Well, well, well. If it isn’t the system of checks and balances. We’ve missed you, buddy!
Long story somewhat short: ICE has been terrible for years, but it’s been much worse under Trump. During Trump’s first regime (~2016-2020), ICE got rocked by a court decision that prevented it from engaging in traffic stops just so it could arrest people for looking vaguely Mexican.
That settlement — secured with the assistance of the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) — was enacted in 2022 during the brief period between Trump Oval Office interloping.
Interlopement or not, it’s still the law of the land in Illinois. And that’s not playing well with Trump’s recent federal invasion of the Chicago area — one spearheaded by Nazi cosplayer Gregory Bovino, last seen violating the law much further south as the commander of a California-based Border Patrol unit.
Bovino chose to violate court orders so often during his short stint in Chicago, he’s been sent elsewhere by the Trump administration. It’s definitely not a sign of disapproval. It’s a vote of confidence that says the presidency will keep changing tables every time it loses a hand to the federal courts.
The Nava consent decree that forbids ICE from doing what it’s been doing in Chicago since before Trump re-grooved his ass marks in the chair behind the Resolute Desk.
And that means a lot of stops, arrests, and ensuing detentions are illegal. And because they’re illegal, people must be freed. The administration continues to act like there’s nothing in the law that prevents it from jailing people who present no flight risk or threat to public safety. That’s definitely not the law of the land and it’s definitely not the law in Seventh Circuit, which has already received notice of the administration’s appeal.
For now, however, that means a lot of people rounded up during Trump’s invasion of Chicago and ICE operations in the area preceding the anti-Democratic Party surge d/b/a “immigration enforcement” will no longer be imprisoned.
District Judge Jeffrey Cummings on Wednesday afternoon ordered the release of at least 313 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between June and early October.
[…]
Cummings has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to immediately release 13 detainees held in Texas, Missouri and other states that both the government and plaintiffs agree were detained in violation of the Castañon Nava settlement that prohibits warrantless immigration arrest in Illinois.
The order [PDF] itself doesn’t limit itself to 13 people, much less the 313 people stated by this Axios article. It says the government must take a look at more than twice this number and provide some sort of evidence as to why this other 300+ should continue to be detained.
To this end, by 12:00 p.m. CST on November 14, 2025, with respect to the subset of 615 individuals discussed on the record, defendants shall provide the Court with their names and specify which of the individuals in this group have been identified by defendants as posing a “high public safety risk” if they were released.
That deadline has come and gone. And the only thing the administration has done is file motions asking for this order to be stayed until this case can be heard by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court. It has offered nothing in defense of those arrests and continued detentions of people it’s unlikely to be able to prove must be indefinitely detained despite being arrested in violation of the Nava Agreement (2022). But it’s apparently hoping the court that didn’t feel Gregory Bovino should be forced to respect the law will have much to say about the consent decree violations it engaged in while Bovino was still running the show in Chicago.
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.
These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.
The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.
When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”
Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.
Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.
Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.
This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.
Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.
“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.
The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.
Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.
Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.
“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”
Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.
Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”
DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twiceordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.
But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.
Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.
Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.
“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)
The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.
Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.
DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.
Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.
“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.
More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”
JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of state-supported punishment.
It sure looks like he’s got quite the double standard.
Yesterday, Vance defended Young Republican leaders who were caught in leaked chat logs making racist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi comments, dismissing their behavior as harmless kids being edgy. But just a month ago, this very same JD Vance was calling for people to be reported to their employers for making far milder comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. And this week, his administration revoked visas from foreigners who criticized Kirk online.
Let’s start with what Vance said yesterday about the Young Republicans scandal. When asked about leaked Telegram messages showing Republican leaders joking about gas chambers, expressing love for Hitler, and using racial slurs more than 250 times, Vance had this to say:
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. At some point, we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not ok.
You can see that video at the end of this clip here:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet."
There are several problems with this defense. First, these weren’t “kids”—many of the participants were in their twenties and thirties, and some held high-level government positions. Peter Giunta was chief of staff to a New York assemblymember. William Hendrix worked for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Michael Bartels serves as a senior adviser in the Trump administration’s Small Business Administration.
Second, these weren’t just “stupid jokes.” The leaked messages included participants saying “I love Hitler,” joking about putting political opponents in gas chambers, using racial slurs hundreds of times, and discussing rape as “epic.” One participant wrote about creating “the greatest physiological torture methods known to man” for political opponents.
But the bigger issue isn’t Vance’s factual errors—it’s his breathtaking hypocrisy.
Just last month, Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s radio show and had a very different message about “edgy, offensive” comments. When people made critical remarks about Kirk’s death, Vance urged listeners to hold them accountable:
Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
This wasn’t theoretical. Many people lost their jobs after Vance’s call to action. Apparently, their “edgy, offensive” jokes were uncivil and unacceptable, and a perfectly good reason to “ruin their lives,” but when it’s pro-Nazi (!!!) content, suddenly Vance wants to give it a pass? Come on.
And this week, Vance’s own administration took it even further. The State Department revoked visas from at least six foreigners who made critical comments about Kirk’s death on social media. The department explicitly stated as much in a tweet:
If you can’t read that, it says:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.
It then proceeded to show the posts from people whose visas it had revoked, making it blatantly clear that they were deciding to punish people in America for their speech, an unambiguous First Amendment violation. The State Department then showed social media posts from some of those whose visas were revoked, and they appeared way less “edgy” and “offensive” than anything that was revealed in that Young Republicans chat.
So let’s be clear about the double standard here: When Young Republicans joke about Hitler and gas chambers, they’re just “kids” telling “edgy, offensive jokes” that we shouldn’t ruin their lives over. But when foreigners or Americans criticize a conservative influencer—with comments that were objectively far milder than “I love Hitler”—they deserve to lose their jobs, their visas, and their livelihoods.
And, of course, this is a regular pattern from the Trump administration. Graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was literally kidnapped off the street for writing a mild op-ed in support of Palestine. The administration has revoked over 6,000 student visas this year, sometimes targeting students who protested in support of Palestine (the State Dept. falsely said it was for “terrorist activity.”) Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air over an extremely mild joke about MAGA’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.
And there are many more examples as well.
Hell, there are even more examples of Vance trying to dismiss horrible things his friends say as “kids being kids.” Remember Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE bro who was found to have posted a ton of truly racist shit just last year? After the tweets came out, Elez resigned, but JD Vance quickly stepped up to defend the tweets as some form of youthful edgy indiscretion:
So, again, when it’s blatantly racist, hateful shit, Vance’s response is:
I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
The pattern is unmistakable: pro-Nazi, blatantly hateful rhetoric from Republican allies gets dismissed as harmless fun, while even mild criticism of conservative figures or support for Palestinian rights gets you targeted for life-ruining punishment by federal agencies.
Vance owes the American people an explanation that he will never give. When exactly are “edgy, offensive jokes” acceptable, and when do they deserve government retaliation? Because right now, it appears the only rule is that it’s all in good fun if your hateful, pro-Nazi posts are in support of the MAGA plan. And simply cannot be allowed if they call out bad behavior on the part of MAGA folks.
If joking about Hitler and gas chambers is just boys being boys, then surely criticizing a political commentator should barely register as offensive speech. Yet somehow, the people making Nazi jokes get Vice Presidential protection while their critics get federal persecution.
This is the MAGA world view: hateful neo-Nazi supporting bigotry is all cool if you’re doing so in support of team MAGA. But if you’re not on the team, then it’s fine to weaponize the entire government against your political views. This is the very blueprint for authoritarian control of speech.
Vance knows full well that he’s using a double standard here. But that’s part of his fascistic view of the world. He’s flaunting the fact that he will abuse his position to protect his friends, while eagerly punishing his political opponents for doing way less. It’s right out of the fascist playbook.
Vance finds it hilarious that he’s getting away with such a double standard, but that doesn’t mean anyone else needs to play along. Keep calling it out. And if there are any true reporters left, they should keep asking him about this double standard over and over again.
America isn’t the land of the free. We abandoned that title when we returned Donald Trump to office — the same person who refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and, immediately upon his return to power, pardoned almost everyone who engaged in an attempted insurrection on his behalf.
The so-called “party of free speech” has repeatedly made it clear that the First Amendment means everyone should be subjected to their hateful speech, but will never be extended to those who oppose the current leadership and/or simply wish to document the evil acts of those currently in power.
The GOP’s extreme hypocrisy during both Trump administrations makes the usual hypocrisy expected of politicians look like a mostly-benign side effect of existing in a democratic republic. Under Trump, there’s nothing benign about the hypocrisy, which no longer contains even the minimum of plausible deniability we’ve come to expect from more competent, less bigoted politicians.
Activists, journalists, and the occasional opinionated college student have all been targeted for expressing their displeasure with this government and its policies. Turning ICE, DHS, and the DOJ into politicized weapons of administration vengeance has ensured maximum pain in return for acts that used to be considered protected by enshrined constitutional rights.
That’s no longer the case. Rights are now privileges under Trump, which means they’ll only protect people the GOP likes. For everyone else, there’s the constant threat of government retaliation — an act that has long been considered illegal by every federal court, but now is destined to become quasi-codified by a Supreme Court that is just as beholden to Trump as any of his Cabinet appointees.
This may be an exceedingly long preamble to the subject matter discussed in this post. But I don’t want any reader to skip over the reality of the current situation before they decide to start being bitchy and pedantic in the comment threads. This country is being destroyed from within by those “leading” it. These are the symptoms of deliberate internal rot. This isn’t just about some guy having his rights ignored and his life expectancy cut short by a deliberately cruel administration.
“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”
The Trump administration learned only one thing from this blowback: to stock its prisons with more people in “direct retaliation” for “reporting,” ensuring Guevara could never be considered an anomaly. That it’s been unable to make these charges stick says more about the ridiculousness of its efforts than any belated recognition that locking up people for using their First Amendment rights might be a bad idea.
Guevara was placed in a detention center run by GEO Group, which has gone all starry-eyed now that ICE has billions of extra dollars to play with and needs more detainment facilities immediately from whatever government contractor is first to respond with literally any bid.
On top of that, Guevara’s phone was seized by federal officers, but as of the end of July, his legal reps had yet to see a warrant justifying its continued detention, much less any searches the government has most likely already performed.
Guevera’s case made the news, as was to be expected when the government arrests journalists (no matter their country of origin) for performing journalism. Just as predictably, the Trump administration has chosen to amp up the punishment of Mario Guevara because his very existence remains problematic for a government that occasionally has to pay lip service to long-held rights.
So, this is what the Trump administration has decided to do with El Salvadoran native Mario Guevara, who fled his country to avoid being imprisoned and tortured by local militia groups: under the cover of night, it has vanished him back to the land he fled, as The Guardian reports:
Guevara has been a media mainstay in the Atlanta area for about 20 years, after fleeing El Salvador to escape leftwing militias in 2004. Though he has a work permit and two of his children are American citizens, he has operated under the “administrative closure” of deportation orders for much of that time.
Immigration officials put him on a plane at 4am on Friday morning, family members said.
Guevara’s final destination is El Salvador, something that follows (as The Guardian reports puts it) the “longest imprisonment” of any reporter arrested for acts of journalism “in United States history.”
This latest act of betrayal of American ideals follows more than 100 days of detention, even though all criminal charges were dropped, leaving Guevara only with dubious claims about legal residency by ICE.
Speaking of ICE, immigration officers told Guevara this his documentation of public activities by public officials in public places was literally a threat to the US government in general.
Despite clearly identifying himself as press, Guevara was arrested by local law enforcement in June while reporting on a protest against the Trump administration near Atlanta. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) then took him into custody. Prosecutors quickly dropped the charges after confirming he was complying with law enforcement, and an immigration judge granted him bond. Immigration officials, however, refused to release him, claiming that livestreaming law enforcement activity makes him a threat.
This is, of course, the current administration’s stance on documenting any federal mass deportation activity. DHS and ICE have both issued statements about the supposed increasing threat to officers (mostly to justify the never-needed-before mask use by federal officers) and the DHS itself has issued guidance to other law enforcement agencies stating that filming law enforcement (itself a protected First Amendment activity) is a threatening act worthy of criminal charges.
Because Guevara managed to attract international attention with his unjustified arrest and lengthy detention, the government has decided to punish him by sending him back to the country he left because he feared for his life.
That’s extremely disheartening because it means shaming the government is no longer enough on its own to provoke change. Sure, plenty of governments decide to become even more vindictive when shamed, but that desire for revenge often results in mistakes that can be undone by federal courts. Now, it appears even the federal courts are powerless (because the Supreme Court is unwilling to oppose Trump) to right wrongs by forcing the government to pay for its mistakes.
This doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t be named and shamed for it being shitty on pretty much every conceivable level. It’s still worth doing, because every bit of exposure has the possibility to help. But we should temper our expectations for positive changes. That’s not meant to be defeatist. Every bit of resistance is worth the effort. If nothing else, we should not be deterred from documenting this rise of authoritarianism as it’s happening. The truth still needs to be told, even if those who find it inconvenient are doing all they can to erase it from the permanent record.
The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.
This week the paper fired its last black opinion columnist for directly quoting Charlie Kirk, a man paid by right wing billionaires to create short-form video internet propaganda where he tricks dull children into believing that minorities are inferior human beings.
Karen Attiah, WAPO’s founding Global Opinions editor, took to Bluesky to say that WAPO management fired her for “gross misconduct.” Her offense? Standing up for her own civil rights in the age of U.S. authoritarianism:
Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah…
Attiah explains what happened here. Her offense, according to a letter sent by Post leadership obtained by Oliver Darcy, was “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men,” including this one that simply quoted Kirk’s own words:
The Washington Post has always had a backward and ignorant policy that tries to prevent its employees from expressing human opinions. But its worth noting that this dated relic has never applied to opinion columnists specifically hired to express their opinions. That’s before you even get to the fact that “I should be allowed to exist without being threatened by hateful bigots” isn’t an opinion.
It’s clear Attiah, who hired murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WAPO’s opinion pages, was fired for the modern cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and rich white authoritarian-earlobe-nibbling billionaires.
Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.
The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes. So all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times) are desperately trying to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors.
The collapse of major U.S. media institutions and repurposing of many of them as propaganda (see: CBS) very closely follows the authoritarian playbook in countries like Hungary. A functional press, healthy education system, and an informed electorate is an existential threat to rich right-wing zealots with terrible, unpopular ideas, who want to strip the country for parts in peace.
But however rich Jeff Bezos may be, the market for billionaire ass kissing and authoritarian earlobe nibbling is minimal and already extremely saturated. The paper has not only been suffering a brain drain of decent journalists and columnists, it’s been heavily bleeding subscribers since election season. And the more Bezos tries to reshape reality and informed consensus, the bigger the backlash seems to get.
The death of mainstream corporate journalism at the hands of weird rich assholes does, one would hope, open the door to more independent journalism, worker-owned journalism outfits, and direct-to-consumer newsletters (though it’s ironic Attiah’s article on her firing is being hosted at Substack, a company run by people who openly courted white supremacists to goose engagement).
If it’s not yet clear, there’s a violent information war going on. And the folks who care about things like foundational ethics, informed consensus, and the public good are losing. Badly. Not giving our money, time, or attention to companies and billionaires keen on crushing democratic norms and basic human rights seems like the very least we can do.
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Neat! How did this happen? Well… it looks a whole lot like what’s happening in the USA right now:
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
So, that’s the Congress part of it. Who else has been pitching in with the effort to consolidate all the nation’s power in the Executive Branch? Oh. Right.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Things like these once seemed like an impossibility in America. Now, they almost seem inevitable. And while it might be extremely difficult to make this happen as quickly as the world’s “coolest dictator” has in El Salvador, it’s probably neither as hard as we want to believe it is, nor would it take nearly as long as we might hope.
The groundwork for destroying the remnants of a democratic republic is already being laid by the Trump administration. If we’re hoping for an extension of our (mostly) representative democratic ideals, we’re going to need a whole lot more than the obviously faulty assumption our fellow Americans won’t be willing to get stomped in the face by a boot heel, just as long as people they don’t like get the boot heel first.
Jasleen Singh, writing for The Brennan Center, has an extremely detailed report on every effort being made by Trump and the GOP to ensure any future elections (if there are any) will be a.) limited as much as possible to people who support the GOP, and b.) so bereft of security and integrity the GOP can claim any election outcome they don’t like is fraudulent.
It all starts with Trump’s most brazen move — the pardoning of nearly every January 6th insurrectionist convicted of federal charges. This made it clear it didn’t really matter whether you were on the right side of history. It only mattered whether or not you were on Trump’s side. In doing so, he set precedent for anyone willing to follow in his footsteps, providing people engaging in criminal acts with a pretty much guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card so long as their violence is on behalf of the GOP.
Singh’s report is as enlightening as it is horrifying, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not going to be able to do it justice with a few pull quotes because there’s just so much being done to undermine the entire election process.
It’s not just the voter suppression efforts, which have been a favorite tactic of Republicans ever since anyone other than white, male landowners were allowed to vote. Multiple aggressive redistricting efforts are underway to throw more votes to local Republicans, and in far too many cases, courts are failing to shut these efforts down.
On the other side of things, nearly anyone or any entity that provided evidence contradicting Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election has been kicked to the curb.
The president and his DOJ appointees have repeatedly threatened to prosecute the election officials who administered the 2020 election. In a March 14, 2025, speech, President Trump stated, “What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The president has also threatened to target nonprofit advocacy groups that play an important role in voter engagement, election monitoring, and litigation to protect the freedom to vote.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeatedrequests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
The goal here is obvious, especially when combined with the deliberate culling of other forms of oversight and election integrity efforts previously provided by the federal government: make every election so insecure and bereft of external support that every election result can be questioned. Of course, results will only be questioned if they don’t go the way the GOP/Trump want them to, but that’s the entire point of this deliberate destruction of anything related to election integrity. Even those simply interested in ensuring the voting process is as secure as possible won’t actually be able to achieve these aims, perhaps leaving some of them to question the outcomes.
There’s so much more in this report. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself. But let’s dip back in for a second to witness yet another aspect of the Department of Justice the Trump administration has dismantled because it doesn’t serve the squad goals of a bunch of GOP members who were fortunate enough to be born in a country they seemingly want to turn into a country people will regret calling their home.
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
At this point, even the most “glass is half-full” person will be forced to recognize the glass is at least two-thirds empty. There’s no “it will get worse before it gets better” going on here. It’s just going to keep getting worse unless there’s a sea change in leadership and an extremely focused effort to right this ship after Trump has deliberately run it aground for four straight years. Nostalgia is useless, as is pretending that playing by the rules will somehow return everything to normal. The other side is wiping its ass with every American ideal it can get a handle on. We’re regressing to the mean, which is never something the Leader of the Free World should be doing. If we stay on this path, we’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the wrong side of history.
Three weeks ago, California federal court judge Maame E. Frimpong issued an order blocking ICE from pretending looking a bit foreign was reasonably suspicious enough to justify stops, much less the mass arrests ICE officers have been carrying out regularly in the Los Angeles area.
The opinion had to spell out things that should have been immediately clear to ICE (or, indeed, any law enforcement agency, federal or local), like:
[T]he Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.
And:
[A]t least one news article reports that people were dragged out of bathrooms at a swap meet, which makes Defendants’ arguments that their stops and arrests are consensual unpersuasive.
The resulting restraining order forbade ICE from doing its usual ICE stuff, at least in the seven California counties overseen by this court.
Defendants may not rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop, except as permitted by law:
i. Apparent race or ethnicity; ii. Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; iii. Presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.) or; iv. The type of work one does.
All of this was obviously unconstitutional. And all of this was the sort of thing ICE wanted to continue doing, especially since Trump and his administration officials were setting the floor at 3,000 arrests per day and stating this was the minimum expected of federal law enforcement officers, but especially those working for ICE.
The government appealed. But it fared no better during the second review of its racist actions. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled on August 1 that the restraining order blocking ICE’s “round up all the Mexicans!” efforts could remain in place. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)
As the ruling [PDF] points out, there’s plenty to indicate ICE’s actions aren’t supported by anything any reasonable person would consider to be reasonable suspicion. This citation may be anecdotal, but it’s one of several similar supporting statements made by those suing the government to force it to play by the constitutional rules:
To give just one example, Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angeles and identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].” The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.” The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.” He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
There’s plenty of reporting out there that backs up this single example of, apparently, many the Appeals Court could have cited. ICE officers are demanding identification and proof of citizenship (already incredibly problematic) from random (but always non-white) people and then ignoring the provided documents in order to move forward with a detention or arrest.
The court also notes it appears ICE is trying to meet a 3,000 arrests per day quota — another thing law enforcement agencies are pretty much universally not allowed to do. The DOJ’s lawyers, of course, claim no such quota exists:
In response to the Court’s inquiry at oral argument, DHS has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law.
Plaintiffs’ allegation that the government maintains a policy mandating 3,000 arrests per day appears to originate from media reports quoting a White House advisor who described that figure as a “goal” that the Administration was “looking to set.” That quotation may have been accurate, but no such goal has been set as a matter of policy, and no such directive has been issued to or by DHS or ICE.
I’m sure this is all very true. But it’s all equally as meaningless. Of course, no written policies or directives exist. Putting it on paper or incorporating it into existing polices would put ICE on the wrong side of the law as far as arrest quotas are concerned. That’s why none of these documents exist. But that doesn’t mean the expectation doesn’t exist and that ICE officials aren’t doing everything they can (short of leaving a paper trail) to push officers to meet this “goal.” Even if the paperwork doesn’t exist, the pressure and perverted incentives do. And that just makes Stephen Miller the only bigoted idiot stupid enough to say this sort of thing in public, when he just could have limited it to internal verbal communications with ICE and DHS officials.
But whatever, the end result is the same: the plaintiffs have shown enough evidence to support their claim that ICE is violating the Constitution by pretending having brown skin and (perhaps) an accent is all the legal justification it needs to detain or arrest people en masse.
I’ll describe the video briefly, just in case you can’t see the embed or chose not to watch it. On August 2, while an existing restraining order was in place (issued July 14 and affirmed August 1), ICE agents wearing masks and camo drove a Penske rental truck into a Home Deport parking lot. Once parked, the back of the rental truck was opened and ICE officers poured into the parking lot and then moved outward to the surrounding neighborhood, grabbing anyone looking vaguely Hispanic. All of this was captured on video by onlookers.
As Scott Greenfield notes in his post, this certainly appears to be what it is: a direct violation of the restraining order that was upheld by the Ninth Circuit a day before this happened:
If you call the Home Depot parking lot “targeted,” then it was a targeted raid. Otherwise, it was just a roundup of random Hispanics without any basis to believe they were “illegal” other than the fact that they appeared Hispanic and were in the Home Depot parking lot. This was exactly what Judge Frimpong found to be unconstitutional racial profiling.
So, if you need another depressing data point about this administration, you can add this one: yet another example of federal government agencies ignoring court orders and practically daring the courts, Congressional reps, voters, and even the people who claim the Second Amendment protects the rest of the Constitution to do anything about it. So far, the courts are on their own, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that holding the government in contempt is about as useless as issuing “strongly worded” memos. (And, of course, the government has already asked for an “emergency” review of this restraining order from Trump’s robed enablers…)
The repeated violation of court orders may give some plaintiffs a clearer road to victory in individual civil rights lawsuits, but it’s doing almost nothing to assure Americans that the current government won’t just pave over our rights and put up an M1 Abrams parking lot.
Here we go. Again. Nonstop. The Racist Fucks Regime is at it again, leveraging every piece of data involuntarily collected by the government as a weapon to deploy against brown people.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will be given access to the personal data of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and ethnicities, to track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the United States, according to an agreement obtained by The Associated Press.
The information will give ICE officials the ability to find “the location of aliens” across the country, says the agreement signed Monday between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security. The agreement has not been announced publicly.
I mean, you can see the cleansing from here. The Trump administration doesn’t actually care about Medicaid enrollees unless it can find some way to kick them off the service. The juice here is this: “home addresses and ethnicities.” No one actually believes the “worst of the worst” are also availing themselves of limited medical assistance offered by the US government, but there’s a slim possibility ICE might pick off a migrant or two by performing biased searches.
No, the only thing anyone given access to this data will be searching for is “ethnicity,” which means ICE and the DHS will be doing the sort of thing they’re not supposed to be doing under the Constitution: pretending being not-white is the same thing as reasonable suspicion. This point was made particularly (and almost insultingly) clear by a federal judge earlier this month:
[T]he Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.
In other words, assuming things about legal status simply because of English skills — or, in this case, ethnicity — is a non-starter constitutionally speaking. But with this new data-sharing agreement, no one has to ask a judge anything, especially if the government continues to ignore due process rights and fly people to whatever maximum security gulag will take them.
ICE/DHS are going to use this database — along with data pulled from the IRS and other federal agencies — to target people solely because of their surnames and/or ethnicity. And, as the AP report notes, this has not been announced publicly, which remains the case at the time of writing.
All that’s on the DHS website is some crowing about arresting 300,000 people since the beginning of this year, interspersed sparsely with a few narratives about “this one time we caught a really bad guy who was also an immigrant!” And all that means is that 99.9% of those 300,000 arrests were of regular, non-dangerous people who were doing little more than following the rules as well as they could while contributing to their workplaces, families, and communities.
Now, even more of those people are going to be ejected from this country by the hideous bigots currently in office. Giving ICE access to a database searchable by ethnicity guarantees that’s pretty much the only way it will be used. Knowing that, the minimal access restrictions placed on this database are meaningless. It just means ICE will have actualize its bigotry a bit more effectively.
The agreement does not allow ICE officials to download the data. Instead, they will be allowed to access it for a limited period from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, until Sept. 9.
Those restrictions might have meant something if there were a greater purpose than just giving ICE agents a search engine with a “-white” search modifier. If anyone actually cared at all about curbing ICE (and the Trump administration), there would be no option to search by ethnicity. Instead, immigration agents would only be able to run searches on names known to them — you know, actual criminal suspects or previously convicted people.
And, of course, it’s even stupider and evil-er than this end result. The original plan was to allow Trump to enact some sort of weird revenge on states he felt weren’t MAGA enough.
Trump officials last month demanded that the federal health agency’s staffers release personally identifiable information on millions of Medicaid enrollees from seven states that permit non-U.S. citizens to enroll in their full Medicaid programs.
The states launched these programs during the Biden administration and said they would not bill the federal government to cover the health care costs of those immigrants. All the states — California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota and Colorado — have Democratic governors.
Unfortunately, even the stupidest evil is still dangerous. In fact, it might be worse than less-stupid evil, which may occasionally perform the sort of sanity checks even single-cell organisms are capable of carrying out. This is blunt force racism that can hardly even be bothered to pretend it’s serving a higher government purpose. ICE doesn’t need this data, something made obvious by the fact it has never utilized it before now. But now it has it and the only thing it can do with it is make things even worse than they already are.
Trump claims to love the military. Of course, he loves himself even more. And he tends to view those injured, killed, or captured by enemy forces as “suckers” and “losers.” He also considers people who volunteer to serve this country as idiots, since the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good is the antithesis of cutthroat capitalism, where only zero sum deals are acceptable.
But he’ll wave the flag, hug the flag, hold military parades on his birthday, and otherwise pretend to be the most patriotic of Americans, when he’s really just the most Trump in a long line of Trumps.
Whatever perceived failures America might have can be fixed by the art of the deal dude, if his internal delusions are to be believed. Surely the problem isn’t the nation’s inability to sincerely address its shortcomings. No, the problems are all “democrat” things, like diversity, equitable treatment, respect for other people, and tolerance of ideas that might clash with our subjective beliefs.
Trump’s return to office has ushered in a new era of revisionist history. It’s simply not enough for the alleged Leader of the Free World to suggest the liberals have us all wrong. He must write his version of history into the permanent record, whether it’s by allowing military bases to reclaim their Confederate warlord names or by insisting national parks be more blindly patriotic, rather than dispassionately presenting historical facts to visitors.
Pete Hegseth — Fox New contributor and alleged sexual harasser — now heads the military. So far, he’s having trouble commanding any respect, especially since he seems to view any covert military actions as chatroom fodder. Worse, he’s seemingly incapable of admitting any wrongdoing, much less taking personal responsibility for his errors. Hegseth says a lot of stupid shit about “lethality” but fails to understand the thing that makes the military work is its high level of personal accountability, something plenty of cop shops who cosplay as soldiers also fail to comprehend.
Those failures aside, what’s happening now is only going to make the military worse. And it’s going to further damage a relationship with the nation as a whole that is already well on its way to “irreparable” thanks to Trump, Hegseth, and pretty much everyone in the current administration.
While this administration is certainly hateful enough to desire a steady separation of black people from government paychecks, it’s too cowardly to start providing separate bathrooms and water fountains for non-whites. Instead, it’s going to do shady shit like this, which comes with enough implausible deniability the administration will never truly be held accountable for its not-so-on-the-sly bigotry.
The Army is preparing to roll out a new policy that could lead to soldiers diagnosed with a chronic skin condition that causes painful razor bumps and scarring to be kicked out of the service — an issue that disproportionately affects Black men.
The new guidance, expected to take effect in the coming weeks, would bar permanent shaving waivers and require medical personnel to craft formal treatment plans for affected troops, according to multiple service officials and internal documents reviewed by Military.com.
Soldiers in need of prolonged waivers may be directed to get laser treatments. Those who need shaving exemptions for more than 12 months over a two-year period could be kicked out of the Army.
These waivers — which were created for the purpose of retaining more soldiers, especially the group that makes up nearly 25% of new recruits. People identifying as white have steadily abandoned the armed forces, dropping from 44,000 recruits in 2018 to just over 25,000 as of two years ago.
As Military.com points out, the shaving exemption was created to retain black soldiers back in the early 1970s. And while the government will be offering laser treatment, these treatments can lead to permanent scarring and/or changes in skin pigmentation.
The other argument — that trimmed beards prevent proper gas mask/respirator use — is also bullshit:
[A] 2021 study from Military Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found there’s no conclusive evidence that a well-groomed, modest beard interferes with mask function.
The only excuse offered for this transparently racist mandate by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sounds like the sort of thing uttered by a stock redneck character written by the laziest of hacks:
“We kicked out good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms,” Hegseth said in a March statement criticizing what he characterized as bad policy decisions by past administrations. “And today we are relaxing the standards on shaving, dreadlocks, man buns, and straight-up obesity. Piece by piece, the standard had to go — because of equity.”
When men were men and had naked women on their arms and mudflaps, says the SecDef born in 1980. “Because of equity,” says the guy who managed to land a top government job because he looked semi-sober during Fox News broadcasts and, coincidentally, had actually spent some time in the military.
But it’s not just black people Hegseth wants vanished from the military, if not history itself. It’s also gay people. No one anywhere was crying out for this supposed wrong to be righted, but here’s Johnny on the Spot doing it anyway:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to take the rare step of renaming a ship, one that bears the name of a gay rights icon, documents and sources show.
Military.com reviewed a memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of the Navy — the official who holds the power to name Navy ships — that showed the sea service had come up with rollout plans for the renaming of the oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk.
A defense official confirmed that the Navy was making preparations to strip the ship of its name but noted that Navy Secretary John Phelan was ordered to do so by Hegseth. The official also said that the timing of the announcement — occurring during Pride month — was intentional.
Yep, everything about this sounds exactly like Hegseth and the Trump Administration, from the wholly unnecessary renaming of ship that no one had said anything about for nearly a decade to the issuing of the mandate during Pride month because otherwise people might think this is just casual bigotry, rather than deliberately targeted, maximally cruel bigotry.
The documents obtained by CBS News also show other vessels named after prominent leaders are also on the Navy’s renaming “recommended list.”
Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers.
These are the actions of the people “leading” this nation. This is how they behave — like tyrants and bullies, rather than public servants or, you know, actual leaders. It’s a multi-trillion dollar circle jerk attended by every frat boy, himbo, bimbo, and substance abuser willing to hitch their wagon to Trump’s delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately for the people who actually make America great, we’re not only expected to cover the tab, but live in a nation that’s becoming increasingly hostile to most of the people who reside in it.
The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they’re bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California.
Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be performative about bigotry, but none of that “assist federal operations” bullshit will mean anything if the original federal operation has been (mostly) grounded by a federal court.
A federal judge on Friday ruled that immigration officers in Southern California can’t rely solely on someone’s race or the fact that they’re speaking Spanish to stop and detain them.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order after a lawsuit was filed by three men who were arrested as they waited to be picked up at a Pasadena bus stop for jobs on June 18,and after two others were stopped and questioned despite saying they are U.S. citizens.
Frimpong’s order bars the detention of people unless the officer or agent “has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”
This may only apply to the central district of California, but that’s where a whole lot of ICE action is taking place. The decision [PDF] acknowledges several things before moving on to chastise the government for its clearly racist behavior.
First, it says the government has a right to engage in large-scale immigration enforcement efforts. Then it points out all the stuff that governs large-scale enforcement efforts… you know, small things like the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, as well as the long-accepted illegality of targeting people simply because of their perceived race.
The court recites the facts:
Agents and officers approach suddenly and in large numbers in military style or SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, masked, and with their vest displaying a generic “POLICE” patch (if any display at all). Agents typically position themselves around individuals, aggressively engage them, and/or shout commands, making it nearly impossible for individuals to answer their questions. When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.
This isn’t how law enforcement interactions are supposed to be initiated, especially when there’s no probable cause to believe anyone being accosted is dangerous, much less suspected of committing a serious crime. These “encounters” are routinely followed by arrests and detention in undermanned facilities that cannot provide basic human necessities like water, food, or other humane considerations.
ICE has a “policy and practice” of denying due process rights and “effectuating warrantless arrests” without making the proper flight risk determinations. Officers also refuse to identify themselves, the reason for the arrest, or anything else related to the constitutional rights they’re supposed to respect.
The court says ICE can continue to carry out its mass enforcement effort. But it will have to respect the law and the Constitution while doing it. The ACLU — representing several people who have been indiscriminately “targeted” by ICE — gets a win, for now.
The court notes ICE has been denying detainees access to legal counsel, along with other routine rights violations, which leads to this footnote that clearly demonstrates just how shitty ICE is when it comes to preventing people they’re absconding with from communicating with anyone, especially their legal representatives.
During the hearing, Defendants contended that because normal operations at B-18 [detention center] have resumed, there is no likelihood that the Access/Detention plaintiffs would again be sprayed or honked at. This argument misses the point. At issue are the denial of access to counsel and interference with the [Plaintiffs’] core missions, not that the attorneys were sprayed or honked at (although one would hope not to be sprayed or honked at during the course of their job.)
Yeah… I mean, one would hope. This is still America for the moment, at least. This refers to immigration attorneys being attacked with pepper spray when attempting to talk to their detained clients. Other attorneys reported ICE vehicle drivers attempted to drown out shouted communications to arrested individuals by laying on the horn any time they heard anyone outside of the vehicles talking to anyone inside them.
For 52 pages, the government does nothing but lose, leading to things you would never expect to hear from a federal court until exactly this moment in time.
Like:
Second, the Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.
And:
Although Patrol Agent in Charge Harvick indicates that “past experiences have demonstrated that illegal aliens utilize and seek work at “certain types of businesses, including car washes,” this is insufficient to make these factors fit the particularized assessment needed. […] Although the agent in that case had experience that work crews “on occasion included illegal aliens,” they did not provide any evidence about how many local work crews did not. Nor did they have any information about the employer of the specific work crew at issue. In the same vein, knowledge that undocumented individuals use and seek work at car washes falls woefully short of the reasonable suspicion needed to target any particular individual at any particular car wash.
Also:
Lastly, at least one news article reports that people were dragged out of bathrooms at a swap meet, which makes Defendants’ arguments that their stops and arrests are consensual unpersuasive.
Given all of this, the court comes down on the side of the Constitution. It blocks ICE from doing the usual ICE bullshit in this district. Detainees are to be given access to legal representation for at least eight hours a day (Monday-Friday) and four hours a day on weekends and holidays while being held at B-18.
And the flow of people to B-18 should start to dry up, thanks to additional mandates from the court. The court says ICE officers need reasonable suspicion to perform stops (and probable cause after that to perform arrests). And reasonable suspicion definitely isn’t whatever the fuck ICE has been doing so far in California or in the rest of the United States, for that matter.
Defendants may not rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop, except as permitted by law:
i. Apparent race or ethnicity; ii. Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; iii. Presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.) or; iv. The type of work one does.
It all adds up to this astoundingly simple statement, albeit one that law enforcement routinely believes to be false: racism isn’t reasonable suspicion. But this administration can’t hit its anti-white quotas without it (and by “it,” I mean open racism), so it will be appealed endlessly as ICE continues to roam the streets like criminals in search of victims.
