 |
VOOZH | about |
|
VOOZH | about |
If federal officers are going to murder another person, it will likely happen here.
Newark, New Jersey is the newest battleground for the administration, as Trump goes to war with his own constituents. The foundation was laid months ago, when ICE officers assaulted, arrested, and illegally refused to grant access to detention facilities to congressional reps.
Now, there’s a war being fought at the Delaney Hall detention facility, overseen by ICE and run by private prison contractor, GEO Group. The protests have been steadily getting more intense. The city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, has been on the Trump administration’s radar ever since officers arrested him for… um… standing on a public sidewalk as New Jersey congressional reps demanded access to the facility.
Things aren’t exactly being made better by Governor Mikie Sherrill. On one hand, she has passed laws that forbid local police cooperation with ICE’s anti-migrant efforts. On the other hand, she’s decided to expend state resources to protect federal resources from protesters.
The crisis remains a volatile, early test of Ms. Sherrill and her administration, with the potential for political fallout that could reverberate far beyond Newark. Ms. Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, has already faced criticism from the left, which has pointed to her decision to send in New Jersey State Police troopers to quell disturbances outside Delaney Hall as evidence of cooperation with the Trump administration’s divisive immigration crackdown.
Seems like that might be a job that would be better handled by vastly better-funded federal agencies, like the Federal Protective Service which is overseen by the flush-with-cash DHS.
But given what’s happening outside of Delaney Hall, it might make more sense to expend state resources on protecting protesters, legal observers, and (especially!) journalists from federal officers, not to mention the locals who are supposed to be serving and protecting.
It’s nothing new to hear that federal officers are assaulting journalists or anyone else attempting to document their actions. But the specificity of these attacks makes it clear federal officers are deliberately seeking to do as much damage as possible to the tools journalists use to make a living.
According to a report by amNewYork, there have been allegations from multiple photojournalists who say they were injured while documenting clashes near the detention center, with some reporting damaged camera equipment and physical injuries, including broken fingers.
Reuters photojournalist Ryan Murphy tells amNewYork that he was struck with a baton over several nights of coverage and said agents targeted his camera during an incident on Thursday. Murphy said he believes the strike broke one of his fingers.
[…]
Photographer Madison Swart, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, also alleged that she was deliberately pushed to the ground while documenting the protests. Swart says an agent struck her with a baton during the confrontation. According to amNewYork, another photographer was reportedly seen curled in the fetal position as agents moved over her, while another prominent photographer, who requested anonymity, says the top of his camera was smashed.
Here’s another account that comes with photos of the damage done:
Mostafa Bassim, a photojournalist for Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, was struck with a baton by a federal officer, damaging his camera lens, while covering protests outside a private immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, on May 28, 2026.
[…]
Bassim told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he arrived at the detention facility shortly before nightfall. He said that even before he was able to start documenting the scene, federal officers noticed his camera and began shining high-powered lights directly at him.
“The second they see you with a camera they just start doing that to you,” Bassim said.
Any officer who’s only interested in doing what’s necessary to maintain the peace wouldn’t deliberately target journalists, especially before the protests themselves start to get out of hand. And when it is actually time to step in to protect federal employees (or government contractors), force should be applied to those whose actions demand a forceful reaction. Deliberately targeting journalists and the tools of their trade is nothing more than being shitty just because you know no one will stop you.
And speaking of being shitty, this is still the high water mark for law enforcement response to the Delaney Hall protests:
[P]hotojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.
The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.
On top of the theft (which is a felony, given the value of items stolen), there’s the officer’s attempt to cover up the crime:
From a hospital bed, she watched on her phone as the AirTag in her camera bag traveled across northern New Jersey — on the highway, then to a private residence, and then to a bar close to that home, she said.
Ms. Katsanis said her boyfriend and the other photographer went out to track the AirTag and found that it had been removed from her bag and was on the side of the road. She said that her name and contact information were still clearly written on the AirTag.
Unfortunately, the officer is still employed, albeit not working at the moment… and better yet not being paid for not working. Suspended without pay. It’s a start. Somehow, the prosecutor’s office can’t help but shift into the exonerative tense when discussing this alleged crime, even as moves forward with its prosecution:
The prosecutors also received footage from Sergeant Brown’s body-worn camera, which they said “shows him interacting with a dark-colored bag consistent with the description of the victim’s belongings.”
“Interacting” is a pretty coy term for “rifling through a bag’s contents before deciding to steal the bag and everything in it.” It’s like describing molestation as “interacting with a minor” or a carjacking as “interacting with a vehicle’s driver.” Tell it like it is: the officer was digging through someone’s bag and shortly thereafter took it back to his home where it was recovered during the execution of a search warrant.
Only one of these two things looks like a trend, that being the deliberate targeting of journalists and their expensive equipment. The camera theft is probably a one-off, but possibly only because federal officers are making sure journalists’ cameras are too broken to be worth stealing.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, darryl brown, delaney hall, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, new jersey, protests, thugs, trump administration
The Trump administration has thrown billions at purging non-white people from this country. Most of that has ended up in the hands of ICE, which has — in turn — thrown hundreds of millions at a number of private companies offering bespoke and/or off-the-shelf surveillance solutions.
The slide down the slippery slope began less than six months after Trump took office in 2025, with the DHS repurposing tech used at border crossings for deployment as far inland as ICE, CBP, etc. were willing to travel. The facial recognition app of choice is “Mobile Fortify,” which ties into the DHS’s pre-existing databases and makes use of any number of third-party facial recognition products. (Which may include the much-reviled Clearview AI, yet another company being paid millions to provide the government with questionable tech predicated on even more questionable business ethics.)
As has almost always been the case with the DHS, the tech was primed, pumped, and deployed without proper testing or legally required privacy impact assessments (PIA) in place. And it was in such a hurry to spread its surveillance tech throughout the nation that it willingly deployed a product that not only couldn’t reliably do the one thing it was asked to do — verify identities — but was only able to be deployed by unilaterally stripping away Congressional limits placed on government use of facial recognition tech.
We’re still waiting on PIAs for Mobile Fortify to arrive and we certainly don’t expect them anytime soon. We also haven’t seen the DHS even pretend to address the app’s major flaws. One would think an app that’s still half-broken would have an extremely short lifespan. But this administration doesn’t care whether or not it works well. It’s only interested in subjecting as many people as possible to it.
Apparently, it’s not enough that thousands of federal agents have access to this app. As Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media, ICE wants to make things exponentially worse by giving it to pretty much any cop who wants to give it a whirl.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone’s immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.
Regular cops will be given access to “Task Force Module,” which will use the underlying tech (and database access) found in the ICE app. Apparently the only difference is that TFM will provide text prompts to cops once the app has finished (mis)identifying someone.
When an officer scans someone’s face, the app will run their face against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records, and then provide instructions to the officer. Either “not detain or arrest under ICE jurisdiction,” or the app will provide a reference code the officer can use to get additional information from ICE.
The document readily admits that DHS expects this app to be used on US citizens. After all, how else can you verify their citizenship? I mean other than the documents people normally carry on them, like ID cards. Or the fact that people not crossing US borders aren’t legally obligated to prove they’re citizens to federal officers just because they’ve decided to spend more time far away from the nation’s borders. This app is a perversion of the American way — a point-and-shoot “papers please” by proxy that allows officers to, in essence, demand production of documents they’re not entitled to ask for.
If ICE, etc. actually cared enough to do their job right, an app like this wouldn’t be necessary. It should have stayed at the border where the government has the right to demand proof of citizenship. Now, this surveillance kudzu will become another toy for cops who are similarly uninterested in respecting rights and equally willing to treat everyone like a suspect because it’s easier than actually doing the legwork.
“Papers please” everywhere all the time is disturbing enough. But giving officers another surveillance toy that’s flawed and deployed without absolutely zero oversight is just going to deliver new horror stories of surveillance abuse by powerful government employees who know no one above them cares what happens to those the government turns its cameras on. Cops and federal agents alike are going to use the tech to stalk and harass protesters, critics, and anyone else they might want to fuck with. And all in service of a bigoted push to rid the nation of people who actually make it great.
Filed Under: cbp, dhs, facial recognition, facial recognition tech, ice, mass deportation, surveillance, trump administration
Companies: clearview ai, mobile fortify
Trump has loved “travel bans” since his first term in office. It has nothing to do with making America safer or better and everything to do with making America whiter.
People were opposed to Trump’s blanket bans all the way back in 2017, when the heads of tech companies managed to collectively grow enough spine to push back against Trump and his bigoted take on immigration.
Well, it’s now Trump’s second term and for damn sure US tech companies aren’t going to be riding to rescue. The post-truth administration continues to welcome white migrants while doing everything it can to eject non-whites, even if it means repeatedly arresting and jailing actual US citizens.
The thing is that migrants actually make America greater than it would ever be if it was just a nation of white people pretending they’re actually the “native” Americans. Migrants break fewer laws, pay more taxes, and avail themselves of fewer social programs than naturally-born citizens.
This administration is fully engaged in Manifest Bigotry. It has stripped temporary protected status from thousands of people who fled from war-torn countries, abject poverty, and nations known for their perpetual human rights abuses. Those still being allowed to access this particular privilege are the kind of people this administration loves: whites fleeing imaginary “persecution” in a nation where Black people have finally been given the same rights as white people.
While it may seem plausible to extend a travel ban now that Trump has picked an unwinnable fight with a nation capable of destroying the world’s economy for the next several decades, it doesn’t explain why Trump feels the need to strip rights and privileges from so many people who’ve already made their way into the United States.
That US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy has blocked work permits and green cards for people from countries deemed “high risk” by the government including Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela—even though they were already present in the US. That’s led many to lose jobs and put their lawful status in jeopardy as the benefits pause has continued.
As the court notes in its ruling, this targeting of so many migrants is retroactive. Rather than treat the new policy as something that only effects everyone moving forward, the administration treats every new anti-migrant policy as retroactive, clawing back protections awarded them by previous administrations.
All of this is being done by executive order. At no point has Congress passed any laws in support of these executive declarations. And while far too many judges (especially those in certain appellate courts and the Supreme Court) seem to feel they’re incapable of reining in executive power, lower courts are more than willing to lay down a few roadblocks, even when it’s almost inevitable the higher courts will have them removed as soon as fucking possible.
And the administration continues this assault on non-white people, practically daring courts to do anything about it. This court — one that is currently entertaining the thought of sanctioning DOJ prosecutors — is trying to do something about it. And the Rhode Island court — represented here by chief judge John McConnell Jr. — points out the government has sabotaged its own reputation repeatedly while engaging in what appears to be blatant bigotry.
McConnell also found evidence—including derogatory statements about immigrants by administration officials after the National Guard shooting—of pretextual reasons behind the policies.
“The Government effectively invites the Court to shut its eyes and ignore the strong evidence of anti-immigrant animus before it,” he wrote. “Doing so would require profound naiveté on the Court’s part.”
This government wants courts to pretend they’re stupid. It wants the sort of deference handed over to despots, even as it pretends it’s still the leader of the Free World. And so the courts that respect the rule of law get this sort of bullshit from administration officials, who choose to present everything as some sort of liberal conspiracy against the Great Morbidly Obese White Hope:
The administration’s critics on the left have been “running the same gambit with so called ‘animus’ claims since 2017,” James Percival, general counsel for DHS, said in a statement.
“It is sabotage dressed in legal clothing,” he said.
Cause and effect, you racist idiots. If you’re seeing more anti-immigrant animus claims since Trump’s first term in office, it’s because the Trump administration (both versions) is deeply steeped in anti-migrant animus. Correlation and causation. That fewer judges ruled against the Biden administration on animus claims isn’t evidence of judicial activism. It’s nothing more than judges responding to stimuli.
Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, ice, iran, john mcconnell, mass deportation, nicaragua, nigeria, rhode island, travel ban, trump administration, venezuela
ICE never needed officers to disguise themselves with masks and strip themselves of identification before Trump took office for the second time. What ICE is doing now isn’t what ICE was doing during Trump’s first term, even though it’s the same hateful bigot sitting behind the Resolute Desk he thinks should be covered in gold leaf.
According to the DHS, ICE officers need to look like roving kidnapping squads because they fear for their safety. Supposedly, they’re under attack now more than ever, something not even supported by the DHS’s context-free claims of massive increases in assaults of ICE officers.
ICE has never been popular. People have been calling for ICE to be abolished for far longer than the last 18 months of its existence. But now that ICE behaves like an invading force, rather than an agency involved in immigration and customs enforcement, more people are reacting to its unwanted presence in their neighborhoods.
ICE’s excuses for mask-wearing were [cough] unmasked when ICE was asked to fill in for unpaid TSA agents. ICE officers showed up at airports without masks to stand around and milk the clock, apparently unworried about being “exposed” or subjected to threats to them or their families.
But now that the TSA is as staffed as it’s ever going to be, ICE is returning to American streets, long on masks and short on training. Criminal opportunists know a good thing when they see it. When it’s impossible to tell whether the person assaulting you/demanding access to your home/running off with your valuables is an actual federal officer or just someone with access to ski masks and camo, the criminals have the upper hand.
As of February, Noticias Telemundo had documented at least six cases of impostors posing as ICE agents to rob or harass immigrants. In mid-January, a man broke into a house in Pittsburgh claiming to be an ICE agent and threatening a teen with a knife. In February, police in San Diego said a man allegedly impersonated an officer and wrapped his arms around the neck of a restaurant manager, claiming the manager was in the country illegally and he was going to arrest him.
Sure, some of you may be scoffing at “six cases” since Trump won the election. But that’s only the ones where a (foreign!) news agency managed to put together the pieces to deliver reporting that should have been done much earlier by domestic new agencies.
Here’s the more damning stat:
Of the 31 impersonation cases documented in 2025, 84% involved individuals who claimed to be ICE agents. Others identified themselves as officers from Border Patrol or the Department of Homeland Security.
Thirty-one impersonations. Apparently all of them involved people pretending to be in the business of migrant deportation. And it’s not just the normal crime you’d expect from criminals seeing a flaw in the system and exploiting it. It’s also led to an increase in the sort of crime this administration will likely greet with pardons and payout from the “FUCK AMERICA $1,776 MILLION SLUSH FUND.”
The recorded incidents include intimidation, robbery and sexual assault, as well as so-called “immigration operations” carried out by armed vigilantes against what they describe as an “invasion” of foreigners in the U.S.
This was a problem the FBI recognized months ago, but rarely speaks of now because it’s being led by the only guy who has a chance at drinking Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth under the table. The current “leadership” has nothing to say about giving criminals more opportunities to engage in criminal acts.
Neither DHS nor ICE responded to Noticias Telemundo’s request for official statistics about cases of fake ICE agents. They also did not comment on the trends revealed by this investigation.
Not even the rote “fake news” quasi-rebuttal from this miserable assortment of inhuman asshats. Well, if DHS and ICE won’t speak for themselves, I’ll let this next quote from NBC/Telemundo speak for itself:
“You’re going back to Mexico,” a man told the immigrants in a video recorded from inside their truck. He insulted them for their appearance and for not speaking English, took their keys and snatched the immigrant’s phone when he called his boss. The manager later told the police that the fake agent had claimed to be from ICE and had warned him that all his employees were going to go to “f—–g jail.”
This isn’t fake news. This isn’t implication extrapolated from minimal inference. There are literal recordings of these impersonations.
This isn’t people imagining the worst because they’re politically opposed to the current administration. These are documented instances of the only thing that could be worse than the brutality and bigotry perpetrated by this administration: criminal acts encouraged by this government’s unwillingness to do its dirty work honestly.
Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, masked officers, mass deportation, thugs, trump administration
This is hardly the worst thing about the administration’s aliens.gov website but it’s still worth noting.
Let’s get to the worst stuff first. The site URL is aliens.gov, which would lead most normal people to believe it has something to do with the ongoing declassification of UFO-related files. That’s something Trump actually made happen, which is weird, because it doesn’t actually deliver him any immediate personal gain.
But that’s not what this site is. Instead, it’s more the same gruesome shit served up by the pin-headed bigots who run the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies. The term “illegal alien” has always been dehumanizing, which is why people who hate brown people love using it, while regular people opt for terms like “undocumented migrants.”
If you choose to visit the site, you’ll be greeted by a mid-budget, somewhat-glitchy, factually-fluid, one-sided take on humanity that reduces anyone this administration wants gone to less than human. The metaphors make it literal: this administration doesn’t think (most) immigrants are human beings. At this site, they’re portrayed as invaders from another world. It’s horrific, gross, and stupid in equal measures.
And it can’t even get the job done properly, as Dell Cameron points out for Wired. The problems start with the splash screen… and get dumber/more evil from there:
Visitors to the site are meant to be greeted by the opening notes of the X-Files theme song, WIRED discovered, set to play beneath a stylized “TOP SECRET” stamp and a warning that immigrants have “shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” The music has gone unnoticed because nearly every browser in the past 10 years has blocked autoplay audio by default.
The music track contains metadata indicating the file was created using late-2000s-era CD-ripping software.
Jesus. Not only do the nation’s top tech people not appear to recognize changes in browser tech, they apparently couldn’t be bothered to license the music they hoped would help complete their dehumanizing metaphor. Copyright infringement is a crime, and thousands of migrants have been arrested and detained for far less.
It’s not just the dumb tech stuff. It’s also the lies and misleading information presented as fact. Some of this appears to be deliberate, like the “3,129,580” number presented to site viewers as “encounters.” The site does nothing to explain what “encounters” means but obviously hopes viewers will read this either as arrests or deportations. That number actually means nothing at all:
The figure does not correspond to any enforcement total published by immigration authorities and is roughly seven times larger than the actual ICE arrest count since January 2025.
When your only goals are (1) making migrants appear less than human and innately dangerous, and (2) tossing around a bunch of big numbers to make it appear as though this nation is overrun by “illegal aliens,” stuff like citations and double-checking your math fall completely off the list of priorities.
And that’s how a site that’s bragging about all the “aliens” the administration has “encountered” ends up bragging about how many legal US citizens have been arrested or detained by ICE:
In 715 of the locations listed, the site identifies at least one of the people arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 of the locations, every single arrestee is reported to be an American.
Whoops. I mean, ICE is certainly doing this sort of thing, but it’s an unforced error for the administration to admit it on its own website. Linking dehumanization to immigration enforcement data keeps proving points administration officials constantly pretend aren’t real… like the uncomfortable fact that migrants are far less likely to commit criminal acts than US citizens. The data provided on this site shows that at least 20% of all arrests aren’t linked to any criminal charges, including the vaguely-worded “immigration” flag most often used in the arrest stats.
Then there’s the fact that this administration continues to believe Puerto Rico is just another Latin American country that’s flooding the nation with illegal immigrants.
Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are American citizens, is mapped on the site as a separate jurisdiction; in one row, the site lists Puerto Rico itself among the foreign countries the arrestees came from.
What usually follows this sort of botchery is apologies and the distant sound of heads rolling. Not here. Not in this version of the United States. Under this administration, no apologies are offered for anything seen here, ranging from the nasty, racist dehumanization of people from foreign countries to the factual errors to the use of unlicensed music.
Instead, we get the government claiming the reason everything looks so stupid and shitty is because it couldn’t be bothered to vet its own data sources before going live:
In a statement provided post-publication, the White House said aliens.gov “pulls data directly from DHS, which initially included a handful of non-immigration HSI arrests,” adding that “this has been updated.” HSI, or Homeland Security Investigations, is a part of ICE. WIRED reviewed the updated data and found there were 270,214 fewer arrests listed.
This is an administration that actively, demonstrably doesn’t care for facts. It’s no surprise that it saw the initial data dump and thought it looked impressive enough to help preach to the converted in the cheap seats. It’s only after people started asking questions that it bothered to look at its own data. And while cleaning this up may make some of the arrests of US citizens disappear, it also subtracts more than a quarter-million-worth of gaudiness from the arrest totals.
The administration continues moving from one dumpster to another, setting each one alight and responding by either claiming its casual carelessness is the equivalent of clerical errors or by personally insulting the journalist and/or the publication they work for. The administration learns nothing from the experience and the wet-brained fucks who dream this sort of thing up will continue to laugh at their own cruel jokes like the pathetic, cruel assholes they are. No one wins, but America just keeps on losing.
Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, ice, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration
Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There’s no single-issue voter whose kink is “surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries.”
Nope, this is Trump’s kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull of Stephen Miller, who still has yet to see his 3,000 arrests per day bigoted fantasy become reality, no matter how many billions we’re (forced to) throw at ICE.
This is just blatant racism masquerading as slightly-less-blatant racism. The law was never unclear. The system wasn’t being exploited by immigrants. Pretty much everyone has always been fine with the US’s green card program. And yet, this is what America means now, just as it heads into its 250th year.
Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.
The obvious question is “WHY?” The obvious answer is this: this administration hates people who aren’t white. If you think this policy might affect the small percentage of migrants from predominately white nations, you’re living in a self-induced psychosis. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the words falling out of the administration’s collective mouth:
In an emailed statement to the Associated Press the agency said people who provide an “economic benefit” or “national interest” could likely stay in the U.S. while others would have to go abroad to apply.
No need to read between the lines here. This administration is as unsophisticated as a used Croc. Both terms stated here can be read as “white” and “also white.” If you think this means otherwise, be sure to show your whole bigoted ass in the comment section below.
The “agency” mentioned here is the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services), which used to be more concerned with ensuring applicants kept on their path to citizenship. That’s no longer the case. It should rebrand as GTFO, since all it does now is give Trump whatever he wants when it comes to expelling non-white people from this nation.
I’m not even exaggerating. More than 90% of successful asylum seekers are white people from other nations. Any actions taken to limit lawful access to citizenship have targeted non-white people. Pretending that living in the US while seeking a green card is the exploitation of a legal loophole is nothing more than more blatant racism from an administration that has already been pretty fucking blatant about its racism.
The fully-suborned USCIS had this to say about a directive I can’t imagine it saw coming:
USCIS described the change as a return to “the original intent of the law” and closing a “loophole.”
Get thee to a white shoe law firm, he said in a Shakepearian voice. Bro, the “original intent of the law” never resulted in a demand to “close” a “loophole” for over FIVE DECADES. To claim it’s imperative NOW is to pretend you’d rather honor the law, rather than the nation’s foremost golf club groundskeeper.
To sum up: get fucked, Trump. This is nothing more than the administration deciding Lady Liberty is free to assault just because she showed a bit of ankle more than 100 years ago.
Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, trump administration, uscis
There are many (negative) things this Trump administration is known for. It’s a long list and I would encourage everyone to add as many negative things to that list.
His DOJ is specifically known for vengeful prosecutions of those who dare to oppose the guy who thinks he’s a king. The nation’s top law enforcement entity has been stripped of talent and experience by repeated purges. It has since been (partially) stocked with people more known for their loyalty to Trump than their legal acumen.
All of this is on the public record. And perhaps nothing is more damning than the combined efforts of two federal judges who are handling the administration’s bullshit prosecution of a half-dozen protesters.
Everything about this is a work of art — one inadvertently commissioned by Trump’s DOJ and its remaining collection of lying lawyers. Here’s a useful summary, via CBS News:
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros said during a Thursday afternoon hearing that the decision to dismiss charges was due to improper handling of the grand jury proceedings by the lead prosecutor in the case. A rare federal trial for misdemeanor charges that had been scheduled to begin next week was canceled, after prosecutors agreed to dismiss the charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled.
Boutros announced the decision to dismiss the remaining charges in court following a closed-door meeting over redacted grand jury transcripts. He told U.S. District Judge April Perry he was unaware until recently of the alleged misconduct, including a prosecutor meeting with a grand juror outside proceedings and other jurors who disagreed with the case being dismissed and prevented from participating. Boutros did not dispute the allegations, saying the conduct was upsetting and the reason the case was being dismissed.
If you’re not intimately familiar with the US legal process (and let’s hope for your sake that you aren’t), this is some wild shit. Some seriously unlawful shit went down as Trump prosecutors tried to convince grand jurors to give them an indictment they hadn’t actually earned.
The transcript [PDF] of the hearing in front of US federal judge April Perry has been released. It’s pretty much just 60 pages of the government being taken behind the proverbial woodshed. It is fucking harsh. And for good reason. It shows the government engaged in a lot of shady, possibly-illegal stuff in hopes of securing at least a federal misdemeanor charge against the four suspects who hadn’t already been excused for a lack of evidence.
It starts here, with this, as the judge weighs whether further sealing of the grand jury deliberations is warranted:
Although I am not going to prejudge the issue without a hearing, I will say that I was incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.
Just in case the context doesn’t make it clear, this is not the court congratulating the DOJ for being the best at law-type stuff it has ever seen. It’s the other thing: a court excoriating the DOJ for doing shady shit the likes of which it has never seen.
The list begins:
First, improper prosecutorial vouching to the grand jurors, with the AUSA putting her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges.
This may not sound like a big deal. It actually is. Here’s a former federal prosecutor (who some of you might be familiar with) explaining why “vouching” is considered off limits by serious prosecutors who actually consider themselves to be in the business of justice.
/4 “Vouching” is when a prosecutor asks a grand jury or jury to just trust them rather than rely on evidence: “I am a federal prosecutor, I have had this job for twenty years, and you can rely on me when I say there is additional strong evidence that shows they are guilty,” that sort of thing.
— Popehat Has Gone Absolutely CRAZY!!! (@kenwhite.bsky.social) 2026-05-22T00:22:37.495Z
To quote the embed verbatim:
“Vouching” is when a prosecutor asks a grand jury or jury to just trust them rather than rely on evidence: “I am a federal prosecutor, I have had this job for twenty years, and you can rely on me when I say there is additional strong evidence that shows they are guilty,” that sort of thing.
So, this is the government being this guy, except that federal charges are involved:
Moving on:
Second, improper prosecutorial communications of a substantive nature with the grand jurors outside of the grand jury room.
Do what now? I mean, what the actual fuck? Grand juries are swathed in secrecy, and we kind of are cool with this because… well, SHIT LIKE THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.
Moving on… again:
And, third, the prosecutor excusing grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case from the deliberations process.
So, that’s how this works now? Has it always been this way? Can the government further stack the grand jury deck simply by booting anyone who doesn’t seem inclined to buy what the government is selling? Maybe this is just the way the government always does these things, but this is the first time I’ve seen a court not only mention it, but directly go after a federal prosecutor for trying to cover up the government’s grand jury min/maxing.
Oh, and there’s so much more if you’re that sort of sadist. Ken White’s Bluesky thread hits a lot of the highlights. Multiple news agencies make the most of some cherry-picked lowlights.
But even without those audiovisual aids, you can see for yourself how this administration operates when it’s trying to punish people for disagreeing with it. Since it knows that law doesn’t support the charges, it will lie, cheat, and steal to get the grand jury “votes” it needs to silence dissent. The courts are already aware of this. But it’s on the public to convert this outrage to votes to prevent the further enshitification of what’s left of this Republic.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, broadview six, chicago, dhs, doj, free speech, ice
It’s one thing to accuse the government of engaging in vindictive prosecutions. It’s quite another thing to prove it.
The deck is stacked against those making these claims. These allegations rarely succeed. The government gets the benefit of the doubt and has the ability to make evidence against its position simply disappear.
It didn’t work here, though. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was among the initial wave of deportations in which the US government sent hundreds of people to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT maximum security prison — one overseen (almost directly) by a man who had declared himself the world’s “coolest dictator.”
Abrego Garcia, however, didn’t go silently. He fought back, first against the fact-free allegations that he was a dangerous MS-13 gang member before fighting the government’s insistence on punishing him for daring to speak up. That retaliation took many forms, including multiple attempts to send Garcia to countries like Liberia and Uganda, rather than allow him to reside in Costa Rica, which had already offered to take Garcia off the government’s hands. It also took the form of gag orders the government hoped would silence Garcia while it continued to make unproven claims about Garcia’s allegedly violent gang-related history.
The more Abrego Garcia pushed back, the angrier the government got. But anger is hardly useful when you’re supposed to be in the business of seeking justice and enforcing the law. It’s even more useless when the only people left manning the DOJ and DHS are people long on sycophancy and short on experience.
The end result is a legal unicorn: a sustained allegation of vindictive prosecution that has resulted in the dismissal of criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The ruling [PDF] — issued by federal judge Waverly Crenshaw (and brought to us by Liz Dye on Bluesky) — opens with a quote of a former federal prosecutor (and Supreme Court justice) that makes it clear where this order is headed.
Then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson warned his fellow prosecutors long ago of the danger of picking the person first and the crime second. “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” Robert H. Jackson, The Federal Prosecutor, 31 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 3, 5 (1940). That is the situation here.
That’s the leadoff. The payoff involves running down everything the administration did in hopes of bullying Abrego Garcia into silence/compliance. Those steps involved everything from resurrecting a traffic stop of a car driven by someone else that never resulted in criminal charges to a government attorney resigning, rather than help the administration pursue its petty revenge. Lots of DOJ/DHS attorneys/officials are name-checked on the way to the court’s ruling in favor of Abrego Garcia.
In short, the timing of [HSI] Agent VanWie’s decision to reopen the closed HSI investigation of the November 2022 traffic stop and [acting US Attorney General Todd] Blanche’s now unrebutted public statements tying the reopened investigation to Abrego’s successful lawsuit taints the investigation with a vindictive motive. That vindictive taint continued with [Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash] Singh’s close substantive oversight of McGuire’s and his prosecution team’s work leading to the indictment. Finally, after the indictment was presented, the Executive Branch found a way to return Abrego to the United States to comply with the District of Maryland’s order to facilitate his return. While the Court finds insufficient evidence of actual vindictiveness, the Court concludes that the Government has failed to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness. The evidence it labels as newly discovered was available to be obtained with due diligence long before April 2025. Even more, it does not explain the Government’s change in position to remove Abrego and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him. McGuire’s subjective explanations also do not cure the retaliatory taint that set the investigation and resulting indictment in motion. Because the presumption of vindictiveness remains unrebutted, the indictment must be dismissed.
Listed above this paragraph is a comprehensive recounting of the government’s actions in this case, which includes several failed appeals (after it was ordered to return Garcia to the US), including a rare loss in the US Supreme Court. It also details the social media postings and press releases issued by the administration, which again stated (without providing evidence) that Garcia was a MS-13 gang member involved in human trafficking.
Because Garcia refused to go quickly and quietly, the administration (begrudgingly, following several appeals) returned him to the United States only to hit him with criminal charges meant to keep him locked up until the government could toss him into the next available hellhole devoid of human rights (Liberia, Uganda, etc.).
None of this worked, and now the government has been fully exposed as the bullying thug it is. Garcia is free to go, mainly because it’s impossible for the Trump administration to provide anything that credibly counters the apparent truth of the matter: Garcia was punished solely because he chose to fight back.
The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly. The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation. What the Government labels as “new evidence” was not new as a matter of law. The prosecutor’s subjective good faith does not cure the retaliatory taint.
This is a massive loss for the Trump administration. While it only affects one of hundreds of victims of its anti-migrant purge efforts, it was a case this administration threw all of its power at and still got shut out by the court. Bullies only win when no one fights back. And a single El Salvadoran has managed to expose the inherent weaknesses of the administration’s institutional bigotry — something that operates outside of the law as frequently as possible. That the government chose to appeal repeatedly just means it has secured multiple levels of adverse precedent. It has been beaten by the person the administration accidentally turned into the poster boy for racist immigration efforts.
Filed Under: bigotry, cecot, dhs, ice, kilmar abrego garcia, mass deportation, trump administration
It’s absolutely amazing how wrong this administration has been when it comes to immigration enforcement. That some people still think the Supreme Court is in the best position to resolve this is insane. This isn’t a circuit split in need of mending. This is pretty much the entirety of the court system coming to the same conclusion.
You can look at this two ways: it’s either a resounding rejection of this administration’s anti-migrant actions or it’s evidence of the futility of the system of checks and balances. Either way, someone’s definitely keeping an eye on this and that someone is Kyle Cheney of Politico, who’s been tracking immigration-related lawsuits ever since Trump returned to office. Here’s the good news/bad news:
More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
You’d think that 10,000 adverse rulings by judges whose appointments have spanned multiple administrations would clearly signal that the current administration’s actions are wrong. But that’s undercut by the opening of the second paragraph, which delivers the bad news no one who supports constitutional rights wants to hear.
This shouldn’t be headed to the Supreme Court — the court most likely to give Trump what he wants, no matter what that means for what’s left of our rights. Just because an extremely small minority of judges have ruled in favor of unjustified detentions doesn’t make it an unsettled matter of law. If we had something approaching 10,000 rulings in favor of this administration’s actions, that might mean we need someone to make the final call.
One way or another, it will end up there, if only because the Trump administration has the unlimited budget to ensure this happens. It can appeal every single one of these 10,000 adverse rulings in perpetuity because it doesn’t have to worry about keeping its lawyers paid. The plaintiffs in these cases, however, have to deal with private sector reality day in and day out and know the least sympathetic court in the land is also the most powerful.
The administration was given the chance to address this reality. And, of course, it chose to respond like a petulant child, rather than attempting to be the adult in the room:
Trump administration officials shrug off the one-sided rebuke from the courts, attributing their losses to “the left and their activist proxies on the judiciary” and predicting that they will prevail at the Supreme Court.
“The law is not a popularity contest among judges,” a Justice Department spokesperson said.
This response is insane. It’s one thing to respond to a judicial aberration with a partisan shrug. It’s quite another to pretend 10,000 rulings from more than 400 judges is nothing more than “judicial activism” by “the left.” Reality (and, hopefully, history) is not on the side of Trump. The only thing left for it to do is hope that the court Trump stacked is similarly willing to pretend thousands of adverse rulings are nothing more than liberals trying to impose their will on the nation.
Pretending is all this administration has. Behold this “activist proxy” of “the left:”
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
What’s left of the DOJ is more beholden to Trump than his own judicial appointees. Anyone willing to speak on record does so with all the personal conviction of someone hoping to avoid the next political purge:
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare, asked about the more than 10,000 rulings against the administration, replied: “That’s great, now the American people can see how judges are putting personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.”
You know what the people are actually going to see? They’re going to see that this administration has repeatedly violated the law and is resorting to accusing Trump’s own judicial appointees of being partisan hacks. That’s not going to play well with people who actually pay attention to these things. And it won’t budge the needle at all with the Trump faithful who either can’t or won’t keep up with the autocratic overtures being pitched by their own personal Jesus.
Unfortunately, the Trump loyalists in the Supreme Court are just as willing to be deliberately ignorant of the law when the administration asks them to rule in its favor. We don’t expect average Americans to grasp the intricacies of decades of precedential rulings. But we should expect the nation’s highest court to comprehend that 400+ judges and 10,000+ rulings might add up to something it shouldn’t ignore, no matter how much the conservative majority might want to please the person they now seem to view as a king, rather than a president.
Filed Under: bigotry, constitutional rights, dhs, ice, mass deportation, mass detention, trump administration
Judge Beryl Howell has now told ICE at least twice: it’s not allowed to grade its own papers.
Since Trump’s return to office, the federal government has been engaged in a months-long purge of anyone who looks a bit foreign. ICE has increasingly relied on administrative warrants to do everything including enter homes to effect arrests of people who’ve only allegedly engaged in civil violations.
Don’t let the word “warrant” fool you. No judge has signed off on these so-called warrants, and they’re certainly not capable — constitutionally-speaking — of granting ICE officers the legal authority to effect arrests of people who would normally just be given a summons, much less allow them to enter people’s homes.
But that was the way things went for several months before dozens of courts and hundreds of decisions told ICE otherwise. With courts ordering ICE to stop arresting people without judicial warrants, ICE had to walk back its aggression a bit. But only a bit. What’s being addressed by a second order by this same DC federal court is representative of ICE’s day-to-day activities around the nation.
This court had already ordered ICE to cease its warrantless arrests of immigrants it couldn’t actually show might pose a flight risk if not locked up. Even policy clarification issued by acting ICE head Todd Lyons in the wake of dozens of courtroom losses failed to change anything in DC. The most reasonable explanation for this apparently deliberate “failure” to comply with court orders and the Constitution is that no one in ICE actually believes Todd Lyons will ever hold any ICE officer accountable.
Judge Howell’s order [PDF] says ICE and its current director are playing word games in hopes of keeping the arrest rate up, defining “escape risk” so loosely it would be almost impossible for any migrant accosted by federal officers to be considered anything else than immediately arrestable.
Plaintiffs raise no issue with the Lyons Memo’s initial definition of “escape risk” to mean whether “an immigration officer determines [an individual] is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Lyons Memo at 4 (emphasis added)—and therefore the sufficiency of this definition to reflect the meaning in the statutory text of “likely to escape” is assumed for purposes of resolving this motion.
Subsequent descriptions in the Memo, however, drop the italicized phrase thereby effectively limiting the immigration officer’s analysis to whether an individual “is likely to remain at the scene of the encounter.”
This is a deliberate move by ICE and its leadership, dropping a phrase that would strongly suggest migrants who are attending court-ordered check-ins or otherwise working their way towards naturalization/asylum aren’t “escape risks” because they clearly desire to remain involved in the naturalization process. But ICE has racked up a whole lot of arrests at immigration courts because that’s a place lazy, opportunistic officers are guaranteed to come across undocumented migrants.
The end result of this one-two punch is exactly what one would expect it to be. And it definitely doesn’t look constitutional. It looks like a purge enabled by the administration’s constant refusal to play by the rules. (All emphasis mine.)
Indeed, historically, federal civil immigration enforcement did not rely on costly mass arrests and detention centers to address the issue of law-abiding noncitizens without legal status in this country, but rather issued summonses to bring them before immigration authorities. As the Supreme Court has made clear, “it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States,” and “[i]f the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 407 (2012).
[…]
The current administration’s apparent reliance on arrests as a routine method of immigration enforcement is a departure from statutory text and historical understanding…
And while a lot of the reasoning sides with the government (due mostly to the court deciding to grant it an assumption of good faith that this administration definitely doesn’t deserve), Judge Howell still says there’s a lot going on here that could — and should — result in a permanent injunction forbidding this flagrant disregard for civil rights.
To be clear, this memorandum opinion does not render any final conclusions about the legality of the challenged policy and practice, which is left for future proceedings after discovery and briefing on dispositive motions. The determination, at this juncture, that certain factors outlined in the Lyons Memo are compliant with the preliminary injunction order is not to say that those factors would survive APA review at final judgment with the benefit of a full record. Nor does this determination suggest that every warrantless civil arrest predicated on consideration of those factors would satisfy the probable cause requirement under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2). Indeed some of the Form I-213s and the accompanying declarations in the record contain, simultaneously, dubious reasons for finding escape risk and highly concerning facts about the arrest[s].
And there will be more on the record. The judge grants the plaintiffs’ expanded discovery request while simultaneously reiterating that the court’s previous order needs to actually be followed by ICE, rather than just alluded to in policy memos that appear intended to give the agency and its officers as much plausible deniability as possible.
Filed Under: cbp, dhs, ice, mass deportation, rights violations, warrantless arrests
Read the latest posts:
