Last fall, an Alabama police officer decided he wasn’t going to allow a 62-year-old woman to exercise her First Amendment rights — not if she was going to do so from inside an inflatable penis costume.

Yes, these are sentences we actually have to write here at Techdirt — things that seem so implausible you’d expect them to be generated from the sloppiest of AI prompts. It’s a real thing, though. It happened to Fairhope, Alabama resident Renea Gamble. It was inflicted by Fairhope PD officer Andrew Babb, who took apparently personal offense at Gamble’s inflatable penis costume and her “No Dick-Tator” sign she carried during a “No Kings” protest.

You can watch the arrest in all of its ingloriousness below. It’s alternately comical and horrifying. Horrifying, because it involves officers assaulting a 62-year-old grandmother. Comical, because multiple attempts are made to fit the person and costume into a police cruiser before deciding it might be easier if the person and costume were separated… which then leads to an officer discovering it’s kind of difficult to shove a non-resisting inflatable penis costume into the truck of a police car.

This arrest and resulting prosecution gained national attention. Rather than encourage the city to drop the prosecution, it seemingly emboldened it. Prosecutors waited until people had moved onto the next outage before dropping additional charges on Renea Gamble, including “disturbing the peace” and “giving a false name to law enforcement.” (The latter charge stemmed from Gamble telling the arresting officers her name was “Auntie Fa.”)

Officer Babb — as captured by his own recording — presented a very subjective take on the First Amendment when arresting Gamble. He not only demanded Gamble explain what he was supposed to tell his own kids if they happened to see her costume (wtaf?), but said her particular form of expression was inherently unlawful because Fairhope was “a family town.”

The officer was as wrong about free speech as the town officials who supported this arrest and prosecution. Fair hope mayor Sherry Sullivan called the costume an “obscene display.” City council president Jack Burrell said the costume “violated community standards,” without bothering to assess what the community’s standards actually were.

Fortunately/unfortunately for him, a local radio station did exactly that, arriving at the opposite conclusion:

In December, a Mobile-based talk radio station held a listener poll to choose its annual Alabamian of the Year, with “Inflatable Fairhope Protest Penis” receiving the most votes.

Much more legitimately fortunate is the disposition of Renea Gamble’s criminal case. As AL.com reports, it has been tossed by municipal judge Haymes Snedeker. However, Snedeker’s acquittal comes with some caveats that will make it a bit more difficult for Gamble to pursue a civil rights lawsuit in this particular venue:

Judge Haymes Snedeker, after a trial lasting more than two hours, said he did not believe Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was attempting to suppress 62-year-old Renea Gamble’s free speech rights during their encounter at the anti-Trump protest. He also said there may have been enough probable cause for Babb to arrest her.

However, Snedeker said he was not 99.9% certain that Gamble should be convicted of crimes stemming from the actions that led to her arrest. She was found not guilty of misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, as well as a municipal violation for disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement.

Snedeker gives the officer too much credit, especially when his own statements during the arrest made it clear he was singling Gamble out because he didn’t agree with her particular form of free expression. The recording shows Gamble wanted to manhandle this penis because he was employed by a “family town” and didn’t want to have to explain to his kids what this costume might represent. He didn’t present anything approaching legal justification prior to pinning Gamble to the ground and handcuffing her.

The judge said all of this despite the officer’s testimony being completely undercut by the recording of the arrest.

Babb testified that he was using de-escalation techniques he was trained to employ as a police officer. He said he was concerned about safety and viewed Gamble’s costume as an “obstruction.” He said he did not arrest her because he was personally offended by the costume or her anti-Trump message.

[…]

[Gamble’s lawyer David] Gespass disagreed, arguing that body camera footage revealed the true nature of the arrest. In the footage, Babb tells Gamble that her costume would not be tolerated in a town that “has values.”

“That’s all he talked about when he was confronting her was, ‘I am not going to put up with this in my town,’” Gespass said. “He said nothing about her causing any problems with traffic. Certainly, if you watch the video, he is not de-escalating anything. He approached her aggressively.”

That wasn’t the only stupid thing said by the government. Here’s the prosecutor attempting to salvage an obviously bogus prosecution:

“There is no constitutional right to wear a total erect penis on the side of the road,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Hmm. Seems wrong. Pretty sure in this context it’s protected speech. And all of these qualifiers suggest no prosecution would be happening if Gamble had simply let a little bit of the air out of the costume to appear a bit more flaccid.

Both the cop and the prosecutor (Marcus McDowell) are welcome to say dumb things in their own defense during testimony. For the judge to suggest this arrest might have been supported by probable cause demands a better explanation than what was given here. If the standard is only that one cop felt something violated the law, the First Amendment is meaningless. It’s the sort of thing that tells citizens their rights only matter once they’re violated… and even then, they still may not mean much. The judge blew the call here and the local cops know it. Gamble still has a target on her back and the cops have the judicial leeway to keep arresting protesters they personally don’t like.

Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the “deep state.”

The FISA court recently blessed an extension of this NSA collection, provided the government fixed the most problematic parts of it — that being other IC agencies’ warrantless access to US persons’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the foreign-facing surveillance dragnet.

Trump was having none of this, pressing the GOP to simply give the administration an un-reformed, un-repaired Section 702 that would presumably allow it to engage in the same abuses it was crying about less than a half-decade ago.

Fortunately for every American only allowed to vote by proxy every two-to-four years for surveillance reform, there is still no clean re-authorization on the books. The senator whose name is synonymous with surveillance reform — Ron Wyden — recently had this to say in his Bluesky post:

Update on where things stand on FISA: this deal is a win. We got the House to back down from an 18 month extension, buying us time to negotiate on real reforms. I’ll be fighting like hell for reforms that put your privacy first, and will have more to share soon.

Not that congressional majority leader Mike Johnson wasn’t trying his damnedest to round up GOP support for a clean renewal that would give Trump what he wanted, and very little of what the GOP actually wanted, given its years of complaining about the FBI’s warrantless access to their communications.

Johnson apparently decided he could slip this one past the goal line by holding a couple of quick votes as time ran out on the current congressional session. Here’s James Baratta with the details for The American Prospect:

Johnson’s dazzling play to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by five years ended in an excruciating defeat, as the bill failed after 20 Republicans joined Democrats in striking it down. One major reason it lost was that the warrant language baked into that measure not only would have codified existing law, but also would have made it easier for Section 702–acquired data to be used against Americans in criminal proceedings.

The 200-220 vote was called at 1:22 early Friday morning.

Baratta’s report refers to this as an “eleventh hour” burst of activity, but it’s actually well past that hour. We’re looking at 13th to 14th hour desperation here, especially since Johnson went back to the well again shortly after this first defeat.

The other shoe dropped during the vote on a rule to consider a clean 18-month extension of Section 702. That rule also failed at 2:07 a.m. in a 197-228 vote.

Given that the average congressional rep is pushing 58, both votes occurred well after bedtime. It’s a testimony to the resistance to clean re-authorization of Section 702 powers that these many reps were still on the floor to shut down Mike Johnson twice.

It also shows that Mike Johnson isn’t actually leading the Republican party. He’s restricted to doing whatever Trump wants, even if that clashes with what many party members want. To get skunked twice in two hours is embarrassing, which means Johnson may not remain majority leader for long, even if Democrats can’t flip the House following the mid-terms.

The good news is this: Congress only has until the end of this month to get a re-authorization passed. If it hopes to prevent this surveillance power from lapsing, Johnson and his fellow surveillance hawks are going to have to make some concessions, which may (finally!) include warrant requirements for searches of US persons’ communications by IC agencies with access to NSA collections.

On the other hand, when push comes to shove, far too many Republicans are willing to be Trump’s doormat and argue against their own interests, along with the interests of the constituents. But this is the most concerted challenge to Section 702 mounted yet. Even the Snowden leaks didn’t manage to get this done. But even if reforms are finally put in place, the public should remember GOP lawmakers did this because they want to shield themselves from domestic surveillance. That it might better protect their constituents is just an unavoidable side effect of their self-interest.

Just to be clear, when I refer to “Trump” in terms of his administration, I’m referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It’s the people around him that are dangerous, since they’re able to convert his rants and brain stem impulses into action.

While it’s understandable that an aspiring autocrat like Trump would feel threatened by a movement dedicated to opposing fascists, it’s only now that he’s returned to office that he can do anything about it. Deliberately ignoring the fact that the most dangerous domestic terrorists are located on the far right of the political spectrum (including the hundreds of people he pardoned for assaulting police officers and raiding a federal building following his 2020 election loss), Trump’s administration is once again attempting to turn protected First Amendment activity into terroristic acts worthy of lengthy minimum federal sentences.

The United States was as concerned as always about Islamist terrorism, said the official, Monica A. Jacobsen, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times and three officials briefed on the meeting. But, she told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

“As always” is a nice touch. It’s always a good idea to keep an “Islamist” scapegoat in the yard, especially when you’re busy losing a war with Iran. Not only does it generate steady work for bored FBI agents, but it also allows Trump to continue pretending the mass deportation of hardworking, tax-paying non-whites is somehow contributing to the effort to root out an alleged “1,700 Iran sleeper cells” in the United States. (No “sleeper cell” has been broken up or deported despite Trump claiming the government already knows who these “sleepers” are and where they’re located.)

As evidence of the dangerousness of “far left” terrorists, Jacobsen pointed to a single protest in Milan, Italy, in which police and protesters “clashed” — the favorite euphemism deployed by people who wish readers to believe protesters were just as violent as law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the administration can’t actually find any hard evidence to back up its assertions about the supposed violent threat posed by far left activists.

In November, the State Department took the first major step in the strategy by designating four leftist groups in Europe — two in Greece, one in Germany and another in Italy — as terrorist organizations. None of the groups has been known to have plotted attacks on Americans in the past decade, which is usually a criterion for such a designation.

All it can do — as it did late last year when Trump unilaterally declared “antifa” a terrorist organization — is disappear any evidence to the contrary — something it did less than 48 hours after Charlie Kirk was killed by gunman during a campus appearance.

Even if you were to decide that what’s being claimed about “far left terrorism” in Europe by this administration is somehow true, you can’t ignore the facts on the ground here in the United States:

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed 112 people across 152 terrorist attacks in the United States, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research institution. Over the same period, left-wing extremists killed 13 people over 35 attacks, according to the analysis, while jihadist attacks left 82 dead.

Even if Trump hadn’t spent his entire term so far routinely insulting and berating our European allies, it’s still unlikely he would have been able to convince them to ignore the reality of the situation for the sole purpose of future abuses of civil liberties and rights.

Trump has been pounding this table since late last year, but now he’s finding fewer world leaders willing to indulge his fantasies or nod politely as Trump’s emissaries literally make shit up about left-wing activist groups.

The State Department wants to bring foreign law enforcement officials from at least 17 countries to The Hague in May for a workshop on how to fight far-left groups like antifa.

[…]

Formal invitations had not been sent as of last week, in part because Congress had to approve funding. U.S. officials told The Times that foreign governments had expressed less interest in the events than the State Department had hoped.

Once again, let’s pause to reflect on these claims. “Antifa” simply stands for “anti-fascist.” You barely have to move left at all to oppose fascism. All you would have to do is move to the left just far enough to align with… I don’t know… Ronald Reagan? And yet this administration is so stupid and thuggish that it actually thinks it can portray people opposed to fascism as more dangerous than US citizens who actively support it.

Everything else on Trump’s list of “domestic threats” is just a lazy rip-off of McCarthyism. “Far left” supposedly covers Communists, Marxists, “anti-capitalists” (yet another tell), and “eco-extremists.” In other words, people who disagree with this particular president and his policies. Free speech is what it is. But Trump and his enablers want people to go away for decades by turning dissent into terrorism.

Meanwhile, the true terrorist threat that is the extremely foreseeable result of the war in Iran is being back-burnered in favor of locking up people who just want to see this country remain a democratic republic. Fortunately for us, the rest of the world is no longer interested (Israel, Hungary, and Russia aside) in pretending Trump poses less of a threat than the people he wants to punish.

We’ve got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I’m sure it would go back even further, taking at least another 100 years off the clock.

The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much has been made clear by the guy at the top of the org chart.

While most presidents — no matter how racist — would at least try to present something “statesmanlike” when talking to the public, Trump has delivered his hatred of non-whites in press conferences and social media tweets. He has frequently referred to non-white countries as “shitholes” and their citizens as “low IQ.” He has claimed Latin America and South America are “sending” the US nothing but terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.

He has also asked publicly why we can’t get more immigrants from predominantly white countries, like Switzerland, Norway, and other countries where blue eyes and blond hair are commonplace. (The answer, of course, is that citizens of those countries actually like the nations they reside in, what with their sensible governments, the prioritization of social safety nets over golden parachutes, and affordable health care. They also prefer their government not be run by criminals and rapists, nor overly forgiving of certain terrorists.)

In hopes of replacing the browner people he’s actively displacing in his War on Migrants, Trump reached out to the supposedly persecuted white people of South Africa, which has only recently made steps towards treating Black people like human beings, rather than possessions or low-level subordinates. Having seen some out-of-context viral video, Trump was convinced white South Africans were being oppressed by Black South Africans, much in the same way he became convinced Haitian refugees were eating people’s pets and/or local water fowl.

All of this racism is now traceable. It’s in the official numbers, as Alex Ip pointed out on Bluesky. The latest refugee numbers compiled [PDF] by the State Department (and released every month) show there’s a new replacement theory in operation here — one that hopes to fill the US with as many white people as possible.

Between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, 4,499 refugees were admitted to the US. All five pages (10 states each) tell the same story: every single refugee admitted during this six-month period was from South Africa. The only exception? Three Afghan refugees who are now residing in Colorado and who arrived here last November.

Since last November, every refugee has been from South Africa. While it may be presumptive to assume that every South African admitted was white, it’s the kind of assumption that’s safe to make because this administration publicly stated it’s only interested in rescuing white South Africans from largely imagined “racial violence.”

The state-by-state breakdown makes it clear the South Africans who have taken advantage of this refugee status are there because Trump rolled out the white carpet for them. The two states with by far the largest numbers of South African refugees are Texas (551) and Florida (331) — both deeply red states that are fully MAGA cooked. California runs a close third with 316, but that’s because California has always attracted arrivals from foreign countries, much in the same way it has attracted US citizens from all over the nation, with its promises of beaches, warm weather, and plenty of places to work while you wait for your script to be optioned.

The only thing working against the administration is all the efforts it’s made to prevent non-citizens from having any rights, much less an opportunity to vote. I’m sure the White House’s finest legal minds (smash cut to a million monkeys with typewriters and Trump U law degrees) are busy finding a way to speed run the naturalization process, but only for refugees admitted to this country since last November. The other irony is some South Africans who’ve taken advantage of this are now claiming they’d rather go back to living in the country they “fled” from because it seems far less dangerous than remaining in a country run by people who prefer fascism to democracy.

This is about as openly racist as it gets. And yet, it’s just going to end up being more bigoted flotsam that will be pushed aside by the next burst of awfulness by this administration. There will be more where this came from. Sooner or later, some of it will manage to break the surface.

While the Trump administration’s extremely aggressive, thoroughly bigoted attempts to eliminate as many non-white people from this country as possible have resulted in some periodic push back from law enforcement officials, we can never forget that federal law enforcement officers are still just law enforcement officers. And, more often than not, they’ll always have the support of their brothers in blue, even though most federal officers prefer camo and face masks these days.

Law enforcement is self-selecting. The people who feel drawn to law enforcement are generally the last people you would want to become law enforcement officers. It’s rarely about being given the chance to serve, protect, and be an active part of your community. It’s almost always about having a badge, a gun, and accountability that’s inversely proportional to the amount of power you immediately obtain.

So, it comes as no surprise that cops who shouldn’t have any skin in the anti-ICE game are stepping up to punish people for daring to criticize the actions of those federal officers. And there’s probably a bit of backlash involved here as well, as this following report details the actions of California law enforcement officers who (one assumes) aren’t thrilled the state’s residents have managed to reclaim much of the power that has always been owed to the people.

Despite the administration’s on/off surges in “blue” states, the furor over ICE and its actions hasn’t died down, not even in California, where the administration rolled out its martial law beta test. At first, it was easy to pretend people protesting ICE were “woke radicals” or “antifa” or “paid organizers” or “lazy trans everywhere college students” or whatever. But it just kept going and expanding, clearly demonstrating a significant portion of the population wasn’t on board with roving kidnapping squads and murders of activists by jumpy recruits recently introduced to the wholly domestic War on Migrants.

Now that it’s everyone rather than just the usual left-wing agitprop cliches federal and local officers expected to confront during protests, cops in California are deciding it’s time to start arresting everyone.

The Clovis Police Department on Tuesday referred Alfred Aldrete, 41, for one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for his role in a February high school student walkout. 

“During the investigation, Aldrete was identified as being present during the walkout and allegedly involved in directing student activity and entering the roadway, which impacted traffic flow,” Clovis police said in a press release. “Investigators also identified Aldrete as being present during a separate student gathering in Clovis on Feb. 5 that occurred outside of school hours.”

Yep, that’s what the Clovis PD actually did: it equated an adult ensuring students made it to their planned protest safely with the sort of horrors — harboring runaways, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, etc. — people usually associate with the crime of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Those would be the sorts of crimes actually prosecuted by county prosecutors under this statute.

This stat may explain why the Clovis PD thought it should explore the fringes of this statute for the sole purpose of punishing someone for speech they (and they people they serve, apparently) don’t care for:

[C]lovis, population 128,000, where Donald Trump won every precinct in the 2024 presidential election — some with more than 70% of the vote. 

That tracks. Fortunately, it doesn’t track as far as the District Attorney’s office:

A representative for Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp in a written statement said prosecutors would not file charges against Aldrete.

Hooray for prosecutorial discretion, but in the non-pejorative sense! It’s an unexpected twist that only makes this further twist even more inexplicable:

Within a day of the walkout, Clovis police said they were considering charges against up to six adults under Section 272 of the California Penal Code, which is most often used to prevent chronic truancy. The Los Angeles Police Department has also said it’s considering charges against people who joined immigration-related protests under the same penal code section. 

At the beginning of Trump’s first martial law-esque surge, the LAPD (and the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department) were opposed to the insertion of National Guard units and other federal officers into the mix. Stating that they were capable of handling whatever minimal “violent protests” they had actually encountered, law enforcement officials made it clear that this federal interloping would only make a manageable problem unmanageable.

More than a year later, the LAPD has flipped the script from blue to red, declaring it’s willing to charge students for truancy (along with the adults who assist them) for participating in walkout that, at best, lasts a few hours. It’s not like these kids are quitting school to pursue a career in protesting. And it’s not like these adults are harming kids by helping them engage fully with their First Amendment rights.

It’s one thing to be the main characters in a pro-Trump town. It’s quite another to be part of the second-largest police force in the United States and decide it’s worth your time, money, and attention to punish people for peacefully protesting. Fuck right off, LAPD. And take the Clovis PD with you.

It wasn’t all that long ago that GOP legislators were collectively stonewalling a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Three years ago, these legislators were seeking to end the FBI (and other IC components’) access to Americans’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the NSA’s supposedly “foreign facing” collections.

It wasn’t that the Republicans cared that Joe Public was being subjected to warrantless domestic surveillance. It was that they were being subjected to warrantless searches of their communications — something that came to light as the result of multiple investigations pertaining to Trump’s first administration.

Now that the GOP has control of the White House again, Republicans are back to not caring about the warrantless searches of US persons’ communications enabled by FISA loopholes very few congressional reps seriously want to see closed.

Another Section 702 reauthorization attempt is only weeks away. Reps who want more of the same thing we’ve been subjected to for decades have until the end of April to push a clean reauthorization through. Unfortunately for them, the FISA Court — while allowing the program to continue whether or not Congress can pass an extension — has made it clear the program needs to be overhauled because it’s still being routinely abused to perform warrantless searches targeting Americans’ communications.

The annual recertification, issued last month in a classified ruling, means that the program can continue to collect phone calls and emails through March 2027 — even if Congress fails later this month to renew the statute that underlies it.

But the judge who issued the March 17 ruling also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data — like the C.I.A., F.B.I. and National Security Agency — have created to allow analysts to process messages, according to unclassified talking points the administration sent to lawmakers in recent days.

The main issue is the filtering tool utilized by agencies with access to the NSA’s collections. The filter allows analysts to drill down the data to only return results pertaining to specific people who have communicated with a foreign person. It would appear agencies like the FBI are using this filter to search for US persons — something that’s supposed to be subjected to additional limitations.

From the talking points detailed by the New York Times, it seems that isn’t the case, which is why the FISA Court is ordering the government to “re-engineer the filter” to force analysts to comply with restrictions pertaining to access of US persons’ communications.

The Trump administration is allegedly “weighing” whether or not to comply with this FISA court order. The only thing that could make it comply would be to codify the order during the reauthorization process. This administration simply isn’t willing to do that.

The Trump administration wants Congress to extend the statute without changes. 

And that’s why Senator Ron Wyden is, again, letting the American public know the current administration is actively arguing against the privacy interests of millions of American citizens:

“The compliance problems are bad enough, but, incredibly, rather than fix them, the Trump Administration is considering appealing the court ruling so that they never have to. This is a highly aggressive and unusual move indicative of an administration that would exploit every angle to expand its surveillance at the expense of Americans’ rights.

“Instead of addressing these problems, opponents of reform are going to try to jam a straight reauthorization of section 702 through Congress next week, while the American people are still in the dark. That’s unacceptable. This court ruling needs to be declassified so that Americans can understand what the Trump administration is actually up to. And Congress must vote for real reforms to protect Americans’ rights.”

I won’t even factor in Trump’s opinion here, because it doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t know enough about anything to be considered qualified to engage in this discussion. Further, this isn’t even necessarily a Trump thing. Pretty much every presidential administration has been unwilling to upset this particular apple cart, even when plenty of evidence of extensive rot has been made public.

But this one’s particularly problematic for the GOP, which spent most of the Biden years claiming Section 702 abuse was evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and his congressional supporters. Now, they’re arguing the opposite: that the “deep state” it so recently opposed should be allowed to do what it wants for as long as it wants to… so long as it’s not sweeping up their communications.

Status quo seems likely to prevail yet again, especially with the Trump Administration clearly interested in increasing the amount of domestic surveillance perpetrated by Intelligence Community components. After all, without it, the “worst of worst” day laborers and factory workers can’t be kidnapped by federal officers and members of the fearsome, centrally organized terrorist group known as “antifa” can’t get caught in dragnets that are supposed to be targeting foreign adversaries. It’s going to be more abuse for the stupidest imaginable reasons because that’s just how things are going to go as long as this iteration of the GOP remains in power.

If you’re not corrupt, you generally don’t have to say certain things.

Let’s take a look at ex-NYC mayor Eric Adams who, while dealing with plenty of corruption investigations and allegations, protested his innocence by saying stuff no one who wasn’t hip deep in corruption would ever say:

“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

This isn’t something that’s nuanced or complex. Most people in any supervisory position never need to tell their subordinates to not break the law. It’s the lowest of low bars that doesn’t even deserve comment, much less “repeatedly.” On the rare occasion that someone does break the law, you may want to reinforce this concept.

But this statement suggests a lot of people working for the mayor really wanted to break the law, but were perhaps occasionally deterred by the “repeated” reminder that breaking the law wasn’t acceptable. Not that this repeated reminder worked. Plenty of people in Mayor Adams’ orbit were subjects of law enforcement investigations. So, this exhortation seems less like a deterrent and more like the laziest form of plausible deniability.

Which brings us to Trump, who is saying things no one who generally expects officials in his administration to get through their careers without breaking laws would ever need to say.

President Trump has repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office, according to people who have heard his comments.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting to laughs, according to people with knowledge of the comments. That radius appears to be expanding as the president repeats the line. Another person who met with Trump earlier this year said the president quipped about pardoning anyone who had come within 10 feet.

In one conversation with advisers in the dining room next to the Oval Office last year, Trump said he would host a news conference and announce mass pardons before he left office, some of the people said.

It’s not just a question of “why would you say that?” It’s also a question of “why would you feel the need to say that?”

We already know Trump isn’t afraid to use his pardon powers to reward supporters and financial benefactors. His mass pardon of January 6 insurrectionists was startling in its transparent self-interest. Trump now appears to be offering pre-emptive pardons, which is only going to encourage his officials to break more laws and engage in more open corruption, now that they’ve been assured they’ll never be punished for it.

Of course, the White House front mouth has applied some spin to a statement Trump has already made at least twice:

“The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said. 

That deflection is just as damning as Trump’s own statements. Even if he’s just making a joke (something that’s almost impossible to believe since Trump seems incapable of humor, much less self-deprecating humor), it’s an incredibly stupid joke to make when he’s already abused this power to pardon a group of people who committed federal crimes in hopes of illegally elevating him to the position of president despite losing the election.

This “it’s just a joke” deflection is further undercut by the press secretary’s next words: Trump’s “pardon power is absolute.” That says that even if Trump isn’t joking, these pardons are going to happen and no one can stop them from happening.

That’s what really matters here. Trump has nothing to fear from anyone. The Supreme Court has already blessed a lot of his theories of absolute executive power. The only thing stopping Trump from pardoning people who commit crimes on his behalf is shame, and he’s entirely devoid of that human quality.

We can already see the scorched earth this political party will leave behind if it’s forced from office in the next election. All we can hope is that Trump fails to follow through with his pardon threat, allowing a bunch of loyalists to be punished for his actions. And that end result is all but assured. Trump has fired plenty of loyalists and yet still has people willing to be thrown under the bus for the cause. Wait, that’s not entirely accurate. Trump is surrounded by loyalists who are willing to ask where each bus is located and when they should lie down under the wheels.

Of course, this is all win-win for Trump. If he doesn’t pardon anyone, those punished for enabling him will be treated as martyrs. And if he does wipe the slate clean as he exits the Oval Office, he’ll once again escape the accountability that is supposed to come with the position. Given what’s been said by Trump, I’d expect his underlings to amp up their illegal efforts. When you have nothing to lose but your soul, it makes sense to sell it while it’s still a seller’s market.

The government’s reliance on grand juries to bring charges against activists, protesters, and the president’s personal enemies has been misplaced. Increasingly, grand juries are refusing to give the government what it wants: rubber-stamped indictments that will allow it to move forward with vindictive prosecutions.

But there’s still something grand juries offer that regular courts can’t: secrecy. If the government doesn’t want the public to know how it’s building cases, it’s best bet to drag everyone involved in front of a grand jury whose secrecy can’t easily be pierced without a concerted effort by involved parties and the assistance of sympathetic judges.

There’s a good reason the government doesn’t want the public to know what it’s doing in this case detailed by Ryan Devereaux for The Intercept. There’s some shady stuff happening here, along with some incredibly incompetent stuff.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

That’s the brief summation. The details, however, make this whole thing look sketch as fuck. Reddit received the first demand for this user’s data on March 4. Two days later, it informed the user that the government was seeking this information. The Reddit user secured legal representation from the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

The user’s lawyers looked through the targeted account and couldn’t find anything that might be considered criminal.

Commenting on a Minnesota Star Tribune article, another Reddit user posted that Ross might be welcomed as a hero in Florida or Texas. John Doe responded by sharing that Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard — biographical details that were circulating widely at the time. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” they wrote.

In another post, a Reddit user asked what they should write on an anti-ICE protest sign. John Doe suggested the lyrics to a song: “Urine speaks louder than words.” In a third instance, Doe wrote, “TSA sucks and we all know it.” According to the Reddit user’s attorneys, these were the most aggressive posts they could find.

While one would hardly expect legal reps to dish out inculpatory information in response to journalist’s questions, the lack of anything possibly law-breaking speaks for itself. The whole thing looks like a fishing expedition by the DOJ on behalf of ICE — something that’s confirmed by the administrative subpoena ICE issued in hopes of unmasking this user.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

In case you’ve forgotten, the C in ICE stands for “Customs.” That means whoever “wrote” this subpoena didn’t even care enough to ensure the correct boilerplate was copy-pasted into the subpoena. ICE wants to punish this person for their speech, which it seemingly believes adds up to a federal crime. In support of its demand for user info, it inserted boilerplate pertaining to customs enforcement.

Then again, this might have been intentional laziness. As The Intercept notes, the Trump administration tried to use the same customs statutes to unmask his critics back in 2017. Those efforts were criticized by the still-operable Office of the Inspector General.

ICE withdrew the tariff-related subpoena. Then the DOJ sent another one nearly a month later, this time targeting Reddit itself:

This time, instead of requesting information on an individual user, the government ordered Reddit itself to appear before a grand jury — not in California, but in Washington.

The request came not from an ICE field agent but rather from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C., where Reddit has received the highest number of federal law enforcement information requests. The records sought spanned a period roughly three times longer than what ICE had originally requested.

That’s the backdoor the DOJ is trying to use. It can’t get the stuff it thinks will generate an indictment via the usual Smoot-Hawley whatever the fuck. And since it’s not interested in seeking an actual warrant (which would require judicial review) to compel Reddit to produce user data and information, it’s hoping it can accomplish the same thing in a secret court far away from anything resembling an adversarial process, much less the watchful eyes of a federal judge.

That’s the Department of Justice deliberately routing around a crucial part of the justice system in hopes of securing ill-gotten “wins” against critics of Trump, his policies, and his administration in general. With any luck, this attempt won’t work because it’s been exposed. But rest assured, this administration will never stop trying to bypass the systems of checks and balances that might occasionally prevent it from doing whatever it wants.

More of the same for the Trump administration — one that seems incapable of achieving its goals without breaking the law or disregarding the Constitution.

Hundreds of judges handling thousands of cases have already told the administration it can’t do the things it thinks it can when it comes to satisfying its anti-migrant bloodlust/Stephen Miller’s 3,000-arrests-per-day quota (they’re the same thing!). And, outside of the Fifth Circuit, where the majority seems to believe Trump should get whatever he wants, this steady stream of judicial rejections continues.

Yet another class-action suit alleging the wholesale violation of Constitutional rights has resulted in a ruling siding with the Constitution. This case is one of several being handled by the ACLU. This particular one originates in Nevada, which at least keeps it out of the hands of the Fifth Circuit. (Unfortunately, the administration knows who’s buttering its bread, which is why detainees are often shipped immediately to detention centers in Texas and Louisiana.)

The administration has only a single argument to present in its defense of its unconstitutional mandatory detention activities. It involves selectively quoting two related (yet distinct!) immigration statutes and pretending that 1+1=whatever the fuck we say it does.

One of the most concise explanations of the administration’s deliberate misreading of these statutes was delivered by Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York last year. The government wants to pretend people who encounter immigration agents while crossing the border are indistinct from migrants who have already been in this country for weeks, months, or years. They’re not the same thing, but the administration insists they are, despite having only convinced the Fifth Circuit that the laws don’t actually say the things they say.

Given that detention under § 1225(b)(2) is essentially mandatory and that detention under § 1226(a) is largely discretionary, it follows that whichever statute Mr. Lopez Benitez is subject to is potentially dispositive here. That is, if Mr. Lopez Benitez was detained as a noncitizen “seeking admission” to the country under § 1225(b)(2) (as Respondents argue), his detention would be mandatory. If, instead, he was detained as a noncitizen “already in the country” under § 1226(a), then his detention is discretionary and he would be, at a minimum, entitled to an appeal before an immigration judge.

To be sure, the line between when a person is “seeking admission” as opposed to being “already in the country” is not necessarily obvious. For instance, someone who has just crossed the border may technically be “in” the country but is still treated as “an alien seeking initial entry.” Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. at 114, 139 (holding that a noncitizen detained “within 25 yards of the border” is treated as if stopped at the border). But there is no dispute that the provisions at issue here are mutually exclusive—a noncitizen cannot be subject to both mandatory detention under 1225 and discretionary detention under § 1226, a point that Respondents conceded.

These are not the same thing. Section 1226 deals with people already in the country, who are given Constitutional protections. Section 1225 deals with people crossing the border who are met immediately by immigration agents, who don’t have access to the same due process rights.

As the court points out in this case, the language of the statutes makes it clear Section 1225 is “temporally and geographically limited to the border” by other language contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The government, however, wants to pretend it’s indistinct from Section 1226, which deals with people who are already in the country and have been there for a significant amount of time.

The only way the government can present its defense of indefinite detention of migrants without bond hearings is to twist the wording of both statutes. The Nevada court [PDF] isn’t going to let that happen. It calls out Trump’s DOJ for its cut-and-paste antics.

The government contends that the plain language of § 1225(b)(2) requires DHS to detain all noncitizens like Plaintiffs, who are present in the U.S. without admission or parole and subject to removal proceedings, regardless of how long they have been in the country or how far from the border they are apprehended. But this Court finds that the government reads § 1225(b)(2 (A) as a fragment of statutory text in isolation.

Context matters. The government knows this, which is why its arguments remove the parts of the law it wants to use from the context that indicates its actions are illegal.

The Court finds the government’s reading of the statutory text inapposite for severalreasons. First, the government distorts the statutory text, including terms of art specially defined by Congress. Second, the government isolates and abstracts the phrases it favors in § 1225(b)(2)(A) from their context within § 1225 and the statutory scheme, while rendering language it finds inconvenient within § 1225(b)(2)(A) both contrary to ordinary meaning and needless surplusage. Finally, the government’s interpretation unnecessarily renders provisions of § 1226(c) superfluous in all but the rarest cases, unjustifiably construes Congress’ addition of § 1226(c)(1)(E) through the 2025 Laken Riley Act to be utterly ineffectual, and creates unnecessary tension between the relevant provisions, §§ 1225 and 1226.

This is what it looks like when you know you can’t win on the merits. This is the government pretending the law says what it wants it to say and hoping to slip it past a judge and under the skirts of Lady Liberty.

Courts aren’t as dumb as the Trump administration hopes. Let’s look at the statutes, the court says, but the whole thing rather than just the things the government thinks might be usable.

The Court cannot accept such a fraught interpretation when a reading devoid of such conflict, which gives each statutory phrase and section independent meaning and force, is far more plausible.

What follows is a few dozen pages making everything summarized above granular and specific. And if Trump doesn’t like it, he can always ask the legislators he treats as extraneous to rewrite the law in his favor. Take it up with Congress if you don’t like the way the law is actually written, the court says without actually saying it:

[E]ven with regards to removal proceedings as opposed to custody determinations, Congress explicitly reflected its understanding of longstanding due process precedent that recognizes the more substantial due process rights of noncitizens already present and residing in the U.S. compared to the minimal rights of noncitizens seeking to enter.

Even a Congress loaded with MAGA bitchboys isn’t going to be able to erase Constitutional protections for migrants no one really seemed to have a problem with until white Christian nationalists took over the West Wing (on two non-consecutive occasions). The current Congress is merely an afterthought in service to Federalist Society theories of unitary executive power — something that surely won’t come back to haunt them when America decides it’s time to hand the reins to the opposition party.

And that’s not all of the bad news for Trump and his enablers. The due process thing is already a known issue and one that has resulted in hundreds of losses for the administration’s lawyers. This court also points out the Fourth Amendment implications of its actions. While this doesn’t necessarily create the sort of precedent that would shut down the DHS’s extremely creative interpretation of the Constitution, it will provide plenty of citation pull-quotes for litigants challenging ICE’s warrantless arrests and home entries.

[N]o administrative warrant requirements exist in the text of § 1225(b)(2)(A) or its implementing regulations. The government’s interpretation of that provision as geographically unlimited is thus in tension with the application of the Fourth Amendment within the country’s interior, which “requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force.”

I’m sure this quotation of Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Trump v. Illinois is deliberate. The guy behind “Kavanaugh stops” (TL;DR: looking foreign is probable cause when it comes to immigration enforcement) is being directly quoted to reject the government’s reliance on administrative warrants to bypass the Constitution. [Chef’s kiss gesture.]

Great stuff. But, as always, tempered by the realization that this administration will not stop doing illegal things just because a court has directly told them these actions are illegal. The old equation — asking forgiveness > asking permission — doesn’t really apply. This administration will do neither. It will simply DO until it becomes impossible to continue.

Don’t let that discourage you, though. Even if the co-equal branches don’t seem to be living up to the “checks and balances” hype, we’re a nation of millions spread across a considerable number of square miles. They can’t take us all at once.

I’m not here to cut the Trump administration any slack or engage in both-sides bullshit, but this is something that has always been true: we treat anyone imprisoned or detained as less than human. The dehumanization begins with something we call “processing” — a word that separates a human from their humanity by making them sound like nothing more than paperwork.

The horrors seen in jails and prisons are often compounded at immigrant detention facilities. While some duty of less-than-minimal care might be extended to imprisoned US citizens, it’s far more often ignored when federal officers believe (mistakenly) that migrants aren’t protected by the Constitution.

The litany of violations stretches back forever. Techdirt doesn’t stretch back quite that far, but let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

From 2022, back when Biden was still in office and people like me were thinking no one would ever elect Trump to office again:

ICE’s ‘Fierce Commitment’ To Ensuring Detainees Are Cared For Properly Includes Inadequate Staffing, Unsanitary Facilities

That’s taken from a report demanding (“Management Alert”) the immediate removal of all detainees from this New Mexico detention center due to numerous violations, including a shortage of 112 employees and no less than 83 cells with “inoperable” sinks and toilets.

Going back further to Trump’s first administration:

Report Shows ICE Almost Never Punishes Contractors Housing Detainees No Matter How Many Violations They Rack Up

In this Inspector General’s report, we learned that only 28 of 106 contractors were provided with the tools needed to meet minimum “performance standards.” We also learned that the $3.9 billion being thrown to private contractors was shored up by absolutely no level of accountability. ICE approved 96% of waivers requested by contractors who failed to meet minimum housing standards for detainees.

While it’s been a persistent problem, things are significantly worse now. The Trump administration is detaining more migrants than ever before. It’s also far more willing to pawn these duties off on private prison contractors who prioritize making money over taking care of the people thrust into their care by Trump’s top bigots.

On top of that, the administration is fighting wars on several litigation fronts in hopes of preventing any form of oversight from slowing its roll towards total migrant annihilation. Everything that was bad before is getting so much worse.

Thanks to the White House Merchant of Death, RFK Jr., measles outbreaks are being reported at detention facilities. Thanks to absolutely every-fucking-body else in the administration, reports of inhumane conditions are somehow still on the rise, even after years of regularly reported inhuman conditions at ICE facilities.

Here’s even more. At a facility where guards were caught setting up suicide “death pools” for inmates, more evidence of deliberate cruelty and inhumane treatment has surfaced. The host of ongoing atrocities is none other than Camp East Montana, comfortably nestled in the heartland of the “who gives a fuck about immigrants” Fifth Circuit: El Paso, Texas.

Here’s the New York Times with the details of more man’s inhumanity to man, as personified by “immigration enforcement” forces of Trump’s second term.

An inspection in February of Camp East Montana in Texas, one of the country’s largest immigration detention centers, found dozens of violations of national standards, including instances that may have exposed detainees to illnesses and uses of force that were not documented, a new report found.

[…]

The inspection, which was carried out by the agency over three days in February and included interviews with 49 detainees, found that there were at least 49 overall “deficiencies” from national standards at the camp. Of all the deficiencies, 22 involved use of force and restraints, and five involved issues related to medical care. 

ICE actually released this inspection report. However, it did make sure names were changed redacted to protect the innocent guilty. While it’s uncharacteristically protective of the inspectors, it also makes sure we may never know which “Creative Corrections” employees helped make this detention center the hell hole it is.

Other censorship by the administration deliberately denies Americans access to the facts. What possible purpose is served here, other than allowing the government to pretend its rights violations were somehow excused by the [redacted] passage of time?

The government not only censored the number of detainee files reviewed, but also the ratio of files in noncompliance. What escapes ICE’s black-boxed attempts to redeem itself is this, which is plenty damning on its own:

[I]nitial classification process and initial housing assignments were not completed within 12 hours of detainees’ admission […]; rather they were completed 14 hours to 25 days after [admission]…

Everything that might show how often (or how frequently) violations occurred has been removed. It’s a deliberate muddying of the statistical waters. Who knows what’s behind the black box? It could mean rights were violated 10% of the time. Or it could mean rights were violated almost every time. But we the people — you know, the ones expected to foot the bill for this bullshit — aren’t allowed to know the actual details of what’s being done in our names.

If the government wants to play it that way, fine. We’ll just assume the worst and dare it to provide evidence to the contrary. And we know it never will. If or when the government decides to unredact this report, it will undoubtedly show us what we’ve always assumed: The administration and its contractors routinely abused detainees and violated their rights because the people in charge made it clear they don’t consider migrants to be humans.

And that makes this news as inevitable as it is deplorable:

So far this year, 14 people have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, including a Mexican man who was found unresponsive last week at a facility outside Los Angeles, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

If that seems like a low (or worse, an acceptable) number of deaths, think again:

In 2025, ICE reported 33 total in-custody deaths and in 2024 there were 11.

Deaths in ICE custody tripled under Trump during his first year back in office. If this pace continues, we’ll be looking at 56 in-custody deaths, which would nearly double the same number Trump managed to triple in 2025.

This will only get worse. The administration is still trying to buy up any warehouses it can to repurpose as detention centers. The workload is being stretched even thinner, leaving private citizens more poorly trained than current ICE officers in charge of the lives and well-being of thousands of detainees. The misery and death will continue. Unfortunately for us, this administration not only welcomes blood on its hands, but revels in it.