with the basics of what actually happened, because the facts here are almost embarrassingly damning. Kassandra Rosado created her Facebook group in January 2025, initially as a small community resource for Chicago-area small business owners trying to understand how ICE raids were affecting foot traffic and community events. The group grew to nearly 100,000 members by October as ICE enforcement escalated under what the agency publicly branded “Operation Midway Blitz.” According to the complaint, Facebook’s own moderators reviewed thousands of posts and found exactly five that violated its guidelines. Just five. Which Facebook removed, telling Rosado that participants acting badly don’t impact the group themselves (a good policy!).
Out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments that members of the Chicagoland group created through October 2025, Facebook’s own moderators found and removed only five purportedly violating its guidelines.
Even as to these five posts, Facebook advised Rosado that they were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group.” Facebook further explained: “Groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”
Then, on October 12, 2025, Laura Loomer tagged Noem and Bondi in a social media post flagging the group. Loomer’s role here deserves a moment of appreciation. This is a person who sued Facebook, claiming it was literally RICO to moderate her posts. Who sued all the major tech companies, arguing that content moderation violated her First Amendment rights. Her entire public identity has been built on the premise that private platforms moderating her speech is unconstitutional censorship.
And here she is, tagging federal officials to demand they force Facebook to suppress other people’s speech. The First Amendment, which constrains government action, apparently only matters when Loomer is the one being moderated. When she wants someone else silenced, she calls in the actual state.
The next day, a DOJ source confirmed to Loomer that DOJ had contacted Facebook to demand removal.
That same day, Facebook disabled the entire group. Then Bondi posted on social media claiming credit:
That’s the AG admitting to a pretty clear First Amendment violation. Not in a leaked email discovered through litigation. Not in a deposition. On X, taking credit. Proudly.
Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago.
…. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.
Noem piled on with her own post, crediting the DOJ for the takedown.
That’s the Secretary of Homeland Security saying:
Anti-ICE radicals are using social media apps to dox, threaten, and terrorize the brave men and women of ICE and their families.
Today, thanks to @POTUS Trump’s @TheJusticeDept under the leadership of @AGPamBondi, Facebook removed a large page being used to dox and threaten our ICE agents in Chicago.
These officers risk their lives every day arresting murderers, rapists, and gang members to protect our homeland. Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our @ICEgov law enforcement.
We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.
The Eyes Up situation is even more instructive. Mark Hodges built Eyes Up specifically as a documentation and archiving tool for videos of ICE enforcement activity. The app uses manual moderation—meaning Hodges or other moderators personally review every video before it becomes publicly accessible.
The complaint specifically notes that:
Eyes Up is not useful for tracking ICE location or movement in real time. Because Hodges or other moderators manually review each video before it becomes publicly available, any ICE officers would be long gone by the time a video is posted.
Apple had independently reviewed and approved Eyes Up for the App Store in August 2025, raising no concerns about the content. On October 3, Apple removed it anyway—citing “information provided by law enforcement” that the app violated its guidelines on “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”
“We had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps.”
For years, MAGA world has treated Murthy v. Missouri as a foundational text of government overreach—proof that the Biden administration ran a sophisticated censorship operation by pressuring social media companies to remove content. Jim Jordan convened hearings. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, though MAGA folks love to ignore or downplay what the Supreme Court decision actually said about the case. The argument, reduced to its essence, was that White House officials sending emails asking platforms to review posts against their existing policies constituted unconstitutional “jawboning.”
The Supreme Court threw the case out because the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that the government’s communications actually caused the platforms to take action. The majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett found that the platforms were making their own independent decisions, often rejecting the government’s requests, and that the plaintiffs couldn’t trace any specific content removal directly to government coercion. The evidence, the Court concluded, just wasn’t there. Barrett’s opinion uses the phrase “no evidence” five times. And the little evidence plaintiffs did offer? She called it out as “unfortunately appear[ing] to be clearly erroneous.”
Bondi and Noem have now done something remarkable: they have provided, entirely on their own initiative and through public statements made to friendly media outlets, every single piece of evidence that was missing in Murthy.
Traceability? Bondi literally said “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app—and Apple did so.” Coercion versus mere persuasion? The complaint details how Noem announced she was “working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute” app developers, how Bondi told Fox News that ICEBlock’s creator “better watch out” because the speech was “not protected,” and how these explicit criminal threats preceded the removals.
The NRA v. Vullo standard, which the Supreme Court articulated just before the Murthy ruling (on a case they heard the same day as Murthy), holds clearly that a government official cannot use “the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression” through third-party intermediaries. The complaint quotes this directly. There is no ambiguity here about what happened or who caused it.
In Murthy, investigators spent years poring over internal communications trying to find proof that the government’s requests had actually caused the platforms to act. And found nothing concrete. Here, the government’s own press releases and Fox News appearances serve that function. You don’t need subpoenas or discovery depositions when the Attorney General is posting on X to take credit.
The complaint captures the legal significance:
Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem want to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations. Wielding the power of federal criminal law, they coerced Facebook to disable Rosado’s Facebook group and coerced Apple to remove Kreisau Group’s Eyes Up app from its App Store. That’s unconstitutional. The First Amendment prohibits the government from coercing companies to censor protected speech. NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 190–91 (2024) (“[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”). Without this Court’s intervention, this unconstitutional coercion will continue.
That last line is important as well, because a key piece of Murthy was that to get an injunction, the plaintiffs had to show that these suppression efforts were likely to continue. That wasn’t there in Murthy. But here, we (again) have Noem and Bondi screaming to the heavens that they’re going to keep doing this.
The “officer safety” justification doesn’t survive contact with the actual facts. An app that archives manually reviewed videos of past ICE activity cannot be used to track officers in real time. The complaint notes that Apple had previously approved the app with full knowledge of what it did, then reversed course only after receiving “information from law enforcement”—which appears to mean a phone call from Bondi’s DOJ:
Apple cited its app review guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”
Apple had never previously stated that Eyes Up purportedly violated guideline 1.1.1 or included “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”
In fact, when Apple had independently reviewed Kreisau Group’s application to include Eyes Up in the App Store in August 2025, Apple did not conclude that Eyes Up violated guideline 1.1.1. During that review, Eyes Up was already available on its website, and Apple had full knowledge of the purpose of Eyes Up, of actual videos available on it, and of how it worked (including its location features). Apple flagged some unrelated issues, which Kreisau Group resolved before Apple approved the app. Apple raised no concern that Eyes Up contained “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content in violation of guideline 1.1.1.
This appears to be the exact opposite of the situation in Murthy, where tech companies frequently rejected government requests if they didn’t violate policies. Here, it appears that, under pressure from Bondi, Apple changed its interpretation of the policies in a weak pretext to justify the government-led censorship.
And it was so clearly pretext:
Apple’s transparency reports show that from 2022 to 2024, it almost never removed apps for “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content under guideline 1.1.1. Apple removed only three apps by US-based creators under guideline 1.1.1 in 2022, four apps in 2023, and none in 2024.
Eyes Up was not tracking anyone. It was creating an archive of documented government behavior in public spaces, exactly the kind of activity the First Amendment—and the Seventh Circuit’s precedent in ACLU v. Alvarez—exists to protect.
The viewpoint discrimination point in the complaint is also notable. The government targeted speech that was critical of ICE operations, while ICE itself actively posts on social media about its own enforcement activities, including specific locations and neighborhoods:
Bondi and Noem are not suppressing laudatory speech about ICE’s operations. ICE’s own social media accounts, for example, frequently share videos and photos of ICE arrests and other information indicating where enforcement operations occurred. Bondi and Noem only target such speech, like with Rosado’s Facebook group, that shares information about ICE operations in ways that are critical of those operations or that defendants perceive as such.
The same footage, in the government’s hands, becomes a success story, which make it textbook viewpoint discrimination.
Which brings us back to the political context that makes this so extraordinary to watch.
The people who spent years insisting that Biden’s White House committed the gravest sin against free speech in living memory by asking Twitter to look at some posts about COVID vaccines are, by and large, completely untroubled by Pam Bondi going on Fox News to brag about forcing Apple to remove an app.
The people who elevated Murthy v. Missouri into a constitutional crisis, who convened hearings and issued subpoenas and demanded that the “censorship industrial complex” be dismantled, have found absolutely nothing to say about a case where the Attorney General of the United States explicitly announced that she demanded a tech company remove an application and the company complied within hours.
Their position was, of course, never really about the principle. It was always about which direction the government’s thumb was pressing. When the Biden administration asked platforms to review COVID misinformation posts against their own existing policies—and platforms rejected the vast majority of those requests—that was tyranny.
When Bondi demands Apple remove an app and Apple does it the same day, that’s apparently just law enforcement doing its job.
The lawsuit asks for declaratory relief and injunctions preventing Bondi and Noem from continuing to coerce Apple and Facebook into suppressing this speech.
These irreparable harms will continue absent declaratory and prospective injunctive relief.
At no point have Bondi or Noem backtracked from their position that any involvement in ICE-tracking speech exposes an individual or business to criminal prosecution, nor from their demands that Apple and Facebook suppress such speech.
Accordingly, Bondi and Noem’s threats continue to hang over Apple and Facebook, who would risk adverse government action were they to reinstate Kreisau Group’s app or Rosado’s Facebook group
FIRE’s complaint frames the stakes with appropriate directness:
Our First Amendment right to speak “to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.” City of Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451, 462–63 (1987). Plaintiffs bring this case to preserve our country’s fundamental character as a free nation, asking this Court to protect the basic First Amendment right to share information about our government and its activities.
The MAGA world spent four years constructing an elaborate theory of shadow-government censorship—one that required stretching reality to its breaking point, cherry-picked emails, and ultimately couldn’t survive Supreme Court scrutiny—when the actual government censorship they always claimed to fear was apparently just one phone call from the AG’s office away. They finally got the “coercive jawboning” they warned everyone about. Bondi and Noem are doing it out in the open, on television, and bragging about it in official social media posts.
And the free speech warriors have nothing to say.
Which tells you everything you need to know about what they actually believed all along. The principle was never “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove speech.” The principle was “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove our speech.” Now that the thumb is pressing in the direction they like, the constitutional crisis has mysteriously resolved itself.
