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I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole “the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face” cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this all is.
Jose Ceballos, who now goes by Joe Ceballos, is the Mayor of Coldwater, Kansas. By all accounts, he is an American success story. He was brought to America, undocumented, when he was four years old. As a student later in life, he was asked while on a field trip for school if he’d like to register to vote. At that point, he had obtained a green card, which denotes at the top of the card that he is a “PERMANENT RESIDENT.”
Reportedly, Ceballos misunderstood the meaning of that residency and thought he was authorized to register to vote. And vote he did, in several elections, and always as a staunch Republican. He voted for Donald Trump in all of the last three Presidential elections. He believes he also voted for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach all four times he ran for election in the state as well. But holding a green card does not authorize him to participate in voting and now the 54 year old is facing both felony charges for fraud brought by Kobach himself, as well as deportation from the Trump administration that he and most of his town voted into office.
An honest mistake, he said. But now he’s found himself in legal trouble that threatens to upend the life he’s spent half a century building. What’s worse than Kobach’s charges, he said, is that the Department of Homeland Security is now threatening him with starting that legal process called deportation.
“I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four,” Ceballos said. “I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported it would wreck my life.”
The leopard has come to eat Ceballos’ face, it seems.
To be clear, I take no pleasure in this. People are allowed to vote Republican, obviously. They are allowed to have voted for Donald Trump, equally obviously. I have family and friends that did likewise and doing so doesn’t mean that I want their lives upended or, frankly, even moderately inconvenienced as a result. But it’s long past time that people understand precisely what they’re voting for because Trump and Republicans are simply not fucking around when it comes to visiting cruelty upon their perceived enemies and it won’t stop with some small subset of people the way people seem to think it will.
Ceballos is beloved in his community. The same town that voted for exactly this sort of thing is now very pissed off that it’s happening.
“If deportation happens, I can tell you that Kobach will have trouble showing up here, especially if he asks to stay with us for a while,” said Dennis Swayze, an 80-year-old Comanche County rancher and a Republican voter. Swayze decades ago took Joe under his wing to hire and mentor him as a mostly penniless but eager calf-roping kid ranch hand. And he says he’s partly to blame for Ceballos’s trouble.
And it’s real trouble. In that news conference on Nov. 5, Kobach said Ceballos could spend as much as five and a half years in prison and pay a $200,000 fine — for voter fraud and election perjury, all felonies.
Ceballos said he now understands that he broke the law — but he and others in his community wonder what’s a fair consequence. The town of 693, in southwest Kansas, might lose their mayor. After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.
He’s so popular in Coldwater, in fact, that his defense attorney is practically begging for this to go before a jury, believing that no jury in town will convict him. I expect Kobach to try some trickery for a trial more favorable to his preferred outcome, because it’s very clear that he plans on digging his heels in.
“Voting by noncitizens, including both legal and illegal aliens, is a very real problem,” Kobach said in his written statement on Nov. 5. “It happens. Every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out a U.S. citizen’s vote.”
And: “This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Homeland Security officials said in a statement on Nov. 13. “If convicted, he will be placed in removal proceedings.”
Coldwater voted for this. Kansas voted for this. And even if a jury essentially engages in nullification, given that Ceballos very much broke the law in his naivete, that not guilty verdict wouldn’t preclude DHS from deporting him anyway.
This only goes one of two ways. The slightly less likely way, I believe, is that DHS deports Ceballos whatever the outcome of his case is. If that happens, the Trump administration will have solidified the point that cruelty is the only meal on the menu, the desire of the serfs be damned. The slightly more likely outcome is that Trump gets wind that Ceballos was a staunch Republican voter and, more importantly, a Trump voter/supporter, and will figure out a way to not enforce the deportation order that, by all rights, should be carried out based on all the things that this administration has said about illegal immigrants and its plans for them.
And if that happens, it puts the lie to all of Trump’s bullshit. It won’t be about law, and it sure as shit isn’t about order. It will purely be about who is willing to bend the knee to the mad king and who is not.
And then we’ll see if the leopard allegory holds true, because leopards don’t actually care who thinks they’re pretty and who does not. In the leopard’s place will be something much, much worse.
Filed Under: coldwater, deportation, donald trump, joe ceballos, kansas, kris kobach, leopard, voter fraud
The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world—including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional.
In a shadow docket ruling yesterday, the Court stayed a lower court order that required basic due process protections for people being shipped to third countries. No analysis of the complex legal issues. No acknowledgment that they’re rewarding the Trump regime for repeatedly violating court orders. Just: “go ahead and traffic people to Libya.”
This isn’t hyperbole. We’re talking about the US government grabbing people—some who entered legally seeking asylum—and shipping them to countries where they’ve never been, don’t speak the language, and face credible threats of violence. Some of those destination countries are actively selling migrants into slavery.
This non-ruling will go down in history as one of the most shameful and horrific rulings from the Supreme Court. We’re talking Dred Scott/Plessy v. Ferguson/Korematsu bad. An obviously horrific decision that attacks human rights and basic due process for no reason… and totally without explanation.
There is a righteous dissent from Justice Sotomayor that excoriates the majority for just how evil this decision is, and I was tempted to just post all of that as this post, but I fear this one requires some explanation.
The Background: How We Got To State-Sanctioned Human Trafficking
The legal backdrop makes this even more shocking. Just last month, the Supreme Court (for the second time) told the Trump DOJ it had to provide some level of “reasonable” due process to those being shipped to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. For a brief moment, it seemed like even the conservatives recognized Trump’s lawlessness.
This case is a bit different. It involves people already deemed deportable. The question: can the US ship them literally anywhere in the world? Under existing law, the answer was yes—but with many limits and with guaranteed basic due process. Specifically, people facing “third country removal” had the right to a “reasonable fear” hearing where they could explain why being shipped to whatever random country the US picked might get them killed. And such removals were only supposed to take place if it was impossible to send them to countries they actually had a connection to.
This is actually important. While the issue of the US trafficking Venezuelans to El Salvador has been well covered, that was a deal with the Salvadoran government. There’s a separate issue of the US randomly shipping off people to a long list of dangerous countries, places where the people being shipped likely know no one, don’t know the language, and may be thousands of miles from anyone they do know. And some of those countries that the US is shipping people to are either war zones or engaged in selling migrants into slavery.
Even if you think immigration violations justify deportation, shipping people to countries where they face torture or slavery sounds like a crime against humanity. And many of these people entered legally seeking asylum—Trump has simply been revoking their status, another move the Court blessed a few weeks ago.
The Case: Government Defies Court Orders, SCOTUS Rewards Them
In this case (DHS v. D.V.D.), District Judge Brian Murphy had ordered DHS to provide basic due process before shipping people around the globe. The government’s response? It ignored him. Repeatedly. Remember Judge Murphy getting annoyed that DHS was shipping men to South Sudan? That was in violation of this restraining order. When he caught them lying about their removals, they kept lying.
Judge Murphy worked diligently to protect constitutional rights. The government thumbed its nose at him. And now the Supreme Court has rewarded that lawlessness.
The government not only gets away with ignoring Judge Murphy’s earlier order, it gets to effectively continue doing so. With no explanation as to why. This isn’t just horrific for due process and the people being trafficked this way, it’s a fucking insult to Judge Murphy who worked diligently to protect rights in this case.
Sotomayor’s Blistering Dissent Calls Out The Majority’s Cowardice
In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel. An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya.
Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.
Basically, the government is doing something really obviously horrific and evil here, a lower court—somewhat heroically—stepped in to help, and the Supreme Court is saying “oh no, go ahead with the evil stuff.” It’s fucking crazy.
Sotomayor notes that these kinds of “third country removals” (i.e., to a country not of their origin nor where they have connections, but only “is willing to accept people the US removes”) are quite “burdensome” on the individuals involved and therefore extremely limited by law. That is, Sotomayor (unlike the majority of the court) recognizes that Congress has put significant conditions on such human trafficking, which the Trump regime is gleefully ignoring.
Noncitizens facing removal of any sort are entitled under international and domestic law to raise a claim under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, S. Treaty Doc. No. 100–20, 1465 U. N. T. S. 113. Article 3 of the Convention prohibits returning any person “to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The United States is a party to the Convention, and in 1998 Congress passed the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act to implement its commands. The Act provides that “[i]t shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” §2242(a), 112 Stat. 2681–822, codified as note to 8 U. S. C. §1231. It also directs the Executive to “prescribe regulations to implement” the Convention. §2242(b), 112 Stat. 2681–822. Those regulations provide, among other things, that “[a] removal order . . . shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3.” 28 CFR §200.1 (2024).
The Pattern of Lawlessness
Sotomayor then details how DHS repeatedly ignored court orders not to send men subject to deportation to specific countries where they faced credible risks of significant harm. Sometimes it appeared to just outright ignore them. Other times it played games with courts, such as claiming that a temporary restraining order (TRO) against DHS removing someone to a certain country didn’t apply because the Defense Department, not DHS, handled the removal to that country.
As she notes:
The Government thus openly flouted two court orders, including the one from which it now seeks relief. Even if the orders in question had been mistaken, the Government had a duty to obey them until they were “‘reversed by orderly and proper proceedings.’” Maness, 419 U. S., at 459 (quoting United States v. Mine Workers, 330 U. S. 258, 293 (1947)). That principle is a bedrock of the rule of law. The Government’s misconduct threatens it to its core.
So too does this Court’s decision to grant the Government equitable relief. This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. See Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam). Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.
The sum total of the Roberts Court’s legacy is going to be “he completely wrecked any respect for the judiciary and the rule of law by making a mockery of it.” Each lawless move like this just makes and more people see the courts as illegitimate. And that’s doubly embarrassing after all of the effort Judge Murphy went through at the district court to make things work properly, despite a defiant Trump regime.
Emergency Relief For Whom?
And this raises the big question: the Supreme Court’s emergency docket is supposed to be used to put an immediate stop to something where there is imminent harm if they don’t. But here, the Court is doing the opposite. The irreparable, and possibly catastrophic, harms are being allowed to move forward, with no evidence of any real harm to the US. As Sotomayor notes:
In light of the Government’s flagrantly unlawful conduct, today’s decision might suggest the Government faces extraordinary harms. Yet even that is not the case. Rather, following a recent trend, the Court appears to give no serious consideration to the irreparable harm factor. See, e.g., id., at ___ (slip op., at ___); SSA v. AFSCME, 605 U. S. ___ (2025). Without a showing that a stay is necessary to avoid irreparable harm, however, this Court’s midstream intervention is inexcusable.
Besides the facially absurd contention that the Executive is “irreparabl[y]” harmed any time a court orders it temporarily to refrain from doing something it would like to do, see Application for Stay of Injunction 37, the Government has identified no irreparable harm from the challenged preliminary injunction.
The DOJ tried to claim irreparable harm because Judge Murphy told the government it could (voluntarily!) conduct the reasonable fear interviews in Djibouti (where the plane carrying some of the men was forced to land). Yet, as Sotomayor points out, that particular issue wasn’t even appealed by the DOJ and it was an option granted to the government after it requested it as an alternative to bringing the men back to the US (which it should have been forced to do because flying the men to South Sudan violated the existing TRO):
Instead, the Government locates the source of its injury in the District Court’s efforts to provide relief to the class members in South Sudan. Id., at 37–39. That argument is misguided. First, the District Court’s remedial orders are not properly before this Court because the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal. Second, the court adopted the narrowest possible remedy, allowing the Government itself to choose whether it would return the class members to the United States or provide them with process where they are held. Finally, the Government is in every respect responsible for any resulting harms. Had it complied with the preliminary injunction, no followup orders would have been necessary, nor would the Government have faced a “sudden need . . . to detain criminal aliens” abroad. Id., at 39. It does not face such “need” today, as it can return the noncitizens it wrongfully removed at any time. No litigant, not even the Government, may “satisfy the irreparable harm requirement if the harm complained of is self-inflicted.”
But the plaintiffs in this case clearly face very real and immediate harms:
For their part, the plaintiffs in this case face extraordinary harms from even a temporary grant of relief to the Government. A. A. R. P. v. Trump, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4) (recognizing detainees’ interests against removal are “particularly weighty”). The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks. Thirteen noncitizens narrowly escaped being the target of extraordinary violence in Libya; O. C. G. spent months in hiding in Guatemala; others face release in South Sudan, which the State Department says is in the midst of “‘armed conflict’” between “‘ethnic groups.’” N. 2, supra. Only the District Court’s careful attention to this case prevented worse outcomes. Yet today the Court obstructs those proceedings, exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.
When put that way, it feels like the kind of thing a Supreme Court is supposed to stop, not reverse a lower court on without explanation.
Sotomayor then points out the pure insanity of this decision:
Given its conduct in these proceedings, the Government’s posture resembles that of the arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.
The Legal Arguments Are Nonsensical Too
Even worse, she notes, if you get past the procedural stuff, the merits argument by the government is nonsensical as well. She calls out some of it as “absurd.”
Ultimately, the Government says, the plaintiffs in this case object to their removal. So, they should bring their challenges in a petition for review of an order of removal. Yet the Government also claims that it need not issue or reopen any orders of removal before deporting someone to a third country. That is part of the problem plaintiffs seek to remedy: Without an applicable order of removal, they have no way to raise their claims under the Convention. In the end, then, the Government’s view is that the only way to challenge its refusal to provide orders of removal is to appeal those (nonexistent) orders. That is absurd.
Even worse, under the government’s argument, these plaintiffs get no due process rights at all—which would also be a totally absurd scenario:
Even if the Government could establish that its enjoined actions (of providing no notice or process) are integral to the “operation” of §1231(b), that in turn would raise a “‘serious constitutional question.’” Webster v. Doe, 486 U. S. 592, 603 (1988). That is because, as the Government reads it, §1252(f )(1) threatens to nullify plaintiffs’ procedural due process rights entirely. Recall that the Government claims it may remove noncitizens in the space of 15 minutes. See supra, at 4. Such noncitizens cannot practicably file individual lawsuits to vindicate their due process rights. After all, they will not know of the need to file a claim until they are on a bus or plane out of the country. Nor will their counsel, whom the Government refuses to notify. The Government can hardly expect every deportable noncitizen to file a pre-emptive lawsuit. Thus, if §1252(f )(1) precludes classwide vindication of the right to notice and due process under these circumstances, then it effectively nullifies those rights.
It is that kind of lawlessness that the Supreme Court blessed yesterday.
WITHOUT EXPLANATION.
Then there’s the Administrative Procedure Act issue, where Sotomayor again points out that the government’s interpretation of the law effectively wipes out large segments of the statute:
That leaves, finally, the merits of plaintiffs’ underlying APA and due process claims. Begin with the statutory and regulatory scheme governing removal. In the Government’s view, once a noncitizen has been found removable, she can effectively be removed anywhere at any time. That view would render meaningless the countless statutory and regulatory provisions providing for notice and a hearing. See, e.g., 8 U. S. C. §1229(a)(1) (“In removal proceedings under section 1229a . . . written notice . . . shall be given . . . to the alien or to the alien’s counsel of record”); 8 CFR §1240.10(f ) (2024) (in removal hearing, the Immigration Judge “shall . . . identify for the record a country, or countries in the alternative, to which the alien’s removal may be made”); §241.8(e) (when a removal order is reinstated after a noncitizen illegally reenters the country, noncitizen who “expresses a fear of returning to the country designated in that order” must be given an interview (emphasis added)); 8 U. S. C. §§1228(b)(1)–(3) (noncitizens determined removable due to felony conviction must be given notice under §1229(a) and 14 days “to apply for judicial review”); 8 CFR §238.1(b)(2) (requiring notice to noncitizens removable due to felony convictions).
The Government asserts that it need only comply with these provisions once, for the first removal proceeding, and can disregard them afterwards. The consequence of that view is that what happens in removal proceedings simply does not matter. The Government could designate any location in its initial order, lose before the immigration judge, decline to appeal, and promptly thereafter deport the noncitizen to a country of the Government’s choosing. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in O. C. G.’s case.
In other words, the Trump regime is deliberately defying the law:
Where did the Government find the authority to disregard Congress’s carefully calibrated scheme of immigration laws? It does not argue the third-country removal statute provides it. See Application for Stay of Injunction 13. Instead, the Government simply falls back on the Executive’s implied authority in this field. Yet “the President must comply with legislation regulating or restricting the transfer of detainees” even in “wartime.”
But, Sotomayor points out, you can’t just ignore the law like that:
It is a “‘cardinal principle of statutory construction,’” moreover, that statutes should be construed so that “‘no clause, sentence, or word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant.’” TRW Inc. v. Andrews, 534 U. S. 19, 31 (2001). Here the Government construes the statute’s lack of “a particular process for carrying out” third-country removals, Application for Stay of Injunction 13, as conveying near-unlimited power to the Executive, rendering the remaining statutory scheme “‘void . . . or insignificant.’” TRW, 534 U. S., at 31. To make this claim is to ignore the clear statutory command that notice and a hearing must be provided. See supra, at 15. The Government cannot show a likelihood of success on plaintiffs’ statutory and regulatory claims, nor can it defend the lawfulness of its no-notice removals.
Even if Trump can ignore Congress, Sotomayor wonders how the Supreme Court can possibly bless his regime ignoring the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process:
Turning to the constitutional claim, this Court has repeatedly affirmed that “ ‘the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law’ in the context of removal proceedings.” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3); A. A. R. P., 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3). Due process includes reasonable notice and an opportunity to be heard. Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U. S. 306, 314 (1950). Of course the Government cannot avoid its obligation to provide due process “in the context of removal proceedings,” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3), by skipping such proceedings entirely and simply whisking noncitizens off the street and onto busses or planes out of the country.
[….]
The Government barely disputes these basic principles. Instead, it obfuscates the issue by asserting that some (perhaps “many”) members of the class should be treated as if they never entered the United States. Application for Stay of Injunction 33–34. Yet even if that were true as to some class members, it could show at most that the class might be too broadly defined, not that the Government is likely to succeed on the constitutional merits.
As she concludes, due process is a core component of the rule of law. And here the majority is tossing it in the wood chipper with nary an explanation.
The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 646 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle. Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled. That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.
Some of the plaintiffs in the case quickly asked Judge Murphy for a new TRO and—interestingly!—he quickly responded that such an order is not necessary because (as Sotomayor noted above) the specific orders regarding the men illegally shipped towards South Sudan, and currently held in Djibouti, was not appealed! This ruling may apply to others, but the current order regarding these men stands:
The Court’s May 21, 2025 Order on Remedy, Dkt. 119, remains in full force and effect, notwithstanding today’s stay of the Preliminary Injunction. DHS v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153, slip op. at 12 (S. Ct. Jun. 23, 2025) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (“[T]he District Court’s remedial orders [were] not properly before [the Supreme] Court because the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal.”).
I imagine the DOJ will challenge that, and tragically the Supreme Court may be on their side.
What This Means Going Forward
The Supreme Court just taught the Trump administration—and every future administration—a valuable lesson: you can ignore court orders with impunity as long as you appeal to the right justices. Why bother following district court rulings when you know the Supreme Court will bail you out without even requiring an explanation?
This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about the fundamental principle that government officials must follow court orders until they’re properly overturned. By rewarding DHS’s blatant defiance, the Court has opened the floodgates. What’s to stop Trump from ignoring the next judge who tries to block his policies? Or the judge after that?
And that shouldn’t take away from the fact that the human cost will be immediate and devastating. Right now, people are sitting in detention centers knowing they could be shipped to Libya, South Sudan, or any other country the administration picks—with no meaningful chance to explain why that might get them killed. Some will disappear into war zones. Others will be sold into slavery. And five or six justices couldn’t be bothered to write a few paragraphs explaining why this is legal.
This decision completes the Roberts Court’s long-term transformation from a judicial body into a partisan enabler of authoritarian rule. Each time they reward lawlessness with their assent, they make clear that the rule of law only applies to those without political connections to the right people.
Judge Murphy tried to do his job. He followed the law, protected constitutional rights, and demanded basic due process. For his efforts, he got a Supreme Court that essentially told him to shut up and get out of the way while the government traffics humans around the globe.
That’s not justice. That’s not law. That’s just power protecting power while people die.
Filed Under: brian murphy, crimes against humanity, deportation, dhs, donald trump, due process, dvd, human trafficking, sonia sotomayor, supreme court
We’ve written a few times about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who was one of the first people detained by ICE and told he was being kicked out of the country solely because Marco Rubio said he doesn’t belong here. No due process. No hearing. Just Rubio’s arbitrary say-so.
A federal court has now rightly ruled that this is all nonsense, and the government has no legitimate claim to detain or deport him on this basis. Though, the judge immediately gives the US government 40 hours to appeal, so Khalil is not yet free.
If you don’t recall, Khalil was seized by ICE agents and pulled away from his pregnant, American-citizen wife. The agents initially told him his visa had been revoked—apparently not realizing he was a green card holder, not a visa holder. When confronted with this basic factual error, they pivoted on the spot to claim his green card was also revoked, sending the government scrambling to reverse-engineer some legal justification for what they’d already done.
Judge Michael Farbiarz finds the entire argument wholly unconvincing. Indeed, he notes that it seems clear that the decision to detain and deport Khalil appears to be wholly arbitrary and/or based on his protected First Amendment activity (he was active in protesting Israel’s actions against Gaza).
Faced with the obvious First Amendment problem, the government tried to argue that Khalil’s detention wasn’t really about his protest activities. Instead, they claimed it was about something a post-hoc fishing expedition turned up: an alleged minor paperwork discrepancy in his green card application.
The judge wasn’t buying it. If this paperwork issue was really the driving force, why is Khalil being detained when others with similar alleged discrepancies aren’t? As the court notes:
Maybe the Petitioner would be detained, in any event, on that second basis. And if so, it might be argued, there would not be any incremental chilling effect from detaining the Petitioner for an additional reason, the Secretary of State’s determination.
But that argument does not work.
The reason: the evidence is that lawful permanent residents are virtually never detained pending removal for the sort of alleged omissions in a lawful-permanent-resident application that the Petitioner is charged with here. And that strongly suggests that it is the Secretary of State’s determination that drives the Petitioner’s ongoing detention — not the other charge against him.
In other words, the government’s paperwork excuse is bullshit. If people aren’t normally detained for these alleged omissions, then why is Khalil? The answer is obvious: the only actual basis the government is using to detain Khalil is Rubio’s “determination” that his free speech activities were somehow unwelcome here.
From there, the court finds that Rubio’s arbitrary determination has already harmed Khalil, costing him a job, harming his reputation, and chilling his speech. Indeed, the court notes that the government doesn’t contest any of this.
The judge then makes the obvious point about where the public interest lies:
“[T]he public has no interest in the enforcement of what is very likely an unconstitutional statute.” Odebrecht Constr., Inc. v. Sec’y, Fla. Dep’t of Transp., 715 F.3d 1268, 1290 (11th Cir. 2013); accord, e.g., Schrader v. Dist. Att’y of York Cnty., 74 F.4th 120, 128–29 (3d Cir. 2023); Chamber of Com. of U.S. v. Edmondson, 594 F.3d 742, 771 (10th Cir. 2010).
And on the other side of the ledger, there is a chilling effect on speech. See Amalgamated Transit Union Loc. 85, 39 F.4th at 109 (“There is a strong public interest in upholding the requirements of the First Amendment. And, if a plaintiff demonstrates both a likelihood of success on the merits and irreparable injury, it almost always will be the case that the public interest will favor the plaintiff.”) (cleaned up).
The government will almost certainly appeal, so this isn’t over yet. But it is yet another example of a court looking at what the Trump regime is doing and saying “what the fuck, that’s not right…” And it still won’t take back the many months that Khalil was locked up for no good reason, missing the birth of his child, and losing out on many opportunities.
Filed Under: chilling effects, deportation, detained, donald trump, free speech, mahmoud khalil, marco rubio, protests
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
The best they can do was… finding a 2022 traffic stop.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back…
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, ben schrader, deportation, dhs, doj, donald trump, el salvador, human trafficking, kristi noem, ms-13, nayib bukele, pam bondi, traffic stop
The Trump administration has just claimed an astounding new power: the ability to deport lawful permanent residents based on their “expected beliefs” (including perfectly “lawful” expected beliefs). This isn’t speculation or hyperbole — it’s the explicit thought-police justification Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave in immigration court documents for trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and green card holder. This attempted expansion of government authority to police thought should alarm anyone who cares about civil liberties, due process, or the rule of law.
As a reminder, Khalil is a lawful permanent resident (green card holder) in the US and a student at Columbia University in New York. While he was involved in some pro-Palestinian demonstrations, MAGA world has falsely labeled him a “Hamas supporter.” I’ve yet to see any evidence that actually supports that claim, but MAGA isn’t exactly known for accuracy in their accusations. Even worse, when ICE showed up at his student housing to arrest him (in front of his pregnant, US citizen wife), they told him his “visa” was being revoked.
Except he doesn’t have a visa. He holds a green card, which makes him a completely lawful permanent resident in the US. ICE then told him his green card was also revoked, which isn’t something they could actually do. Since then, there’s been a lot of obnoxious game playing by Homeland Security playing “hide the guy we kidnapped,” before dumping him in Louisiana and seeking to deport him.
There are multiple legal proceedings going on with respect to Khalil’s future in the US, with the main one taking place in a federal court in New Jersey. But down in Louisiana there’s a separate legal process in front of an “immigration judge,” which is not an Article III judge or a part of the judiciary at all. Rather it’s someone who works for the DOJ reviewing immigration issues.
For a brief moment last week, it looked like even this DOJ employee was perplexed as to why Khalil had been taken and why the US was trying to deport him. Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ordered DHS to give some reason for why Khalil was detained and why they were trying to deport him.
At a hearing, Judge Jamee Comans gave the federal government 24 hours to turn over its evidence against Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and prominent pro-Palestinian activist, said Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil’s attorneys, who attended the hearing.
“The government has not produced a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” Van Der Hout said.
The next day, the government finally produced the “evidence” and to say it is underwhelming is quite the understatement. They released a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a bunch of vague claims, including that he could single-handedly kick green card holders out of the country based on their “expected beliefs” even if they are perfectly “lawful.”
If you can’t read that screenshot, it says:
Under INA section 237(a) (4) (C)(i), an alien is deportable from the United States if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. Under INA section 237(a)(4)(C)(ii), for cases in which the basis for this determination is the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful, the Secretary of State must personally determine that the alien’s presence or activities would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.
This document should forever define Marco Rubio’s legacy. As Secretary of State, he has personally put his name on a legal claim that the government can deport lawful residents based on beliefs they might hold in the future — even if those beliefs would be perfectly legal. This isn’t just standard immigration enforcement overreach — it’s an attempt to establish thought-police powers that would make Orwell blush. And Rubio didn’t just sign off on this theory — he’s actively championing it, apparently seeing no problem with claiming the power to exile people based on what he thinks they might someday believe.
For anyone keeping score at home: when MAGA supporters inevitably start ranting about Democrats wanting to police speech and thought, remember that Rubio’s the one who officially claimed the power to deport legal residents based on “expected beliefs.” That should be carved into his political tombstone.
Also: fuck that fascist bullshit.
The other part of the document claims that it was done based on the “policy” of the US to fight antisemitism and to protect Jews, but fuck that as well. It’s clearly bullshit. This is the same administration that has said the Naval Academy library had to remove books about the Holocaust, while leaving Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the shelves. This is the same administration that hired into a top position someone with a long history of blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories popular in neo-Nazi circles. This administration’s claims of fighting antisemitism appear to be pretty antisemitic itself, using false claims of wanting to “protect” Jews to actually make Jews targets of more hatred.
This isn’t about “a compelling foreign policy interest” by the Secretary State. This is about a fucking insecure coward in the form of Marco Rubio, who has been given power by Donald Trump and is using the position to destroy lives because that’s what insecure fascists do.
Tragically, in this case, that was enough for DOJ employee Judge Jamee Comans, who said that was enough of a justification to bless Khalil’s deportation.
An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mahmoud Khalil, granting the government an early victory in its efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. college campuses.
Again, this is only the first stage in a multi-stage process involving separate federal court proceedings in New Jersey as well, and even in front of the immigration judge the situation isn’t over. Khalil’s lawyers can still argue that he shouldn’t be deported to this same judge (leaving aside the constitutional issues that will show up in the New Jersey case).
Here, Comans admitted during the hearing that she was unable to look the larger constitutional issues:
Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.
“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement.
She denied Mr. Khalil’s lawyers’ requests that they be allowed to cross-examine or depose Mr. Rubio so that he could elaborate on his claims. “This court is neither inclined or authorized” to compel such testimony, she said.
Khalil himself highlighted the fundamental absurdity of these proceedings in a powerful statement to the court:
“I would like to quote what you said last time, that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “Clearly, what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”
The contrast could not be starker: A student, dragged 1,000 miles from his family, calmly calling out the mockery of due process, while the Secretary of State claims the power to deport people based on what he thinks they might believe in the future.
This case is about far more than just Mahmoud Khalil. It’s about whether we’ll allow the government to claim the power to police thought itself. Marco Rubio has now officially attached his name to one of the most dangerously authoritarian theories of government power we’ve seen: that the state can exile legal residents based on their “expected beliefs.” That should follow him for the rest of his life. He should never live down this cowardly suck-up in pursuit of power.
We need more people in America like Khalil, willing to speak truth to power even at great personal cost, and fewer power-hungry officials ready to torch fundamental civil liberties just to score political points in pursuit of the fascist destruction of the American constitutional and democratic principles.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, deportation, due process, fascism, free speech, green cards, mahmoud khalil, marco rubio, thought police
Don’t let the White House (or the media!) get away with calling trafficking people they don’t like to foreign slave labor camps “deportation.” As we’ve noted, deportation involves due process. It also (by definition) means removing a foreigner from a country.
As we’ve covered lately, the government’s belief that it can engage in human trafficking to El Salvadoran slave labor camps with no due process was unlikely to stop at just those who were not citizens. After all, it has already involved tons of people who could not be shown to have been convicted of crimes, and in many cases with no actual affiliation with the “gangs” the administration insists they’re members of.
And, when you don’t believe in due process, then there’s no way to prove you’re a US citizen in the first place. The administration’s hatred and mocking of due process already meant that they believed they could disappear US citizens to a slave labor camp without any chance at review.
But now they’ve come out and said it. On Sunday, Donald Trump hinted at it, and on Tuesday, White House chief propagandist Karoline Leavitt said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the White House would like to traffic US citizens to El Salvadoran slave labor camps (where they now claim they have no ability to get someone out, even if they shipped someone by mistake).
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses….
Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.
Let’s be absolutely clear: This isn’t deportation — it’s extra-judicial rendition of American citizens, precisely the kind of authoritarian practice that the Constitution’s due process protections were designed to prevent. The administration’s deliberate misuse of immigration terminology attempts to normalize what would effectively be government kidnapping.
Combined with Trump’s head of human trafficking, Tom Homan admitting that ICE is the main decider in who gets renditioned this way (rather than a judge), and we have a lawless, sociopathic administration that is set to disappear US citizens without due process.
This is something many of us have been warning about for months, and Trump and his minions are now admitting it.
Hopefully, by now, more and more people are realizing that when Trump says stuff like this, he’s serious. He’s not joking. He’s not playing 10-dimensional chess. He’s not trying to make “the woke” upset. He legitimately thinks that people he doesn’t like deserve no rights, no due process, no dignity, and has no qualms at all with shipping them to foreign slave labor camps.
And that’s why people need to speak out and make it clear that this is not just unacceptable and unconstitutional. It is pure sociopathic evil. This is crazed dictatorial “disappear people who annoy me” bullshit.
Yes, many people will try to hide and cower in silence, and that’s what the MAGA crew want. But it’s why we need to be speaking up and calling out what’s happening. The history books will record the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump and his loyalist minions, agreeing to push pure evil in pursuit of power. But those of us living it need to speak out about it now while we still have the chance.
The gravity of this moment cannot be overstated. The administration is not floating trial balloons or engaging in political theater — they are explicitly stating their intent to create an extra-judicial system for disappearing US citizens. With ICE empowered as judge, jury, and executioner, and El Salvador’s prisons serving as black sites beyond US jurisdiction, we’re watching the blueprint for an American gulag take shape.
This represents something beyond a constitutional crisis that transcends typical partisan divisions. When a presidential administration openly advocates for the power to extra-judicially rendition citizens, silence becomes complicity. The time for “wait and see” or “they don’t really mean it” has long passed.
We’ve already seen how quickly “exceptional” measures against non-citizens became normalized. Now, as predicted, those same mechanisms are being turned against citizens. If we don’t forcefully reject this assault on fundamental constitutional rights now, we may soon lose the ability to reject it at all.
Filed Under: deportation, donald trump, el salvador, human trafficking, karoline leavitt, rendition, tom homan, us citizens
A federal court has delivered a rebuke of police gang databases in, of all things, a review of a deportation hearing.
As we’ve been made painfully aware, gang databases are just extensions of biased policing efforts. People are placed in gang databases for numerous, incredibly stupid reasons. People are designated gang members simply for living, working, and going to school in areas where gang activity is prevalent. have been added to gang databases because cops can’t be bothered to perform any due diligence. There’s no way for people to know they’ve been designated as gang-affiliated and, worse, there’s often no way to challenge this designation and get yourself removed from these lists, which tend to result in additional harassment by police officers or “gang enhancements” that lengthen sentences for anyone listed in these dubious databases.
In 2015, Homeland Security Investigations officers performed a sweep in Boston, Massachusetts, rounding up suspected MS-13 gang members for deportation. This sweep snared Cristian Diaz Ortiz, who was 16, had entered the country illegally, and was now living with his uncle.
Oritz applied for asylum, citing the fear of being subjected to MS-13 gang violence if he was sent back to his home country, El Salvador. From the First Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:
On October 1, 2018, Diaz Ortiz filed an application for asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT protection, basing his request on multiple grounds, including persecution because of his evangelical Christian religion. He also reported that an aunt had been murdered in 2011 by members of MS-13, and he feared that the gang would kill him as well if he returned to El Salvador. In a subsequently filed affidavit, Diaz Ortiz stated that, while he was living in El Salvador, MS-13 had threatened his life “on multiple occasions” because he was a practicing evangelical Christian. He said he repeatedly refused the gang’s demands that he join MS-13, but gang members continued to follow him and issue threats. In 2015, the gang physically attacked him and warned “that they would kill [him] and [his] family if [he] did not stop saying [he] was a Christian and living and preaching against the gang way of life.”
The Immigration Judge sided with the Department of Homeland Security. It largely made this decision due to the introduction of a “Gang Assessment Database” that said Ortiz was not a practicing Christian who might fear retaliation if removed from the country, but rather an MS-13 infiltrator. The “gang package” (as the court refers to it) was compiled by the Boston PD. It stated the following:
Cristian Josue DIAZ ORTIZ has been verified as an MS-13 gang member by the Boston Police Department (BPD)/Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC).
Cristian Josue DIAZ ORTIZ has documented associations with MS-13 gang members by the Boston Police Department and Boston School Police Department (BSPD). (See the attached BPD & BSPD incident/field interview reports and gang intelligence bulletins.)
Cristian Josue DIAZ ORTIZ has been documented carrying common MS-13 gang related weapons by the Boston Police Department. (See the attached BPD incident/field interview reports.) [A footnote states that the only “weapon” ever documented by the BPD was a bike chain and a padlock carried in Ortiz’s backpack.]
Cristian Josue DIAZ ORTIZ has been documented frequenting areas notorious for MS13 gang activity by the Boston Police Department. These areas are 104 Bennington St. and the East Boston Airport Park/Stadium in East Boston, Massachusetts which are both known for MS-13 gang activity including recent firearms arrests and a homicide.
According to the Boston PD, Oritz racked up “points” by associating with gang members and being in areas MS-13 members frequented. If enough points are accrued, a person gets placed in the gang database. But the underlying events had nothing to do with gang activity, despite what the summary provided by the DHS said.
The BPD documented nine “interactions” with Ortiz in which it assigned “gang” points to him. Three of those instances involved Ortiz smoking marijuana (a civil infraction in Massachusetts) with students and others the BPD claimed were “known MS-13 members.” Four others involved Ortiz “loitering” in a place near “known gang member” or being approached and talked to by “known gang members.” And one of the interactions was the time the BPD “discovered” Oritz carrying a bike lock and chain in his backpack — something not all that uncommon for bike owners (which Ortiz was).
This “gang package” was critiqued by a law enforcement expert who testified that Ortiz should never have been included in the gang database. The former Boston police officer pointed out Ortiz had never been suspected of criminal activity and was apparently being penalized solely for spending time with people of his same ethnicity. The gang package’s claim that Ortiz had a “history” of carrying weapons was clearly undercut by the BPD’s documentation of a single incident where an officer recovered something that could be used as a weapon (the bike chain), but was not inherently a tool of unlawful violence.
The immigration judge ignored all of this, finding only the DHS and BPD credible. So did the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Fortunately for Ortiz, the First Circuit isn’t as easily impressed by the Boston PD’s police work. It has some very harsh words for the two lower levels that blew off their obligations to the asylum seeker.
If the IJ and BIA had performed even a cursory assessment of reliability, they would have discovered a lack of evidence to substantiate the gang package’s classification of Diaz Ortiz as a member of MS-13. Most significantly, the record contains no explanation of the basis for the point system employed by the BPD. The record is silent on how the Department determined what point values should attach to what conduct, or what point threshold is reasonable to reliably establish gang membership.
As the appeals court points out, these databases are inherently unreliable because literally anything can be used to imply someone is a gang member. The lower courts were wrong to completely dismiss Ortiz’s challenge of the BPD’s assessment.
That silence is so consequential because, during the period relevant to this case, the list of “items or activities” that could lead to “verification for entry into the Gang Assessment Database” was shockingly wide-ranging. It included “Prior Validation by a Law Enforcement Agency” (nine points), “Documented Association (BPD Incident Report)” (four points), and the open-ended “Information Not Covered by Other Selection Criteria” (one point). The 2017 form for submitting FIO [Field Interview Operations] reports to the database states that a “Documented Association” includes virtually any interaction with someone identified as a gang member: “[w]alking, eating, recreating, communicating, or otherwise associating with confirmed gang members or associates.”
The points are easy to acquire, but there’s no consistency in how the Boston PD assigns them, lending more credibility to the assumption that gang databases mainly exist to confirm cops’ biases.
Moreover, the point system was applied to Diaz Ortiz in a haphazard manner. He was assigned points for most, but not all, of his documented interactions with purported MS-13 members. When he was assigned points, he was not always assigned the same number per interaction. Although he was assigned two points for “contact” with alleged gang members or associates on most occasions, he was assigned five points for the “Intelligence Report” submitted by the Boston School Police that describes an encounter that appears no different from the other “contacts.” Only two items in the Rule 335 list carry five points: “Information from Reliable, Confidential Informant” and “Information Developed During Investigation and/or Surveillance.” We thus cannot accept the BIA’s implicit conclusion that the gang package’s points-driven identification of Diaz-Ortiz as a “VERIFIED and ACTIVE” member of MS-13 was reliable.
Case in point:
The entry for November 28, 2017 — the report from a Boston school officer — illustrates several of these issues. The gist of the entry is that two officers made “casual conversation” with a student in a “full face mask” whom they identified as a member of MS-13, and they then saw the student walk over to a group of teenage boys that included Diaz Ortiz. The report identifies no improper conduct by any of the students; it does not say that the mask bore gang colors or symbols;23 it does not indicate that the masked student spoke directly to Diaz Ortiz. Nor does the report explain the basis for identifying the student as an MS-13 member other than to say that the BRIC labeled the student as a “verified” member. Therefore, we at most can infer from this paltry set of facts that Diaz Ortiz was standing near an individual who was identified as an MS-13 member by the BRIC, with the only basis for that identification the possible use of the same problematic point system that identified Diaz Ortiz as a member. Yet, Diaz Ortiz received five points merely because that student decided to walk over and join a group that included him.
Yes, the BPD decided Ortiz was affiliated with a notorious El Salvadoran gang internationally known for violently [checks gang package] smoking the reefer and conversing in public.
The whole opinion is worth reading. It ruthlessly picks apart the BPD’s gang database, reaching conclusions that apply to every gang database run by any law enforcement agency in America. This vacates the lower courts’ decisions, which means Ortiz can again plead his case before the BIA. And this time he’ll get a new judge because the First Circuit feels that sending it back to the original immigration judge would just allow that judge to re-engage with their pre-existing biases.
Gang databases are garbage. Even the most cursory examination of the underlying factors common to almost every gang database makes that clear. But the immigration court couldn’t be bothered to do this, which almost resulted in someone being sent back to El Salvador where interactions with actual gang members might have resulted in his death, rather than just being an unwilling participant in Boston’s “Whose Gang Is It Anyway?,” where everything’s made up and, unfortunately, the points do matter.
Filed Under: 1st circuit, boston, boston pd, boston police, deportation, gang database
Under president Donald Trump, ICE went from barely tolerable to fascist stormtroopery, doing anything in its power to kick people out of the country. Trump claimed he was just trying to make the nation safer by ridding us of the “worst of the worst.” His vague directives lit a fire under the worst ICE employees, giving them free rein to forcibly eject as many people as possible, even if those people were not the “worst,” nor even trending towards that direction.
ICE struggled to find (figuratively [but also maybe literally?]) boatloads of hardened criminals to send packing, so it decided quantity was preferable to quality. To cite just one example of ICE’s enthusiasm for ejecting even the best and brightest (along with everyone else), the agency set up and ran a fake college solely for the purpose of booting people trying to do nothing more than continue their education and satisfy the requirements of their student visas.
A court case currently being reviewed by the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court appears to show ICE engaging in retaliation against protected speech in order to remove (check reports) a man who has lived in this country illegally, but definitely gainfully, for nearly two decades. Joel Rose has this report for NPR:
Activist Claudio Rojas says he was deported to his homeland, Argentina, for appearing in a film that criticized U.S. immigration authorities.
Rojas is one of the stars of The Infiltrators. He was invited to introduce the movie at the Miami Film Festival in 2019. Instead, Rojas was detained at a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.
A few weeks later, he was deported.
Here’s a description of the film — one based partially on fact — via the Sundance Institute. The film took home two Sundance Film Festival awards at the 2019 ceremony.
Without warning, Claudio Rojas is detained by ICE officials outside his Florida home. He is transferred to the Broward Transitional Center, a detention facility used as a holding space for imminent deportations. Terrified of never seeing him again, Claudio’s family contacts the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), a group of activist Dreamers known for stopping deportations. Believing that no one is free as long as one is in detention, NIYA enlists Marco Saavedra to self-deport with the hopes of gaining access to the detention center and impeding Claudio’s expulsion. Once inside, Marco discovers a complex for-profit institution housing hundreds of multinational immigrants, all imprisoned without trial.
In real life — like in the film — Rojas was released and headed back to his family. He was one of the lucky ones. The for-profit detention facility (along with its ICE overseers) did everything it could to keep detainees away from their legal representation prior to their almost inevitable expulsion from the country.
Rojas’ appearance in this film appears to have provoked ICE into removing him from the United States, sending him far away from the family he raised here. Need a second opinion on the optics of this ICE maneuver? Here’s the opening of Matt Fagerholm’s review of the film for Roger Ebert’s site.
A month after Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s “The Infiltrators” garnered two prizes at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, one of its subjects, immigrant rights activist Claudio Rojas, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during what was supposed to be a routine appointment. His subsequent deportation to Argentina, severing him from his family in the states, appears to have been a clear retaliation for Rojas’ attempts chronicled in this documentary to undermine Florida’s Broward Transitional Center, a for-profit institution that specializes in detaining immigrants without a trial or court-appointed lawyer.
Rojas challenged his removal, citing its retaliatory aspects. The district court refused to consider his request, considering everything about it moot because ICE had already sent him back to Argentina. Since he was here illegally, the court said ICE had the legal justification to kick him out, even though it had never pulled the trigger on this option until after he appeared in a film critical of ICE and its detention facilities.
What he’s heard from one of three-judge panel handling his case is promising.
[T]he Supreme Court’s ruling in the AADC case left the door open for a future deportation case that is so “outrageous,” as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, that it would cross the line.
And appeals court Judge Robin Rosenbaum asked during the hearing whether the Rojas case fits that description.
“There’s possibly an outrageous First Amendment scenario where it could be a problem,” Rosenbaum said. “It seems to me the situation couldn’t be much more outrageous than what we have here.”
While challenging removals is less likely to end in a government loss than cases involving qualified immunity, there’s still hope that this decision — and ICE’s apparently retaliatory actions — will result in Rojas having his removal reversed.
But it’s a very slim chance. That decision does indeed say courts may be able to find an “outrageous” scenario that they can exercise jurisdiction over.
To resolve the present controversy, we need not rule out the possibility of a rare case in which the alleged basis of discrimination is so outrageous that the foregoing considerations can be overcome.
However, the rest of the concluding paragraph says this:
Whether or not there be such exceptions, the general rule certainly applies here. When an alien’s continuing presence in this country is in violation of the immigration laws, the Government does not offend the Constitution by deporting him for the additional reason that it believes him to be a member of an organization that supports terrorist activity.
It’s a long shot but it’s worth taking. If nothing else, further courtroom examination of ICE’s activities is likely to expose its selective enforcement of immigration laws — something it did plenty of under Trump, targeting the easiest-to-remove persons rather than the “worst of the worst” one of our worst presidents claimed immigration officers would prioritize.
Filed Under: 11th circuit, 1st amendment, activism, claudio rojas, deportation, ice, immigration, retaliation
ICE has gotten bigger and bolder under the Trump Administration. The minimal constraints placed on it by previous administrations have been removed, allowing the agency to gorge on data and engage in widespread surveillance. Billions of dollars and an untold amount of tech are being thrown at a “problem” that isn’t even criminal. Living in this country while undocumented is a civil violation, but ICE (and the Administration) treats it as one of the most severe threats to the nation.
America is apparently going to be made great by tossing out those aspiring to be Americans, or at the very least just trying to escape the horrors or poverty of their native countries. To ensure ICE can remove as many people as possible, the agency has tapped into national ALPR databases, run facial recognition searches against drivers license databases, and hooked up with a tech company nearly as reviled as ICE is.
But that’s not the full extent of ICE’s surveillance/deportation efforts. As Alvaro M. Bedoya reports for Slate, the agency is leveraging everything it can get it hands on to ensure a steady flow of undocumented immigrants out of this country.
In 2017, breaking with prior practice, ICE started to use data from interviews with scared, detained kids and their relatives to find and arrest more than 500 sponsors who stepped forward to take in the children. At the same time, ICE announced a plan for a social media monitoring program that would use artificial intelligence to automatically flag 10,000 people per month for deportation investigations. (It was scuttled only when computer scientists helpfully indicated that the proposed system was impossible.)
And it’s not enough for immigrants to steer clear of the entities that may help them get ejected from the country. ICE is all over anything that might lead it to more deportees.
Many immigrants avoid contact with any government agency, even the DMV, but they can’t go without heat, electricity, or water; ICE aimed to find them, too. So, that same year, ICE paid for access to a private database that includes the addresses of customers from 80 national and regional electric, cable, gas, and telephone companies.
There’s a private company weaving this massive amount of data into usable intel for ICE. Palantir provides the software that analyzes data, builds profiles, and makes sense of ICE’s massive data stash. The company even fills in any blanks ICE might have by adding in information purchased from data brokers.
Palantir doesn’t like to talk about its work with ICE. Bedoya points out the company’s most recent securities filing makes no mention of ICE or the company’s assistance in tracking down undocumented immigrants. It prefers to discuss its military customers and its supposed commitment to keeping this country safe. When asked directly about ICE, Palantir has downplayed its involvement. This is how Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, spins things.
When criticized, Karp has described Palantir’s work for ICE as “limited,” “a de minimis part of our work”—strange things for American contractor to say about its second–largest U.S. government client.
This toxic partnership has done little to damage Palantir’s reputation — at least as far as investors are concerned. Its work with ICE targets what many consider to be unimportant people: immigrants who are in the country illegally. If the company is good at what it does and customers like ICE are happy and willing to sign multi-million dollar contracts, any moral and legal qualms shareholders might have will be papered over with money.
Filed Under: big data, data, deportation, dhs, ice, immigration, trump administration
Companies: palantir
Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York isn’t one to suffer the federal government’s many fools. Five years ago, Rakoff resigned from the DOJ’s rigged forensics committee — one supposedly formed to tell the DOJ what it was doing wrong when analyzing and testifying about forensic evidence. Rakoff received a personal call from the DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General who told him the Commission would not be examining the handling of pre-trial evidence. In other words, the Commission could not make any recommendations about disclosures about means and methodology used by forensic investigators to defendants prior to trial. Rakoff resigned, calling out the government for its “trial by ambush” practices.
More recently, Judge Rakoff demanded to know why every single one of the DEA’s 179 reverse sting operations targeted minorities. The stings involve the DEA telling targets a shipment of drugs is coming in and how to intercept it. There are no real drugs arriving and the DEA swoops in to arrest people for attempting to make off with nonexistent drugs. It then uses the imaginary amount of drugs to recommend prison sentences. Somehow, the fake amount always clears the bar needed to demand a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence.
Judge Rakoff is back and he’s still angry. He’s been handling litigation over ICE’s nasty practice of camping out at courthouses to arrest people for immigration violations. ICE figures this is a great place to find people because they’re compelled to show up. Immigration agents aren’t just picking up accused criminals. They’re also hauling off witnesses and crime victims. (h/t Courthouse News Service)
The lawsuit was filed by the New York State Attorney General, who sought an injunction blocking ICE agents from trolling state courthouses for undocumented immigrants. ICE has been blocked, and Judge Rakoff wastes no time excoriating the agency for its actions. From the opening of the decision [PDF]:
Recent events confirm the need for freely and fully functioning state courts, not least in the State of New York. But it is one thing for the state courts to try to deal with the impediments brought on by a pandemic, and quite another for them to have to grapple with disruptions and intimidations artificially imposed by an agency of the federal government in violation of long-standing privileges and fundamental principles of federalism and of separation of powers.
The ruling points out ICE never used to be this way. But Trump’s Executive Order, released shortly after he was elected, gave ICE the idea its earlier reluctance to look completely evil was going to limit its ability to aggressively pursue the foreign baddies the US president clearly wanted removed. Arrests at New York state courthouses leapt from 28 in 2016 to 161 in 2017. In 2019, the total was 173 arrests.
The judge says ICE has been completely disruptive to the judicial process.
Plaintiffs have also submitted substantial evidence indicating that these arrests, in addition to their impact on litigants, undermined the orderly functioning of New York courts themselves. Because ICE arrested aliens as they were entering court for scheduled proceedings, the agency forced courts to adjourn proceedings at the last minute, wasting scarce judicial time and resources. Similar results occurred when ICE failed to produce a criminal defendant for a scheduled conference. Even worse were those occasions when ICE conducted an arrest in the courthouse itself, resulting in “complete chaos,” as well as physical damage, Finally, ICE further undermined the interests of justice by arresting and deporting criminal defendants who were appearing in court in connection with their own cases, thereby ensuring that these defendants never faced justice for their crimes.
After discussing the Executive Order and previous laws governing ICE enforcement activities, Judge Rakoff says there’s nothing in any of it that suggests it’s lawful to interrupt court proceedings to perform arrests for civil violations, much less prevent crime victims and witnesses from participating in the justice system.
[F]or all the reasons previously explained, courthouse civil arrests are not lawful, because they contravene the common-law privilege, which the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] is best read to incorporate, that protects courts and litigants against these intimidating and disrupting intrusions. Regardless of what ICE may have believed, then, the Executive Order in fact did not compel the agency to undertake its vast broadening of the scope of courthouse arrests. To the contrary, by its use of the term “lawful,” it effectively forbade such unlawful intrusions.
These arrests are illegal, Judge Rakoff says. And ICE has offered nothing in defense of its increased presence in state courtrooms that says otherwise.
[ICE] has effectively offered no rationale other than its misguided reliance on the Executive Order for its consequential decision to expand its agents’ authority to conduct courthouse arrests. Although the Directive itself makes conclusory references to the “reduce[d] safety risks” of conducting arrests in a place where people are screened for firearms, and the “unwillingness of jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE in the transfer of custody of aliens from their prisons and jails,” the record contains no explanation of how the agency balanced any such benefits against the harms of the policy discussed above.
ICE is now frozen — blocked from entering New York courtrooms to grab potential detainees. Rakoff says the policy — as enacted by ICE since 2017 — is illegal. It not only prevents ICE from entering courtrooms to effect arrests but also prevents ICE from detaining people traveling to state courthouses as parties or witnesses to civil lawsuits. ICE will probably appeal this because it seems to believe inflicting misery is part of its directive, but, for now, it will have to limit itself to raiding dozens of other places to grab people suspected of civil violations.
Filed Under: courthouses, deportation, ice, immigration, jed rakoff, new york, undocumented
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