GREENBELT, MARYLAND – A Maryland federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to make officials and documents available for an inquiry into whether they’re violating a court order to take steps to release a wrongly deported Salvadoran man from custody.
Continue reading “Judge Orders Expedited Discovery Over Administration’s Abrego Garcia Defiance”Failures of Imagination
Our conversations today are full of fairly moralizing claims about anticipatory obedience or obeying in advance. But much of what is happening is what I would classify as failures of imagination. They may have substantively the same effect, similar actions. But they’re different.
For instance, today FEMA rejected a request from Washington state for disaster relief funds for a cyclone that hit the state last fall. As these things go, the sums are relatively small — $34 million. But the flat rejection is almost unheard of, from my experience. Unheard of, but, given the players, totally predictable. At a minimum it’s immediately understandable. You know exactly why they rejected it. I’m not saying these rejections never happen. The governmental mores have changed in recent decades. Assenting to these requests is generally a matter of course and I suspect when there are disagreements it’s handled informally in a de facto negotiation. When it’s a major disaster and it’s a matter of billions it’s a different story. But from what I can tell here, FEMA just said: No. That disaster doesn’t count.
We’re already seeing signs of this across the federal government. With things that are at all discretionary, blue states are just out of luck. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson (D) said, “This is another troubling example of the federal government withholding funding.”
That’s it?
Continue reading “Failures of Imagination”‘This Is About Much More’ Than Riggs: The Latest In The North Carolina GOP Judge’s Attempt To Steal An Election
The ongoing Republican effort to steal last year’s North Carolina Supreme Court race — the only 2024 race that has not yet been certified — continues this week after a federal court ordered the State Board of Elections to comply with a state court order that could potentially disenfranchise thousands of overseas and military voters.
Continue reading “‘This Is About Much More’ Than Riggs: The Latest In The North Carolina GOP Judge’s Attempt To Steal An Election”What’s Really in the White House Law Firm Agreements?
Last week I asked some questions about the law firm “agreements” with Donald Trump that seem very unclear from the available news coverage. Namely, where are the agreements? Are they formal agreements committed to writing? Who are the parties? Are they signed?
Sources from the Big Law firms who inked (maybe?) new agreements last week gave me a lot more visibility into what these deals are about. So I want to share that with you.
First, I want to renew my request to lawyers at the big firms to reach out and share information. I can not only protect your confidentiality, I can keep your firm anonymous as well. See more in the addenda at the end of this post.
Now let’s get down to business. Let’s start with what and where are the agreements?
Continue reading “What’s Really in the White House Law Firm Agreements?”Trump II Hits A New All-Time Low In Oval Office Debacle
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Defiance And Mendacity
I want to begin today by setting the stage for the hearing scheduled this afternoon at 4 p.m. ET in federal court in Maryland in the case of mistakenly deported and wrongfully imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
We’re five days and counting into the executive branch engaging in ongoing contemptuous behavior toward the judicial branch by refusing to abide by a district court order backed by the Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s conduct has been on brand: egregious, contemptible, and brazen. It has refused to comply with deadlines; rebuffed the judge’s repeated demands for information; shifted its arguments and positions in an attempt to re-litigate already-decided matters; and sent DOJ lawyers into court to absorb judicial fire unarmed with facts or legitimate legal arguments.
And that’s just touching on how the Trump administration has conducted itself in court.
On the underlying case itself, the Trump administration mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia in contravention of an existing order from an immigration judge; it sent the El Salvadoran to a brutal prison in his home country, where he’s been for a month as of today; and there is no evidence of any kind that the Trump administration has lifted a finger to correct its error and to try to retrieve him.
This was all true even before yesterday’s historically grim Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in which the two heads of state and top Trump officials chortled, bragged, and postured in front of cameras about never releasing Abrego Garcia. To justify defying the courts, human rights, and basic decency, the mendacious cabal in the Oval Office invented, distorted, and disregarded facts about Abrego Garcia, the legal background of his case, and the court orders the administration is currently defying.
But I go back to the Trump administration’s conduct in U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ court. At a hearing in the case on Friday, April 4, a Justice Department lawyer admitted the administration’s error in deporting Abrego Garcia and expressed frustration to Xinis about his client’s conduct since then. By the next day, that lawyer and his supervisor had been taken off the case and placed on administrative leave for what Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed was insufficient advocacy on the administration’s behalf.
The following Friday, after the Supreme Court intervened to uphold Xinis’ order save for one word – “effectuate,” which she subsequently dropped when issuing a new order – a replacement DOJ lawyer was in court refusing and unable to provide even the most basic information about Abrego Garcia’s current status, what the administration had already done and what it planned to do to try to facilitate his release. That lawyer told the court the administration needed until today to provide full answers to those question, and suggested it might be able to provide them by the close of business yesterday. Unsatisfied with that response, the judge ordered daily status updates.
The daily status updates – two of which were filed after deadline – have failed to answer the judge’s questions, except to confirm that Abrego Garcia is alive and in the CECOT prison. Yesterday’s Oval Office set piece now renders suspect almost anything the Justice Department says in court about the case because the President himself has made the administration’s position clear.
What does this leave for Judge Xinis to do? The short answer: It’s not clear. The combination of defiance and mendacity in pursuit and defense of extra-constitutional ends may be unprecedented in our history. Xinis may summon Trump officials to testify, she may find the administration in contempt, she may try to impose fines or take other punitive actions against specific officials. But I wouldn’t be under any illusion that there’s a magic bullet here for her.
But let’s also be clear that this is about far more than Abrego Garcia.
The Supreme Court weighed in once already, but in a way that tried to sidestep a direct confrontation with the President. At an institutional level, it tried to create some space for the President to right the wrong done to Abrego Garcia and to the rule of law without inviting additional attacks on the constitutional structure. That failed.
President Trump – apparently at the urging of non-lawyer Stephen Miller – has twisted the Supreme Court decision that was unanimous against him into an unrecognizable ruling that was unanimous for him. But he is fundamentally defying the Supreme Court now. Only additional intervention from the Supreme Court can potentially resolve this matter, but whether the Roberts Court will clip Trump’s wings, I hardly need to tell you, is not a sure thing.
‘Homegrowns Are Next’
Trump’s broader scheme to use El Salvador as a extra-legal dumping ground – beyond the reach of U.S. law – for people Trump deems undesirable isn’t going to be limited to El Salvadoran migrants or alleged-but-unproven Venezuelan gang members:
Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
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Reaction To The Latest Oval Office Debacle
- Adam Serwer: “This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”
- Jonathan V. Last: “The real question is: Does the chief justice understand this state of affairs? Or is he blind to reality?”
- Timothy Snyder: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.”
- Chris Geidner: “[I]t appears that the administration — likely led by Stephen Miller, based on who is and how he performed in the Oval Office on Monday, with a pliant Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem helping him — has centered in on an approach to get out from under these pesky federal courts by shoehorning all manner of illegal and even unconstitutional actions into “foreign relations” and beyond the reach of the courts.”
- Joyce Vance: “If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked “You are here.” We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger. Donald Trump could snap his fingers and secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. We all know that’s true, no matter what pretense this administration assumes.”
CODA: Another Form Of Court Defiance
The Trump White House denied the Associated Press access to the President’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele despite a court order forbidding the Trump administration from punishing the AP for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Another Pro-Palestinian Student Stripped Of Legal Status
The Trump administration has unilaterally revoked the green card of another pro-Palestinian Columbia student and detained him for deportation. Mohsen Mahdawi was detained when he showed up at a Vermont immigration center for what he was told was an interview related to his naturalization. A federal judge in Vermont quickly ordered the Trump administration not to deport Mahdawi while his case is pending.
Harvard Holds Firm Against Trump Attack
Three things you need to know about Harvard University’s decision to refuse to comply with the demands from the Trump administration to essentially give up its independence in order to continue to receive federal funding:
- How arbitrary and off-the-cuff President Trump was in targeting Harvard.
- How extreme the demand letter from the administration to Harvard was.
- How the anti-DEI administration demanded Harvard institute DEI for conservatives.
Following Harvard’s refusal to comply, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the university.
DOGE Watch
NPR: A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
Don’t Sleep On North Carolina Supreme Court Race
Rich Hasen: We’re Getting Dangerously Close to a Losing North Carolina Candidate Being Declared the Winner
What It Feels Like, Right Now
Chuck Wendig: “It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants.”
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Harvard Letter
You’ve likely seen that Harvard officially and publicly refused the Trump White House’s latest set of demands. You can see the letter here. I would say that if you’re going to read only one letter, it should actually be the one the White House (notionally the GSA, HHS and Education) sent to Harvard, which the university published along with its response.
It’s a very clarifying letter. It’s not too much to say it essentially demands operational control over the whole university or perhaps more specifically a kind of receivership of the sort police departments sometimes go into under consent to decrees after they’re caught framing or torturing prisoners. When I first read it I was not … well, certainly not happy to see it but it occurred to me that the demands were not only substantively of an indefensible character but also very tenuous legally. It’s good to have this fight on these grounds because, as I said, they demand to put the entire university under the direct control, down to hiring, curriculum, admissions and more, of MAGA operatives. It’s been suggested to me by one person familiar with the university’s decision-making that waiting for the White House to spell out all its demands on paper may have been by design to put the university’s refusal on the surest legal footing. If that’s the case, it was smart to wait.
Continue reading “Harvard Letter”Just Another Lawless Monday
On a particularly lawless Monday, President Trump defied a Supreme Court order on live TV, barred the Associated Press from that event in defiance of a different court order and prompted a fired agency chair to ask for intensive questioning of officials under oath following the government’s alleged violation of yet another court order.
Continue reading “Just Another Lawless Monday”Bukele’s Offense Against the American People
Here’s how I look at today’s White House spectacle.
I don’t really care what these two men say. The only next step I’m focused on is the one that now faces the Supreme Court. The White House is now brazenly ignoring the crystal clear import and goal of the Court’s order which is not to facilitate merely the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, but his “release from custody in El Salvador.” The Court will now rapidly have to decide whether to knuckle under to this institutional humiliation or stand its ground. I don’t know which course it will choose. But I am very eager to find out.
Nayib Bukele is actively and publicly conspiring not only to violate American domestic law but the orders of American courts. El Salvador is a minor power, essentially a city-state, which even in our current degraded state requires the friendship and almost always the aid of the United States. Bukele is interfering not only in American domestic politics but the American legal and constitutional process. These are grave offenses against the sovereignty of the American people and the American constitutional order.
Trump won’t be in power forever. The next Democratic administration won’t be like the last one. He needs to know that, and the consequences of that, today.
Any Democratic politician who doesn’t understand this and say as much publicly should have no future in elected office.
What Are Universities Supposed to Do?
I’ve heard from a number of you in response to my posts about the fate of universities in the Trump era. I’ve published a couple of these responses below and I’ll post more. They are fascinating and illuminating replies. Most are generally supportive. A few are in the category of “Dude, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there are a number which I would put in the category of, “I agree. The universities have to fight. But I’m not sure you get how big a bloodbath we’re talking about.”
I wanted to expand on those earlier posts. And much of this will be meant to address that last category of responses.
I haven’t been directly involved in university life for a couple decades. So there are lots of details I don’t know, and plenty of things I didn’t learn during my time as a grad student and TA. But I think I do get the broad outlines. I know that what we’re talking about is full of risks, probable damage and levels of damage that are existential. So let me expand on what I’ve said by distilling points I’ve made in most of these email exchanges with readers over the last several days. To be clear, this isn’t meant as any sort of manifesto: just a distillation of what I think and some additional detail that expands on those earlier posts.
Most of what I said in these exchanges came down to five points.
Continue reading “What Are Universities Supposed to Do?”Trump, Bukele Condemn Abrego Garcia to Prison On Live TV
It defies a Supreme Court ruling, flouts a lower court ruling, and undermines the basic principle that the government must provide due process before depriving someone of their freedom. Yet the man wrongly deported to a Salvadoran prison will remain there indefinitely, President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said during a Monday Oval Office meeting.
Continue reading “Trump, Bukele Condemn Abrego Garcia to Prison On Live TV”