A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Editor’s Note: While Morning Memo has mostly focused on the legal and historical implications of the Trump administration’s lawless detention and deportation policies, today’s Morning Memo contains disturbing video and images of what is happening on the ground.

Trigger Warning: Noem’s Propaganda Video

In a bewildering move that could undermine some of the Trump administration’s legal arguments, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made a highly publicized visit to the prison in El Salvador where her department deported Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act.

But things only got worse.

In a stunning departure from humanitarian norms, Noem was photographed and filmed in front of prison cells packed with shaved-headed prisoners. Here’s an AP mashup of her trip that includes footage of her recording a direct-to-the-camera propaganda video:

Here’s the video Noem produced, with tattooed prisoners used as props:

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem uses prisoners in El Salvador as a prop for an official government video.

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— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 10:34 PM

Correction: Noem shot the video in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, not the Venezuelan detainees housed elsewhere in the prison. I regret the error.

‘You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos’

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky reported earlier this week, some of the Venezuelan nationals deported under the Alien Enemies Act were initially detained on the basis of their tattoos, many of which were innocuous and not Tren de Aragua gang symbols. Now Mother Jones has a new report zeroing in on the tattoos as the pretext for detention.

Appeals Court Stands Up For Judicial Branch

In one of the most significant appeals court rulings so far in President Trump’s second term, the D.C. Circuit let stand the order blocking further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

In the 2-1 decision, a George Bush I appointee vigorously defended a role for the judiciary in reviewing Alien Enemies Act cases. The ruling, while not a final decision on the merits, also called into question numerous aspect of the government’s case and set the stage for a full ventilation of the issues raised by the Trump administration’s conduct.

The case now returns to U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is separately considering whether the Trump administration violated the terms of his order.

More Foreign Students Whisked Off American Streets

A Tufts University PhD candidate on a student visa was detained outside of Boston and whisked to a detention facility in Louisiana – despite an emergency court order not to take her out of Massachusetts without notice.

Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish citizen who had been outspoken in her support for Palestinians. The pattern of detentions shows the Trump administration is targeting foreign students for their pro-Palestinian political views. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Ozturk was detained under the same law used to detain Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist.

The incident was caught in a disturbing video:

Meanwhile, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama was also detained by federal authorities. It’s not clear on what grounds Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian citizen, was detained or what his legal status was at the time he was picked up off campus.

MUST READ

With the Trump DOJ making a ham-fisted attempt to disqualify her from an important case, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell took the opportunity to school President Trump on the independent judiciary and to rebuke the Trump DOJ for its “ad hominem attack.”

“This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented,” Howell wrote in her opinion declining to recuse herself from overseeing the lawsuit by the law firm Perkins Coie challenging Trump’s executive order targeting it.

EXCLUSIVE

The NYT reports that the federal judiciary has created a new “Judicial Security and Independence Task Force” composed of federal judges that is expected to hold its first meeting within the next 10 days.

BOOM: The Atlantic Has The Receipts

In response to the Trump administration’s campaign of lying and obfuscation over the Signal group chat fiasco, The Atlantic published the messages themselves.

In other developments:

• The information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed in the Signal chat was highly classified at the time he wrote it, CNN reports.
• A watchdog group is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent destruction of the Signal messages. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg was assigned the case.
• National security adviser Mike Waltz, who mistakenly invited The Atlantic executive editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat left his Venmo friends list public, Wired discovered.

The Rule Of Law Doesn’t Even Get A Funeral

The WSJ, on the Signal group chat fiasco:

In past years, such a breach would likely have given rise to a separate and more thorough investigation by the FBI and Justice Department’s national security division to assess the extent of the potential harm and whether any laws were violated. But top Justice Department officials appear not to be mounting such an inquiry.

The Autocratic Legal Playbook

UCLA law professor Scott Cummings, with a reminder on where we are:

To understand what action to take requires clarity about the democratic assault now being advanced with brutal efficiency against the United States. Trump and his legal team have carefully studied how democracies die. And they have learned the key lesson: democratic backsliding occurs when elected leaders claim a mandate to erode the pillars of democracy—free and fair elections, fundamental rights, and checks and balances—to enlarge executive power.

The “autocratic legal playbook” is the strategic roadmap to this consolidation. The targets are well-established: capture the courts; erase internal pockets of independence within the public bureaucracy; silence sources of free thought and expression in universities, civil society, and the media; replace independent public prosecutors and government lawyers with loyalists; and disable legal resistance by coopting law firms and the professional bar.

The Five Pillars Of Trumpian Repression

Benjamin Wittes has categorized the authoritarian moves by Trump so far, and they fall into similar themes as the above “autocratic legal playbook”:

1. attack on the government’s own power to spend money;
2. internal retributions and restructurings within government itself—most importantly, in the power agencies: DoD, FBI, and DOJ;
3. the overt creation of a zone of impunity for political allies and friends;
4. non-criminal legal pressures on a variety of universities, law firms, news media outlets, and others;
5. willingness to deploy liberally overt threats of criminal investigation or prosecution.

Trump II Clown Show

TPM’s Hunter Walker on how L. Brent Bozell III, Trump’s new pick to be ambassador to South Africa, actively opposed the fight to end apartheid.

The Destruction

• NYT: U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries
• Politico: Documents reveal scope of Trump’s foreign aid cuts
• WaPo: Trump officials working to strip FEMA’s role in disaster recovery by Oct. 1
• NYT: Trump Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions From State Health Services

WARNING: GOP’s Funny Math Ploy

Republicans on the Hill intend to rely on never-before-used magic math to make passing its massive bill containing major elements of President Trump’s agenda possible with only a majority vote in the Senate.

With everything else going on, it’s been difficult to sustain a focus on this crucial bit of chicanery. The funny math would dramatically reduce the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts and lower size of the spending cuts needed to offset it. All of which would facilitate passing the mega bill via a simple majority vote in a reconciliation package.

The key obstacle to this tactic is the Senate parliamentarian, who is expected to rule soon on whether this scheme passes muster under Senate rules.

The larger historical context should be clear by this point: The GOP touts policies like tax cuts and purports to have staunch principles like deploring deficit spending that don’t add up and aren’t popular so when push comes to shove they change the rules, fuzz the math, and otherwise obscure the disconnect between what they say and what they actually do.

Quote Of The Day

NPR CEO Katherine Maher on a tweet she posted in 2020 calling Trump a fascist and a sociopath: "I regret those tweets. I would not tweet them again today. They represented a time where I was reflecting on something I believe that the president had said rather than who he is."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 26, 2025 at 1:47 PM

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

A Constitutional Collision In Slow Motion

With a defiant new filing last night from the Trump DOJ, the stage is now set for what is shaping up to be the most direct constitutional confrontation yet between President Trump and the judicial branch.

It comes in the Alien Enemies Act case before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., where the issue is whether the Trump administration violated his order blocking deportations under the act. But it’s critical to understand that whether the administration complied with the judge’s order is a separate issue from the extent of the powers of the president under the Alien Enemies Act, the deportations themselves, and whether any of the president’s conduct in this regard is subject to judicial review.

Where things now stand is that Judge Boasberg has been trying to ascertain whether the Trump administration violated his order. The Trump DOJ has gone to extraordinary lengths to foil that inquiry:

• It has sent junior lawyers into court with insufficient factual information.
• It has delayed, stalled, and deflected answering the judge’s questions.
• It has rebuked the judge for having the temerity to ask for more details.
• It has suggested the judge, a former FISA judge with deep experience in national security matters, can’t be trusted with the answers to his questions.
• It has invoked the state secrets privilege to shield itself from his inquiries.

Along the way the Trump DOJ has taken a sneering tone with the judge, made absurd arguments – verbal orders from the bench don’t count! – and given the court the runaround in various other ways. To be clear, the administration insists it didn’t violate the judge’s order, but it is persisting in refusing to answer his questions so that he can make his own determination as to what happened and when and whether the failure to turn around airplanes loaded with detainees before they reached El Salvador was a violation of his order.

I can’t emphasize enough that this is all happening not in the context of the Alien Enemies Act itself but in a contempt of court proceeding, where the court’s inherent authority to enforce its own orders, sanction lawyers for misconduct and misbehavior, and ensure the integrity and orderliness of its own proceedings is at stake. That’s what heightens this constitutional clash and sets it apart from what we might think of as “normal” line-drawing exercises between executive and judicial authority.

It’s also important to keep in mind that, as TPM’s Josh Kovensky groundbreaking reporting yesterday showed, the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was designed and implemented in the dark to avoid judicial oversight. The ACLU managed to suss out enough of what was going on to get into court before the operation was entirely complete, but that was precisely what the administration was trying avoid. Under those circumstances, a violation of the judge’s emergency order is even more pungent.

The next step in this matter isn’t exactly clear to me. The ball is now in Boasberg’s court, with the administration adamant that there are no grounds to hold it in contempt while refusing to recognize the judge’s authority to inquire into the matter. Something’s got to give.

Judge Blocks Deportation of Columbia Student

U.S. District Judge Naomi Buchwald blocked the Trump administration from arresting and deporting a Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident of the United States who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests.

Trump Says Jump, Columbia Asks How High

At the insistence of the Trump administration, Columbia University publicly reiterated that it is still complying with the agreement it reached to try to get some $400 million in federal funding reinstated.

Trump Targets Another Law Firm

President Trump issued a new executive order targeting Jenner and Block, a major law firm that used to employ Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team who became an outspoken Trump critic. “He’s a bad guy,” Trump said after signing the order.

The executive order mirrored the ones Trump has used to target other major law firms, which has now resulted in some of them declining to represent Trump targets and pulling back on their pro bono work for the advocacy groups leading the charge to challenge the Trump administration in court, the WaPo reports.

Meanwhile, some major law firms have seized on Trump’s attacks on their competitors to try to poach lawyers at the weakened firms, the NYT reports.

The Retribution: 2020 Election Version

• IMPORTANT: President Trump issued what election law expert Rick Hasen is calling a “dangerous” executive order purporting to impose a wide range of new regulations on the conduct of federal elections, including citizenship requirements, prosecuting the GOP’s great white whale of election fraud, and prohibiting the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day. Most alarmingly, it gives DOGE a role in policing voter registration rolls.
• Jan. 6 Reparations: President Trump floated the possibility of financial compensation for the Jan. 6 rioters who were prosecuted, Politico reports.
• Rewards And Inducements: “President Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday for Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden whose congressional testimony two years ago helped fuel House Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family,” the NYT reports.

Will Trump DOJ Bury The Signal Fiasco?

The question may answer itself. But before we give way to cynicism, a close look at the legal implications of using Signal for planning U.S. military attacks:

• Just Security: The Criminal Law Precedents That Are Most Relevant
• Politico: The Potential Legal Fallout of the Signal Group Chat Leak
• NYT: Signal Chat Disclosure Poses Early Test for F.B.I. and Justice Dept.

Signal Fiasco Is A Complete Shitshow

From the Hill to the White House, the Trump administration flailed in it response to the revelation that top officials – including the vice president, secretary of defense, national security adviser, DNI, and CIA director, among others – were using a commercial app to engage in war-planning. The accidental addition of The Atlantic executive editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat was just the cherry on top of the shit sundae.

Of note: One watchdog group filed a lawsuit to try to enforce the Federal Records Act, which the use of Signal suggests the Trump administration is evading, though to what extent, who knows?

Trump II Clown Show

• President Trump will nominate conservative firebrand L. Brent Bozell III as U.S. ambassador to South Africa after withdrawing his nomination to lead the now partially dismantled U.S. Agency for Global Media.
• DHS has hired David Geier, a vaccine skeptic who has long promoted false claims about the connection between immunizations and autism, to conduct a critical study of possible links between the two, the WaPo reports.

The Purges

• Bloomberg: Treasury Plans ‘Substantial’ Layoffs as Part of Musk’s DOGE Push
• Inside Higher Ed: Education Department Reeling After Layoffs

The Destruction

• EPA: Trump officials knew their legal justification for terminating dozens of Environmental Protection Agency grants was flawed, according to documents and internal emails reviewed by The Washington Post.
• RFE/RL: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked President Trump’s push to close down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade Claims New Victims

• The Trump administration is threatening to use a review of the DEI efforts by groups like Planned Parenthood to freeze tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for family planning, the WSJ reports.
• Corporate America is retreating from providing financial support for pride events in the face of Trump’s anti-DEI rampage.

For Your Radar …

In response to Greenland’s ire over visits this week by high-level Trump administration figures, including second lady Usha Vance, Vice President JD Vance has escalated the situation by announcing he will now join and lead the U.S. delegation.

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