Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.

If this sounds familiar (and it should), it’s because Trump loves promoting people to US Attorney positions, but absolutely refuses to engage with the nomination process that’s required by law.

This has happened more than once, as the New York Times article notes. The last time we covered it here at Techdirt, it took nearly five hours for Trump to fire a US attorney appointed by the courts.

The firing of court-appointed US attorneys is going to be a thing going forward. The legally approved process for appointment of US attorneys is pretty simple and every president before Trump has somehow managed to respect it. If an administration wants to appoint a US attorney, it needs to run this pick past the Senate for a thumbs up/down. If it doesn’t, the person can only hold that office for 120 days. If that doesn’t happen, the courts get to put someone in that position.

Trump has blown off the confirmation process multiple times and courts have responded by engaging with their legal duty to elevate someone to that position. When that happens, the Trump administration lurches into semi-consciousness and “fires” the actually legally appointed US attorney.

The thing is that it doesn’t matter how fast the administration fires prosecutors appointed by federal judges. Until Trump actually shepherds some prosecutor picks through the confirmation process, this is just going to keep happening every four months or so.

The US attorney dumped by Trump in less than an hour is utilizing the court system the administration chooses to ignore 90% of the time. If Trump wants to ignore the legal process for prosecutor appointments, the administration should be on the hook for wrongful termination.

In his lawsuit filed Tuesday, Rogoff argued that his termination was unlawful because the president lacks the authority to remove judicially appointed judges. 

“By purporting to fire Mr. Rogoff — and apparently committing to firing anyone else a district court appoints without ‘the support of POTUS’ — the President has attempted to negate Congress’s exercise of its constitutionally enumerated power,” the suit alleges. 

Rogoff argued his firing was an unconstitutional separation of powers, noting Congress set up a mechanism to appoint U.S. attorneys until the president nominates — and the Senate confirms — a U.S. attorney. He also alleged that he was denied due process. 

While it’s impossible to tell how this will all play out — especially when our Supreme Court is at least 50% MAGA-cooked — it seems like everything involved here has been established for years and never ignored so completely as it has been since Trump began his second term.

While the administration appears to believe that every firing resets the clock, I don’t think courts should feel obligated to humor this pretense. Instead, courts should simply reinstate their picks if the administration doesn’t have anyone lined up for confirmation. Instead of allowing Trump to pick whoever he wants and fire whoever he doesn’t the moment a court appoints them, courts dealing with this bullshit should appoint the same person over and over again or, at the very least, refuse to recognize the position of US Attorney until one has been properly and legally confirmed.

We’ll see where this lawsuit goes. But even if it ends up the victim of executive privilege, courts still retain the power to enforce the laws this administration willfully ignored.

No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible.

Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, many of them from (direct quote right here) “shithole countries.” They blame Biden for this completely imaginary “crisis” and preach the same message to the faithful over and over again: “worst of the worst.”

But it’s not that and it’s never been that. If the administration was simply trying to eject dangerous criminals, ICE wouldn’t be sending officers to immigration courts to pounce on migrants who are following the rules for staying in this country. ICE wouldn’t have set up a fake college to snare foreigners following the visa rules by continuing their education. And the government wouldn’t be telling its lawyers to dismiss ongoing removal proceedings solely for the purpose of making migrants attending scheduled probation check-ins immediately arrestable.

It’s only getting nastier and uglier. The Trump administration is now moving up immigration hearing dates for the sole purpose of generating more unearned “wins” that will, in turn, generate more deportations. Here’s Gwynne Hogan with the brutally nasty details for The City Reporter:

The mass immigration hearings picked up in New York City in early June, The City Reporter reported at the time. They were dubbed mega masters because a single judge could be assigned a docket of more than 100 cases a day, about double a regular master calendar docket before.

In addition to the large number of cases, many of these hearings were scheduled just weeks in advance and replaced hearings people might have had on the books months or years away.

The City Reporter observed one such mega master hearing where, on a docket of 121 cases, 39 people and their family members were ordered removed for failing to show up to court. In some instances, family members’ cases were linked.

As this report notes, for years most hearing dates were generally scheduled 180 days out from the initial hearing. But in the past few months — along with the creation of these so-called “mega masters” — the lead time has dropped precipitously. In May, the average was 98 days. By June, it was 42 days.

This is deliberate. Migrants engaged in the legal process would have no reason to believe their cases would be accelerated. After all, the mass deportation surges the Trump administration has generated tens of thousands of new cases, which would generally result in additional delays, rather than sudden accelerations.

And while the government is required to notify migrants of schedule changes, it’s not as though it’s a push notification via the normally accepted form of human connection these days. It’s a letter sent by snail mail. And it’s not as though this government is going to perform any due diligence to make sure the notification is seen by the intended recipient.

What’s happening here is the administration flooding the docket and ambushing migrants who fail to check their hearing status daily and who would have no reason to do so when they hadn’t seen any changes to hearing dates for several months.

The plan is as ugly as it is shitty: accelerate thousands of hearing dates and send federal officers out to scoop up migrants who are now on the wrong end of in absentia rulings handed down by judges who are deliberately overloaded to prevent them from fully engaging with these cases.

This is all in service to the impossible deportation goals set by the administration. You can’t get 2-3,000 arrests per day without cheating. Here’s how this has been playing out over the past couple of months.

In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the [New York City] “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia. 

The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. 

The real human cost is as incalculable as it is heartbreaking:

On Friday morning, several dozen people managed to make it to a courtroom inside 26 Federal Plaza for their mega master hearing where Immigration Judge Thanos Kanellakos appeared virtually from a courtroom in Maryland, overseeing a docket of 90 cases.

Most of the people who made it to court had traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee, Georgia, North Dakota and Illinois to attend.

[…]

Several people at court told The City Reporter they’d had a court date scheduled months or even years away when they happened to double-check the online portal recently and learned they had a new hearing scheduled a few days away.

There is no legitimate reason for the government to be doing this. There is only the constant desire to hurt human beings this administration considers to be less than human. That’s why it’s trying to eradicate temporary protected status for all but the whitest migrants. And that’s why it’s engaging in barely disguised entrapment to keep its flying rail cars and prison camps loaded with its preferred scapegoats.

The Trump administration’s continual trend towards maximum awfulness means that every report seems to be “I’ve got bad news and I’ve got worse news.” What was already bad has become even worse now that more of the administration’s actions have been exposed during court proceedings.

Last July, the Trump administration unilaterally decided ICE should have access to Medicaid data for the sole purpose of locating migrants to arrest and deport. That much was made clear by the administration itself, which said the data would give ICE officials better tools to discover “the location of aliens.” An agreement was reached with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service by the DHS because of course that happened. The administration had already purged plenty of non-loyalists, which meant those remaining wouldn’t put up much of fight.

There was no legal basis for this demand, which is why the headline says “illegally.” If this was a legal request, we wouldn’t be seeing lawsuits challenging the sharing of this sensitive medical data because the law would already be settled. Specifically, ICE wanted access to Medicaid data that exposed “home addresses and ethnicities.” Not exactly subtle, but nothing ever is with this grotesque shotgun of an administration.

But this sharing was challenged in court, and that converts that bad news to worse news. Not only did ICE have access to information it wasn’t legally entitled to have, but its private contractors did too, as NPR reports:

After Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people in January with immigration officials, ICE then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings. Palantir operates an app called ELITE that is used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.

That revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.

Palantir’s thirst for data is constant. And it will take anything its government customers choose to give it, including information that has been obtained illegally.

Palantir issued a couple of statements in response to this reporting based on courtroom revelations in ongoing lawsuits.

First, it said that the data in question had been “purged.” That’s great if true, but this seems like something that needs verification before trust because who knows where else this data set ended up before court orders blocked the government from using this data. If you think only ICE was peeking into this illicitly obtained data, you’re awarding the government the good faith it not only hasn’t earned, but has spent pretty much every minute since Trump’s election actively destroying.

ICE’s surveillance tech contractor also said this:

Palantir provided the following statement to NPR: “Our customers control their own data and manage access to that data. When Palantir employees are granted access to a customer’s dataset, it is solely to help integrate and analyze that data — which is what our software does — not to store it or use it for our own purposes. Palantir can confirm that the dataset in question was purged pursuant to government instruction.”

Well… I’d like to believe this much in the same way I’d like to believe a system of checks and balances is capable of constraining a rogue regime, much less its private contractors who are not subject to these particular restraints.

I believe Palantir to the extent that its employees aren’t just surfing waves of incoming data for their own personal reasons, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that a belated “purge” has actually scrubbed the data and removed any ancillary… well, let’s call them “infections.” Without turning over evidence of this purge to the courts, it’s easy to say it’s all been handled, even if the only thing that happened what Palantir deleting the source CSVs (or whatever) from its system, which isn’t the same thing as stripping it from Palantir’s databases.

Another reason for high levels of skepticism is this: ICE somehow couldn’t stop itself from passing this illegally obtained data to Palantir despite (apparently) trying to comply with a court order.

In a court filing last week, the Justice Department said that CMS again inadvertently reshared with ICE the dataset with millions of names that CMS had first improperly shared with ICE in January. The government said the error occurred during an effort to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit.

You see the problem, right? Because not every state sued over this illegal data collection, ICE continues to collect data that should — at this point — be considered off-limits. The only reason it doesn’t is because some states (you know the ones) have decided they’ll do whatever it takes to ensure the administration gets to keep being openly racist.

Consequently, the data sets aren’t being sorted between racist/non-racist (or whatever the SORT term is), which means ICE continues to retain data it’s been ordered to delete and Palantir keeps getting handed data the government isn’t allowed to collect, much less distribute.

Then there’s the ultimate problem. No matter what’s happening here in the lower courts, the administration will continue to push for a resolution from the US Supreme Court. And the odds are about 6-3 that SCOTUS will say the government can do whatever it wants with whatever data it collects, ignoring years of precedent and administrative firewalls that are meant to protect US citizens (and residents) from being abused and surveilled by their government.

Former DHS head Kristi Noem got permanently sidelined for being unable to do two impossible things at once: be the anti-migrant hardliner Trump appointed her to be and massage the message when shit went sideways. Two murders in less than a month in Minneapolis may have made plenty of administration figures secretly happy, but once the narrative spun out of their control, it was clear a head needed to roll.

Say hello to Markwayne Mullin. Mullin was yet another Trump loyalist, albeit one that promised a kinder, gentler approach to the bigoted targeting of anyone who didn’t look white enough to belong in this country.

During his confirmation hearings in March. Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin told senators: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”

Well, that’s not going to look good on the next employee review. While immigration officers did manage to keep murders to a minimum after Mullin took office, ICE is back to being the lead story every single day.

July 9, 2026:

Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.

The victim of that shooting was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived and worked in the United States for 35 years. According to his family, Araujo was still actively trying to obtain permanent residence and/or citizenship.

And let’s not pretend — as the DHS would have us do with its statement — that it’s okay to kill people who are the targets of immigration arrests. The DHS may have (kind of) admitted fault here, but only in the context that any killing of someone actually targeted by ICE, etc. is fair game when it comes to instant death penalties. Most of the people ICE targets have no violent criminal record, which means federal officers are routinely boxing in vehicles, smashing windows, and violently accosting people suspected of a civil violation. It’s not like this is happening to people who are overdue on their property taxes. I mean, yet.

This isn’t helpful either, and fewer journalists should be willing to publish whatever happens to fall out of the government’s mouth moments after it has summarily executed someone:

When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.

Homeland security officials said Mr. Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though no video or other evidence for that claim has emerged.

The encounter was escalated the moment ICE officers decided to treat suspected civil violations like a felony stop. The government escalated. The reaction officers received was entirely expected from an innocent person who was suddenly surrounded by masked people with guns.

But video not recorded by ICE officers (who were all supposed to be wearing body cameras at this time) pokes a lot of holes in the government’s self-serving theory:

I don’t know what Araujo thought was happening, but in the videos it looks like a couple of unmarked crossovers aggressively pursuing a vehicle with no lights on or any other indication the vehicles contain law enforcement officers. (See 1:20-1:25 of the video where the ICE vehicle cuts through a parking lot.)

Either way, it ended with officers killing Araujo, then the government going on to smear the person they’d just killed:

The Houston incident, following one of the latest deadly shootings by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, mirrors countless routine police encounters that happen daily across the country as officers find suspected drug paraphernalia and seek court orders to seize and test it for illegal substances.

In this instance, however, the search warrant, shielded from public view when initially filed, was inexplicably unsealed and made public the next day. Justice Department veterans told CNN they can’t remember a time when information that could be critical to a case was made publicly available while a criminal investigation was still underway.

A bit more on the “illegal substances:”

The still-unidentified substances were allegedly found on the dashboard and floor of a van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man ICE tried to pull over last week on suspicion of being in the country unlawfully.

First and fucking foremost, these were immigration officers who had the wrong person. Second, this chase wasn’t initiated because officers saw some possible illicit substances on the dashboard. This was only discovered after Araujo had already been killed. Third, the government has yet to deliver lab results on the substances, which means they could have been anything. Considering they were found on the dashboard (those recovered from the floor probably fell off the dashboard), it’s hard to believe Araujo was just driving around with drugs right out there in plain sight. And, once again, this ain’t the Philippines. You can’t just kill people because they have drugs on them.

This was nothing but a cheap attempt to somehow justify a killing after the fact. But it didn’t end with a shitty smear campaign. The other people in the van were apparently subjected to intimidation tactics by ICE officers following the shooting:

They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.

Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.

Araujo had no criminal record, ran his own business, and was on his way to a job with his passengers when he was chased, shot, and killed. And while the government has admitted it misidentified the person officers killed, it still hasn’t explained why it’s okay to engage in these tactics against people only suspected of violating immigration law. It also hasn’t offered any information about the person officers were seeking, which means the real target was another harmless migrant and not the “worst of worst” we keep hearing about every time the DHS is asked to defend its actions.

As I noted earlier, this is only one of two killings to happen this month. Another killing happened in Maine roughly a week later. Since we’re already more than 1,000 words into this one, I’ll dig deep into that killing in another post. But I will leave you with this, which not only shows the kind of people ICE is willing to hire to keep the deportation mill running, but also the kind of people who are innately attracted to ICE:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.

David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

This is the real reason ICE officers want to wear masks. It’s also the real reason ICE wants officers to wear masks. These officers are the real threat to public safety, but the less we know about them, the more ICE can publicly pretend it’s nothing but top-notch, well-trained officers regularly engaging in excessive force.

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don’t have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary — losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees.

While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have resoundingly made it clear that detainees are owed a bond hearing, rather than simply be expected to ride out an indefinite detention with zero options until the administration finds some random country to dump them in.

With ICE and a compliant DOJ doing everything they can to prevent detainees from filing habeus corpus motions — using methods ranging from shuffling detainees from state to state to deny them standing to multiple purges of DOJ attorneys who aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump — lots of judges aren’t actually seeing the entirety of the administration’s illegal actions. The administration is “flooding the zone” to create a “fog of war” in a way that’s as inelegant and brutish as my mixed metaphor.

But the administration can’t stop acts of God from exposing what ICE and the DOJ would have preferred remained hidden. Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced the evacuation of an ICE detention facility. And that let a judge handling cases in that jurisdiction see clearly exactly how many times the administration had flouted direct court orders.

[The fires] opened a can of worms in federal court after a federal judge was notified that 47 of those detainees were shipped outside the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of court orders. When Miami-based Judge Michael Moore was alerted to the 47 violations, he ordered a deeper look into how often ICE had violated similar court orders in recent months.

The answer alarmed him, and prompted him to respond with force in a hearing on Thursday morning.

Attorneys at the Department of Justice alerted Moore that an estimated 116 detainees have recently been removed from South Florida in direct violation of court orders, a significant increase from the original 47 number. Some of those violations were never reported to the court until Moore started asking.

While Judge Moore understood the fires might mean moving detained migrants to other locations, the government was supposed to inform the court if it attempted to move people with pending petitions out of the court’s jurisdiction. This never happened. And it was happening even before wildfires created this crisis. According to the judge, the DOJ and ICE had done this previously, including one case where the judge wasn’t informed of a relocation until the date of the hearing, which was weeks after the court had told the government to bring this migrant to a bond hearing.

Moore’s takedown of the administration occurred before a packed house of observers, including dozens of interns and federal court clerks. And Moore lit them up:

“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ attorneys. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”

He noted that some detainees not only had been moved to other states, but some have been “removed from the United States” in direct violation of court orders.

The law is settled (at least for the moment) in this circuit. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court ruled two months ago that the government had to provide bond hearings to all detained migrants — something that has always been the case prior to this administration’s refusal to respect the Constitution.

This is how the administration wants to play it, which meant the judge had minimal patience for the DOJ lawyer caught up in the middle of this mess.

Matthew Feely, the DOJ attorney on the case, apologized for the court order violations and said the Southern District of Florida’s office has been overwhelmed with habeus corpus petitions, stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s stance that it does not have to offer bond hearing to immigrant detainees. 

[…]

In 2022, there were only 23 habeus corpus petitions filed in the district, he said. In 2023 there were 31. But between June of 2025 and July 10, 2026, there were about 1,800 petitions filed.

At the same time, Feely said the amount of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida has plummeted by 40% since last year.

“We’re struggling here, your honor,” said Feely, while adding that the DOJ is trying to hire to fill the vacant positions.

“I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” responded Moore, who was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”

There it is. This administration does not follow court precedent. It does not respect the Constitution. It makes up its own rules that are completely unsupported by case law. Then it fires everyone who won’t assist the administration with its dirty work. 1,800 petitions in a single federal district, being handled by a DOJ office that has seen 40% of its workforce resign or get fired for refusing to play by Trump’s rules. And as court orders continue to pile up, the administration still refuses to comply with them.

It’s an unmitigated good that this played out in the open. The problem that hasn’t been addressed is how you rein in a rogue regime that deliberately ignores a co-equal branch of the government. Courts need to start considering their options, including this one:

In cases where federal marshals fail to act to enforce court orders (or contempt of court findings), courts can turn to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Federal judges have the authority to deputize state law enforcement officers to carry out federal court orders, particularly in cases of contempt or defiance by federal officials. State attorneys general, governors, and local sheriffs can be called upon to enforce judicial rulings.

The usual stuff isn’t working. Extreme measures are needed. The question is whether anyone in the court system — or in state law enforcement — has the will to get this done.

Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they’ll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to.

Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration’s attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to the government’s witnesses noted a plethora of “untruthful statements” or “material misrepresentations.”

Six months later, the losing streak created by unforced (but deliberate) “errors” continued. Federal immigration officers just couldn’t stop lying, forcing DOJ prosecutors to voluntarily dismiss a bunch of felony assault cases that were completely reliant on statements made by officers who were later shown to be lying.

Here’s another case that’s hit a dead end because an ICE officer lied and an ICE supervisor decided to pass on these lies to a federal prosecutor. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)

A Venezuelan man arrested by ICE was hit with a slew of escalating charges, most of which have vanished now that the truth is involved.

Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, 31, was referred to by DHS as a “criminal illegal alien” and a “known Tren de Aragua terrorist.” The agency said he “violently attacked an ICE agent” by slamming her head into the ground and attempting to choke her to death. At a preliminary hearing, a Homeland Security agent and a federal prosecutor said Hurtado-Cariaco received “special forces-type training” in the Venezuelan military and may have been involved in “killing people, hurting people, [and] committing human rights violations.”

The only thing true here is that Hurtado was once a member of the Venezuela military. But he deserted, fled to the US, and filed an asylum claim. He was paroled into the US in 2024 and, since then, had been steadily working as a delivery driver.

The arrest of Hurtado didn’t look great. Two ICE officers tried (and failed) to subdue him. He managed to escape custody, but was arrested successfully shortly after he fled the scene of the first attempted detention.

Perhaps the (attempted) arresting officer was too embarrassed to tell the truth. But the lies he told had serious consequences.

The initial narrative of what happened during Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest was provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Craig Allrich. Allrich, who was not at the scene of the arrest, penned the affidavit that would be used to secure a criminal complaint against Hurtado-Cariaco.

The first complaint actually told the truth. It simply said that Hurtado had resisted arrest. But that apparently wasn’t good enough for Allrich and/or the officer who failed to subdue Hurtado during his first encounter with him. Things got worse for Hurtado in a hurry.

It was in the amended complaint that Allrich laid out how Hurtado-Cariaco allegedly attempted to murder the female ICE officer, referred to as “Victim 1” throughout the document. 

[…]

[A]s the two agents struggled to detain Hurtado-Cariaco, he was “able to get control of Victim 1 and place [her] in a chokehold.” Allrich said the male agent gave repeated commands to Hurtado-Cariaco to release the chokehold, but he “chose to continue choking Victim 1 rather than simply fleeing the scene.”

This assertion was a lie. Two recordings made by bystanders who witnessed the attempted arrest made it clear Hurtado had definitely resisted arrest, but at no point did he pin down the female ICE officer, nor did he ever place her in a chokehold.

At no point in either video is Hurtado-Cariaco seen choking the female agent. Instead, the videos show agents placing Hurtado-Cariaco into a chokehold on two separate occasions as he attempts to break free.

Hurtado’s federal public defender, Richard McWilliams, says federal prosecutors sat on these recordings and refused to remove the attempted murder charge despite having evidence proving otherwise. US Attorney Lesley Woods says this isn’t true, claiming the public defender refused to turn over the recordings he had obtained.

But Woods’ claims are difficult to believe, especially when prosecutors waited months to rewrite the indictment, excising the bogus attempted murder charge just so that they could replace it something nearly as damaging.

By November, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment, which abandoned the attempted murder charge and replaced it with another serious felony – providing material support to a terrorist organization.

According to prosecutors, the mere existence of a tattoo — one that doesn’t actually demonstrate a connection to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — was enough to hit Hurtado with terrorism charges.

(And that charge is only possible because the Trump administration unilaterally declared this gang to be foreign terrorist organization — something it only did in an attempt to legalize its unconstitutional detain-and-deport program.)

None of this bullshit impressed the judge handling Hurtado’s criminal case.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said at the sentencing that the allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence.” Though Rossiter said there is “no doubt” that Hurtado-Cariaco committed the offense that he pleaded guilty to by fleeing the officers and struggling with them, he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”

That’s a polite way of saying either the ICE officer at the scene lied or that the ICE supervisor who prepared the affidavit didn’t care whether or not he was being lied to.

And the judge isn’t happy with the government’s last ditch attempt to stick Hurtado with a lengthy sentence by belatedly adding some terrorism charges to the mix. As it stands now, Hurtado’s guilty plea to resisting arrest nets him a 14-month sentence, most of which he has already served because he’s been in jail since his arrest last June.

“To refer to him as a terrorist, attempted murderer, that he had put a chokehold on these victims… It’s just not borne out by the evidence,” Rossiter said. “And it’s troubling.”

If you can’t do your job without lying, you can’t be trusted to hold that position. If the administration can’t find enough people to arrest and deport without having to make up stories about murder or terrorism, then it needs to restrain itself to the promise that has always been empty: go after the worst of the worst. These lies were caught. Dozens or hundreds of others will go undetected.

Given what we know about the people “leading” this country and these agencies, I firmly believe they’d lie even if they didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of people they are. And the foot soldiers willingly serving this rolling atrocity of an administration need to be filmed whenever possible, because it’s the only way to keep them honest.

This is probably nothing more than another data point in a deluge, but it’s worth pointing out because it’s instructive.

Cops are using a whole lot of surveillance tech these days. Flock Safety has been especially aggressive in pursuing the law enforcement market, offering cops access to a nationwide network of cameras, including many owned and operated by private citizens.

Flock — and its law enforcement partners — have generated a lot of negative press over the last couple of years. Some of this is due to cops abusing their access and/or performing searches for federal agencies that aren’t allowed to directly access Flock’s database. Some of this is due to Flock itself, which has seen the negative press and largely chosen to ignore it.

But now Flock has real problems. Federal legislators are demanding answers to uncomfortable questions. And dozens of cities are attempting to rid themselves of Flock cameras following public outcry and/or evidence of abuse by those with access.

In San Francisco, it’s a blend of both. And the answers/excuses made by Flock and the SFPD make it clear law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with the tech they now have easy access to.

“During a routine compliance audit in May, SFPD officials found that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) had queried SFPD’s Flock network on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies. There were 299 improper inquiries over approximately one year, which accounts for 0.005% of inquiries over that period,” the release states.

Each of these searches performed on behalf of federal agencies broke state law. To its credit, the SFPD pulled the plug on access following the results of this audit. And while that’s the sort of response we’d like to see from more law enforcement agencies, the statements issued by those involved (SFPD, Flock) make it clear the only way to prevent abuse is to never allow cops to have access to this tech in the first place.

Here’s what Flock Safety had to say about the audit results:

A Flock spokesperson in February said the company had disabled its national lookup feature for all California agencies and is confident its privacy protections comply with state law, local policy and community expectations.

[…]

In response to the San Francisco audit, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel told KTVU that the searches were not a result of a software malfunction, platform issue, unauthorized access, or any failure of the Flock system.

Without more information, it’s impossible to tell whether the first statement issued by Flock (in response to a lawsuit) is true. It could be that feds asked the SFPD to perform local searches, which would lend credence to Flock’s initial statement. The fact that 299 potentially illegal searches took place over the last year doesn’t generate a whole lot of confidence in either the supply or demand side of the Flock equation.

The second statement makes things a bit more clear: this wasn’t SFPD officers going outside of any limitations imposed by Flock or the department itself. Instead, they broke the law by running searches they most likely knew violated state regulations. In other words, this wasn’t Flock enabling lawlessness. This was cops working within the system to violate the law.

The implication gets even stronger now that the SFPD has issued its own statement. This appears to have been officers breaking the law, rather than the law being (accidentally or otherwise) bypassed because the software wasn’t configured correctly.

The San Francisco Police Department identified the activity through a routine audit of its own Flock network and took immediate action, Lewbel noted. 

He added that no out-of-state or federal agencies had direct access to SFPD’s Flock system or any California Flock system. 

The first sentence means something. The second sentence, however, is meaningless. The limitations placed on access by Flock and SFPD policies were circumvented to perform exactly the sort of searches they were meant to prevent. This audit could have come back completely clean if SFPD officers hadn’t decided to break the rules.

And even if 299 illegal searches are only “0.005%” of the total number of searches, that doesn’t mean the other 99.995% of searches were justified. Most people assume ALPR databases are only accessed when a license plate generates a hit due to prior placement on a watch list. That’s an false impression that’s been perpetrated for years by law enforcement, which constantly claims these are used to track down car thieves, kidnappers, bank robbers, and other dangerous criminals.

But when audits are only looking for searches that route around parameters, they don’t see all the searches being made by cops who are bored or are tracking their exes or trying to hunt down women who are doing nothing more than seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The “0.005% of searches” assertion is likely misleading as well. Plaintiffs suing the state over its ALPR use alleged more than 1.6 million illegal searches during the same time period across the state. Not only that, but the number of total searches is likely inflated by those triggered by the system itself, which involve minimal interaction by officers utilizing the ALPR network.

On one hand, if we decide Flock is actually telling the truth this time, the blame lies with the officers who choose to break the rules and the law. On the other hand, if Flock’s representation of the facts is inaccurate, it only means cops who knew what the law was chose to break it simply because they easily could. Neither of these scenarios add up to the SFPD being trustworthy. And splitting the difference just means we can’t trust the SFPD’s camera provider either.

Florida Republicans’ bigoted little piece of speech policing — the former “Stop WOKE Act” — has already been terminated multiple times by federal courts. Two lawsuits with two sets of plaintiffs have generated the same results: a ruling declaring the law unconstitutional and an injunction blocking the state from enforcing it.

The law aims to directly regulate speech in classrooms, allowing the government to punish teachers and administrators from engaging in any speech the Florida GOP doesn’t agree with. In practice, this means eliminating discussions about racism, equitable treatment, or anything related to LGBTQ+ issues.

The two lawsuits have generated some pretty stark paragraphs from presiding judges. Both take their cues from pop culture. Noting the cognitive dissonance of state lawmaking, the court said this in 2022:

In the popular television series Stranger Things, the “upside down” describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. See Stranger Things (Netflix 2022). Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely. 

The same court said this when the second lawsuit against the Stop WOKE law crossed its desk:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of “freedom.” To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the State of Florida passed the so-called “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the State’s doublespeak) the “Individual Freedom Act.” The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.

The state appealed both decisions. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction in March 2023. The state continued to assault the court with motions to undo this injunction, prompting the Eleventh Circuit to issue this additional order:

The Clerk is DIRECTED to treat any motion for reconsideration of this order as a non-emergency matter.

Forced to wait its turn, Ron DeSantis and his MAGA buddies have had to wait more than three years just to find out they still won’t be able to enforce this blatantly unconstitutional law. The state’s lawyers will read the whole thing looking for ways to argue this differently if (or when) the US Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

But anyone wanting to know how this turns out for Florida’s public service bigots won’t have to dip too far into the 85-page ruling. By the middle of the fourth page, you’ll know what you need to know. From the decision [PDF]:

When several groups of professors challenged Florida’s new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.

That is not a blessed union. Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.

The injunction stays in place, presumably forever. While there are certainly some members of the Supreme Court who would love to tie their precedent and ethics into knots just to block speech they personally don’t like, this doesn’t appear to be the case they’d choose since it would likely generate precedent that might work against the bigots in the Supreme Court when they go to bat for bigots in the White House.

The appeals court has already blocked the other part of the law — the clauses attempting to regulate speech in private workplaces by forbidding mandatory meetings that promoted views the GOP doesn’t agree with. The last ditch attempt to claim the government can regulate speech in college classrooms doesn’t fare any better, even if it’s not quite as clear cut in terms of constitutional violations as telling private companies what they can and can’t say.

Claiming that all speech by government employees is “government speech” is a non-starter. The state couldn’t find precedent to support its novel take on the First Amendment. And the few odds and ends it threw at the judicial wall in hopes of seeing something stick failed as well.

More credibly, the State explains that it also seeks to protect its “most cherished ideals.” But that justification fails, too. Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them.

The court spends 50 pages dismantling each and every one of the state’s arguments, citation by citation. There can be no doubt the law is unconstitutional, not that it matters to the state, which has already announced it will be appealing the ruling. But this is censorship that can’t even be bothered to pretend it’s anything but the very thing it claims it is opposed to. “Individual Freedom Act” (as it was renamed), my ass.

Florida seeks to strip public university professors—and by extension their students—of the ability to fully engage with ideas that are, for better or for worse, very popular in some academic circles. The State asks us to consider its rules a means of targeting discrimination. But hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind.

There’s a dissent that runs nearly as long as the opinion. Written by Judge Barbara Lagoa (someone with a history of anti-trans rulings), it’s 30+ pages of wasted time. To paraphrase: none of these plaintiffs should have been granted standing, much less relief and also: [bunch of Justice Alito quotes].

Doesn’t really matter, since it’s the dissent but I guarantee if anyone’s going to start polling for an en banc rehearing, it’s going by Judge Lagoa.

Suck it, DeSantis. Until that happens (if it ever will), your stupid hateful law is as dead as the eyes of your sycophants.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. And even while it still (theoretically) lasts, it’s really nothing more than the Fifth Circuit saying rights can violated, but only for 90 days at a time.

Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit managed to deliver a very un-Fifth Circuit decision, finding in favor of rights and against the Trump administration’s war on migrants. As almost every court has recognized for decades, people residing in the United States — even illegally — have constitutional rights. The Fifth Circuit has long been one of the exceptions to this rule.

The administration chose to ignore this because doing would slow its horrific roll towards an eventual evacuation of everyone who wasn’t white enough for this administration to recognize as Americans. To justify ignoring long-held constitutional rights, the administration first invoked the Alien Enemies Act (best known for our atrocities against Japanese migrants and residents during World War II). Then it pretended that anyone who had been in the country for weeks, years, or decades should be treated the same as anyone apprehended while illegally crossing the border.

The Fifth Circuit couldn’t bring itself to rule that migrants arrested long after they’ve crossed the border have access to their due process rights on day one of their apprehension. Instead, it decided (without really explaining why) these rights don’t actually kick in until someone has been in custody for more than 90 days.

That meant nothing would really change. People arrested by ICE and other DHS components all over the nation would be hastily relocated to the Fifth Circuit (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi) ASAP to prevent them from challenging their detention for 90 days. Presumably, the administration hoped to have most of these detainees deported long before they were allowed to invoke their constitutional rights.

Apparently, 90 days of denying rights isn’t long enough. It looks as though enough judges in the Fifth Circuit think these rights should never be available to migrants. Less than a month after handing down its decision, the Fifth Circuit has declared it will be taking another pass at this.

A majority of the circuit judges in regular active service and not disqualified having voted in favor, on the Court’s own motion, to rehear this case en banc,

IT IS ORDERED that this cause shall be reheard by the court en banc with oral argument on a date hereafter to be fixed. The Clerk will specify a briefing schedule for the filing of supplemental briefs. Pursuant to 5th Circuit Rule 41.3, the panel opinion in this case dated July 02, 2026, is VACATED.

So, we’re now back to the Fifth Circuit status quo. The government can ignore constitutional rights on day one and continue ignoring them until they’ve ejected migrants into whatever war-torn human rights hellhole will have them.

Sure, there’s a very slim (I’d say “nonexistent”) chance the petitioners for rehearing think the Fifth Circuit screwed up by giving the administration a 90-day head start on ignoring constitutional rights. But come on. We’re talking about the Fifth Circuit here.

The most likely reason for this rehearing action is that a lot of Fifth Circuit judges think the Trump administration shouldn’t have to recognize the rights of migrants ever, which is why they want to take another stab at setting precedent that would cover some of the DHS’s largest detention facilities.

The best case scenario would appear to be the circuit upholding its previous ruling, with its (unconstitutional) 90-day 14th Amendment snooze button. The worst case scenario is the entire panel agrees with this hideous, racist administration and says anyone in the country without documentation should be treated like someone caught in the act of crossing the border illegally. I’m not holding my breath for a positive outcome. I need that breath for stuff that’s actually feasible and foreseeable.

Donald Trump believes that being elected president means he should never be challenged, never be asked to justify his actions, and never be given less than absolute loyalty and deference. He also clearly believes the office is there to serve him, rather than there for him to serve the public. He’s going to make bank from his position of power and anyone who doesn’t like it can keep their feelings to themselves.

Kash Patel — Trump’s appointee to head the FBI — seems to feel the same way about his job. It’s not exactly the same as Trump. He might get richer due to this position, but he clearly believes it’s there to help him pursue his dreams — dreams that appear to be the equivalent of those of a B-list celebrity. He wants backstage access, bottle service, a jet-setting lifestyle, and absolute loyalty. And, like Trump, for everyone to just shut up about it.

That’s why his tenure is more notable for lie detector tests, libel lawsuits, and ridiculous denials than for anything that might be considered an actual accomplishment. And that’s why he’s managed to go far enough that even some GOP members are getting sick of his bullshit.

FBI Director Kash Patel has been demanding special perks from bureau employees during his taxpayer-funded travels throughout the country, including helicopter tours and jet ski excursions, according to whistleblower accounts given to Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees and obtained exclusively by MS NOW.

[…]

But the Democrats are not alone in their concerns about Patel’s use of public resources; MS NOW has also viewed a letter to Patel from Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley written in May demanding that Patel turn over information about his flights on FBI aircraft and about the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles, which was first reported in December by MS NOW.

“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law?  If yes, please provide the records,” the Grassley letter says.

Of course, the FBI PR office denies any of this is true, despite all the documentation indicating otherwise. While there may actually be a cost savings (believe it or not) by switching to BMWs, the rest of this can’t be explained away as something that saves taxpayers money or makes Patel a better FBI director.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson claims this is all above board, saying Patel has reimbursed the government for all personal expenses. But if that’s true, it seems unlikely congressional oversight would be asking questions about it.

As for the Republicans upset about Patel’s behavior and tendency to treat the FBI director position as a lifestyle accessory, they simply can’t seem to engage in oversight without taking swipes at Democratic leadership for [re-reads reports] raising the same goddamn questions.

In a post on X after this story was published, Sen. Grassley said, “I see Dems r riding my coattails & suddenly showing interest in doing oversight of FBI aircraft. Where was that energy w Wray&other directors???” he wrote, referring to former FBI director Christopher Wray, who served under both President Trump during his first term and President Biden.

“My oversight is the same no matter the admin UNLIKE Dems who only seem interested in oversight when it benefits them politically,” he added.

lolwut?

I’m no fan of Christopher Wray, but no one ever suggested he was blowing taxpayer cash on personal trips to exotic locations. And no one ever even hinted that he might be the wrong person for the job due to an inability to remain reliably sober, much less ever caught on camera chugging booze with sports teams in their lockers after a victory.

And there certainly was nothing that sounded like this when Wray was running the FBI’s anti-encryption efforts:

The Democrats said they have been told that Patel “demoted personnel in Brussels because they failed to ensure you were adequately entertained, stoking fear among rank-and-file agents that they must provide your demanded perks or face termination. Concerns and strains prompted by the prioritization of your personal entertainment on international trips may have led to the resignation of the head of the FBI’s international operations this year.”

Not that anyone is going to get Patel to admit to any of these things. He may have to attend congressional hearings in the future, but everything we’ve seen so far from this administration strongly suggests tough questions will be met with open hostility, flat-out refusals to provide answers, and plenty of stupid assertions from the person under the congressional microscope.

That’s not to say this is a completely futile effort. It calls more attention to Patel’s antics and apparent disregard for his position and his duties. It keeps his carelessness in the public eye. Thanks to the source of the criticism, it makes it far more difficult for the FBI to pretend none of this is happening. Hopefully, there will be a reckoning. And hopefully this will happen long before Donald Trump leaves office.