As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo – acquired via a whistleblower – asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge’s warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”
Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Conversation’s Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.
Okay, I’m going to read the Fourth Amendment – and then you’re going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Can you help us understand what that means?
Since the beginning of the republic, it has been uncontested that in order to invade someone’s home, you need to have a warrant that was considered, and signed off on, by a judicial officer. This mandate is right within the Fourth Amendment; it is a core protection.
In addition to that, through jurisprudence that has evolved since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it is settled law that it applies to everyone. That would include noncitizens as well.
What I see in this directive that ICE put out, apparently quite some time ago and somewhat secretly, is something that, to my mind, turns the Fourth Amendment on its head.
What does the Fourth Amendment aim to protect someone from?
In the context of the ICE search, it means that a person’s home, as they say, really is their castle. Historically, it was meant to remedy something that was true in England, where the colonists came from, which was that the king or those empowered by the king could invade people’s homes at will. The Fourth Amendment was meant to establish a sort of zone of privacy for people, so that their papers, their property, their persons would be safe from intrusion without cause.
So it’s essentially a protection against abuse of the government’s power.
That’s precisely what it is.
Has the accepted interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed over the centuries?
It hasn’t. But Fourth Amendment law has evolved because the framers, for example, didn’t envision that there would be cellphones. They couldn’t understand or anticipate that there would be things like cellphones and electronic surveillance. All those modalities have come into the sphere of Fourth Amendment protection. The law has evolved in a way that actually has made Fourth Amendment protections greater and more wide-ranging, simply because of technology and other developments such as the use of automobiles and other means of transportation. So there are greater protected zones of privacy than just a person’s home.
ICE says it only needs an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, to enter a home and arrest someone. Can you briefly describe the difference and what it means in this situation?
It’s absolutely central to the question here. In this context, an administrative warrant is nothing more than the folks at ICE headquarters writing something up and directing their agents to go arrest somebody. That’s all. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘We want you arrested because we said so.’ At bottom that’s what an administrative warrant is, and of course it hasn’t been approved by a judge.
This authorized use of administrative warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment flies in the face of their limited use prior to the ICE directive.
A judicially approved warrant, on the other hand, has by definition been reviewed by a judge. In this case, it would be either a U.S. magistrate judge or U.S. district judge. That means that it would have to be supported by probable cause to enter someone’s residence to arrest them.
So the key distinction is that there’s a neutral arbiter. In this case, a federal judge who evaluates whether or not there’s sufficient cause to – as is stated clearly in the Fourth Amendment – be empowered to enter someone’s home. An administrative warrant has no such protection. It is not much more than a piece of paper generated in a self-serving way by ICE, free of review to substantiate what is stated in it.
Have there been other kinds of situations, historically, where the government has successfully proposed working around the Fourth Amendment?
There are a few, such as consent searches and exigent circumstances where someone is in danger or evidence is about to be destroyed. But generally it’s really the opposite and cases point to greater protections. For example, in the 1960s the Supreme Court had to confront warrantless wiretapping; it was very difficult for judges in that age who were not tech-savvy to apply the Fourth Amendment to this technology, and they struggled to find a remedy when there was no actual intrusion into a structure. In the end, the court found that intrusion was not necessary and that people’s expectation of privacy included their phone conversations. This of course has been extended to various other means of technology including GPS tracking and cellphone use generally.
What’s the direction this could go in at this point?
What I fear here – and I think ICE probably knows this – is that more often than not, a person who may not have legal standing to be in the country, notwithstanding the fact that there was a Fourth Amendment violation by ICE, may ultimately be out of luck. You could say that the arrest was illegal, and you go back to square one, but at the same time you’ve apprehended the person. So I’m struggling to figure out how you remedy this.
Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me come home.”
The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.
Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn’t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.
Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump’s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped.
Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump’s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the “Friends of Trump.”
The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.
The Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter, and more than a third of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit.
But even amid this turmoil, Ver’s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump’s family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver’s team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word “fraud.”
It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.
Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.
“Roger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.
In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department.“I know of no cases like this,” said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. “They’re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.”
Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump’s or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called “the happiest day of my entire life.” In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world’s supply.
Ver is clean-cut and fit — he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He’s often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.
Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new “non-country” without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.
“Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people’s income to control them in any way,” he told a gathering of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. “It makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes.” More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They “say, ‘Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?’”
Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn’t a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep “exit tax” on the appreciation of all their property.
In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes.
Ver’s defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors’ advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies’ holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.
The Biden administration’s Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver’s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was “rock solid,” according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver’s defense that he made a good-faith error.
By the time of Trump’s election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials worried he might use to escape on the high seas.
In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was “barking up every tree,” said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump’s orbit.
Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president. “If anybody knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare it’s Trump, so I think he’ll be able to see it in this case as well,” Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. On Charlie Kirk’s show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word “censored” written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver’s prosecution was unfair. Ver paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.
Ver’s pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign — in which he kept comparing himself to Trump — was not landing, according to Pierce. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors — shut up,” his friend recalled saying.
One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver’s flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, “Roger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.”
But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the “Friends of Trump,” a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state’s solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump’s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.
Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump’s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche to join Trump’s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump’s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022.
On Ver’s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver.
Kise scored the legal team’s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.
In that meeting, however, it wasn’t clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver’s case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged.
Bhirudinitiallyexpressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was “hard to believe” that a man going by “Bitcoin Jesus” would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.
Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.
The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.
But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees’ zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges.
Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.
“While there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,” said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver’s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.
It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being “weaponized” against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.
While many cases failed to grab the administration’s attention, Kise got results. Last week, Kise’s client Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon from Trump.
“Every defense attorney is running the ‘weaponization’ play. This guy gets an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise,” said a person who recently attended a high-level meeting Kise secured to talk the Justice Department down from prosecuting a client.
As Kise stepped up the pressure, Ver’s case ate up a significant share of Bhirud’s time, despite his job overseeing more than 1,000 Justice Department attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter. Ordinarily, it would be rare for a political appointee to be so involved, especially to the exclusion of career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.
Bhirud began to muse to coworkers about whether failure to pay one’s taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn’t it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware Ver’s advocates could try to elevate the case to the White House.
The government ceded ground and offered to take prison time off the table. Eventually, Ver’s team and Bhirud hit on the deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed on a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for a payout and an agreement not to violate any more laws. The government usually reserves such an agreement for lawbreaking corporations to avoid putting large employers out of business — not for fugitive billionaires.
By the time fall approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche’s blessing, were negotiating Ver’s extraordinary deal line by line. Once more, career prosecutors were cut out from the negotiations.
Ver’s team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government’s supposed final offer because it required him to admit to “fraud,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In the end, Ver agreed to admit only to a “willful” failure to report and pay taxes on all his bitcoin and turned over the $50 million.
The government arrived at that figure in a roundabout manner. It dropped its claim that Ver had lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on how much he had evaded in taxes in 2014 alone, plus what the government asserted were interest and penalties. In the end, the deal amounted to the sum he allegedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a U.S. court.
Under any previous administration, convincing the leadership of the tax division to drop an indicted criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a nonstarter. While the Justice Department settles most tax matters civilly through fines, when prosecutors do charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate is over 90%.
People “always ask you, ‘Can’t I just pay the taxes and it’ll go away?’” said Jack Townsend, a former DOJ tax attorney. “The common answer that everybody gave — until the Trump administration — was that, no, you can’t do that.”
When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it touted it as a victory.
“We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and satisfied his obligations to the American public,” Bhirud said in the Justice Department’s press release announcing the deferred prosecution agreement. “This resolution sends a clear message: whether you deal in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe.”
Inside the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: “He’s admitted he owes money, and we get money, but everything else about it stinks to high heaven,” said a current DOJ official familiar with the case. “We shouldn’t negotiate with people who are fugitives, as if they have power over us.”
Among the wealthy targets of white-collar criminal investigations, the Ver affair sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in that kind of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are asking which of the “Friends of Trump” they should hire. One prominent criminal tax defense lawyer said he would give his clients a copy of Ver’s agreement and tell them, “These are the guys who got this done.”
The only one of Ver’s many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.
Over the past week, two federal judges have issued rulings on immigration cases that aren’t just legally significant—they’re genuinely extraordinary documents. One includes a photo of a five-year-old in a Spiderman backpack, biblical citations, and closes with Ben Franklin’s warning about keeping the republic. The other spends 83 pages methodically dismantling a cabinet secretary’s decision, includes screenshots of her social media posts, and concludes that she “pounds X (f/k/a Twitter)” instead of following the law. Both judges reached back to the Founders to make their points. Both dropped any pretense of the typical judicial deference afforded to the executive branch. And both made crystal clear that they see what’s happening for exactly what it is.
Let’s start with the shorter one. Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas issued a brief but devastating opinion granting habeas corpus to Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son, Liam—the child whose photo went viral wearing a blue hat with ears and a Spiderman backpack when he was kidnapped by federal agents in Minnesota and shipped to a detention center in Texas. Judge Biery didn’t mince words:
The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.
He then offered what he called a “civics lesson to the government,” including reminding them of some key parts that were in the Declaration we signed 250 years ago to be free from a monarch:
Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old ThomasJefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:
“He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.”
“He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.”
“For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”
“He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.”
“We the people” are hearing echos of that history.
And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.
U.S. CONST. amend. IV.
And the startling conclusion to the civics lesson the US federal government got from a judge.
Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.
And in case anyone missed the point, Biery closed with a reference you don’t often see in federal court opinions: “Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: ‘Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?’ ‘A republic, if you can keep it.'” Followed by: “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, It is so ORDERED.”
The ruling includes the photo of the five-year-old child, and two biblical citations. The first to “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'” and the second to… “Jesus wept.”
If Judge Biery’s ruling was a shot across the bow—short, sharp, impossible to miss—then Judge Ana Reyes’s 83-page ruling in the Haitian TPS (Temporary Protected Status) case is a full broadside. Where Biery reached for the Declaration and the Bible, Reyes brings receipts—83 pages of them—that lay bare just how far federal judges have moved from customary deference to open incredulity.
The ruling opens with a letter from George Washington in 1783 declaring that “America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.”
Then it gets to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s position on immigration:
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has a different take.
The ruling then includes a screenshot of Noem’s X post declaring “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE. THEY ARE ALL KILLERS, LEECHES, AND ENTITLEMENT JUNKIES. WE DONT WANT THEM HERE.”
Judge Reyes notes dryly: “So says the official responsible for overseeing the TPS program.”
The plaintiffs in the case are five Haitian TPS holders whom Judge Reyes takes pains to introduce:
They are not, it emerges, killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies. They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department; Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.
The ruling systematically dismantles every single aspect of Secretary Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation. But the section on DHS’s supposed “consultation with appropriate agencies” is particularly brutal.
The TPS statute requires the Secretary to consult with appropriate agencies before making a termination decision. Here’s what that “consultation” actually looked like:
On Friday, September 5, 2025—that is, the same day that the NTPSA court set aside the Partial Vacatur of Haiti’s TPS designation—a DHS staffer emailed a State staffer at 4:55 p.m.: “Due to the litigation, we are re-reviewing country conditions in Haiti based on the original TPS deadline. Can you advise on State’s views on the matter?” The State staffer responded within 53 minutes: “State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS statue of Haiti.”
This was it. The full extent of the supposed consultation with appropriate agencies.
The judge notes that she believe she “must be missing something” and included a bit of the transcript from the hearing:
Court: So in the Federal Register notice, the Secretary wrote, “After reviewing country conditions and consulting with appropriate U.S. Government agencies, the Secretary determined that Haiti no longer meets the conditions for the designating as TPS”; right?
Government Counsel: Yes.
Court: What were the appropriate agencies that the Secretary consulted? . . .
Government Counsel: So, Your Honor, it’s the Department of State email found at 409 and 410. That is what we have. . . .
Court: No other agency was consulted?
Government Counsel: No other agency was consulted. . . .
Court: And the extent of the Department of State consultation was the email exchange at 409 and 410.
Government Counsel: That is my understanding
The judge’s response to this 53-minute email exchange being presented as statutory “consultation” is unsparing:
Congress did not vest the Secretary with Humpty Dumpty-like power to make the word “consultation” mean “just what [she] chooses it to mean—neither more nor less.”
It gets worse. The court notes that the State Department’s own Travel Advisory for Haiti—the document that literally says “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason”—was updated after Noem’s first termination attempt. The updated version, warning of worsened conditions, doesn’t even appear in the administrative record. The Secretary responsible for making this determination simply didn’t look at her own government’s assessment of the country’s safety.
Then there’s the pattern. As of this ruling, Secretary Noem has terminated TPS designations for every single country that has come up for review since taking office. Twelve countries. Twelve terminations. The ruling includes a handy chart:
Twelve for twelve. Judge Reyes notes this is “unprecedented in the thirty-five years since the establishment of the TPS program for a DHS Secretary to terminate every TPS designation that crosses her desk for review.”
The ruling then gets into the substance of Noem’s reasoning—or lack thereof. The Secretary claims there are parts of Haiti “suitable to return to” but never identifies a single safe location. Indeed, the Court gave the government a chance to explain exactly where these “parts” of Haiti that were safe were, and was not impressed by the answer:
According to Secretary Noem, “data surrounding internal relocation does indicate parts of the country are suitable to return to.” But the Secretary cited no data to support this proposition and failed to identify a single safe location. In response to an inquiry from the Court, the Government cited an October 29, 2025, USCIS memo in the administrative record as the supporting analysis. “The memo,” it noted, “reflects that individuals have been internally displaced, thereby indicating that Haitian residents found certain areas in Haiti that could be suitable for return.” Butthe memo also fails to identify a single safe location by name or even geographic area. And the fact that, as the memo notes, 1.3 million Haitians—around twelve percent of the population—have been “internally displaced due to escalating violence” says nothing about whether they escaped to suitable areas. If anything, those areas are presumptively now less suitable for return, having been inundated with internal refugees.
Meanwhile, the administrative record is full of statements like these:
“Haiti’s crisis has reached catastrophic levels” — Human Rights Watch, January 2025
“The violence has increased dramatically in 2024” — Doctors Without Borders, January 2025
“Haiti is paralyzed” — Crisis Group, February 2025
“Top United Nations Officials Urge Swift Global Action as Haiti Nears Collapse” — UN Security Council, July 2025
“The people of Haiti are in a perfect storm of suffering” — UN Secretary-General Guterres, August 2025
Against all of this, Secretary Noem concluded that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian TPS holders from returning [to] safety.” Judge Reyes is incredulous that the Secretary’s analysis relies on “emerging signals of hope” rather than actual changed conditions:
Unable to identify present conditions supporting her conclusion, Secretary Noem turns instead to speculation about future improvement. Each source she cited speaks to how Haiti might improve in the future. She quoted a UN article referencing Secretary-General António Guterres’s statement that despite ongoing violence in Haiti, “‘there are emerging signals of hope.’’’ He cautioned that “these fragile gains” depend on “more decisive international support.”Emerging signals of hope, of course, are not actual change.Secretary-General Guterres’s full remarks to the UNSC underscore this point. They do not describe a nation on the brink of recovery. Rather, they describe a nation in crisis, whose future hinges on internal “unity” and “resolve from [the UNSC].”
The ruling also destroys the government’s “national interest” analysis, which focuses on immigrants attempting to enter the US illegally and those who overstay visas. The problem? TPS holders are already here. Legally:
Secretary Noem’s analysis also focused on those who “overstay their visas” and so remain in the country unlawfully. Id. She claimed that these overstayers “may be harder to locate and monitor,” increasing vulnerabilities in immigration enforcement systems. See id. She also said they “place an added strain on local communities by increasing demand for public resources, contributing to housing and healthcare pressures, and competing in an already limited job market.” Id. But Haitian TPS holders are not in this cohort either. They are in the U.S. lawfully. See Jan. 6 P.M. Hr’g Tr. at 85:15–87:12. Indeed, TPS holders are easy to locate because they regularly update their address information with DHS to maintain that status and their work authorization. See id. at 94:25–95:6. And Secretary Noem provides no data to support the overgeneralization that those who overstay their visas are a strain on their local communities. See Dkt. 122. They may well cause a strain, but terminating Haiti’s TPS termination not alleviate it because, again, Haitian TPS holders do not fall into this cohort.
Regarding that confusion of TPS visitors being here legally, meaning they literally cannot overstay their visas, the judge notes in a footnote how absurd part of the government’s argument is:
With respect, this borders on the absurd. The latter has zero relation to the former or reality.
When asked where in the record the Court could find data on TPS holders represented in “overstay” rates (based on those who maybe overstayed visas prior to getting TPS status), the government comes up empty. See if you sense where the judge loses patience:
The Government responds by speculating that maybe some Haitians overstayed their visas before obtaining TPS status.Maybe. Who knows? Not Secretary Noem.The Court asked the Government: “[w]here in the [CAR] can the Court find the percentage of TPS holders represented in the overstay rates?” The response: “The [CAR] does not contain data that is this finely dissected.” Which is to say, not enough people to even bother counting.
The equal protection analysis is where things get really pointed. Judge Reyes catalogs President Trump’s statements about Haitians and other nonwhite immigrants:
President Trump has made—freely, at times even boastfully—several derogatory statements about Haitians and other nonwhite foreigners. To start, he has repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity, declaring that “illegal immigrants”—a category he wrongly assigns to Haitian TPS holders—are “poisoning the blood” of America. He has, Plaintiffs allege, complained that recently admitted nonwhite Africans would “never ‘go back to their huts’ in Africa.” He has complained further that nonwhite immigration is an “invasion,” creating a “dumping ground” that is “destroying our country.” He has described immigrants as “not people,” “snakes,” and “garbage,” who have “bad genes.” He has also stated that he prefers immigrants from “nice”—predominantly white—countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark over immigrants from “shithole countries”
President Trump has referred to Haiti as a “shithole country,” suggested Haitians “probably have AIDS,” and complained that Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” He has also promoted the false conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets of the people” in Springfield, Ohio. Even after that (ridiculous) claim was debunked, he claimed they were eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” About two weeks after the Termination, he again described Haiti as a “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting” “shithole country.” He stated: “I have also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.” Then continued, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why cannot we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few, let us have a few, from Denmark.” It is not a coincidence that Haiti’s population is ninety-five percent black while Norway’s is over ninety percent white.
The ruling notes that Trump’s statements came close in time to Noem’s decisions, and that Noem herself has made her own views clear, as noted in the screenshot, calling Haitians “leeches, entitlement junkies, and foreign invaders” just three days after making the Termination decision.
And then we get to the conclusion. It’s worth quoting at length because you really don’t see this kind of language from the bench:
There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it.Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).
And then the kicker:
Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.
These rulings represent something we’ve been watching develop for months now: federal judges completely abandoning the traditional deference typically afforded to government positions, because the government has made clear it doesn’t deserve it. The DOJ’s credibility has been in freefall, and judges are no longer pretending otherwise. They’re reaching back to Franklin and Washington as genuine warnings about what happens when executive power operates unchecked by law or facts.
Some people will dismiss this as “activist judges.” But what we’re seeing is something different: judges trying to do their actual jobs—reviewing whether the government followed the law—and finding that the government isn’t even pretending to follow it anymore.
The administration is ignoring statutory requirements entirely, fabricating rationales after the fact, and treating judicial review as an inconvenience to be steamrolled rather than a constitutional check to be respected. We’re not talking about simple judicial disagreements of interpretation of the law. These opinions read more like desperate signals from the bench that something has gone very, very wrong.
I’ve seen some complaints—in particular about the first short ruling—that it doesn’t read in a very judicial manner. The lack of citations is a bit startling, and probably bodes ill if the government appeals. But that’s almost the point. When a judge includes a photo of a child in a Spiderman backpack, cites “Jesus wept,” and closes with Ben Franklin’s warning about keeping the republic—or when another judge spends 83 pages documenting that the Secretary of DHS ignored her own agencies, ignored the evidence, ignored the law, and instead “pounds X”—they’re writing for more than an appeals court. They’re writing for history. They’re writing for the public. They’re sick of the lies and the gaslighting, and the simple fascism of it all in a supposed constitutional democracy. And they want to make damn sure that someone, somewhere, is paying attention.
The administration’s racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump’s return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable.
The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process and access to legal representation. Officers grabbed people, sent them far from their home states, and shoved them into planes headed to foreign hellhole prisons as quickly as possible in hopes of nullifying the inevitable legal challenges.
The 14th Amendment got kicked while it was still down when the administration decided birthright citizenship was no longer a thing. And the entire administration simply pretends the First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who says things or does stuff it doesn’t like.
The Fourth Amendment got turned into a doormat last May when the DHS Office of Legal Counsel (usurping the role usually held by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel) told federal officers they no longer needed judicial warrants to enter homes so long as they could semi-credibly claim the person they were seeking was subject to immigration court order of removal.
Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
“Amid tensions,” Polish journalists wrote in late 1939. That bit of coyness aside, there’s additional coyness in the memo issued by ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons. There’s very little in the way of legal citations. But there’s definitely a permission slip ICE agents can write for themselves when they head out to terrorize US residents.
Lyons thinks he can redefine legal terms on the fly to allow immigration officers to arrest people without warrants. The memo says “flight risk” (which allows for a warrantless arrest) is not the correct term since it can only be applied after an arrest:
Without explanation, and without any formal policy, ICE previously applied the phrase “likely to escape” as being the equivalent of “flight risk. ” This unreasoned position was incorrect. In fact, there are significant differences between the two standards in the immigration regulatory context and immigration officers should avoid conflating them. A flight risk analysis looks at whether an alien is likely to attend future immigration court hearings, appear before ERO as directed, surrender for removal, and comply with other immigration obligations. Flight risk determinations are made after an alien’s arrest, where the alien has already been identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, and may have had DNA collected.
That’s simply no good for this administration — especially when immigration forces are expected to come up with 3,000 arrests perday. Lyons says (again, without supporting legal citations) that “likely to escape” should be the standard for warrantless arrests, which is a determination agents should be able to make on their own without having to seek an arrest warrant. After all, if they go get a warrant, there’s a good chance the person they want to arrest might be a bit more difficult to find.
While the flight-risk analysis assesses whether an already identified and detained alien is likely to comply with future immigration obligations such as court appearances and appearances before ERO , the likelihood-of-escape analysis is narrowly focused on determining whether the person is likely to escape before the officer can practically obtain an administrative arrest warrant, while in the field. This on-the-spot determination as to the likelihood of escape is often made with limited information about the subject’s identity, background, or place of residence and no corroboration of any self-serving statements made by the subject.
The goalposts are moved. If an officer thinks a person they just happened to come across while performing an arrest with an actual warrant might not stick around to be arrested later, the officer can just arrest them as well, citing the lowered standard of “likely to escape.”
And what makes one “likely to escape” under this arbitrary, completely made the fuck up “legal” standard? Well, it’s a fine blend of “anything” and “everything.”
The subject’s behavior before or during the “encounter,” which covers anything from “suspicious behavior” to simply refusing officers’ commands to let them in a house (without a warrant) or yank them from a car (without a warrant). For that matter, being in a car is all that’s needed to be considered “likely to escape.” (“The subject’s ability and means to promptly depart the scene.”)
Or maybe the “subject” looks like they just may be healthy enough to leave on foot:
The subject’s age and health…
Also on the list: documents an officer “suspects” might be fraudulent (with no demand made that officers attempt to verify documents before engaging in a warrantless arrest). The list also says officers can make warrantless arrests if they suspect the person has violated any immigration law, even though they are not required to do anything at all to seek information that might corroborate their suspicions.
The end result is exactly what this administration wants it to be: a blank check for warrantless arrests that can then be justified after the fact by the officers who performed the arrest. And if they happen to be wrong, they’ll just cut the person loose, secure in the knowledge they’ll never be punished by their superiors, much less held accountable in court now that the Supreme Court has made it impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations.
Given this further erasure of civil rights, one can only assume the coming weeks will bring us DHS/ICE memos declaring the use of private homes as federal operation centers to be well within the confines of the Third Amendment. Perhaps we’ll even see some women jailed for attempting to vote during the upcoming midterms. ALL RIGHTS MUST GO!, says the administration proudly hosting this dumpster fire of a civil liberties fire sale. And once again, the party claiming to make America great continues to eliminate all the stuff that makes America America.
MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday to prevent federal immigration agents from taking a local resident into detention, although the city of St. Peter denied the intervention in a statement Saturday.
It’s believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago.
The person federal officers ran off the road, threatened at gun point, dragged out of the car, and arrested was someone who was merely observing what they were doing. It was one woman in one car and yet federal officers felt compelled to box her in and approach her with weapons drawn. They treated this like a felony stop, as though they were in the process of apprehending a known violent criminal, rather than one person armed with a dash cam and a cellphone.
She wasn’t doing anything illegal. She was doing what anyone could have done: recorded law enforcement officers performing their public duties. Just because ICE et al would prefer to go about their business unobserved (hence the rented cars, dummy license plates, and face masks) doesn’t make being seen by others an illegal act.
Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to tell others to call 911 on her behalf. Federal officers arrested her and drove her towards the Whipple Federal Building, presumably in hopes of getting her on the next plane to wherever the fuck before she had a chance to contact anyone.
But her 911 call derailed this:
“I couldn’t hear what was being said, but within 30 seconds after they hung up, they exited on, an exit that goes into Le Sueur… and then turned around, didn’t say anything to me, and started heading back towards St. Peter.”
The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.
Shortly after that, Chief Grochow drove her home from the St. Peter police station, where the federal officers had left her.
This is frightening stuff. If her husband hadn’t managed to talk to an attorney and if that attorney hadn’t reached out to the police chief, this US citizen might still be sitting in an ICE detention center.
And if that’s not frightening enough, there’s this coda, which makes it clear this administration is willing to punish anyone who won’t immediately try to lick the boots pressed to their necks:
MPR News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident. A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman’s name, date of birth and “A-number,” or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them.
What the fuck. This isn’t normal. This is a rogue administration that answers to no one and has made it clear to the federal officers who serve it (rather than the public they’re supposed to be serving) that they’ll never be punished for behaving like violent, lawless thugs. Many more people are going to be brutalized, if not actually killed, by this government simply because they refuse to ignore what ICE, etc. are doing.
Let’s just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they’re currently at the top of Trump’s shitlist. Prior to last month’s escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s possible ICE would have bragged about robbing money from people at an international airport.
But because this other thing (the MAGA dude) happened first — and because Minneapolis residents have proven incredibly resilient in the face of vengeful federal operations — ICE had to get out its X bullhorn and yell about taking money from people the MAGA faithful have been encouraged to hate by their dimwitted handler, Donald Trump. (For a bit of catharsis, here’s a wonderful recording of the so-called “MAGA influencer” Jake Lang being welcomed to Minneapolis by counter-protesters while he tried to get his anti-migrant hate on. It seems this mook forgot protesters burned a police station to the ground following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.)
This X post comes to us via Dom Ervolina on Bluesky. But since that post can’t be seen by people who aren’t logged in, I’m going to screenshot the X post in all of its ingloriousness, because we certainly aren’t going to be linking to and/or embedding a post from that particular den of depravity that’s overseen by a landlord who can’t seem to decide whether he should be an absentee landlord or a cheerleader for his CSAM-creating, Hitler proxy AI, Grok.
Here goes nothing:
It’s an official post by the X ICE account. Although ICE wasn’t directly involved with this airport robbery, it was first in line to celebrate it. Here’s what it says:
UNDECLARED CASH SEIZED AT MSP
On January 18, HSI St. Paul and @CBP seized $14,135 from two Somali-born U.S. citizens who were departing on international flights from MSP.
ICE and CBP remain vigilant in detecting and preventing the illegal movement of funds across borders to protect national security.
It’s accompanied by a photo of the alleged $14,135 scattered across a Formica table apparently located adjacent to (and somewhat blocking) an airport walkway.
Note that it says $14,135. $14,000 should have been enough. But the bottom right corner of the photo makes it clear federal officers weren’t satisfied until they’d rifled through these people’s wallets.
Yep, that’s $35 dollars, splayed across the table like it’s the focal point of a video produced by the least-successful SoundCloud rap artist ever.
Also, note the way this phrase is… um, phrased:
“…from two Somali-born U.S. citizens…”
You see what the government led with, right? They expect everyone who’s going to cheer whatever they do to stop reading after the “i” in “Somali” (or maybe the “n” in “-born” at best). And they expect everyone to ignore the words that follow that: “U.S. citizens.”
The rabble will get roused because it has something to do (however adjacently) with the people Trump hates and who will do all they can to stoke that hatred, even if that means the occasional bout of hypothermia. (See above link about Maga dudebro getting railed by the locals.)
Ignore the rest of the racist dogwhistling and you get nothing more than ICE celebrating the fact that the CBP stole $14,135 from US citizens.
But that’s not even the stupidest part of ICE masturbating on main. The rules for taking money out of the country are pretty simple: you must declare any amount over $10,000 to Customs. There were two people and $14,000 involved here. Even the laziest of elementary school students should be able to spot the problem here.
No matter how you slice it up, CBP cannot use a customs violation to justify the seizure of $14,000 from two people. If one person was over the limit, the other person was carrying an amount of cash that didn’t need to be declared. If both were carrying half, neither of them were violating the law.
And since the government has yet to give us more details on this, we’re left to assume the government grabbed $14,000 from two US citizens just because it thinks it can get away with it.
Now, it’s entirely possible the government will claim the two people were working together to smuggle more than $10,000 out of the country. But if it does, it should be directly and persistently challenged by the court that takes this case. If that doesn’t happen, the government will be able to steal any amount of cash from any number of passengers boarding the same plane if that total manages to clear the $10,000 mark.
And it will also assume it can free-associate connections between people boarding different flights carrying cash by pretending these unconnected people are engaged in a conspiracy to violate a customs law that seemingly only exists to allow the government to pick people’s pockets (figuratively but also LITERALLY) at our nation’s airports.
On top of that, there are the activities of other federal agencies like the DEA and ATF, who pretend any mildly significant amount of cash in travelers’ luggage must be the end result of illegal activity. And this is so fucking maddening because it has NEVER been illegal to carry cash from place to place, much less try to leave the country with an (undeclared) stack of greenbacks (under $10,000) that tend to produce better results in vacation destinations and ancestral homelands whose currency isn’t worth as much as the US dollar.
There’s no shaming the government into behaving better — not when it’s headed by some of the most shameless government officials ever to hold executive branch offices. But, for the time being, you can possibly sue them into submission. And that’s what needs to happen now. The government is engaging in racism and mouthing empty phrases about “national security” to justify its abusive xenophobia. Sure, this sort of thing predates Trump. But it doesn’t mean we should consider it acceptable just because it’s been SOP for most of this century.
Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than “any domestic law enforcement agency.”
“I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” he said. “Not because we want to be, but because we have to be.”
Granted, the punchline is weak and the person delivering it is even weaker, but for ex-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino — he of the routine violation of court orders and a predilection for Nazi-esque outerwear — to suggest that any part of the anti-migrant hate train is good with children is laughable. That’s some gallows ass humor right there.
Trump didn’t invent separating children from parents when detaining and deporting migrants, but he was the first to turn it into the rule, rather than the tragic exception. His second administration is definitely the one filled with people whose eyes absolutely light up every time they destroy the life of an immigrant.
Here’s what Bovino was defending, while doing his best to talk around the issue. This photo is courtesy of the school that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos attended before being arrested (along with his father) and sent to a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from their home.
That’s a federal officer holding onto the child’s backpack, as if the frightened child might make a run for freedom at any point.
Since that moment went viral, tons of conflicting narratives have been sent out into the public domain. The government has said the usual moronic, hateful stuff about the father being an illegal immigrant who abandoned his child at school when officers closed in on him. The father’s lawyer claims the father has a pending asylum claim, which doesn’t actually make him an illegal immigrant. In fact, it means he can’t be detained or deported until his case is heard.
Stumbling onto the scene following the second execution of a Minneapolis resident in the past three weeks is JD Vance, who was apparently sent out by the president to charm their critics into submission. But being charming or empathetic or otherwise projecting something resembling “normal human being” has never been one of Vance’s skills. So, while he opened up with something approaching respecting the humanity of others — that being that he has a five-year-old of his own — he soon veered in the direction of MAGA incantations to claim the child got everything that was coming to him.
In Minneapolis, Vance sought to appear empathetic toward the child. He declared that he too has a 5-year-old, and said he’d been moved by the story. However, he said he’d done “follow-up research” and discovered that the father was an “illegal alien.”
“Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?” asked Vance, speaking of ICE. He then scoffed: “If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity.”
“Follow up research” of course means “handed DHS talking points.” And referring to the father as an illegal alien (repeatedly) is just a lie of convenience. And it’s probably not even an intentional lie, as Greg Sargent points out in The New Republic. It’s just Vance’s worldview — one shared by plenty of people in the administration — getting out ahead of his pathetic attempt to calm the Minnesota waters.
But an even more grotesque Trump-Vance stance here is going unnoticed. Vance simply doesn’t think it’s a misnomer to call the father an “illegal alien,” despite his asylum claim. That’s because Vance plainly doesn’t believe those awaiting asylum adjudication are here legitimately at all. He and Trump have adopted the position that legal loopholes allow them to deport asylum-seekers before their claims are heard.
Everyone Trump wants gone can be labeled an illegal immigrant. All federal officers and prosecutors need to do is strip them of their protected status, revoke their visas, void asylum applications, or dismiss pending immigration cases to convert people following legal pathways towards permanent residence into “illegals” who are supposedly “invading” our country.
And it will do this even though there are vulnerable people — children, the elderly, parents with newborns, people who are likely to be tortured or killed if deported to the countries they fled — in the mix. And then they’ll send someone who’s not quite as abrasive as Trump, Noem, Bovino, Bondi, etc. to soft-sell the horrors the administration will continue to inflict on this nation for the rest of whatever. It’s callous, malicious, and above all, evil for its own sake. It does nothing to make America greater or safer. All it does is make it whiter.
First off, there’s a chance my headline (which went through several iterations) undersells what’s actually going on here. What’s detailed below is yet another jaw-dropping act of executive hubris, with the DOJ again deciding it can do whatever the hell it wants when a judge dares to tell it “no.”
A little background: it was discovered at some point that the acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office, David Easterwood, was also a pastor of Cities Church, also located in St. Paul, Minnesota. A protest naturally followed. A bit more unnaturally, protesters entered the church and disrupted the service. CNN’s Don Lemon covered the protest, drawing some fire of his own simply for being a rather persistent critic of the Trump administration and its actions.
U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said her agency is investigating federal civil rights violations “by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.”
“A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!” she said on social media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.
You’ll note the qualifier AAG Dhillon used in this exclamation point-riddled X missive: “Christian worshippers.” That sort of thing matters, because it makes it clear (perhaps unintentionally) that this government won’t mind if other protesters disrupt religious services engaged in by members of other religions. (You know exactly what I mean as assuredly as Dhillon knew what she meant when posted that response to the protest.)
Meanwhile, in my home state, Kristi Noem’s successor, Governor Larry Rhoden, announced legislation that would turn the misdemeanor offense of using threats or violent acts to prevent people from practicing their religion into a felony that would double the jail time and fine for those convicted of this offense (bringing it to 2 years in jail and a $4,000 fine).
“If religious liberties fail, any other liberty eventually fails with it,” Rhoden said during a press conference. “If someone decides to target a house of worship, there will be real consequences.”
OK. Well, we’ll see how this gets selectively enforced in the future. I’m pretty sure some religions are more deserving of protection than others, even if the governor does better at keeping the quiet part quiet than Harmeet Dhillon did.
Long story short: the federal magistrate judge rejected five of the eight arrest warrants presented by DOJ prosecutors, including the two targeting Don Lemon and his producer. Rejected arrest warrants are probably even less common than rejected search warrants. But the DOJ continues to fail its way into history under AG Pam Bondi and the second Trump administration.
Like search warrants, those presenting them to judges have options when judges reject their offerings. They can revise them, perhaps sprinkling them with a bit more probable cause or other connective tissue. Or they can decide to buttress apparently bogus charges by talking a grand jury into signing off on an indictment.
But with grand juries brushing off the DOJ repeatedly in recent months and prosecutors desperate to keep winning the battle of headlines, the DOJ went an entirely different direction — a direction so unexpected and unprecedented that the state’s top federal judge felt compelled to write two letters to the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court. Not only did the DOJ ask the Appeals Court to directly review the warrants that had been directed, it did this without notice to the lower court and asked the appeals court to seal its request to keep it from being made public.
That put Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz (a George W. Bush appointee) in the position of having to file an emergency communication of his own with the court, which was followed shortly thereafter by a longer email with more details about the DOJ’s actions. Both letters are detailed in Steve Vladeck’s extremely informative post on this string of events, which includes this chilling description of the DOJ attempted to do:
[C]hief Judge Schiltz is a highly regarded jurist who could not be accused of having an axe to grind against the current administration. And that’s all the more reason why everyone, but especially his colleagues across the federal judiciary, ought to take seriously a pair of letters he filed on Friday in response to an extraordinary (in multiple senses of the word) attempt by the Department of Justice to end-run long-settled understandings of basic criminal procedure in order to bring federal criminal charges against individuals who protested inside a St. Paul church last Sunday.
The Schiltz letters are striking not only because of who wrote them, but because of the deeply unprofessional behavior they describe.
The first letter opens with this:
I am working from home today, as the program that my mentally disabled adult son attends each day is closed because of the extreme cold At 11:34 am, I received an email regarding Case No. 26-1135, entitled “In re: United States of America.” The order in its entirety read:
The motion of the United States to seal is granted. The Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota is invited to file a response, at his discretion, to the petition for writ of mandamus. Any response is due by 2:00 p.m. Friday, January 23.
This is the first that I have heard of any petition for a writ of mandamus. The United States did not have the courtesy to tell me that they would be filing such a petition, nor did the United States serve the petition on me. I am unable to access any documents in Case No. 26-1135 because, at the request of the United States, the case is sealed-apparently even from me. So I have been given about two-and-one-half hours to respond to a mandamus petition that I have not read and cannot read.
Apparently I am supposed to guess what the petition is about and guess what the mandamus petition says and then respond.
On the evening of Tuesday, January 20, five of the eight arrest warrants were rejected by the magistrate judge. Within “minutes,” the DOJ prosecutor was demanding an immediate review of the magistrates’ rejections. The review was assigned to Judge Schiltz, who told the DOJ that because what it was demanding was “unprecedented,” he would hold a bench meeting with the other district judges to decide how to proceed.
Somewhat ironically, that meeting was postponed due to “security concerns” related to the arrival of both J.D. Vance and AG Pam Bondi in Minneapolis, along with protests at the courthouse where two church protesters were scheduled to make their initial appearances. The meeting was postponed to January 27th.
That wasn’t good enough for the DOJ, which had headlines it wanted to keep making. So, it went directly to the Appeals Court, said some extremely disingenuous stuff about “national security” and the ongoing danger of church disruptions if it wasn’t able to arrest three more protesters immediately. (It appears to have given up on locking up Don Lemon.)
Judge Schiltz’s follow-up email shreds the government’s justifications for immediate judicial review of its rejected arrest warrant:
The government’s arguments about the urgency of its request makes no sense. As the government says, “dozens” of protestors invaded Cities Church on Sunday. The leaders of that group have been arrested, and everyone knows that they have been arrested. The government says that there are plans to disrupt Cities Church again on Sunday. Of course, the best way to protect Cities Church is to protect Cities Church; we have thousands of law-enforcement officers in town, and presumably a few of them could be stationed outside of Cities Church on Sunday. The government does not explain why the arrests of five more people – one of whom is a journalist and the other his producer – would make Cities Church any safer, especially because that would still leave “dozens” of those who invaded the church on Sunday free to do it again.
Judge Shiltz should be commended for making sure all of this ends up the permanent record. The government tried to bury its attempt to bypass the normal chain of judicial command, but that has only led to it being further exposed as the thugs they are and definitely intend to be. The DOJ is supposed to hold the law in utmost esteem. But this version continues to act as though the law is whatever it says it is.
For now, the DOJ will still need to wait for a review of its deficient warrants by the lower court. The Appeals Court has rejected its end-around effort, albeit without saying anything more than it might be a little premature. But what was actually said by a judge concurring with the rejection of the writ of mandamus isn’t exactly heartening:
“The Complaint and Affidavit clearly establish probable cause for all five arrest warrants, and while there is no discretion to refuse to issue an arrest warrant once probable cause for its issuance has been shown … the government has failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief,” Grasz wrote.
Hey, Judge Grasz, if you’re concurring with the rejection of an “emergency” review of the merits of rejected search warrants, maybe you should keep your views on the merits to yourself. Unless, of course, you’re just signalling the Trump Administration that it should speed run the alternatives so the warrants can receive your thumbs up once they return to the appellate level.
For now, the warrants are dead. Unfortunately, the DOJ will have probably moved on to some new horrific thing before these get a second pass by the district court.
The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.
Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. Of course, they’ve always been cities overseen by members of the Democratic party, which actually makes this a lot worse, since it shows everyone — including local law enforcement — that this isn’t actually about enforcing laws.
This dates all the way back to Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with handling what the administration constantly referred to as “violent protests,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Law enforcement officials made it clear they could handle the protests that were happening and that adding National Guard units to the hundreds of federal officers would only make things worse.
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. This has repeated itself in every city this regime has invaded. When local cops bristle at the incursion or officials make it clear they don’t feel obligated to finish the fights the fed’s roving gang of kidnappers pick, the administration claims the representatives of the cities it’s invaded just don’t love America enough.
None of that ultimately matters. The administration will continue to treat every complaint as sedition and every protester as a terrorist. Its officers will go far beyond what any pack of rogue cops would dare to do — past bending or breaking rules to simply acting as though there are no rules at all.
Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.
In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records.
It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.
But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.
In Minnesota, it’s even worse. Federal officers have executed two Minneapolis residents in broad daylight (and wounded another). In both cases, local law enforcement was told it was not allowed to investigate these shootings.
After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
[…]
It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
That’s fucked up. This isn’t any better:
Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.
Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.
Even if the administration can see what’s happening, it’s fifty-fifty whether it recognizes the danger of what it is and just doesn’t care or is simply too brutish to see the future it’s creating.
The administration complains about sanctuary cities and demands every law enforcement agency serve its needs, no matter what nastiness it chooses to engage in. But not every law enforcement official (along with many of the people who work for them) is interested in damaging whatever long-term relationships they might have built with the communities they serve just because the federal government wants some fuck buddies while it’s in town.
And none of this is going to go away, no matter how many times violent stooges like (suddenly former) Border Patrol head Greg Bovino says blatantly untrue things during press conferences:
“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.”
Not a single word of that is true. And the cops you expect to back you up when you engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical actions aren’t interested in helping you dig yourself out of your own holes. DHS components no longer engage in good faith with law enforcement when hunting down migrants. Nor do they cooperate with the locals when they have questions about agents’ actions.
Administration leaders think the country serves the federal government, rather than the other way around. And as often as cops can be just as awful as these federal interlopers, at least there’s a modicum of oversight still in operation that might occasionally deter, if not actually punish, wrongdoing by officers. None of that exists at the federal level. Federal officers aren’t expected to answer to anyone and they know it. That much is obvious from their everyday behavior.
But the federal government needs the support of local law enforcement, especially one that thinks it’s going to be able to oppress its way out of any situation it puts itself in. Losing the rank-and-file is something a lot of GOP legislators can’t afford, not with the midterms coming up. This party is poison and even those you’d expect to have the administration’s back are beginning to back away from America’s most toxic asset as quickly as possible.
First, there’s the lies: the immediate, reflexive flurry of posts meant to portray anyone federal immigration officers kill as a threat to public safety. When an officer murdered Renee Good, the administration claimed she was a terrorist who was trying to run over the officer that killed her. Recordings proved this was all a lie.
Even before multiple recordings of the incident surfaced (including one leaked by the murderer himself), the administration was locking everything down. Whenever a law enforcement officer — federal or otherwise — kills someone, an investigation is opened. In almost every case, a parallel investigation is run by an outside agency to at least give the impression that the fix isn’t in.
That didn’t even happen in the Renee Good execution. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrived at the scene of the shooting assuming it would be opening an investigation. After momentarily granting the BCA access, the feds not only kicked the BCA out, but changed the locks.
Joseph H. Thompson, a career federal prosecutor who was running the office the day Ms. Good was killed, called on the Department of Homeland Security to halt immigration enforcement operations while the F.B.I. and state investigators began gathering evidence, according to an email he sent to colleagues that morning.
Yet, shortly after Mr. Thompson set out to launch a conventional review of Ms. Good’s killing, senior officials in the Trump administration overruled him on two fronts.
They sent immigration agents back into the streets of Minneapolis that same day and they barred the B.C.A. from the investigation.
A few days after that, former Trump personal lawyer/current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche made it clear there wasn’t going to be an internal investigation either.
“Look, what happened that day has been reviewed by millions and millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones,” Blanche said. “The department of justice, our civil rights unit, we don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger. We never do.”
“The department of justice doesn’t just stand up and investigate because some congressman thinks we should, because some governor thinks that we should,” Blanche said. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate and that is not the case here.
Todd, maybe this is something this administration never does/never will do, but internal investigations (and outside investigations) have been the status quo for decades, even if the officer claims they were acting self-defense.
Instead, the FBI decided to investigate Good’s surviving partner as well as the person ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered. This prompted a wave of resignations by DOJ prosecutors in the Minnesota US Attorney’s office. The shedding of talent continues in the aftermath of this abhorrent miscarriage of justice:
The FBI agent who initially began working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good has resigned from the bureau, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Soon after the agent opened the civil rights investigation, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the officer. The FBI blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.
Anyone with half a soul should be exiting this administration as quickly as possible. When an administration chases lies with an absolute refusal to even take a second look at a killing by an officer, it’s pretty clear the DHS’s roving kidnapping squads are also allowed to be roving death squads.
Federal officers have done it again. They’ve executed another protester who posed no threat, shooting Alex Pretti 10 times while he lay face down in the street. Again, the administration led with lies that were soon exposed by multiple recordings of the shooting. And again, the feds are locking local law enforcement out to prevent an independent investigation of the shooting.
After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
The BCA wasn’t going to fall for this a second time. State investigators headed to court to secure a search warrant to access evidence held by the DHS and FBI. That warrant was approved. This one may not be so easy to sweep under the Trump regime rug, as Minnesota Public Radio reports:
Judge Eric Tostrud’s order bars the federal government from “destroying or altering evidence related to the fatal shooting involving federal officers that took place in or around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026, including but not limited to evidence that defendants and those working on their behalf removed from the scene and/or evidence that defendants have taken into their exclusive custody.”
Nice. Granted, we know the administration tends to blow off court orders it doesn’t like. So, there’s not much stopping the feds from destroying or altering evidence, other than the threat of contempt charges, which isn’t quite the deterrent one would hope it to be.
But this is all on the public record now. And it leaves the administration with basically only one response to the lawsuit filed by state investigators: argue for its “right” to destroy or alter evidence related to a killing committed by one of its own officers. I mean, it’s obviously not going to show up to court and claim this is something it can legally do. There will be lots of stuff said about jurisdiction and other procedural steps, but underneath it all, the government will basically be fighting for judicial blessing of its planned disappearing of everything that might indicate this wasn’t a clean kill. Remember that because what follows from here will be the administration trying to lock the judicial system out as well.
