This article is part of TPM’s ongoing “Creating the Enemy Within” project, tracking the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.
When Amber Lowrey first heard that her sister had been arrested at a protest on July 4, it didn’t alarm her.
Continue reading “Guilt by Association: First ‘Antifa’ Case Sweeps Anti-Trump Activists Into One Terrorism Conspiracy”This story was originally reported by Amanda Becker of The 19th. Meet Amanda and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
The residents of Springfield, Ohio, had prepared for the arrival of immigration agents on February 3, the expiration date set by the Trump administration for Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, who account for nearly a quarter of the city’s population. A federal judge intervened at the last minute, pushing the deadline indefinitely. The agents never arrived.
Still, the city has found itself on edge this month and the threat is as unsettling as it is familiar: online misinformation, this time accusing the very people trying to protect their immigrant neighbors from deportation of trafficking their children instead.
Continue reading “TikTokers Came to Springfield Looking for ICE. Then the Child Trafficking Rumors Began.”After a federal judge decisively shot down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to downgrade Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-AZ) rank and retirement benefits this week, Hegseth wasted no time in responding publicly.
Continue reading “Hegseth Vows to Keep up Kelly Retribution Crusade “Yesterday, one of ICE’s and the White House’s prize ICE-as-victim cases blew up. We’ve seen a version of this happen before. The story is pushed on Fox. Charges follow. But as it begins to make its way through the courts, it falls apart and the charges are more or less quietly dropped. We’ve seen so, so many of these cases where it’s clear that what the ICE agents said just wasn’t true. I don’t even have to tell you about some of the more obscure ones. Though they didn’t get to charges since the purported attackers were already dead, you can see the pattern in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. First, the story was that protestors were trying to kill ICE agents and the agents barely emerged alive. Then we see the video and none of that is true. The key, though, is that in those cases where charges were filed, it’s always no harm no foul. The claims of ICE agents are shown to have been false, but it’s on to the next wilding spree. There are no consequences. Not for the original behavior. Not for lying about it.
But yesterday something different happened. The DOJ went into court and asked that a set of charges be dismissed with prejudice, i.e., they can’t be filed again. And the reason was this sentence that’s been rattling around my head for the last 24 hours. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit.”
Continue reading “Has ICE Debuted New ‘No Lying’ Policy?”In a careful, incremental, and modulated ruling designed to withstand an all but certain appeal by the Trump DOJ, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. ordered the administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a subset of the Venezuelan nationals spirited out of the country 11 months ago under the wartime Alien Enemies Act.
It marks the second time Boasberg has ordered the return of AEA detainees. The first time was in emergency rulings he issued as the AEA deportations unfolded over a weekend last March, when he ordered the removals stopped and the planes carrying the detainees to El Salvador turned around. The Trump administration defied those orders, but Boasberg’s subsequent efforts to hold those responsible in contempt of court have been thwarted twice by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the administration’s second appeal is currently languishing.
Throughout the latest round of litigation over how to give the AEA detainees the due process they were initially denied, the Trump DOJ has been sneering at Boasberg, rejecting the premises of his orders and barely engaging with his requests for information and proposed solutions. In yesterday’s order, Boasberg noted the pattern: “Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.”
Boasberg sprinkled similar admonitions throughout his ruling, which I’ve excerpted and condensed here:
Defendants at every turn have objected to Plaintiffs’ legitimate proposals without offering a single option for remedying the injury that they inflicted upon the deportees. … [I]t is up to the Government to remedy the wrong that it perpetrated here and to provide a means for doing so. … [M]indful of the flagrancy of the Government’s violations of the deportees’ due-process rights that landed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the solution-less mire Defendants propose.
It is not clear how many, if any, of the 137 former detainees who were held for months in El Salvador’s CECOT prison wish to return to the United States, where they face certain detention and the threat of being deported to a third country again. But for those who make it out of Venezuela to third countries and who want to return, Boasberg crafted his order to give them relief similar to that accorded by the Supreme Court to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported the same weekend in March but on a different flight and not as an alleged alien enemy.
Boasberg stopped short for now of ordering the same relief for those detainees still in Venezuela, so as not to interfere in the executive branch’s conduct of foreign relations and risk being overturned on appeal. Those still in Venezuela will, however, be allowed to begin filing legal challenges to President Trump’s AEA proclamation and their designations as members of the Tren del Aragua gang. Boasberg saved for another day the question of remote hearings for the detainees abroad.
All of this just sets the stage for another round of appeals, which could drag on for months, further delaying any accountability for the administration’s wrongful conduct.
Last Friday’s Morning Memo led with a report in the Star Tribune that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and FBI were set to announce a joint investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti. No such announcement has been forthcoming, and yesterday Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told senators that the feds are still blocking state and local authorities from participating in the investigations of the shootings of Pretti and Renee Good.
Everything you want to know — and a lot you don’t want to know — about how Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are running DHS, via the WSJ.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C., long a colorful jurist, let the exclamation points fly in ruling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the constitutional rights of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) by attempting to downgrade his rank and retirement benefits over his participation in a video reminding troops of their duty not to follow unlawful orders.
The controversial whistleblower complaint that DNI Tulsi Gabbard allegedly tried to bury involves an intercepted communication between two foreign nationals who discussed President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the WSJ and a matching NYT piece.
Their phone call was intercepted by a foreign intelligence service and provided to the National Security Agency, the NYT reported.
“It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner,” the WSJ reported, but both papers noted that the conversation was at least in part about Iran.
The NYT went a little further:
The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration. At a time last year when Mr. Kushner’s role in Middle East peace talks was less public than it is now, the foreign officials were recorded saying that he was the person to speak to in order to influence the talks.
The intercept also included what officials described as “gossip” or speculation about Mr. Kushner that was not supported by other intelligence.
One final tidbit, via the NYT: “Mr. Kushner’s name was redacted in the original report from the National Security Agency, but people reading it, including the whistle-blower, were able to determine that the reference was to him.”
The federal judges in the Northern District of New York put out a pretty milquetoast statement that suggest they are not going to fight the Trump DOJ’s immediate firing of the interim U.S. attorney they themselves had just appointed:
U.S. District Judge Manish S. Shah of Chicago blocked the Trump administration from clawing back $600 million in public health funds from four blue states — California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — ruling that the evidence showed its decision was “based on arbitrary, capricious or unconstitutional rationales.”
That’s not a headline I expected to see in my lifetime.
With President Trump abandoning 80 years of U.S. defense of Europe and with Russia’s territorial ambitions uncontained, Germany is racing to prepare for armed conflict, the WSJ reports:
Germany’s military-intelligence agency estimates that within the next three years, Russia, whose armies poured into Ukraine in 2022, will have amassed enough weaponry and trained enough troops to be able to start a wider war across Europe. [Germany’s top military officer] says a smaller attack could come at any time.
President Trump personally announced at the White House that he is reversing the Environmental Protection Agency’s nearly 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health. The elimination of the endangerment finding — the foundation for federal regulation of GHG emissions — puts the United States, already an international laggard on climate change policy, back at square one.
“Reversing the endangerment finding has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. That’s because if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases,” climate change reporter Lisa Friedman wrote in a piece that adopts the typically restrained NYT style but still manages to vibrate with barely concealed outrage.
Beating back the flames of fascism while the fascists fan the flames of global warming is the dual-threat 21st-century apocalypse that I can still scarcely get my head around.
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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first in a series of eight “Arctic Frost Accountability” subcommittee hearings, which are ostensibly intended to provide oversight of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The real purpose, though, is to provide Republican senators with more camera time to relitigate the results of that election and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
In his opening remarks, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, confronted his Republican colleagues over “their undying fealty to the president’s abnormal behavior” and “his attempt to whitewash history.” But he also called out another group of people who have been doing the same of late: Trump’s judicial nominees.
“Have you seen the contortions that these nominees have gone through when they’re asked the basic question, ‘Who won the election in 2020?’” Durbin asked. “They won’t answer. They go through these painful contortions. They can’t answer it because it’s an article of faith: If you’re loyal to Trump, you never accept the premise that he lost an election.”
Durbin is referring to the fact that, to date, all 37 of Trump’s second-term judicial nominees have refused to answer simple questions related to the 2020 election and the insurrection. Instead, nominees typically state only that President Joe Biden “was certified” as the victor, and they claim that as nominees, it would be “inappropriate” for them to say that the Capitol was attacked on January 6 (which they describe as a “political controversy”).
One explanation for this behavior is that nominees understand that if they don’t go along with the president’s conspiracy theories, their nominations would be immediately pulled. The other explanation is that they believe in these conspiracy theories, too.
Durbin has raised this pattern a number of times during Judiciary Committee meetings. In June, for example, he said he could not support the confirmation of Cristian Stevens, whom Trump nominated to a district court judgeship in Missouri, in light of Stevens’s inability to “acknowledge these basic facts and denounce the violence perpetrated against law enforcement on this day.”
Just last week, though, Durbin voted to confirm two of Trump’s nominees, David Clay Fowlkes and Aaron Peterson, to serve as life-tenured federal judges. And he’s not the only one: During Trump’s second term, 19 Democrats have voted to confirm at least one of Trump’s nominees. New Hampshire Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen have voted to confirm six and seven nominees, respectively, and Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, has voted for five. Among Senate Democrats, Durbin and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are tied for the lead in this ignominious category with eight yes votes apiece.
Continue reading “Why Are Senate Democrats Still Voting to Confirm Trump’s Judicial Nominees?”Democrats have been warning for some time that there is a potential near future in which President Trump takes his army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and floods polling places in areas that tend to not vote for Republicans during the midterm elections, an election-meddling rerun of what he has already done in blue cities and states around the country.
Continue reading “Dem Senator Pushes ICE Director To Admit His Officers Have No Place at Polling Stations”Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) broke with most of his Republican peers Thursday, using his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security committee to press immigration officials on agents’ violent behavior.
Continue reading “Rand Paul’s Fairweather Libertarianism Rears Its Head As He Criticizes DHS Officials”Yesterday, we talked about the global Authoritarian Movement or Authoritarian International (with the convenient acronym “AI”). Today, I wanted to talk about something slightly more specific. It’s part of the same phenomenon, perhaps a subset of it, but it’s distinct.
Back during Trump’s first term, people in the anti-Trump world became intensely, if superficially, engaged with the inner-workings of Russia under Vladimir Putin, particularly the aggressive use of influence and disruption operations in competitor states, as well as the use of “kompromat” to maintain control over Russian oligarchs and key people — allies and enemies — abroad. One of the features of that world is that it’s really not extortion. It can be an oddly stabilizing system because everyone kind of has something on everyone else. In any case, this became a big part of the Trump opposition world during Trump’s first term. What did Putin have on Trump? What did he want? When did it start?
Continue reading “More Thoughts on the Authoritarian International”This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Two weeks ago, three of my employees were ridesharing to work at our Minneapolis nonprofit when they realized they were being followed by federal agents. As soon as they parked, agents surrounded them with guns drawn and pointed at my staff. They grabbed one employee who, they said, “fit the description” of somebody they were looking for — essentially meaning he just happens to have brown skin. “Just checking his paperwork,” they said. Side note: he is here legally. By morning, he was in Texas.
This is our reality here in Minneapolis: constantly monitoring daily atrocities committed by ICE agents as they swarm our neighborhoods and terrorize our neighbors. The results of two months of ICE occupation in Minnesota? Two Americans dead, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot by federal agents on video. Ninety-six court orders violated in one month. Massive warrantless searches ruled unconstitutional. Businesses destroyed to the tune of millions of dollars a week, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune. Before Operation Metro Surge, there were only 150 immigration officers in Minneapolis. We saw nearly 3,000 in our city at the operation’s peak, which Border Czar Tom Homan announced Thursday is finally coming to an end. But it remains to be seen how quickly the officers will actually depart, and another American city could easily be next.
Congress votes on Department of Homeland Security funding this Friday. Before another blank check happens, they need to understand what they’re funding. This isn’t just immigration enforcement. This is economic sabotage wrapped in racism.
Continue reading “Congress, Don’t Give DHS a Blank Check to Undermine Our Local Economies”
