Trump DOJ Colludes With Texas to Harbor Fugitive ICE Agent

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

First at TPM …

In important development overnight, the Trump administration is now openly colluding with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to keep an indicted ICE agent from facing justice in Minnesota.

In a new court filing, the Trump DOJ leaped in on Abbott’s side only a few hours after Abbott in his own filing outlined for the first time his legal argument for not yet having complied with Minnesota’s extradition request for ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro, who is jailed in Brownsville, is charged with allegedly shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in Minneapolis in January during Operation Metro Surge then lying about it.

While the Constitution, federal law, and legal precedent don’t give a governor discretion to deny a valid extradition request from another state, Abbott claims he is “investigating” whether Castro is truly a fugitive under extradition law. His argument — which legal experts dismiss as insubstantial — is that Castro may not be a fugitive because he didn’t flee Minnesota after the incident but was ordered by ICE to return to his home base in Texas. As a legal matter, that’s irrelevant to the analysis.

“While the Governor has serious doubts that Mr. Castro qualifies as a fugitive, the Governor has not yet received a report from the Secretary and so has not made a decision concerning Minnesota’s request,” Abbott’s filing said.

Last night, the Trump DOJ jumped into the case to which it is not a party. It filed a statement of interest that attempts to buttress Abbott’s legal position by supplying a declaration from an ICE official that Castro was indeed directed to return home to Texas after the incident, which the official says was common practice after such incidents for public safety or the safety of federal agents. “Castro had no discretion in the matter,” according to Patrick Divver, an ICE official above Castro in the chain of command during Operation Metro Surge.

In his declaration, Divver describes getting Castro and his partner — a witness to the shooting — out of Minnesota two days after the shooting. He claims it was to protect them from protesters “using aggressive and sometimes violent tactics, including doxxing” against federal agents. Immediately removing them from Minnesota also had the effect of putting the agent involved in the shooting and an agent who witnessed the shooting out of reach of Minnesota law enforcement.

While the DOJ filing doesn’t explicitly take Abbott’s side, it provides the factual underpinning for Abbott’s legal argument. The dove-tailed filings by Abbott and the Trump DOJ on the same day are just the latest effort by the Trump administration to foil Minnesota’s effort to criminally charge federal agents for abuses during Operation Metro Surge:

• The Trump DOJ blocked Minnesota from participating in the ultimately aborted federal investigations into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and for months withheld from state investigators and prosecutors the evidence it had initially collected after those shootings.
• More recently, the Trump DOJ has threatened criminal prosecution of the victims of a road-rage-style incident in which ICE agent Gregory Morgan, Jr. allegedly brandished his service weapon at a random driver while passing him on the right shoulder. As a result, the victims have taken the Fifth rather that testify, forcing Minnesota prosecutors to seek immunity for their testimony — immunity that the Trump DOJ has refused to give.

Notably, even as Abbott has stonewalled for months Minnesota’s extradition request for Castro, he has routinely processed other extradition requests from Minnesota.

After the new filings, Minnesota late yesterday asked the court to allow it to file a reply to Abbott’s new arguments, which it says he had not previously raised during the month’s long stonewalling of its request.

It also sought to supplement the record with declarations from Minnesota investigators to reinforce its argument that Castro is a flight risk because he is in a “close, personal relationship” with a woman in Mexico. A state investigator reviewed 16 of the 394 jailhouse phone calls between Castro and the woman in which he expressed his intention to marry her after his release and “buy a big house in Mexico so he can retire there.” Another investigator talked to Castro’s wife, who said he had left their home and marriage in November to pursue the relationship with the Mexican woman and claimed he bought the property in Mexico where the woman lives, along with a Jeep for her use.

The tone of Abbott’s filing is telling. If he loses the extradition fight, he can blame the courts for making him do it. If he wins, it’s icing. In the meantime, he can use it as a performative tip of the hat to President Trump and to make political hay, like this gratuitous swipe at Minnesota Gov. Tom Walz (D) in his latest filing: “Given this odd rush to judgment, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that Governor Tim Walz is content to look the other way when the context is sexual violence against children by illegal aliens, but not when the context is immigration enforcement by federal officers.”

It’s all of a piece with the larger Cold Civil War that Trump is fighting by sending armed federal agents into blue states, targeting elected Democrats with spurious accusations of fraud and pursuing them with a new DOJ fraud section run out of the White House, refusing to provide blue states with disaster funds, and targeting specific states like Colorado for retribution for alleged misdeeds like prosecuting a Trump ally and having mail-in voting.

Aiding and abetting a red state in refusing to abide by the Constitution and honor a blue state’s extradition request is in the same bucket of sledge-hammering the federal system as deploying red state national guards to blue states over the objections of their governors.

While accountability for the abuses of federal agents in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge is a historically important endeavor in preserving the rule of law, the larger issue is the assault on the federal structure by, of all things, a president absurdly butt-hurt by the fact that not every state voted for him.

Unpacking What SCOTUS Just Did

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the Roberts Court lifted an injunction on a Trump executive order to create citizenship lists and gives the Postal Service control over who receives a mail-in ballot — although, importantly, another injunction blocking the same executive order remains in place:

• Chris Geidner: What Monday’s Supreme Court election order ruling is and is not
• Rick Hasen: KBJ Warns of “Kafkaesque Nightmare” After Pro-Trump Supreme Court Ruling on Mail Voting. We’ll Know Soon Enough.
• Steve Vladeck: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling
• TPM’s Kate Riga: Trump Gets Significant Early Win in Mail-In Ballot Case from Supreme Court

Trump Can’t Say He Wasn’t Warned

The WSJ reports on a February meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office :

Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.

Today’s Absurdity: 🙃🙃🙃

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.