 |
VOOZH | about |
|
VOOZH | about |
Behold this utter bullshit, uttered by the Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan:
White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”
Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”
“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”
This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.
Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.
If you keep arresting the same person over and over, sooner or later what’s left of the safety net will fail and that citizen will be expelled from the country. That’s what one US citizen is hoping to prevent with his lawsuit against the government, which is being handled by the Institute for Justice. On multiple occasions, federal officers have decided this US citizen is deserving of deportation, as Isabela Dias reports for Mother Jones:
In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.
Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented.
One time might be an aberration. Repeated occurrences are something else entirely.
This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship.
On one hand, repetition indicates that anti-migrant efforts under Trump are extremely sloppy, overseen by people who value quantity over quality. That’s almost certainly true, especially now that the DHS has lowered hiring and training standards for ICE. On top of that, there’s the casual racism of the policies, which — thanks to the Supreme Court — are pretty much legal because officers are allowed to infer from darker skin tones that someone might be in the country illegally.
On the other hand, there’s a chance Venegas is being targeted repeatedly for vindictive reasons. That seems less likely, at least in terms of what’s been detailed in his court filings. If it continues now that his lawsuit has been filed, that might suggest his arrests and detentions are no longer accidental.
Whatever the case, there’s going to be more of this happening, no matter what half-assed niceties Tom Homan might state during press conferences. The Trump administration is fighting to end birthright citizenship in this nation. If it does make this happen, it won’t be retroactive. But that’s hardly going to matter to the DHS and its underling agencies, which have repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of existing laws, when not violating direct orders from federal courts.
And this administration is going even further, seeking to “denaturalize” certain US citizens in order to deport them:
The Trump administration on Friday announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.
The Justice Department unveiled denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against roughly a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.
At first glance, this might look like the sort of thing the US government should be doing. This takes serious criminals off our books (so to speak) and sends problematic naturalized citizens back to their home countries to be their problem.
But we already know how this is going to work. The “worst of the worst” lie has been uttered repeatedly to defend the administration’s aggressive/transgressive tactics. But the facts have repeatedly shown the administration just wants non-whites gone. It doesn’t really care about any relevant criminal activity.
The same thing is happening here. The administration is making it clear this is just more bigotry, rather than an actual effort to root out the “worst of the worst” for the safety of the nation.
The group of naturalized U.S. citizens whose citizenship the Justice Department is now seeking to revoke includes immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan.
While this group does include some accused of molesting a child and a supposed terrorist sympathizer, it also includes these people:
The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.
These are far less serious crimes, which don’t lend themselves to the “worst of the worst” narrative the administration deploys when its actions are questioned.
The lack of diversity (in other words, no white people or those with ties to Western European countries) in those selected to be first up for denaturalization is a leading indicator of further unlawful detentions of US citizens. As the government goes after more non-white US citizens under this pretense, DHS agencies will respond by rounding up more non-white US citizens, turning Homan’s false assurances into the lie it was always meant to be.
The administration actually wants to deport certain US citizens. That these agencies are far too willing to oblige, even without the necessary facts in hand, will definitely increase the number of citizens being held by ICE and correspondingly increase the number of those deported despite still being citizens of this nation.
Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, donald trump, florida, ice, leonardo garcia venegas, mass deportation, rights violations, texas, tom homan, trump administration
Something that never was a problem for years suddenly became a thing after Trump’s return to office. As his administration ramped up its cruelty towards non-white people, Democratic leaders suddenly became much more interested in seeing how ICE was handling this influx of detainees.
Not that they were wrong to do so. The history of ICE detention is extremely ugly, with detainees regularly treated like the subhumans ICE (and their subcontractors) seem to believe these human beings are. But with ICE and the DHS making all the wrong kinds of headlines as the administration carried out its racial cleansing programs, DHS started to pretend congressional members were no longer allowed to perform inspections of ICE detention facilities.
In some cases, this refusal to comply with the law resulted in the arrest of politicians trying to engage in their legally ordained oversight duties. When that intimidation failed to stem the flow of congressional reps to ICE facilities, DHS started issuing its own limitations on inspections — exactly zero of which were supported by current law.
Kristi Noem issued “guidance” last year pretending that Trump’s budget bill freed ICE from having to open their facilities to congressional inspection. Noem’s theory was that while normally DHS couldn’t make congressional reps give ICE 72 hours to seven days advance notice of inspections, the “Big Beautiful Bill” concocted by the GOP created pathways for pretending existing law didn’t exist.
That guidance specifically noted the DC Appeals Court had already ruled against the DHS by stating its current demands for advance notice were “inconsistent” with existing law. No doubt we’ll see similar misleading “guidance” issued by the DHS again in the near future as the DC Appeals Court has (again) rejected the government’s attempts to violate the law while litigation over these new policies continues.
A federal appeals court on Friday required the Trump administration to continue allowing lawmakers to inspect immigration detention facilities without advance notice, ruling unanimously that the impromptu visits posed minimal problems for the government.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit preserved, for now, the ability of Democrats in Congress to make unannounced visits to detention centers and check on the conditions inside.
The one-page order [PDF] (and its 10-page explanation by Judge Rao) is inexplicably absent from the New York Times reporting. But it’s embedded below (and linked above).
Judge Rao says the government does have some interest in controlling access to its facilities for several, mostly credible reasons. But its belief that these concerns override existing law allowing congressional inspections is misplaced.
The government is entitled to deference on how it maintains the security of detention facilities, but the current record does not substantiate the government’s claim that oversight visits without advance notice impose harms beyond administrative inconvenience. While a close call, particularly because of the strong likelihood of success on the merits, I concur in denying a stay.
As Noem pointed out in her memo, the Big Beautiful Act created a flow of funding that was (theoretically) outside of the purview of existing appropriations laws governing ICE facility inspection. This order points out that this is no longer the case as that particular rider attached to the Act lapsed along with the rest of the DHS’s funding during the shutdown. The dead rider has not been re-attached, so the DHS’s insistence this means this particular funding can be used to thwart congressional oversight isn’t exactly a foregone conclusion.
That’s not to say this decision will ultimately lead to the DHS abandoning its demands for advance notice before inspections. While the government has failed to show it will suffer irreparable harm if congressional reps are allowed on-demand access to detention facilities, the plaintiffs here are legislators — people who aren’t generally allowed to sue the same government that employs them to obtain relief.
Judge Rao says the administration is likely to emerge victorious because the Democratic congressional reps don’t have standing. But that doesn’t mean the government has presented solid arguments about its own interests in denying access to detention facilities.
The government has credibly alleged inconvenience and disruption caused by congressional visits. But the government has not shown that these harms arise from congressional visits undertaken without seven days’ advance notice, as opposed to congressional visits generally. The government cites a single security incident involving the unauthorized presence of the Mayor of Newark in the secured area of an ICE facility and the alleged obstruction of the Mayor’s arrest by Representative McIver. But the government does not explain how this incident resulted from a lack of prior notice of the Representative’s oversight visit.
To be sure, the mayor of Newark is not allowed to access ICE facilities without advance notice or explicit permission. But that doesn’t extend to everyone else ICE wishes to keep out of its facilities — a list that seems to include every congressional rep that actually might want to perform an inspection.
In addition, this never used to be a problem. The Appeals Court isn’t convinced that it’s suddenly a problem now, just because this version of the DHS wants to pretend it is.
By contrast, the Members have provided numerous declarations attesting to congressional visits made with less than seven days’ notice that were conducted without incident since 2019. The government does not meaningfully dispute these accounts and responds only that the pending litigation incentivizes the Members to conduct their visits in a nondisruptive manner. Even if that is true, this pending appeal will continue to provide the same incentives for good behavior.
For now, congressional reps don’t need to give ICE a heads up before engaging in an inspection. That may change (at least temporarily) if the administration can show these congressional reps don’t have standing to pursue this litigation. But we can hope that any final dispensation of this case only grants the administration its argument about standing. The law is still the law, no matter how the DHS might feel about the law. When this all wraps up, the status should be reset to quo: Congressional reps have a legal right to inspect facilities without advance notice. Everything else is just mud in the water.
Filed Under: accountability, congress, dc circuit, dhs, ice, oversight, trump administration
The content of their character was never up for consideration. Under Donald Trump, the only thing that matters is the color of their skin. That’s why almost every single person granted asylum since Trump took office has been white. That’s why Trump has been asking (out loud!) why we keep getting migrants from “shithole” countries (like those located in South America, Africa, and Latin America) rather than blond haired, blue eyed expats from Scandinavian countries whose residents’ lives would become noticeably worse if they chose to move to the US.
The president wraps himself in the flag, delivers a lot of garbled Team USA jingoism, and routinely proclaims we have the best military in the world. But even the people most directly responsible for keeping the US on top of the military game aren’t allowed to remain here if they’re not white.
Jose Serrano, an active duty soldier who served three tours in Afghanistan, said immigration agents arrested his wife April 14 as they attended an appointment with immigration services to take steps toward her permanent residency.
“A person opened the door, escorted us through the hallway, and at the end of the hallway, my wife got arrested,” Serrano said. “Arrested without any order, any warrant … They took away my wife. They don’t tell me anything.”
On top of all this awfulness, this incident shows ICE isn’t actually shifting away from immigration court arrests despite (1) officials saying otherwise, and (2) more importantly, ICE itself supposedly letting officers know that court arrests like these are not allowed under current ICE policy.
The regular awfulness is this: the Trump administration is willing to attack its own military if it means racking up a few more arrests and deportations:
[L]ast April, DHS eliminated a 2022 policy that considered military service of an immediate family member to be a “significant mitigating factor” in deciding whether or not to pursue immigration enforcement. The administration’s new policy states that “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”
It’s not just this nation’s relationship with its own military that’s being permanently damaged by Trump’s bigoted war on non-white people. It’s also any future relationships we might have in countries where we’re engaged in combat. When the US began its full withdrawal from Afghanistan, it promised protections to Afghans who worked with the military to provide intelligence or otherwise aided in the US in the decades-long war.
That’s all being tossed aside by Trump because he and his administration simply just don’t like non-white people.
After halting a U.S. resettlement program for Afghans who helped the American war effort, President Trump is in talks to send as many as 1,100 of them to the Democratic Republic of Congo, an aid worker briefed on the plan said Tuesday.
The group includes interpreters for the U.S. military, former members of the Afghan Special Operations forces and family members of American service members. More than 400 children are among them.
The Afghans have been living in limbo in Qatar for over a year. They were taken there after being evacuated by the United States for their own safety because they supported American forces during the war against the Taliban that began in 2001.
Thanks for your help. Now, go fuck yourselves. That’s the message the US is sending to people who aided the US during this war. It’s the kind of message that isn’t likely to score it any allies as it resumes hostilities in the Middle East.
This report says Trump is “in talks” with DRC to pursue this “resettlement” of Afghan allies — one the administration pursues despite the protests of the people who risked their own lives to assist the US during the Afghanistan war.
It’s hard to believe Trump is actually engaged in anything. DRC already has a refugee problem of its own.
More than 600,000 refugees, mostly from the Central African Republic and Rwanda, are currently in Congo, according to the United Nations. Human rights activists say that the country is not equipped to take in more in the midst of fighting with neighboring Rwanda that has displaced even more people because of attacks on refugee camps.
On top of this, many Afghan allies already have family members living in the United States due to previous efforts made by the Biden administration to protect those who aided the US. This forced resettlement in, well, pretty much any African country that agrees to take them divides even more families. It also demonstrates the United States is not to be trusted when it offers favors in return for assistance. All it takes is an election cycle to roll back guarantees and turn trusted allies into just another set of people being moved from “shithole country” to “shithole country” by a bunch of bigots who would rather destroy America than allow any more non-white people to become residents of what used the be the world’s “melting pot.”
At least for now, Trump has seemingly found a willing dumping ground for people he doesn’t want in this country:
On April 17, the U.S. government deported 15 people to the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a deeply impoverished African country that’s been scarred by years of conflict.
The group—comprising men and women from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru—is the first to arrive as part of a secretive migration deal brokered with the Trump administration.
“They took us, they put us on a plane, and they chained us by our hands and feet,” said one Colombian man, sitting on a plastic chair in a shabby hotel near Kinshasa’s airport. The deportees didn’t know their final destination until they were on the plane, he added.
Like El Salvador, I’m sure the DRC is more than happy to take our money to take some people off our hands. And like El Salvador, I’m sure the DRC government doesn’t actually care what happens to any of these people being shoved out of DHS charter flights like so much human refuse. If the US can’t be bothered to care, why should some third party in a developing nation do anything more than allow planes to land so long as the checks keep clearing?
This is what America is now: a place where human rights, civil liberties, and basic human morality are no longer weaved into the fabric of the nation. America is no longer the world’s policeman. It is now the world’s corrupt, racist sheriff.
Filed Under: afghanistan, bigotry, cruelty, dhs, ice, mass deportation, pete hegseth, trump administration, us military
Not that ICE was ever that great about taking care of all the people it detains. It certainly wasn’t during Trump’s first term. The DHS Inspector General released a report that said there were numerous problems in a single detention facility. Not only that but what was contained in the report was incomplete because the inspectors were both unwilling and unable to dig deep into the issues. ICE officers and officials were far from compliant and inspectors made it worse by questioning detainees about conditions in public areas often containing… you guessed it: ICE officers.
They’re certainly not any better now. Detentions are way up and this iteration of immigration enforcement officials cares even less about the rights and well-being of detained migrants than those employed during Trump 1.0. Not for nothing, but there’s a very obvious reason DHS is doing everything it can to prevent congressional members from inspecting detention centers. We know what it is. Congressional reps know what it is. And for damn sure the people keeping them out of detention centers know what it is.
If the ignition point is the indiscriminate ejection of non-white people from the United States, overseen by ghoulish MAGA acolytes with white Christian nationalist leanings, and carried out by roving bands of masked kidnappers.
The inevitable outcome of everything listed above is this:
The number of immigrants who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has reached an all-time high this fiscal year.
Twenty-nine people have died in ICE custody since October, the start of the federal government’s fiscal year, already surpassing 2004’s toll of 28, the previous record, according to government data.
The latest death in custody has been, of course, conveniently blamed on the victim.
The most recent death was of 27-year-old Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt, a Cuban man held in ICE custody in Miami, Florida. According to an initial report released by ICE on the evening of April 16, Carbonell-Betancourt was found unresponsive in his cell on the morning of April 12. The report lists the cause of death as a “presumed suicide,” but the official cause remains under investigation.
Since it appears the government will be investigating itself, we can safely assume “presumed” will be removed from the cause of death as soon as the DHS makes the cause official.
And, of course, ICE (via its acting director) said this was exactly what we should expect from it:
During a congressional hearing also on Thursday, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said there are a high number of deaths this fiscal year “because we do have the highest amount in detention that ICE has ever had since its inception in 2003.”
Not a great excuse. While it’s obviously true that increases in one thing might lead to increases in related things, it’s not guaranteed. And it’s not a great look to tell Congress of course more people are dying. More people are being detained.
You’re supposed to keep the numbers down on the death side, no matter how many people you decide absolutely can’t be allowed to go un-detained for the (allegedly) engaging in civil violations. And while (now former) acting director Lyons goes on to say “We don’t want anyone to die in custody,” I kind of don’t believe him?
He also said this:
“I hope that’s a policy of anyone that has to be tasked with detaining someone.”
You hope? You set the policies. You enforce them. You’re not allowed to hope.
More deaths are happening where most migrants are being sent: Texas. Texas is in the Fifth Circuit, which has been incredibly receptive of every new awfulness this administration engages in. Consequently, as many migrants as possible are sent there as soon as possible, no matter where they’re initially detained. Those deaths include one that has been ruled a homicide: the killing of Geraldo Luna Campos, who the DHS initially claimed had been placed in segregation after he allegedly became “disruptive” while waiting in line for medication. That narrative has since been replaced with something far closer to the truth.
[T]he El Paso Medical Examiner’s Office ruled his death a homicide due to “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The FBI is now investigating the death.
This won’t be the last homicide. The DHS only has the most minimal interest in protecting and caring for the thousands of people federal officers have detained. ICE is completely unwilling to police itself. And the administration overseeing all of this could not care less about the people they’ve decided are unworthy of residing in this country. And the fiscal year isn’t even over yet. There are still five months to go. A ghastly record is going to be set by this administration. Hopefully, it will never be broken.
Filed Under: cbp, cruelty, dhs, ice, todd lyons, trump administration
Raids and arrests around the nation by federal immigration officers all feature the same thing: a bunch of people in masks shoving people into unmarked vehicles. What’s happening under Trump during his second term doesn’t feel like America. And it certainly doesn’t look like America. Instead, it looks like the actions of paramilitary jump-out squads, roaming US streets looking for people to “disappear.”
DHS and ICE officials have repeatedly tried to justify this level of person-by-person obfuscation as being essential to the safety of federal officers. But we all know what this is really about: protecting these officers from the consequences of their own actions. If safety was so paramount, the ICE officers sent to airports to… well, mainly just stand around… would have been wearing masks. But they weren’t. So the context (like detaining children or straight up murdering people on the streets) matters.
California’s legislature passed a law banning federal officers from wearing masks while carrying out their mass deportation efforts in the state. Governor Gavin Newsom signed it, triggering an immediate round of apoplectic responses from federal officials.
The law, however, didn’t last long.
A federal judge blocked the mask ban in February, ruling that it discriminated against the federal government because it did not apply to state troopers. The law made exceptions for undercover agents, protective equipment like N95 respirators or tactical gear, and other situations where not wearing a mask would jeopardize the operation. That judge let the ID law stand.
The state of California appealed this decision. Unfortunately for Californians and government accountability in general, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has upheld the lower court’s ruling.
We conclude that § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions. The Supremacy Clause forbids the State from enforcing such legislation.
While the lower court did suggest the California law might find its way around the Supremacy Clause issue by rewriting it to cover all law enforcement officers, not just federal officers, the Appeals Court wasn’t nearly as receptive to this argument. The legislature already has a bill prepped to do exactly this, but it seems unlikely to survive a federal court review following this ruling.
The district court asked the wrong question. By looking to the degree § 10 interfered with the activities of the United States, the district court applied a standard pertaining to States’ regulation of federal contractors and third-party employers, not the standard applicable to direct regulation of governmental activities of the United States.
[…]
The district court also misunderstood Clifton v. Cox, 549 F.2d 722 (9th Cir. 1977). There, in concluding that California could not criminally prosecute a federal officer despite allegations that he “exceeded his express authority” under federal law, we asked “whether the [officer’s] conduct was necessary and proper under the circumstances.” That standard is inapplicable here because § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act directly regulates inherently governmental conduct of federal officers carrying out their duties under federal authority.
Finally — and perhaps most distressingly — the Ninth Circuit completely sidesteps the public safety concerns that were the basis for this bill. The concerns weren’t theoretical. They were echoed by Trump’s own FBI, which issued a memo to law enforcement informing them that masked criminals posing as law enforcement officers had committed robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults.
None of that matters to the Ninth Circuit, which says it doesn’t even need to discuss the kind of public safety concern law enforcement generally uses to justify police misconduct or repeated rights violations.
California nonetheless contends that even if we determined that § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act likely violates the Supremacy Clause, we would still need to balance the equities. California specifically urges us to consider the public safety concerns which spurred the Act’s enactment. We decline to do so. Because the United States has shown a likelihood that the Act violates the Supremacy Clause, it has also shown that both the public interest and balance of the equities tip “decisively in . . . favor” of a preliminary injunction.
Oh, well. The masks stay on. And if it failed in this circuit, similar efforts are likely to fail in other appellate jurisdictions. The administration gets another “win” by arguing against the interests of the public it’s supposed to be serving.
Filed Under: 9th circuit, california, dhs, gavin newsom, government accountability, ice, mass deportation, police misconduct, trump administration
The administration’s anti-migrant tactics are now months into an indefinite period of continuous escalation. That protest efforts have escalated alongside it apparently means nothing to the officials spearheading this brazen attack on non-white people.
It wasn’t until federal officers began killing people in front of witnesses that the administration decided to dial things back a bit. But did it ever actually do it? Or did it just sideline the most famous faces associated with this wave of violence and unlawfulness?
Punting former DHS head Kristi Noem into the nosebleed section of the federal government didn’t do much to change things, not when “Border Czar” Tom Homan (the guy who more or less said protesters were to blame for the Minneapolis murders) is still hanging around and her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, looks like just another expendable MAGA footsoldier.
Some small sort of de-escalation seems to be happening now, but it’s hard to tell if this is due to policy changes, budget issues, or the natural result of pushing this hard for this long. Sooner or later, things tend to trend towards inertia, no matter how much motivational frothing is being done by those who aren’t actually on the front lines.
Then there’s the DOJ upsetting the administration’s own apple cart by admitting in court that ICE officers were committing illegal arrests by pouncing on migrants attending immigration hearings. Not that ICE officers have necessarily stopped doing this (there’s evidence to suggest at least some of them haven’t), but it does make it clear that continuing to do so is at least a violation of policy, as well as being, you know, actually illegal.
So, when things are being said about further de-escalation, you may as well start ingesting fistfuls of salt. First, here’s the good news, which comes from two unnamed DHS officials who insist things are being calmed down from the top down:
Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly instructed immigration enforcement officers to cut back on arrests inside courthouses and to no longer enter homes without a warrant, backing off two controversial policies that have sparked violent and chaotic scenes in the president’s mass deportation campaign.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices across the country were verbally instructed by their superiors that they should no longer enter homes unless they have a judicial warrant, two Homeland Security officials told NBC News.
That would seem to be the least this administration could do since it would finally align ICE’s actions with the law and its internal policies. However, if these instructions are only be handed out “verbally,” it means the DHS is deliberately avoiding creating a paper trail that might be used against it should it decide to just go back to doing this the old, illegal way.
And that probably explains the immediate, contradictory statement that followed the reporting based on assertions made by two unidentified DHS officials.
A spokesperson for Homeland Security told The Independent that there has been “no change in policy.”
“We will continue to arrest illegal aliens at immigration courts following their proceedings in compliance with the law and any applicable court orders,” the person said. “It is commonsense to take them into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings.”
That’s definitely not the same thing as what was expressed by these DHS officials. And the rest of the statement makes it clear federal officers will continue to arrest people who show up for their scheduled immigration hearings. While it does make sense to arrest people who’ve been issued an order of removal, that’s not actually what ICE has been doing. It has been bringing in DOJ lawyers to dismiss pending cases to immediately make people eligible for removal. And — as has been shown in court — ICE officers have been arresting people not currently under orders of removal and then generating arrest warrants after the fact.
So, it’s not a good news/bad news thing going on here. It’s bad news/worse news, with a balance that constantly shifts depending on what mood the administration is in on any given day. Courts haven’t been able to stop ICE from engaging in illegal arrests. And the growing national opposition to Trump’s anti-migrant actions hasn’t made any discernible dent in the administration’s lust for punishing non-white people simply for existing.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, dhs, ice, mass deportation, trump administration
The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP.
The DHS can’t even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or later and the administration won’t let the lack of tax revenue offsets stop it from feeding billions more into its Bigotry Machine.
But that’s not all. Behold our all-but-officially-declared war in Iran, currently headed by the Department of Defense War Little Excursion, which is adding billions of dollars weekly to the national deficit. After all, as right-leaning libertarians like to point out, the government doesn’t actually “make” anything. The private sector builds the bombs and missiles. And unlike TSA agents, they expect to be paid.
You know who could help this country offset some of its insane expenditures? It’s the same people we’re spending billions to remove from the country:
Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.
More succinctly, immigrants out-punch their weight class when it comes to erasing budget deficits:
Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
[…]
Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
But that help is apparently no longer welcome. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating the firewall between the IRS and ICE, allowing ICE agents to use this data to hunt down taxpayers who work harder and pay more taxes than the white, natural-born citizens that this administration pretends make America great.
That’s going to cause even more problems for an administration that is spending far more liberally than any “liberal” it blames its current budget problems on. Here’s how that looks on the ground as Tax Day has come and gone in the United States:
By the time Tax Day rolls around every April 15, accountant María José Solís usually has more to do. More clients. More paperwork. More phones ringing, more emails and WhatsApp messages pinging.
But this year, she said, more than 550 of her regular clients have disappeared. That’s about 15 percent of her customer base at Toro Taxes, the bilingual firm in Wheaton, Maryland, that Solís runs.
There’s your anecdote, albeit one that’s being repeated around the nation. Here’s the data:
The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the IRS stands to lose between $147 billion and $479 billion over the next decade as migration to the U.S. declines, deportations increase and immigrants of various statuses disengage from the formal economy for what some experts say may be an extended period.
That estimate will likely be low if the Trump administration continues to purge migrants at the rate it has since Trump returned to office. It will definitely be lower if another similarly bigoted GOP lawmaker succeeds him as president.
And it’s not just the losses up front. There’s money leaking out the back as well. It’s a double-dip, because migrants with ITINs (individual tax identification numbers) pay taxes for services they can’t actually access, like Social Security and Medicare. They’re actually subsidizing citizens who pay fewer taxes, work fewer hours, and commit more crimes than they do.
This nation continues to become poorer, not just in terms of financial viability, but in heart and spirit. Migrants made this nation great. Now, a bunch of ungrateful people who hate people who aren’t white are not only driving us deeper into debt, but they’re eliminating a source of income that never asked for anything more than a chance to survive.
Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, ice, immigration, irs, mass deportation, trump administration
This story was originally published by ProPublica and Frontline. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school.
A squad of federal agents moved in flinging flash-bang grenades — explosives designed to disorient — into a small home before storming inside. They’d come for Alejandro Orellana, a Marine Corps veteran and UPS employee accused of being a central figure in a secret confederacy of insurrectionists. A news video had shown the 30-year-old distributing water, food and face shields to people protesting the Trump administration’s immigration roundups in Los Angeles.
Bill Essayli, a former state legislator who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles, joined the raid along with a Fox News crew.
With cameras rolling, Orellana, his parents and brothers were led out in handcuffs as agents searched their home.
On Fox News, Essayli, sporting a blue FBI windbreaker, hyped the arrest of Orellana, a quiet, wiry man with a long mane of coal-black hair. “It appears they’re well-orchestrated and coordinated, and well-funded,” he said. “And today was one of the first arrests — first key arrests — that we did.”
Essayli would charge Orellana with conspiracy — under a federal statute typically used to build cases against drug traffickers and organized crime — and with aiding and abetting civil disorder.
Within weeks, the prosecutor’s marquee case would quietly fall apart. Agents who searched Orellana’s house found little that could be considered incriminating, and prosecutors never charged anyone else as part of the supposed conspiracy. By late July, they moved to have the charges dismissed.
It wouldn’t be the only such case.
Over the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has made much of its success in sweeping through U.S. cities, capturing unauthorized immigrants and arresting people who publicly oppose the operations, routinely accusing dissenters of being domestic terrorists or extremists. Federal agents have arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens like Orellana — including protesters, activists observing the immigration enforcement operations, bystanders and, in some cases, the family members of people targeted for deportation.
Less clear to the public is what has happened to those charged.
To find out, ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.
But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.
“What’s happening now is not comparable to anything that’s happened in the past,” said
Cuauhtémoc Ortega, the chief federal defender for the Central District of California, who personally represented Orellana and other protesters. “We’ve never had a situation where it seems like you arrest first and then try to justify the reasons for the arrests later.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the arrests and declined to answer detailed questions from ProPublica and FRONTLINE.
But in a statement in response to an earlier story, DHS said, “The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting. DHS is taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers.”
Watch FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s Documentary: “Caught in the Crackdown”
Given the unprecedented nature of the urban sweeps, it is difficult to compare the rate of failed cases to another time period or context. But current and former federal prosecutors and other legal experts said having that number of arrests come to nothing is particularly striking in the federal system, where U.S. attorneys usually secure convictions or guilty pleas in more than 90% of the cases they bring; only 8.2% of federal criminal cases were dismissed in 2022, according to data compiled by that court system.
The failures highlight the challenges of sending large numbers of federal agents into major cities to conduct roving immigration sweeps: They aren’t accustomed to dealing with crowds of angry protesters
Border Patrol agents are typically stationed at the border where their day-to-day work entails scooping up people who have crossed illegally. ICE agents, who often work in urban settings, had little prior experience handling hostile crowds. And FBI agents, who have aided in the immigration sweeps, would normally spend months or years painstakingly amassing evidence before making arrests.
That lack of experience in street policing and crowd control, coupled with the Trump administration’s demand for huge numbers of deportations, led agents to make a wave of unjustified arrests, legal experts say.
To be sure, protesters have often engaged in hostile behavior, hurling expletives, getting in agents’ faces and occasionally becoming violent. A woman in Minnesota is accused of biting off part of an agent’s finger during a scuffle after the killing of Alex Pretti in late January; in Los Angeles, an officer outside an immigration detention facility suffered a dislocated finger after a protester allegedly grabbed his bulletproof vest and shook him.
But the agents’ conduct has also frequently been violent. As ProPublica and FRONTLINE reported last year, they have routinely shot pepper balls or tear gas at protesters in ways that violate their own rules, causing severe injuries to demonstrators in several cities.
“The agents, they don’t know how to operate in these situations,” said Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement. Their behavior, she said, “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.
In its earlier statement, DHS said that “rioters and terrorists” have repeatedly attacked immigration agents, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection personnel “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”
The arrests are not without consequence. Even unsuccessful prosecutions can be costly and emotionally taxing for defendants, said Jared Fishman, a former career prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. The aggressive tactics of the agents and the gleeful social media posts by DHS accusing protesters of serious crimes, Fishman said, affect people’s willingness to publicly challenge the mass deportation policies.
“If the goal of the Trump administration is to keep people out of the streets, then it doesn’t matter if the people are getting convicted,” said Fishman, now the executive director of the Justice Innovation Lab, a nonprofit focused on creating a more equitable and effective justice system. “I’m sure it’s having a chilling effect.”
After reviewing data and some court records for ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Fishman said, “The numbers seem to indicate a pattern and practice of illegal arrests.”
The crackdown on protesters began in June of 2025, when the Department of Homeland Security launched its wave of major immigration sweeps in Southern California. The campaign was led by Gregory Bovino, a veteran Border Patrol chief who normally presided over a remote stretch of sand and scrub deep in the state’s Imperial Valley.
Bovino from the start encouraged his agents to shut down or arrest protesters.
“Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino told his officers, footage from an agent’s body-worn camera shows. “Everybody fucking gets it if they touch you.”
He went on to remind them that their actions should be “legal, ethical, moral” while encouraging them to use so-called less lethal weapons on protesters.
“We’re gonna look at shipping tractor trailers full of that shit in here,” he said.
Bovino’s forces repeatedly fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at the heads and faces of demonstrators and journalists.
Bovino’s aggressive tactics sparked intense opposition from Angelenos, including those gathered in the streets in front of the sprawling federal office complex in downtown Los Angeles on June 9.
That day Orellana drove his Ford F-150 pickup truck loaded with bottled water, snacks and cardboard boxes containing Uvex brand face shields — clear plastic masks designed to protect industrial workers from flying debris and chemical splashes — to the protest.
When he arrived in front of the federal building, another person hopped into the bed and began handing out the supplies to protesters gathered outside the entrance.
Orellana told FRONTLINE and ProPublica that he decided to help distribute the supplies after watching federal agents fire tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds at an earlier demonstration.
“A bunch of us took it upon ourselves to, you know, go downtown and give out these resources — the food, water and of course the PPE,” he said, referring to personal protective equipment.
Video and photos quickly made their way onto social media. An X user with more than 30,000 followers posted a photo of Orellana. “A photograph of the man delivering boxes of gas masks to the rioters has emerged,” wrote the poster. “We must identify him, so we can track down who is funding this coordinated attack.”
From there the thread was picked up by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has a vast audience on the platform. Jones, who repeatedly claimed that financier and philanthropist George Soros was funding the protests, eventually named Orellana as the driver of the pickup. More than two million people saw the post.
Within 48 hours, the soldiers and federal agents arrived to arrest Orellana.
Over the next five months, they arrested more than one hundred U.S. citizens in Los Angeles and other cities in Southern California — most of them demonstrators — charging them with assaulting federal law enforcement personnel or interfering with agents’ activities. Others were accused of damaging government property. At least 16, like Orellana, were charged with conspiracy, which can carry a sentence of up to six years in prison.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that more than a third of those cases crumbled. In eight instances, juries acquitted defendants at trial. But more frequently, prosecutors dropped charges when the claims made by immigration officers and agents didn’t match video evidence or other inconsistencies emerged. In several cases, prosecutors declined to file charges at all.
There have been some successful prosecutions: 32 of the 116 people whose arrests in California we reviewed have been convicted, many pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges. And in late February, jurors convicted two activists on stalking charges after they livestreamed themselves following an immigration agent to his home; the pair were acquitted of conspiracy.
Today 38 cases are still pending.
Essayli has stated on social media that his office brought more than 100 cases and secured convictions in more than half of them. When asked about the discrepancy between his claims and the data compiled by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, he declined to comment.
“The U.S. attorney’s office does not lose cases because they’re bad lawyers,” said Carley Palmer, who spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the office Essayli now runs. “They are excellent trial attorneys. So if they’re losing a case, it may mean that the evidence isn’t there, or it may mean that the community doesn’t believe it should be a federal crime.”
Palmer, who is now in private practice, said the glut of protest and low-level criminal immigration cases have shifted resources away from the complex prosecutions the DOJ is uniquely equipped to handle: environmental crimes, public corruption, financial fraud, cyberscams, civil rights violations.
Essayli declined to be interviewed for this story or an accompanying FRONTLINE documentary set to air Tuesday. He was appointed by the Trump administration in early 2025, but he has never been confirmed by the Senate, raising ongoing questions about the legality of his role as top prosecutor for the region. His office did not respond to detailed questions sent by email.
Like Orellana, Julian Pecora Cardenas, 31, was charged with conspiracy last summer after following a convoy of federal agents in his car.
On the morning of July 5, Pecora Cardenas followed vans full of Border Patrol agents after they left a Coast Guard station in San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, livestreaming their movements on Instagram. “It’s every citizen’s duty to conduct oversight of their government,” he said. “I was within my First Amendment rights.”
After roughly 30 minutes, the agents stopped, pulled Pecora Cardenas from his Hyundai and slammed him to the pavement. “I honestly thought it was going to be like a George Floyd moment,” Pecora Cardenas recalled in an interview, alleging that multiple agents pinned him to the asphalt with their knees. He suffered a concussion, needed stitches over his left eye and wore an orthopedic collar to stabilize his injured neck.
Federal prosecutors charged Pecora Cardenas and another activist with conspiracy to impede the federal agents, saying that they “were illegally maneuvering their vehicles through traffic, stop lights, and stop signs to stay behind the agent’s vehicles,” that they tried to block the Border Patrol vehicles, and that they created “hazardous conditions on the road.”
Pecora Cardenas’ own video of the day’s events told a different story. The footage, which ProPublica and FRONTLINE have reviewed, contradicts the claims that the men had interfered with the agents. Within days of seeing the images, Essayli’s office jettisoned the charges “in the interest of justice.”
Pecora Cardenas hasn’t tried to observe federal agents or participate in a protest since his arrest. “I don’t want to be assaulted again. I don’t want to wind up back in federal prison for something that I didn’t do.”
When Bovino, the Border Patrol chief, left California and took his forces to Illinois last fall, their focus on protesters intensified.
In roughly one month, federal agents arrested more than a hundred American citizens, many of them activists participating in demonstrations or documenting the movements of immigration agents as their convoys of rented SUVs rolled through the streets of Chicago and surrounding communities.
But Justice Department prosecutors in Chicago had less success prosecuting those arrested than their peers in California.
On the morning of Oct. 3, 2025, about two hundred demonstrators gathered near the ICE facility in Broadview, a small town in the western suburbs of Chicago. Tucked away in a quiet industrial park, the nondescript building had become the locus of ongoing protests since Bovino and his forces had arrived in Illinois.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, accompanied by a DHS video team, was on site that day wearing a baseball cap and a black ballistic vest.
Also present was Benny Johnson, a prominent podcaster and online influencer who is close to the Trump administration. Johnson, who had brought his own camera crew to shoot video for his YouTube channel and other social media accounts, was effectively embedded with Noem, Bovino and the immigration agents.
At about 9 a.m., Bovino and a phalanx of heavily armed agents in combat gear began striding down Harvard Street toward the protesters. “Walk slowly,” Bovino told his men.
Without a bullhorn or any sort of amplification, Bovino informed the crowd that they were being dispersed. Then he and his colleagues began shoving people to the ground and arresting them.
In a matter of minutes, a dozen protesters had been handcuffed. Three arrestees interviewed by ProPublica and FRONTLINE told us they were confused because they’d been standing in a “free speech zone” set up by state officials.
“I felt somebody grab my shoulder and pull me to the ground,” said Juan Muñoz, a business owner and elected leader in nearby Oak Park Township. “And once I fell onto my back, that’s when I saw it was Greg Bovino.”
Kyle Frankovich, a Harvard data scientist and Chicago resident, was also arrested. “They were just randomly grabbing people,” he recalled. “There was nowhere to go, people were falling all over the place, and several of the people they arrested simply had the misfortune of tripping over all of the other protesters” as federal agents surged into the crowd.
Frankovich said FBI agents who questioned him asked who had paid for him to participate in the demonstration and who “covered the transportation cost for you to be here today.”
Johnson’s video team and a DHS camera crew filmed the arrested protesters as they were lined up outside the ICE building, while Noem looked on. DHS posted photos of Frankovich in handcuffs on X and Facebook with the message, “We will NOT allow violent activist to lay hands on our law enforcement.”
Johnson, who has more than more than 4 million followers on X and more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube, posted a video on X panning across the arrested protesters and wrote: “I saw dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement. Every activist here attacked ICE agents in broad daylight just for enforcing American law.” He made the same claim in a nearly 13-minute-long YouTube video.
Such social media content had become a central feature of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. DHS, Border Patrol and a raft of allied social media influencers regularly produced slick videos showing agents in action: riding in helicopters, striding through city streets clutching rifles, breaking down doors, and apprehending immigrants and activists.
But on that day in Chicago, DHS had strayed far from the facts. And so had Johnson, a 38-year-old former journalist who turned to social media after being embroiled in plagiarism scandals at BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review.
After about eight hours in custody, Frankovich, Muñoz and nearly all the others were released without charges. In the end, only one person would be prosecuted.
Neither DHS nor Johnson have taken the posts down. Johnson did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
The lone person charged with a crime that day was Cole Sheridan, who was accused of attacking Bovino and sending him to the hospital with an injured groin muscle.
Sheridan spent three and a half days in jail — “probably the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever had to experience,” he said in an interview with FRONTLINE and ProPublica — before being released.
In court, a prosecutor said that Sheridan had thrown a punch at Bovino and pushed him, transcripts show.
The evidence presented by the Justice Department, though, was slim. Bovino didn’t wear a body camera, so prosecutors relied on video from the body camera of Border Patrol agent Jason Epperson. But it didn’t show Sheridan assaulting anyone — though he did call Bovino “a fucking idiot.” In statements to investigators, Bovino and Epperson had offered conflicting accounts of the encounter.
About a month after Sheridan was arrested, prosecutors moved to dismiss the case after a bystander video surfaced showing clearly that Sheridan hadn’t assaulted Bovino.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced something truly that bizarre and absurd as, like, seeing a law enforcement agent concoct a narrative to arrest me, to press charges against me,” said Sheridan, who describes himself as intensely private and was initially reluctant to talk publicly about his arrest. “That was extremely unnerving.”
He remains worried that he’ll be harassed or even physically attacked because of the inflammatory social media posts about him. “What a farce. Every element of it felt staged,” he said.
In a statement to ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros said, “Our willingness to be open-minded and dismiss cases — or not file charges in the first place — reflects our commitment to do the right thing even in those cases where a crime was committed and the conduct in question clearly falls outside any protected First Amendment activity.” He declined to comment directly on Sheridan’s case.
FRONTLINE and ProPublica showed video of Sheridan’s arrest to Lopez, the former Justice Department attorney. “It’s just a gross abuse of power,” she said. “And we’ve almost normalized that this is how federal law enforcement behaves now. They just arrest people.”
Of the 109 arrests that ProPublica and FRONTLINE documented in the Chicago area, federal prosecutors dropped charges in at least 75 cases.
When Bovino and his forces arrived in North Carolina last November, they were greeted by protesters opposed to the deportation sweeps, as they had been in previous cities.
Heather Morrow was one of them. She had joined a small group of demonstrators, chanting and banging on metal dishes outside an immigration facility in Charlotte when ICE officers confronted the group.
They handcuffed Morrow, 45, and another activist, stuffed them in the back of a federal vehicle and, according to Morrow, kept them there for hours before finally taking her to jail.
“I was so traumatized,” Morrow, a school bus driver and dog boarder, said in an interview. “I didn’t expect them to be so overly aggressive. I really showed up there expecting conversation, making them come to their senses.”
After a full day and night in custody, she was released to face federal felony assault charges. A Department of Justice press release accused her of attacking an ICE officer just as he showed up for his work shift, grabbing his shoulders and trying to jump on his back.
But a shaky phone video circulating on social media showed what appeared to be a very different scene. In it, an officer comes from behind and abruptly tackles Morrow to the pavement. The video doesn’t show her assaulting anyone.
When prosecutors saw the video, they dumped the felony charges. But they promptly filed a new misdemeanor case against Morrow and the other activist, alleging the pair impeded ICE officers and failed to follow their orders. It took a month for Morrow to get her phone back from federal custody, while her other confiscated possessions, including her keys, have been lost, Morrow’s attorney said. Because she’s on pretrial probation, the federal government has seized her passport. Morrow has pleaded not guilty, and her case is ongoing.
In early January, Bovino arrived in Minneapolis with his social media team. Within weeks, two activists — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot and killed by immigration agents. The Trump administration immediately portrayed Good as an extremist; Bovino claimed that Pretti was planning to kill federal personnel when he was shot to death.
The killings, which sparked national outcry, would prompt the administration to recalibrate. By Jan. 26, Bovino had been demoted and sent back to his home station in the California desert.
But immigration agents continued to roam the Twin Cities, and activists continued to get arrested.
Civil rights attorneys from around the country gathered in a Minneapolis conference room on Jan. 30 to discuss those arrests.
During a break for lunch, Jon Feinberg, president of the National Police Accountability Project, stepped out of the room and spoke to reporters. “To be charged with a federal crime is something that is life-altering,” said Feinberg, who is based in Philadelphia. “The consequences of being accused and possibly convicted of a federal offense are devastating, especially when people have not engaged in criminal conduct from any reasonable person’s perspective.”
ProPublica and FRONTLINE have identified nearly 80 arrests stemming from the Minnesota immigration sweeps. Most of the cases are still ongoing, though a handful have been dismissed.
Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, did not respond to requests for comment.
One of those arrested was Rebecca Ringstrom, who lives in Blaine, a quiet suburb north of Minneapolis.
Ringstrom, 42, is a member of an activist group that tracks immigration agents as they move around Blaine. “There was a vehicle with four agents inside that I could see. All four were in tactical gear,” she said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “I was able to look at the plate and see that it was a confirmed ICE vehicle.”
Behind the wheel of her Kia, she began following them; Ringstrom insists her driving was safe and lawful. But in a matter of minutes, she’d been arrested and accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.
Ringstrom said an agent at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where she was briefly held after her arrest, said he wished he’d arrested her — because he would’ve made the experience more unpleasant and violent. “There was no reason to say that. I’m already here. I’m in handcuffs. It’s just a way to intimidate,” she recalled.
She was charged with interfering with a federal agent and issued a notice of violation — essentially a ticket — for the misdemeanor offense. Since then, Ringstrom has lined up a pro bono lawyer, but she has also lost her job, “likely due to the ongoing coverage” of her arrest.
She is scheduled to make her first court appearance later this month.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, arrests, benny johnson, bill essayli, dhs, donald trump, fbi, free speech, gregory bovino, ice, kristi noem, pretextual arrests, protests
For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of that mattered to the MAGA ecosystem, of course, which continued to treat a handful of out-of-context sternly worded emails from Biden officials as the greatest censorship regime in American history.
Then the Trump administration came in, and a funny thing happened. The same people who’d built entire careers around the supposed horrors of government pressure on tech platforms suddenly had nothing to say when the Attorney General of the United States went on Fox News to brag — brag! — about demanding Apple remove an app and Facebook take down a group, both because their content was critical of ICE enforcement.
On Friday, Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois granted a preliminary injunction against DOJ and DHS, finding that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the government violated the First Amendment by coercing Facebook and Apple into suppressing protected speech. The ruling is short and direct in an almost embarrassingly straightforward way — largely because Pam Bondi and the rest of the government handed the plaintiffs most of their case on a silver platter, then held press conferences to make sure everyone knew about it.
We covered the DOJ’s demands on Apple back in October and FIRE’s subsequent lawsuit in February. As we explained then, the case seemed quite straightforward, and now the district court has agreed.
The plaintiffs are Kassandra Rosado, who ran a Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” with nearly 100,000 members, and Kreisau Group, which made a phone app called “Eyes Up” for documenting ICE enforcement activity. Both services existed well before the government got involved. Both had been reviewed by the platforms and found compliant with their respective policies. In fact, as the ruling notes regarding the Facebook group:
Prior to October 14, out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments made in the Chicagoland Facebook group, Facebook’s moderators found and removed only five posts and comments that purportedly violated Facebook’s guidelines. … When Facebook removed those posts, Facebook advised Rosado that the posts were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group” and that “groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”
Then Laura Loomer — a person whose entire public identity was built around suing Facebook and other tech companies for moderating her own posts, and who once argued that content moderation was literal RICO — tagged Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem in a social media post demanding they do something about the Chicagoland group. Because apparently the First Amendment only constrains Meta when Loomer herself is being moderated; when she wants other people silenced, she calls in the actual federal government.
Two days later, Facebook disabled the group. That same day, Bondi posted this to X:
Today following outreach from [the DOJ], Facebook removed a large group that was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago.
Noem followed up with her own X post taking credit for the DOJ’s “leadership” in getting Facebook to act, adding the observation that:
Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement. … We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.
On the Apple side, Bondi went even further, telling Fox News Digital directly:
We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so.
A few days later, she added that “we had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps” and — in a sentence that should probably be framed and hung in every law school’s First Amendment classroom — followed it with: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.”
Apple promptly removed Eyes Up too, informing the developer that “law enforcement” had provided “information” indicating the app violated Apple’s guideline against “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” — the same guideline Apple had independently reviewed the app under just two months earlier, when it found no such problem.
The legal framework here is familiar territory for Techdirt readers. Bantam Books v. Sullivan from 1963 established that “thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings” against parties who don’t come around to the government’s preferred speech outcomes violate the First Amendment. 2024’s NRA v. Vullo reaffirmed and sharpened that principle, holding that “[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test, per Vullo, is whether government conduct, “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff’s speech.”
That’s what was missing in the Murthy case — but was clearly present in Vullo. And here.
Judge Alonso applies this framework step-by-step. On causation — the element the Murthy plaintiffs famously failed on — he identifies three facts that, taken together, make it overwhelmingly likely the injuries trace to government coercion rather than independent platform judgment:
First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content.
Unlike in Murthy, where it was all vague speculation disconnected from reality, the causal chain here is pretty clear, helped along by a Trump administration that simply can’t resist bragging about suppressing the rights of Americans.
Bondi and Noem’s inability to resist a Fox News hit really made this case super easy. In Murthy, the Supreme Court found that plaintiffs couldn’t even establish the Biden administration had caused the content moderation decisions they were complaining about, because platforms had their own independent reasons for their policies and had often rejected government requests outright. Here, the government has publicly, repeatedly, and proudly announced that it caused the removals.
On the coercion analysis itself, Alonso walks through the Seventh Circuit’s Backpage.com v. Dart framework, noting that government officials don’t even need direct regulatory authority over the target to cross the line. What matters is “the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” And here, the court finds, Bondi and Noem demanded rather than requested, and made clear there would be consequences for non-compliance:
Bondi and Noem also intimated that Facebook and Apple may be subject to prosecution for failing to comply with Bondi and Noem’s demands. For example, after stating that we “had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps,” Bondi further stated: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.” … And in the same social media post where Noem wrote that “[p]latforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our [ICE] law enforcement,” she added: “We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.” … Although these statements may not be direct threats to prosecute Facebook and Apple, they are intimations of a threat. And thinly veiled threats such as these constitute sufficient evidence on which Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim.
The quote from Bondi about not stopping “at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets,” paired with her public announcement that she’d forced Apple’s hand, is about as textbook a Bantam Books fact pattern as you’re going to find. The Supreme Court’s warning in 1963 was that “[p]eople do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Sixty-three years later, here is the Attorney General of the United States describing the process of coming around, and taking credit for it.
Of course, as you know, Bondi was fired by Trump earlier this month for insufficient commitment to his vindictive fantasies, and Noem has also been replaced. Both are automatically substituted out in the litigation under Rule 25(d) for their successors, Todd Blanche and Markwayne Mullin. The people who orchestrated the censorship may be out of power, but it’s not like their replacements are any less likely to violate the free expression rights of Americans. This injunction binds these replacement-level cabinet members all the same.
But still, in all of this, it’s astounding that we’ve heard nothing from the vocal crew who insisted the Murthy case was the quintessential example of American government censorship. The same people who were trumpeting a faux settlement in that case just weeks ago seem to have zero to say about a court finding actual censorship here.
For years, the people who built entire media careers around the supposed Biden jawboning scandal insisted — against all available evidence — that private platforms making their own moderation decisions after receiving polite feedback from the government constituted the greatest assault on free speech in American history. They refused to accept the distinction between persuasion and coercion, dismissed every platform executive who explained that moderation decisions were independent, and treated the Supreme Court’s rejection of their standing arguments in Murthy as a miscarriage of justice rather than an accurate assessment of what the evidence actually showed.
And now, confronted with an actual, documented, judicially confirmed case of government coercion — where the Attorney General literally said the word “demanding” in a Fox News interview, where the Secretary of Homeland Security publicly warned platforms they “must be PROACTIVE” and threatened prosecution, where a federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction applying the exact legal framework they claimed to care about — the response from the usual suspects has been… crickets.
Turns out they didn’t actually care about jawboning as a principle — they just cared which way the pressure was pointed. They didn’t want government neutrality about platform moderation decisions; they wanted government pressure in their preferred direction. The First Amendment, in their functional view, prohibits making life difficult for people they like and permits — encourages, even — making life difficult for people they don’t. And sure, they’ll claim this censorship was justified because it was “necessary” to “protect ICE from harm.” But that’s not how the First Amendment works, it’s wrong as a principle, and — perhaps most importantly — that same logic would have applied to the censorship they (falsely) claimed was happening under Biden regarding COVID information, which was also, in theory, done to protect American lives.
Alonso’s ruling is a reminder that the First Amendment doesn’t care about your political team. Bantam Books and Vullo don’t have political valences. Bantam Books was an 8-1 decision. Vullo was 9-0. Coercing platforms to remove speech the government disfavors is unconstitutional regardless of which administration is doing the coercing and regardless of whether the speech in question is popular with any particular political faction. But you have to actually show the coercion! A court applying the law honestly to the facts here couldn’t reach any other conclusion, because Bondi and Noem made the facts unmissable. They said the quiet part loud, on camera, to Fox News, in tweets they pinned to their profiles.
The supposedly monumental Missouri case had none of that — which is exactly why the Supreme Court rejected it. And yet it’s still held up by many as some sort of evidence of censorship, by the very same people who seem to have zero interest in this far more direct and documented example.
The takeaway is simple: if you spent five years insisting that jawboning is a grave constitutional offense, you don’t get to cheer when your team does the exact same thing. Or, well — you can, but the rest of us are going to notice. And maybe say something about it.
Everyone else gets to file this ruling away for the next time someone starts ranting about Murthy. This is what the law actually looks like when the facts are there. And the facts, in this case, were provided by the government itself, free of charge, on national television.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, dhs, doj, eyes up, free speech, ice, iceblock, jawboning, jorge alonso, kristi noem, murthy v. missouri, pam bondi
Companies: apple, facebook, meta
We’ve got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I’m sure it would go back even further, taking at least another 100 years off the clock.
The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much has been made clear by the guy at the top of the org chart.
While most presidents — no matter how racist — would at least try to present something “statesmanlike” when talking to the public, Trump has delivered his hatred of non-whites in press conferences and social media tweets. He has frequently referred to non-white countries as “shitholes” and their citizens as “low IQ.” He has claimed Latin America and South America are “sending” the US nothing but terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.
He has also asked publicly why we can’t get more immigrants from predominantly white countries, like Switzerland, Norway, and other countries where blue eyes and blond hair are commonplace. (The answer, of course, is that citizens of those countries actually like the nations they reside in, what with their sensible governments, the prioritization of social safety nets over golden parachutes, and affordable health care. They also prefer their government not be run by criminals and rapists, nor overly forgiving of certain terrorists.)
In hopes of replacing the browner people he’s actively displacing in his War on Migrants, Trump reached out to the supposedly persecuted white people of South Africa, which has only recently made steps towards treating Black people like human beings, rather than possessions or low-level subordinates. Having seen some out-of-context viral video, Trump was convinced white South Africans were being oppressed by Black South Africans, much in the same way he became convinced Haitian refugees were eating people’s pets and/or local water fowl.
All of this racism is now traceable. It’s in the official numbers, as Alex Ip pointed out on Bluesky. The latest refugee numbers compiled [PDF] by the State Department (and released every month) show there’s a new replacement theory in operation here — one that hopes to fill the US with as many white people as possible.
Between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, 4,499 refugees were admitted to the US. All five pages (10 states each) tell the same story: every single refugee admitted during this six-month period was from South Africa. The only exception? Three Afghan refugees who are now residing in Colorado and who arrived here last November.
Since last November, every refugee has been from South Africa. While it may be presumptive to assume that every South African admitted was white, it’s the kind of assumption that’s safe to make because this administration publicly stated it’s only interested in rescuing white South Africans from largely imagined “racial violence.”
The state-by-state breakdown makes it clear the South Africans who have taken advantage of this refugee status are there because Trump rolled out the white carpet for them. The two states with by far the largest numbers of South African refugees are Texas (551) and Florida (331) — both deeply red states that are fully MAGA cooked. California runs a close third with 316, but that’s because California has always attracted arrivals from foreign countries, much in the same way it has attracted US citizens from all over the nation, with its promises of beaches, warm weather, and plenty of places to work while you wait for your script to be optioned.
The only thing working against the administration is all the efforts it’s made to prevent non-citizens from having any rights, much less an opportunity to vote. I’m sure the White House’s finest legal minds (smash cut to a million monkeys with typewriters and Trump U law degrees) are busy finding a way to speed run the naturalization process, but only for refugees admitted to this country since last November. The other irony is some South Africans who’ve taken advantage of this are now claiming they’d rather go back to living in the country they “fled” from because it seems far less dangerous than remaining in a country run by people who prefer fascism to democracy.
This is about as openly racist as it gets. And yet, it’s just going to end up being more bigoted flotsam that will be pushed aside by the next burst of awfulness by this administration. There will be more where this came from. Sooner or later, some of it will manage to break the surface.
Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, racism, south africa, trump administration, white boy summer, white christian nationalism
Read the latest posts:
