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Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them — treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon — one of Anthropic’s biggest investors.
Considering how much Trump-supporting VC bros in Silicon Valley insisted that the Biden admin wanted to shut down powerful AI models during the last administration, it’s quite something to see them cheering on the Trump admin actually doing exactly that.
As you’ll recall, a couple months ago, Anthropic talked about its “Mythos-class” LLM models with (depending on your perspective) the greatest marketing hype ever or an appropriate level of caution for the risks with the model (more likely: somewhere in between). When they first talked about it, they said that it was quite good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and so initially it was only available to a set group of organizations that might find it useful to patch certain holes. From what I’ve heard from people in the industry, the tool is good and useful, but it’s not magical.
Then, a little over a week ago, they rolled out the latest version of Mythos, which was still limited to pre-vetted companies, but then they offered up “Fable 5” as a tool for anyone else. This was described as “Mythos-class” but with extra guardrails, including that if it thought you might do something bad with Fable, it would drop you down to its previous best-in-class Opus 4.8 model. Fable was also twice as expensive on a per-token basis, but apparently much more efficient, so the actual pricing difference was likely less big. And some of the early tests with Fable 5 showed it to be way more impressive at certain coding tasks. There were also some oddities, like Fable only being available in the commercial subscription plans for a couple weeks before switching over to only (way more expensive) API usage.
Still, there were some concerns about the guardrails, and how frequently they were kicking people out to Opus on perfectly normal queries. There were other concerns about its changed data retention policies for large enterprises. Previously, companies could negotiate a zero retention policy with Anthropic and guarantee that no data was being held by the company. But with the latest models, they required you to let them hold onto any data shared with the models for 30 days. Anthropic insisted this was solely for safety reviews, in case something went wrong, they could track down the reasons why, but it scared away some large enterprises that could risk their own data or source code being retained anywhere else.
Either way, all that went silent late on Friday (amusingly, in the middle of me messing around with Fable) when Anthropic announced that the US government had made them shut down access to the models with zero due process. Technically, the US government claimed that for “national security” reasons, no foreign national could be allowed to have access to the models (including Anthropic’s own foreign national employees), and since Anthropic doesn’t know which of its customers are foreign nationals, they had to shut down all access.
There are a number of different threads to pull on from previous events that are all worth mentioning here as useful background:
So all of those things came together to lead to this effective ban.
Soon after it was announced, it was revealed that Amazon (one of Anthropic’s biggest investors) had actually alerted the US government to the supposed “bug” that gave the administration the ammo it needed to shut down the model.
Anthropic said it thinks the government became aware of a method of so-called jailbreaking before Friday’s action. “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass,” the company said.
The jailbreak research in question was done by researchers at Amazon, who used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s model to provide them with information about a handful of security vulnerabilities, said Katie Moussouris, chief executive with the cybersecurity firm Luta Security. Anthropic shared a copy of the report with her, she said.
Now, if you’re thinking “a jailbreak sounds dangerous for this tech” then, sure… except that the reporting says the jailbreak was useful in a different way:
But the information provided by the model in this report would be of more use to people defending computer networks than to those attacking them, she said.
“Who at the White House evaluated this and thought it was a threat?” she said. “It’s a complete overreaction because this is exactly the kind of prompting that defenders would do.”
That almost makes it sound like somebody (NSA?) didn’t want people using this to protect themselves — rather than being worried about malicious uses. It sure wouldn’t be the first time the NSA compromised everyone’s security to make sure they could keep spying on people.
None of this is good or reasonable tech policy — or industrial policy, or any other kind of policy. It’s all just power-seeking Calvinball. Apparently the US government can just scream “national security” with no evidence or explanation and shut down an entire model. That’s ripe for abuse — especially with this administration.
When I wrote recently about how authoritarians seek to grab control over centralized technology choke points, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of, though I didn’t expect them to be so ham-fisted about it.
It’s tempting to read this purely as retaliation by the Trump admin against Anthropic, a company they’re already mad at and already illegally trying to punish. But all of these other issues play into this as well, including Anthropic’s constant refrain of “we’re so dangerous, please regulate us.”
You kept asking for it. Now you’ve got it.
And where are all those Silicon Valley VCs who insisted everyone had to back Trump because Biden was going to seize and shut down LLMs? I looked on X at the feeds of the various of Trump’s biggest supporters who had talked shit about Biden shutting down AI innovation and… of course they’re still supporting Trump. David Sacks came out with a long tweet saying that the administration was totally justified in shutting down Fable because of “safety” saying that Anthropic had “prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.”
Can you imagine how Sacks would have responded if the Biden admin had demanded an AI company shut down a model because of “safety?” Oh, you don’t have to imagine, because he was pretty clear about how he felt about the Biden EO. He claimed it “hamstrung American AI companies” even though nothing in the Biden admin plans would have ever gotten so far as what the Trump admin did on Friday, shutting down an entire model. All it did was ask companies to voluntarily pre-submit frontier models for an analysis by experts who might make some suggestions on how to keep them secure.
And that was so horrific it was worth effectively blowing up the American democratic order. Yet now Trump goes way further in literally shutting down an LLM and Sacks says it’s all good because it’s for “safety.”
These are not serious people. This is not a serious administration.
They are just power hungry jackasses with poor impulse control.
Here’s what we know: the jailbreak was defensive in nature, according to the cybersecurity expert who reviewed the actual report. Also, the administration offered no public evidence, no due process, and no coherent explanation for why this particular jailbreak required shutting down access for everyone, including Anthropic’s own employees. We also know that this administration pulls out “national security” claims quite frequently that later turn out to be bogus, and thus we shouldn’t trust them without more evidence.
Maybe there’s classified information that changes the picture. But this administration has burned any benefit of the doubt it might have had. What we’re left with is a government that learned it can yell “national security” and make technology disappear — and a roster of Silicon Valley allies who spent years screaming about regulatory overreach from the last administration have suddenly found a new song to sing.
Filed Under: ai ban, claude, dario amodei, donald trump, due process, export controls, fable 5, mythos, national security, trump administration
Companies: anthropic
More of the same for the Trump administration — one that seems incapable of achieving its goals without breaking the law or disregarding the Constitution.
Hundreds of judges handling thousands of cases have already told the administration it can’t do the things it thinks it can when it comes to satisfying its anti-migrant bloodlust/Stephen Miller’s 3,000-arrests-per-day quota (they’re the same thing!). And, outside of the Fifth Circuit, where the majority seems to believe Trump should get whatever he wants, this steady stream of judicial rejections continues.
Yet another class-action suit alleging the wholesale violation of Constitutional rights has resulted in a ruling siding with the Constitution. This case is one of several being handled by the ACLU. This particular one originates in Nevada, which at least keeps it out of the hands of the Fifth Circuit. (Unfortunately, the administration knows who’s buttering its bread, which is why detainees are often shipped immediately to detention centers in Texas and Louisiana.)
The administration has only a single argument to present in its defense of its unconstitutional mandatory detention activities. It involves selectively quoting two related (yet distinct!) immigration statutes and pretending that 1+1=whatever the fuck we say it does.
One of the most concise explanations of the administration’s deliberate misreading of these statutes was delivered by Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York last year. The government wants to pretend people who encounter immigration agents while crossing the border are indistinct from migrants who have already been in this country for weeks, months, or years. They’re not the same thing, but the administration insists they are, despite having only convinced the Fifth Circuit that the laws don’t actually say the things they say.
Given that detention under § 1225(b)(2) is essentially mandatory and that detention under § 1226(a) is largely discretionary, it follows that whichever statute Mr. Lopez Benitez is subject to is potentially dispositive here. That is, if Mr. Lopez Benitez was detained as a noncitizen “seeking admission” to the country under § 1225(b)(2) (as Respondents argue), his detention would be mandatory. If, instead, he was detained as a noncitizen “already in the country” under § 1226(a), then his detention is discretionary and he would be, at a minimum, entitled to an appeal before an immigration judge.
To be sure, the line between when a person is “seeking admission” as opposed to being “already in the country” is not necessarily obvious. For instance, someone who has just crossed the border may technically be “in” the country but is still treated as “an alien seeking initial entry.” Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. at 114, 139 (holding that a noncitizen detained “within 25 yards of the border” is treated as if stopped at the border). But there is no dispute that the provisions at issue here are mutually exclusive—a noncitizen cannot be subject to both mandatory detention under 1225 and discretionary detention under § 1226, a point that Respondents conceded.
These are not the same thing. Section 1226 deals with people already in the country, who are given Constitutional protections. Section 1225 deals with people crossing the border who are met immediately by immigration agents, who don’t have access to the same due process rights.
As the court points out in this case, the language of the statutes makes it clear Section 1225 is “temporally and geographically limited to the border” by other language contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The government, however, wants to pretend it’s indistinct from Section 1226, which deals with people who are already in the country and have been there for a significant amount of time.
The only way the government can present its defense of indefinite detention of migrants without bond hearings is to twist the wording of both statutes. The Nevada court [PDF] isn’t going to let that happen. It calls out Trump’s DOJ for its cut-and-paste antics.
The government contends that the plain language of § 1225(b)(2) requires DHS to detain all noncitizens like Plaintiffs, who are present in the U.S. without admission or parole and subject to removal proceedings, regardless of how long they have been in the country or how far from the border they are apprehended. But this Court finds that the government reads § 1225(b)(2 (A) as a fragment of statutory text in isolation.
Context matters. The government knows this, which is why its arguments remove the parts of the law it wants to use from the context that indicates its actions are illegal.
The Court finds the government’s reading of the statutory text inapposite for severalreasons. First, the government distorts the statutory text, including terms of art specially defined by Congress. Second, the government isolates and abstracts the phrases it favors in § 1225(b)(2)(A) from their context within § 1225 and the statutory scheme, while rendering language it finds inconvenient within § 1225(b)(2)(A) both contrary to ordinary meaning and needless surplusage. Finally, the government’s interpretation unnecessarily renders provisions of § 1226(c) superfluous in all but the rarest cases, unjustifiably construes Congress’ addition of § 1226(c)(1)(E) through the 2025 Laken Riley Act to be utterly ineffectual, and creates unnecessary tension between the relevant provisions, §§ 1225 and 1226.
This is what it looks like when you know you can’t win on the merits. This is the government pretending the law says what it wants it to say and hoping to slip it past a judge and under the skirts of Lady Liberty.
Courts aren’t as dumb as the Trump administration hopes. Let’s look at the statutes, the court says, but the whole thing rather than just the things the government thinks might be usable.
The Court cannot accept such a fraught interpretation when a reading devoid of such conflict, which gives each statutory phrase and section independent meaning and force, is far more plausible.
What follows is a few dozen pages making everything summarized above granular and specific. And if Trump doesn’t like it, he can always ask the legislators he treats as extraneous to rewrite the law in his favor. Take it up with Congress if you don’t like the way the law is actually written, the court says without actually saying it:
[E]ven with regards to removal proceedings as opposed to custody determinations, Congress explicitly reflected its understanding of longstanding due process precedent that recognizes the more substantial due process rights of noncitizens already present and residing in the U.S. compared to the minimal rights of noncitizens seeking to enter.
Even a Congress loaded with MAGA bitchboys isn’t going to be able to erase Constitutional protections for migrants no one really seemed to have a problem with until white Christian nationalists took over the West Wing (on two non-consecutive occasions). The current Congress is merely an afterthought in service to Federalist Society theories of unitary executive power — something that surely won’t come back to haunt them when America decides it’s time to hand the reins to the opposition party.
And that’s not all of the bad news for Trump and his enablers. The due process thing is already a known issue and one that has resulted in hundreds of losses for the administration’s lawyers. This court also points out the Fourth Amendment implications of its actions. While this doesn’t necessarily create the sort of precedent that would shut down the DHS’s extremely creative interpretation of the Constitution, it will provide plenty of citation pull-quotes for litigants challenging ICE’s warrantless arrests and home entries.
[N]o administrative warrant requirements exist in the text of § 1225(b)(2)(A) or its implementing regulations. The government’s interpretation of that provision as geographically unlimited is thus in tension with the application of the Fourth Amendment within the country’s interior, which “requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force.”
I’m sure this quotation of Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Trump v. Illinois is deliberate. The guy behind “Kavanaugh stops” (TL;DR: looking foreign is probable cause when it comes to immigration enforcement) is being directly quoted to reject the government’s reliance on administrative warrants to bypass the Constitution. [Chef’s kiss gesture.]
Great stuff. But, as always, tempered by the realization that this administration will not stop doing illegal things just because a court has directly told them these actions are illegal. The old equation — asking forgiveness > asking permission — doesn’t really apply. This administration will do neither. It will simply DO until it becomes impossible to continue.
Don’t let that discourage you, though. Even if the co-equal branches don’t seem to be living up to the “checks and balances” hype, we’re a nation of millions spread across a considerable number of square miles. They can’t take us all at once.
Filed Under: 14th amendment, bigotry, dhs, due process, ice, mass deportation, nevada, trump administration
Companies: aclu
We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data.
In the past year, DHS has consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.
These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it. When a handful of users challenged a few of them in court with the help of ACLU affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision.
But it is difficult for the average user to fight back on their own. Quashing a subpoena is a fast-moving process that requires lawyers and resources. Not everyone can afford a lawyer on a moment’s notice, and non-profits and pro-bono attorneys have already been stretched to near capacity during the Trump administration.
That is why we, joined by the ACLU of Northern California, have asked several large tech platforms to do more to protect their users, including:
We sent the letter to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, SNAP, TikTok, and X.
An administrative subpoena is an investigative tool available to federal agencies like DHS. Many times, these are sent to technology companies to obtain user data. A subpoena cannot be used to obtain the content of communications, but they have been used to try and obtain some basic subscriber information like name, address, IP address, length of service, and session times.
Unlike a search warrant, an administrative subpoena is not approved by a judge. If a technology company refuses to comply, an agency’s only recourse is to drop it or go to court and try to convince a judge that the request is lawful. That is what we are asking companies to do—simply require court intervention and not obey in advance.
It is unclear how many administrative subpoenas DHS has issued in the past year. Subpoenas can come from many places—including civil courts, grand juries, criminal trials, and administrative agencies like DHS. Altogether, Google received 28,622 and Meta received 14,520 subpoenas in the first half of 2025, according to their transparency reports. The numbers are not broken out by type.
In the past year, DHS has used these subpoenas to target protected speech. The following are just a few of the known examples.
On April 1, 2025, DHS sent a subpoena to Google in an attempt to locate a Cornell PhD student in the United States on a student visa. The student was likely targeted because of his brief attendance at a protest the year before. Google complied with the subpoena without giving the student an opportunity to challenge it. While Google promises to give users prior notice, it sometimes breaks that promise to avoid delay. This must stop.
In September 2025, DHS sent a subpoena and summons to Meta to try to unmask anonymous users behind Instagram accounts that tracked ICE activity in communities in California and Pennsylvania. The users—with the help of the ACLU and its state affiliates— challenged the subpoenas in court, and DHS withdrew the subpoenas before a court could make a ruling. In the Pennsylvania case, DHS tried to use legal authority that its own inspector general had already criticized in a lengthy report.
In October 2025, DHS sent Google a subpoena demanding information about a retiree who criticized the agency’s policies. The retiree had sent an email asking the agency to use common sense and decency in a high-profile asylum case. In a shocking turn, federal agents later appeared on that person’s doorstep. The ACLU is currently challenging the subpoena.
Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, administrative subpoenas, dhs, due process, privacy
Companies: amazon, apple, discord, google, meta, microsoft, reddit, snap, tiktok, x
The ICE surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota was instigated by a far-right click bait artist and encouraged by the president’s portrayal of Somali immigrants as “garbage” people from a “garbage” country. And those were some of the nicer words Trump used to describe the people his agencies would be hunting down first.
Several weeks later, a draw-down has begun, prompted by two murders committed by federal officers, an inability to obtain indictments against protesters, and every narrative about violence perpetrated by federal officers disintegrating the moment the government was asked to provide some evidence of its claims to the court.
Hundreds of judges in hundreds of immigration cases have found that the government has routinely violated the due process rights of the immigrants it has arrested. This dates all the way back to the beginning of Trump’s second term, but months of roving patrols by masked men with guns has created a massive influx of cases courts are still trying to sort out. But one thing is clear: the government will do anything it can to keep the people it arrests from availing themselves of their constitutional rights.
This starts with the arrests themselves, which most often occur without a judicial warrant. The same goes for the invasion of people’s houses and places of business. With the Supreme Court giving its tacit blessing to casual racism (the so-called “Kavanaugh stops”), anyone who looks less than white or whose English has a bit of an accent is considered reasonably suspicious enough to detain.
The government has been on the losing end of hundreds of cases involving due process rights. This decision [PDF], coming to us via Politico’s Kyle Cheney, details the massive amount of constant movement this government engages in to keep people separated from their rights and physical freedom.
It opens with this:
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) recognizes that noncitizen detainees have a constitutional right to access counsel. But in recent weeks, ICE has isolated thousands of people—most of them detained at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building—from their attorneys. Plaintiffs, who are noncitizen detainees and a nonprofit that represents noncitizens, have presented substantial, specific evidence detailing these alleged violations of the United States Constitution. In response, Defendants offer threadbare declarations generally asserting, without examples or evidence, that ICE provides telephone access to counsel for noncitizens in its custody. The Plaintiffs’ declarations provide specifics of the opposite. The gulf between the parties’ evidence is simply too wide and too deep for Defendants to overcome.
It’s not like ICE can’t provide detainees with access to attorneys or respect their due process rights. It’s that they choose not to, now that Trump is in charge. The access is theoretically possible. It’s just being purposefully denied. And it’s not even just being denied in the sense that phone call requests are being refused. People detained by ICE are placed into a constant state of flux for the sole purpose of making it as difficult as possible for them to avail themselves of their rights.
The devil is in the details. And the court brings plenty of those, all relating to the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” that targeted Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Detainees are moved frequently, quickly, without notice,and often with no way for attorneys to know where or how long they will be at a given facility. (ECF No. 20 (“Boche Decl.”) ¶¶ 9, 13, 18; ECF No. 24 (“Edin Decl.”) ¶ 6; Heinz Decl. ¶ 5 (explaining that of eleven clients initially detained at Whipple, ten were transferred out of the state within twenty-four hours); Kelley Decl. ¶ 19.) Once a person has been transferred out of Minnesota, “representation becomes substantially more difficult”—attorneys must secure local counsel to sponsor a pro hac vice application and navigate additional barriers.
This is a key part of the administration’s deliberate destruction of constitutional rights. Moving people quickly helps prevent habeas corpus motions from being filed, since they need to be filed in the jurisdiction where they’re being held. If detainees are shifted from place to place quickly enough, their counsel needs to figure out where they’re being held and hope that their challenge lands in court before their clients are moved again. And with the Fifth Circuit basically codifying the denial of due process to migrants, more and more people arrested elsewhere in the nation are being sent to detainment centers in Texas as quickly as possible.
All of this is intentional:
Defendants transfer people so quickly that even Defendants struggle to locate detainees. Often, Defendants do not accurately or timely input information into the Online Detainee Locator System. This prevents Minnesota-based attorneys from locating and speaking with their clients.The locator either produces no search results or instructs attorneys to call for details, referencing a phone number that ICE does not answer. Often, Defendants do not update the locator until after detainees areout of state. Attorneys frequently learn of their client’s location for the first time when the government responds to a habeas petition.
These are not the good faith efforts of a government just trying to get a grasp on the immigration situation. These are the bad faith efforts of government hoping to violate rights quickly enough that the people it doesn’t like will be remanded to the nearest war-torn nation/foreign torture prison before the judicial branch has a chance to catch up.
There’s more. There’s the phone that detainees supposedly have access to for their one phone call. It’s the same line used to receive calls for inmates, so that means lawyers calling clients back either run into a busy signal or a ringing phone that detainees aren’t allowed to answer and ICE officers certainly aren’t interested in answering.
Lawyers seeking access to their clients have been refused access. In some cases, they’ve been threatened with arrest by officers simply for showing up. Even if they happen to make it inside the Whipple Detention Center, ICE officers and detention center employees usually refuse them access to their clients.
And when people try to work within the unconstitutional limitations of this deliberately broken system, they’re mocked for even bothering to avail themselves of their rights.
When an attorney told an agent that she sent a copy of a releaseorder to the specified email address, the agent laughed and said “something to the effect of ‘yeah we really need to get someone to check that email.’”
To sum up, the government is exactly what the court thinks it is: a set of deliberate rights violations pretending it’s a legitimate government operation that’s just trying to do the best it can in these troubling times:
It appears that in planning for Operation Metro Surge, the government failed to plan for the constitutional rights of its civil detainees. The government suggests—with minimal explanation and even less evidence—that doing so would result in “chaos.” The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.
The administration has long lost the “presumption of regularity” that courts have utilized for years while handling lawsuits and legal challenges against the government. It no longer is considered to be acting in good faith in much of the country (Fifth Circuit excluded, for the most part). This is the “rule of law” party making it clear that it will only follow the rules and laws it likes. And it will continue to do so because courts can’t actually physically free people or force the government to respect their rights. The Trump administration is fine with losing in court and losing the hearts and minds of most of America as long as those in power keep getting to do what they want.
Filed Under: dhs, doj, due process, ice, immigration, kristi noem, mass deportation, minnesota, rights violations, todd lyons, tom homan, trump administration
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” —Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, September 8, 2025
From that one line, which Anil Kalhan dubbed “Kavanaugh Stops,” we see story after story of just how disconnected from reality, and the Constitution, Brett Kavanaugh was in that statement.
In short: Brett Kavanaugh has some explaining to do.
Just a few quotes:
My name is George Retes. I am — I was born and raised here in Ventura, California, I’m 26 years old and I am an Iraq combat veteran…. I was going to work like normal. I show up. ICE is there. There’s kind of like a roadblock. I get out. I identify myself, that I’m a U.S. citizen, that I’m just trying to get to work…. I’m getting ready to leave and they surround my car, start banging on it, start shouting these contradictory orders…. Even though I was giving them no reason, they still felt the need to — one agent knelt my back and another agent knelt on my neck. And during that time, I’m just pleading with them that I couldn’t breathe…. I was an isolation. I was in basically this concrete cell. I was stripped naked in like a hospital gown. And they leave the lights on 24/7…. They just came out and they said that I was violent and that I assaulted agents. Why lie when it’s on video of everything that happened? Why lie?
That’s just one person’s story in that PBS piece. There are two others as well. And we already know hundreds of other US Citizens have been kicked, dragged, beaten, and detained for days. It feels like every few days we hear about more such stories. And those are only the ones that get attention. You have to assume that there are many more ones that haven’t yet reached the public.
It feels like perhaps Justice Kavanaugh owes us all an explanation. And an apology. And a new ruling that makes it much clearer that immigration enforcement officials have no right to just randomly stop and detain people without a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, and those facts need to be more than “skin color” or “they were being annoying to us.”
Filed Under: 4th amendment, brett kavanaugh, cbp, due process, george retes, ice, immigration, kavanaugh stops, us citizens
Judge Boasberg got his vindication in the frivolous “complaint” the DOJ filed against him, and now he’s calling out the DOJ’s bullshit in the long-running case that caused them to file the complaint against him in the first place: the JGG v. Trump case regarding the group of Venezuelans the US government shipped off to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran concentration camp.
Boasberg, who until last year was generally seen as a fairly generic “law and order” type judge who was extremely deferential to any “national security” claims from the DOJ (John Roberts had him lead the FISA Court, for goodness’ sake!), has clearly had enough of this DOJ and the games they’ve been playing in his court.
In a short but quite incredible ruling, he calls out the DOJ for deciding to effectively ignore the case while telling the court to “pound sand.”
On December 22, 2025, this Court issued a Memorandum Opinion finding that the Government had denied due process to a class of Venezuelans it deported to El Salvador last March in defiance of this Court’s Order. See J.G.G. v. Trump, 2025 WL 3706685, at *19 (D.D.C. Dec. 22, 2025). The Court offered the Government the opportunity to propose steps that would facilitate hearings for the class members on their habeas corpus claims so that they could “challenge their designations under the [Alien Enemies Act] and the validity of the [President’s] Proclamation.” Id. Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.
From a former FISC judge—someone who spent years giving national security claims every benefit of the doubt—”pound sand” is practically a primal scream.
Due to this, he orders the government to work to “facilitate the return” of these people it illegally shipped to a foreign concentration camp (that is, assuming any of them actually want to come back).
Believing that other courses would be both more productive and in line with the Supreme Court’s requirements outlined in Noem v. Abrego Garcia, 145 S. Ct. 1017 (2025), the Court will now order the Government to facilitate the return from third countries of those Plaintiffs who so desire. It will also permit other Plaintiffs to file their habeas supplements from abroad.
Boasberg references the Donald Trump-led invasion of Venezuela and the unsettled situation there for many of the plaintiffs. He points out that the lawyers for the plaintiffs have been thoughtful and cautious in how they approach this case. That is in contrast to the US government.
Plaintiffs’ prudent approach has not been replicated by their Government counterparts. Although the Supreme Court in Abrego Garcia upheld Judge Paula Xinis’s order directing the Government “to facilitate and effectuate the return of” that deportee, see 145 S. Ct. at 1018, Defendants at every turn have objected to Plaintiffs’ legitimate proposals without offering a single option for remedying the injury that they inflicted upon the deportees or fulfilling their duty as articulated by the Supreme Court.
Boasberg points to the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying that it’s ridiculous that the DOJ is pretending that case doesn’t exist or doesn’t say what it says. Then he points out that the DOJ keeps “flagrantly” disobeying courts.
Against this backdrop, and mindful of the flagrancy of the Government’s violations of the deportees’ due-process rights that landed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the solution-less mire Defendants propose. The Court will thus order Defendants to take several discrete actions that will begin the remedial process for at least some Plaintiffs, as the Supreme Court has required in similar circumstances. It does so while treading lightly, as it must, in the area of foreign affairs. See Abrego Garcia, 145 S. Ct. at 1018 (recognizing “deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs”)
Even given all this, the specific remedy is not one that many of the plaintiffs are likely to accept: he orders that the US government facilitate the return of any of those who want it among those… not in Venezuela. But, since most of them were eventually released from CECOT into Venezuela, that may mean that this ruling doesn’t really apply to many men. On top of that Boasberg points out that anyone who does qualify and takes up the offer will likely be detained by immigration officials upon getting here. But, if they want, the US government has to pay for their plane flights back to the US. And, in theory, the plaintiffs should then be given the due process they were denied last year.
Plaintiffs also request that such boarding letter include Government payment of the cost of the air travel. Given that the Court has already found that their removal was unlawful — as opposed to the situation contemplated by the cited Directive, which notes that “[f]acilitating an alien’s return does not necessarily include funding the alien’s travel,” Directive 11061.1, ¶ 3.1 (emphasis added) — the Court deems that a reasonable request. It is unclear why Plaintiffs should bear the financial cost of their return in such an instance. See Ms. L. v. U.S. Immig. & Customs Enf’t (“ICE”), 2026 WL 313340, at *4 (S.D. Cal. Feb. 5, 2026) (requiring Government to “bear the expense of returning these family units to the United States” given that “[e]ach of the removals was unlawful, and absent the removals, these families would still be in the United States”). It is worth emphasizing that this situation would never have arisen had the Government simply afforded Plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them.
I’m guessing not many are eager to re-enter the US and face deportation again. Of course, many of these people left Venezuela for the US in the first place for a reason, so perhaps some will take their chances on coming back. Even against a very vindictive US government.
The frustrating coda here is the lack of any real consequences for DOJ officials who treated this entire proceeding as a joke—declining to seriously participate and essentially daring the court to do something about it. Boasberg could have ordered sanctions. He didn’t. And that’s probably fine with this DOJ, which has learned that contempt for the courts carries no real cost.
Unfortunately, that may be the real story here. Judge gets fed up, once again, with a DOJ that thumbs its nose at the court, says extraordinary things in a ruling that calls out the DOJ’s behavior… but does little that will lead to actual accountability for those involved, beyond having them “lose” the case. We’ve seen a lot of this, and it’s only going to continue until judges figure out how to impose real consequences for DOJ lawyers for treating the court with literal contempt.
Filed Under: cecot, donald trump, due process, el salvador, james boasberg, pam bondi, pound sand, trump administration, venezuela
Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that’s simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that’s almost entirely the result of immigration, which is why courts have routinely held that non-citizens have the same rights as citizens while on US soil.
That’s still the case, for the most part. The Fifth Circuit — fulfilling its role as the preferred US Supreme Court understudy — has chosen to ignore literally hundreds of rulings in favor of due process rights for immigrants to decide those no longer exist in the states most migrants detained by the government get sent to before being removed from the country.
Last November, the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate due process rights had been rejected by more than 100 judges in more than 200 cases. A few months later — and with a full-press surge happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the number of rejections has spiked:
A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.
While most of the mass deportation action is currently happening far north of the Fifth Circuit (which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), arrested immigrants are often sent almost immediately to detention facilities closer to the southern US border. Texas is, by far, the most popular destination for ICE detainee flights.
The Fifth Circuit waited around until late Friday night to release this decision [PDF], presumably in hopes of seeing the backlash subside a bit before the judges were due back at the office. Steve Vladeck covers all the angles in his post on this abhorrent ruling, starting with how this is an insane conclusion to reach given that 3,000 cases around the country have upheld the same rights the Fifth Circuit has chosen to deny to any migrant with the misfortune of finding themselves in its jurisdiction.
Well, late Friday night, in a ruling handed down just two days after oral argument, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—holding that, yes, the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion was written by Judge Edith Jones and joined in full by Judge Kyle Duncan—two of the most reactionary, right-wing federal appellate judges in the country…
The obvious upshot of this decision is that ICE et al will be rushing detainees to Texas ASAFP to take advantage of this ruling.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council noted last night, the Fifth Circuit’s decision will “fuel ICE’s push to transfer people to Texas immediately,” and it will put “even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond.” All of that can be traced to another procedural technicality—the principle that a district court gains jurisdiction over a habeas petition if, but only if, it is filed while the petitioner is physically in that court’s jurisdiction. In other words, to avoid being subject to the Fifth Circuit’s decision (while it remains on the books), detainees arrested elsewhere would have to have someone file on their behalf before they’re physically transferred into the Fifth Circuit.
There’s still a chance that people arrested in, say, Minneapolis, Minnesota might be able to avoid the Fifth Circuit’s refusal to recognize their due process rights. But the denial of due process rights begins immediately in most cases, with ICE officers refusing to allow detainees to contact family members, much less seek legal representation. If ICE can get them on a plane headed south before anything is filed in local courts, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling will override whatever rights migrants might have still had access to in the states they were removed from.
An appeal of this decision is already in process. And while it’s concerning that this particular iteration of the Supreme Court will be handling it, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will convert the Fifth’s ruling into nationwide precedent. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court has rejected a handful of Fifth Circuit rulings that cross the line into an open embrace of violent fascism. On the other hand, this version of the Supreme Court is far more prone to deliver wordless rubber stamps of appellate decisions it likes, so some caution is warranted.
This decision requires the most MAGA-coded judges in the Fifth to buy everything the Trump administration is selling. And what it’s selling is a brand new interpretation of the phrase “seeking admission.” Rather than limiting it to people crossing the border illegally, it applies this definition to any migrant who doesn’t have the proper paperwork, even if they arrived in this country decades ago.
The dissent, written by Judge Dana Douglas, makes it clear that this administration will do anything and everything that serves its racist desire to eject non-whites from the United States.
The Congress that passed IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act [1996]) would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people. For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so, and nothing in the congressional record or the history of the statute’s enforcement suggests that it did. Nonetheless, the government today asserts the authority and mandate to detain millions of noncitizens in the interior, some of them present here for decades, on the same terms as if they were apprehended at the border.
Do you want to be this shitty, Judge Douglas asks the judges who pretended this sort of thing is OK as long as it’s Trump doing it.
The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that “seeking admission” is like being an “applicant for admission,” in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens. Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. I dissent.
Hopefully this ruling will be reset by the Supreme Court or an en banc rehearing. But for now, the law of the land in three states that are willing to house ICE detainees says due process rights are only available in the 47 states the Fifth Circuit doesn’t control.
Filed Under: 14th amendment, 5th circuit, alien enemies act, due process, mass deportation, trump administration
Nothing this administration does is subtle. Nothing about its anti-migrant purge has been anything less than brutish. As if to drive the point home that the bigots were running the shop, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the stripping of due process from people whose only crime was usually just a civil infraction: being undocumented. Anyone who knows the history of that Act knows it was last used for the same purpose: to round up a bunch of non-white people and imprison/deport them.
As fast as it could, the administration rounded up anyone that looked Latino, tossed them on airplanes, and sent them to whatever country would take them. For more than 100 deportees, the final destination was El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, known mainly for its inhumane abuse of anyone unfortunate enough to end up there.
Judge James Boasberg has seen plenty from this administration already. He’s the judge who was received one of the first fuck you’s from the Trump anti-migrant machinery. The administration blew off his order to stop sending migrants to El Salvador, pretending it couldn’t do anything about the flights it had hurriedly sent airborne the moment it seemed Boasberg might issue an injunction.
Boasberg continues to thwart the administration’s unlawful actions. And because he’s chosen to do his job (rather than slip himself into Trump’s pocket like too many members of the Supreme Court), he’s been targeted personally by the administration. Earlier this year, Trump’s team filed a completely bogus misconduct complaint against him because he expressed very legitimate concerns about the current administration during a US court system judicial conference: that there was far more than a non-zero chance Trump’s administration would simply refuse to comply with court orders.
It wasn’t just a legitimate concern. This has actually happened more than once. Judge Boasberg has personal experience with the administration’s refusal to comply with the letter and/or spirit of his court orders.
Here’s another ruling the administration will probably choose to ignore if it can’t get SCOTUS to slide it a mash note under the table during the next shadow docket drop.
A federal judge on Monday said the U.S. government denied due process to the Venezuelan men it deported to a prison in El Salvador in March after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
[…]
Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in his order agreed that they deserved the right to a hearing — whether by bringing them back to the U.S. or allowing them to pursue legal remedies from abroad.
“On the merits, the Court concludes that this class was denied their due-process rights and will thus require the Government to facilitate their ability to obtain such hearing. Our law requires no less,” Boasberg wrote in his opinion.
Lest we forget (as the Trump administration definitely wants you to), this is how this all began. I quote directly from the ruling [PDF] because this document ensures the government can’t claim ignorance of its own bullshit as this case continues to move forward:
These men were given “no advance notice of the basis for their removal,” nor were they informed that they could challenge their designation. The only reason that this Court was made aware of these impending removals was because a few of the men moved to El Valle had been able to contact their lawyers the day before, who rightly surmised that such a Proclamation either had secretly issued or was about to issue and thus filed this action at 1:12 a.m. on March 15. The Court granted the five named Plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order that same morning, which enjoined their removal, and it scheduled an emergency hearing for 5:00 p.m. that day to consider the Motion to Certify a Class.
Just an hour before the hearing, the Proclamation was made public. Less than two hours after the Proclamation was published, and while the emergency hearing was ongoing, the Government flew 252 Venezuelan men, including 137 putative class members, out of the United States.
The Trump administration thought if it violated due process rights fast enough, no one would be able to do anything but offer up a resigned shrug. Boasberg has refused to do this. He saw this happening and moved on it. The administration efforts to stay ahead of easily foreseeable adverse rulings may now result in a lot of deportations being undone.
As for the government’s last-ditch argument that the Court has no jurisdiction because the hastily deported people are no longer in the custody of US federal officers, the court has this to say:
In a statement to the U.N. Office, El Salvador expressly disclaimed responsibility for the detainees, contending instead that “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons l[ay] exclusively with the competent foreign authorities.”
So, it’s no use pretending the people denied their due process rights are still not under the control of the United States government. On top of that, there’s plenty of documentation on the public record that shows the Trump administration not only asked El Salvador’s government to accept whatever people it chose to dump into CECOT, but paid it nearly $50 million to offset whatever expenses El Salvador might rack up while violating the human rights of Trump’s deportees.
And the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act doesn’t change anything. Only under very narrow circumstances can due process rights be nullified. None of that is happening here. To pretend the government’s vague assertions about foreign powers and threats to national security are all that’s needed to negate the constitutional rights extended to anyone who happens to reside in this country, no matter how temporarily.
The remedy must thus adapt to meet the injury that has occurred. The Court finds that the only remedy that would give effect to its granting of Plaintiffs’ Motion would be to order the Government to undo the effects of their unlawful removal by facilitating a meaningful opportunity to contest their designation and the Proclamation’s validity. Otherwise, a finding of unlawful removal would be meaningless for Plaintiffs, who have already been sent back to Venezuela against their wishes and without due process. Expedited removal cannot be allowed to render this relief toothless. If secretly spiriting individuals to another country were enough to neuter the Great Writ, then “the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.”
Those are the words of someone who not only knows the law, but respects it. These are words of the Trump administration:
“Once again Judge Boasberg issued an order that has no basis in law and undermines national security,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to NPR.
Amazing. This death cult of an administration is also a murder cult and kidnapping cult. National security interests can still be served while respecting due process rights. It’s not either/or, no matter how many people we murder in international waters. But this initial statement makes it clear the administration will do everything it can to continue violating these rights, no matter what the courts say about the issue.
Filed Under: alien enemies act, cecot, dhs, doj, due process, james boasberg, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration
Yeah, the economy sucks and trade-war tariff agendas are only making things worse. But as Trump promised/threatened during a recent national address from the White House, things are turning around, even if you (MAGA voters especially) are too stupid to see it.
It looks like the first growth market to see a significant increase might be law firms specializing in maritime law. (And those of you who specialize in Third Amendment law might want to hang around for a bit before becoming Costco greeters or whatever.)
The Trump administration has been straight up murdering people in international waters for the past few months. The regime’s “shoot first, demand all questioners be hit with sedition charges” plan hasn’t exactly worked out. Questions are actually being asked, and in response, the administration has been engaged in some last-minute retcon. Following the controversial boat strikes, the government has now declared drug cartels and drugs themselves to be terrorists worthy of extrajudicial killings.
Not only has Trump declared a controlled substance to be a “weapon of mass destruction” (fentanyl), he’s also pretty much directly asked oil companies if they’re interested in seeing a foreign government overthrown — an offering that ensures the CIA won’t be getting the holidays off this year.
Trump kills people in boats and commandeers Venezuelan oil tankers while relying on plenty of specious legal assertions. If there’s anyone who loves specious legal assertions, it’s the people who worship Donald Trump. This is the new hotness awaiting us in 2026: the addition of mercenaries to an undeclared war of opportunity.
Here’s Senate head Mike Lee with a proposal to allow regular-ass Americans to participate in actions that are already extremely questionable in terms of legality.
U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced legislation today that would allow private entities to stop drug cartel smuggling and violence. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act authorizes President Trump, as provided under the Constitution, to commission American operators under letters of marque to seize cartel property and persons on land or sea. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced the House version of the legislation.
“The Constitution provides for Letters of Marque and Reprisal as a tool against the enemies of the United States,” said Senator Mike Lee.“Cartels have replaced corsairs in the modern era, but we can still give private American citizens and their businesses a stake in the fight against these murderous foreign criminals. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.”
Lee’s bill is hardly worth reading. It only runs three pages and basically says “the president can hire whatever mercenaries he wants” before heading to a conclusion that claims the president can declare whoever he wants to be a “cartel” and therefore a worthy target of whatever sort of Blackwater-murdering-civilians might ensure.
Of course, every Senate bill must be matched with something similar. No one specially asked congressional reps Tim Burchett and Mark Messmer to speak up, but they’ll be damned if their bootlicking will go unnoticed.
Here’s a bit of Rep. Burchett’s CV:
On March 28, 2023, Burchett responded to the Covenant School shooting, where three nine-year-old students and three staff members were killed in Nashville, by telling reporters: “It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.'” Burchett also said he sees no “real role” for Congress in reducing gun violence, other than to “mess things up”.
[…]
After a local D.J. was killed and 22 others were wounded in the 2024 Kansas City parade shooting, Burchett inaccurately identified an adult attendee of the Kansas City rally, Denton Loudermill Jr., as the shooter, claiming he was an “illegal alien”. Burchett’s social media post received 1.4 million views.
Yeah, so he’s one of those people.
Burchett’s buddy on this one is Rep. Mark Messmer, who used to be a pretty normal person before being elected to his current position. Now he’s just a guy who says stuff like this:
“I agree with President Trump that drug cartels are foreign terrorist organizations and are a serious threat to all Americans,” said Rep. Messmer. “The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 would add another arrow in our national security quiver, guaranteeing that President Trump has all the authority he needs to protect our citizens from criminal and terrorist-linked threats.”
These two rubes were at least ahead of the game. They tossed this one into the congressional pool back in February 2025. That one has been copied word-for-word by Sen. Mike Lee, who looks like he’s desperately trying to shore up his toady credentials now that Trump has pretty much declared war on anything traversing international waters while in the vicinity of Venezuela. Everything old is new again, except for Donald Trump, who is older than last time and far less likely to remember this idea got pitched months ago.
The Trump administration has never seen a bad idea it can’t make worse. And while Trump has chosen to legislate from the executive office as often as possible, he’ll always have a place in his heart for the desperate sycophants who are willing to give him whatever he wants, no matter the cost to their own careers.
And there are plenty of violent, bigoted sycophants in the private sector just dying for an opportunity to get their violent racism on. They, too, are now being given a chance to claim a chair at the Big Boy table and to engage in lawlessness this administration will always celebrate, rather than condemn.
Filed Under: boat strikes, drug war, due process, extrajudicial killings, mark messmer, mercenaries, mike lee, murder, tim burchett, trump administration, venezuela
The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulings against the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence.
Like it or not, MAGA faithful, immigrants have rights. They have the rights natural born citizens have access to, which is certainly something the Trump administration doesn’t think is true, even though it is.
The administration got a big win from the Supreme Court in terms of violating Fourth Amendment rights. In a solo concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh made it clear the majority believed there is nothing wrong with rounding up people simply because they look a bit more brown than white on the outside.
Meanwhile, ICE pretends it’s still targeting criminals, even when all data says otherwise. It continues to claim it’s going after known criminals but its paperwork doesn’t match its public statements. If it was really going after criminals, it should be able to obtain arrest warrants. The fact that it rarely has anything more than administrative warrants (self-issued warrants without judicial backing) in its possession at any given time contradicts its assertions about its alleged “targeted” enforcement efforts.
The Trump administration continues to get railed on the regular by federal courts. The latest is no exception:
A federal judge in Denver on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant, unless the detainee posed a flight risk, the latest in a string of lower-court decisions rebuking President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics.
[…]
In Colorado, Judge Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that immigration agents had acted unlawfully by arresting and detaining immigrants — some for as long as 100 days — without showing the required probable cause that they posed a threat of fleeing.
This decision aligns itself with several others. Unfortunately, the body of judicial work ruling against Trump’s anti-immigration programs hasn’t really changed anything. Many rulings have been appealed. What has yet to be heard by the Supreme Court has often been given a pass by appellate judges.
And even if a court rules definitively against Trump, there’s no reason to believe this administration will act in accordance with the ruling. Emil Bove — the former DOJ lawyer who told prosecutors to tell the courts to fuck themselves if they opposed Trump — is now sitting on the Third Circuit. Other rulings delivered by federal courts have been immediately stayed by appellate courts who normally would have allowed things to play out at the lower level before undercutting their findings.
What’s happening here affects a lot of rights beyond the immediate recognition of Fourth Amendment incursion. These warrantless arrests are often followed by indefinite detentions that involve violations of Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
This government is plain nasty. It has zero interest in the rule of law. It wants to be the bully on the block at all times. If the system of checks and balances rears it head, the administration will either ignore the concerns raised or engage in unprecedented attacks on the judiciary itself. Pointing out the incompetency of Trump administration thugs is about as useless as criticizing the GPA of the person beating your skull to pulp with a baseball bat. The end result is the same. Any legitimate points raised mid-beating won’t do anything to reduce the CTE trauma. It’s best to assume bad faith from the beginning because this is the administration’s sole operating speed.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, border patrol, cbp, colorado, denver, due process, ice, mass deportation, trump administration
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