Air Force None

By now, you’ve likely ingested many of the details from the bombshell Washinton Post report on the elaborate security operation and public misinformation campaign to spirit President Trump out of Ankara, Turkey, following last month’s NATO summit in order to avoid a credible threat to his life from Iran.

The entire ruse is remarkable by the historic standards of security theater and continuity of government protocols that have hovered over our political consciousness since the peak tensions of the Cold War nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Especially striking is that White House staff and the press pool who remained on the older model Air Force One that everyone thought Trump was aboard ended up serving as decoys — sitting ducks for whatever scheme Iran had conjured up but ultimately failed in or decided not to execute.

The image we conjure in our minds of Trump boarding Air Force One on one side of the plane before secretly exiting the other side into a waiting catering truck is indelible. But I’m just as taken by what happened after Trump’s secret flight landed in the U.K.

Once on the ground, Trump had to be secretly returned to the older Air Force One, then make a show of disembarking from it before boarding the new Qatari Force One that he took across the Atlantic to Joint Base Andrews. As you may know, the Air Force One call sign only applies when the president is aboard the aircraft, but I’m taking some liberties with the term here for the sake of clarity.

“It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing,” the WaPo noted.

The NYT has a more robust account of this part of the operation: “Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.”

Here is he pretending to have just flown in on the older Air Force One:

Here he is walking between the old and new Air Force One aircraft:

This entire episode would be notable in its own right, but the NYT’s subsequent reporting on the ostensible version of what happened — the old Air Force One was used because the new Qatari-gifted one lacked sufficient defense capabilities given the Iranian threat — gave rise to a leak investigation and highly controversial subpoenas to NYT reporters.

Those subpoenas have since been withdrawn, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck to try to piece together that related saga in light of this new information. Was the administration, for instance, agitated not just that the new Air Force One was being denigrated by the NYT’s reporting but that the NYT was onto the secret mission to extricate Trump from Turkey? We don’t know if the NYT had additional information on the ruse that it didn’t publish, though its followup to yesterday’s WaPo exclusive didn’t betray any previous unpublished knowledge of the operation.

The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sharply criticized principal associate deputy attorney general Trent McCotter in dropping criminal fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several of his co-defendants.

Judge Garaufis largely (but not entirely) granted the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but, in a withering 47-page order, he shellacked political appointee McCotter for pushing the dismissal through without consultation with investigators:

On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.

Garaufis also flamed McCotter for claiming the indictment was the handiwork of a politicized Biden DOJ:

McCotter appears to be accusing officials across four different government offices of bringing a detailed 54-page, 5-count indictment out of spite. However, he has not provided a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the timing of the unsealing of the indictment, or the charging decisions, in this case was politically motivated. McCotter’s baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office.

The dismissal of the case against Adani, essentially a foreign bribery case of the kind that the Trump DOJ has de-emphasized pursuing, came after Adani retained Bob Giuffra and Jamie McDonald (who Trump later nominated as Manhattan U.S. attorney) of Sullivan & Cromwell (which is representing Trump personally in other matters). In a presentation to McCotter at the Justice Department, Giuffra reportedly said that Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy if the charges were dropped, according to CBS News.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ICYMI: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion for vindictive prosecution was denied Friday by the trial judge, who declined to look past federal prosecutors in Alabama to Main Justice or to the White House in assessing improper motives for bringing the politicized case.
• Reflecting Pool: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will make an effort to extract information from the Trump DOJ about the charging decision in the since-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn, Greg Sargent reports.
• OLC Dramatically Expands Claimed Scope of Executive Privilege: The president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers … so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the Office of Legal Counsel asserts in a new memo flagged by Punchbowl.

Photo of the Day

Former Trump lawyer Emil Bove swears in former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general in front of President Trump in the Oval Office, Aug. 10, 2026:

🇺🇸 @AGToddBlanche has officially been sworn in as the United States Attorney General today in the Oval Office. pic.twitter.com/0PfeWYLDqT

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 10, 2026

Painful Flashback Alert

NYT: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed by Rod Rosenstein’s Appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Families, lawyers and judges describe a year of frantic emergency cases after a Trump administration memo reversed decades of interpretation of federal law and allowed ICE to begin detaining without bond hearings people who have lived in the U.S. for years. Federal judges have since ruled against the Trump detention policy more than 16,000 times.
• Arizona Daily Star: “Conditions are deteriorating to dangerous levels at a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of immigrants have been imprisoned since the U.S. deported them to the African nation, without warning or due process, the immigrants and their attorneys say.”
• The American Prospect: An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned in 2023 after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a $244 million no-bid federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.
• NYT: New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims

Quote of the Day

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, writing about President Trump’s new birthright citizenship executive orders:

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it extended the promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall all future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment. 

The Pyrocene Keeps Pyrocening

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, nudging past July 2012 and July 1936. The average temperature of 76.9F was more than three degrees above the 20th century average.

In completely unrelated news, the Swiss Re Institute warned today that wildfire risk is the fastest-growing weather peril globally. 

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The Bureaucratic Hellscape of Trump Authoritarianism

This morning I want to focus your attention on another especially Kafkaesque example of the worst of the Trump mass deportation operation combined with — and this is critical — the administration’s lawless behavior in federal courts.

Across numerous cases — the Alien Enemies Act, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, “Cristian“, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez, and others — I have been focused not just on the brutalities of the immigration system (many of which pre-dated Trump), but on the new layers of barbarism plus the administration’s direct challenge to the constitutional role of the federal judiciary in policing the mass deportation operation.

In the case of Guatemalan national Faustino Pablo Pablo, we have both in spades.

In a new ruling Friday, which has not been previously reported, U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama of El Paso ordered Pablo released from ICE detention after a surreal nine-month journey through the worst of the Trumpian immigration system compounded by highly misleading representations — if not outright lies — by the administration in court. Because of the limited public remote access to habeas corpus cases in federal court, we are largely reliant on Judge Guaderrama’s publicly available orders for the narrative of what befell Pablo.

Pablo arrived in the United States in 2012 after fleeing Guatemala. While Pablo would come to have an order of removal against him, an immigration judge in 2013 issued a withholding of removal to his native Guatemala under the Convention Against Torture, finding that Pablo had “shown it is more likely than not that he will be tortured by, or with the consent or acquiescence of, the Guatemalan government.”

As a result, Pablo was released under an order of supervision and had been living his life freely in the United States for more than decade until Nov. 5, 2025, when he showed up for a routine ICE check-in appointment in California and was detained without notice or explanation.

On Nov. 17, Pablo was transferred to Camp East Montana, the brutal tent encampment on Ft. Bliss in El Paso. The following day, Pablo filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in the Western District of Texas. On Nov. 20, he sought an injunction prohibiting the administration from removing him from the court’s jurisdiction while his habeas case was pending. By the time the Judge Guaderrama issued the injunction later that day, Pablo had already been unlawfully deported to Guatemala.

In an admission that it resisted making in other similar cases, the Trump administration conceded that the violation of the immigration judge’s order barring Pablo’s removal to Guatemala had been “unlawful” and began the process of returning him to the United States.

It wasn’t without, shall we say, hiccups.

When Pablo wasn’t returned as promised on a Dec. 4 flight, Judge Guaderrama decried the “blatant lawlessness” of Pablo’s removal and set a deadline for the administration to return him. As TPM first reported, the administration finally returned him to the United States on Dec. 11.

But the saga was not nearly over for Pablo, a Mayan whose native language is Mam, a fact which will become relevant in a moment. What ensued, as outlined in Judge Guaderrama’s order Friday, is the sort of mind-bending behavior from the administration that is part Trumpian authoritarianism and part bureaucratic hellscape.

Even before Pablo’s return, DHS was threatening him with removal to a third country: “One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S.,” the bombastic then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “We will deport him to another country.”

After his return, the administration spent the next several months purporting to be preparing to deport Pablo to Mexico, its stated choice as a third-country destination for him.

As he had successfully done for Guatemala, Pablo applied for withholding of removal to Mexico under the Convention Against Torture, but an asylum officer denied his claim of fear of removal in December, clearing the way for his deportation to Mexico.

At that point, the administration repeatedly told Judge Guaderrama that it was prepared to deport Pablo to Mexico and that his injunction barring Pablo’s removal was the only remaining impediment. In his order Friday, Judge Guaderrama documented the administration’s representations to the court:

January 20, 2026: If the Court lifts the stay of removal, ICE will proceed with removing Petitioner to Mexico . . . . The only impediment to removal is this Court’s Order staying removal.

April 6, 2026: If this Court vacated his stay of removal, ERO does not foresee additional procedural hurdles to removing Petitioner to Mexico. Absent any unforeseen circumstances, ERO believes they could effect removal to Mexico within a week of this Court lifting the stay of removal.

July 15, 2026: But for the judicial stay of removal entered in this case, third country removal to Mexico is significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.

In response, Judge Guaderrama lifted his injunction barring Pablo’s removal but in a subsequent order required that an immigration judge review the denial of Pablo’s application for withholding from removal to Mexico. “As far as the Court could tell, the aforementioned IJ review was the Government’s only ‘impediment to removal,'” Guaderrama wrote in his newest order.

But Pablo remained trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

Pablo was scheduled for a hearing in front of an immigration judge on July 27, but his claim of fear of removal to Mexico was not reviewed at the hearing. In addition, the administration did not provide a Mam interpreter so Pablo was unable to understand the proceedings, and Pablo’s attorney wasn’t admitted to the virtual hearing until after it had ended. When Pablo’s attorney was eventually brought in, the immigration judge’s legal assistant informed the attorney that “[t]he judge did not think it was important for [her] to be [t]here,” the attorney later told Judge Guaderrama.

Getting fed up, Judge Guaderrama held an evidentiary hearing of his own on July 29. At issue was whether Pablo’s continued detention was lawful. Even with an order of removal, a detainee cannot be held indefinitely. The Supreme Court has declared detentions lasting up to six months to be presumptively reasonable. Continued detention past that point is lawful only if there is a “significant likelihood” that the detainee will be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Guaderrama required the administration to make the still-detained Pablo available for the hearing. Also present for the hearing: two ICE officers with personal knowledge of Pablo’s removal process.

What emerged at the evidentiary hearing was shocking, given the trajectory of Pablo’s case and the many assurances (listed above) from the administration to Judge Guaderrama.

“At that hearing, the Government revealed that Mexico was not (and had never been) a viable option for third-country removal,” Judge Guaderrama recounted in his order.

It turns out that back in December, Pablo had opted out of the only program which would have allowed the administration to deport him to Mexico. So Mexico was never an option, and in the intervening months the administration had not identified any another third country options.

But it gets worse (emphasis Guaderrama’s): “The Government has not taken any steps since December 2025 to identify another country that would accept Petitioner’s removal.”

In a cynically ironic moment at the hearing, an administration lawyer asked Guaderrama, after all this time, for “the opportunity to be able to determine if there’s another third country” to which to deport Pablo.

The developments were eerily similar to those in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The administration had likewise unlawfully deported Abrego Garcia in violation of an order of withholding. After dragging its feet for months, it reluctantly returned him to the United States to face what was eventually ruled a vindictive prosecution, but in the meantime purported to be preparing to deport him to various African third countries. Ultimately U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland rejected repeated claims by the Trump administration to the court that Abrego Garcia’s third-country deportation was imminent, finding no evidence that the administration had actually taken steps to arrange a third country that would accept him.

In both cases, the claimed plans for third-country deportations ended up looking like a pretext created to justify the punitive continued detention of an immigrant whose wrongful deportations had embarrassed the administration.

In what may have been among the final straws for Guaderrama, the immigration court held another hearing in Pablo’s case on Aug. 5. Again, no Mam interpreter was present for Pablo, and the immigration judge has not reviewed the asylum officer’s denial of Pablo’s fear claim. Pablo was scheduled for another immigration court hearing to be held on Aug. 31.

In a court filing the next day, the administration managed to make things worse by conceding that it has no plan to move on from Mexico as its country of choice for Pablo, Judge Guaderrama recounted:

The Government does not plan to start looking in the near future, either. One day after Petitioner confirmed that he still does “not accept removal to Mexico,” the Government explained that it will wait to look into “an alternative third country for removal” in case Petitioner has a sudden change of heart.

Guaderrama had had enough.

In his 19-page opinion Friday, Guaderrama said that no matter how he applied the law, even when interpreting it least favorably for Pablo, the continued detention of Pablo was a violation of the Constitution and statute.

Guaderrama ordered the administration to release Pablo no later than today and to confirm his release to the court by COB tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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