Because of some family travel I’m doing, we’ve rescheduled this week’s podcast til tomorrow, Friday. So it should be in your podcast feeds sometime Friday afternoon.
Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Arrested Again, Appeals Court Rules
A 2-1 conservative majority on a federal appeals panel on Thursday reversed a ruling that had blocked federal officers from arresting Mahmoud Khalil, handing the Trump administration a win in its effort to crack down on and in some cases remove pro-Palestinian voices from the country.
The ruling is unlikely to take immediate effect, as attorneys for Khalil are expected to ask a full session of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. But it marks a defeat for the pro-Palestine activist, whose nighttime detention by ICE agents last year over his pro-Palestine advocacy was an early, high-profile example of the administration’s swift crackdown on those it regards as political opponents.
Continue reading “Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Arrested Again, Appeals Court Rules”What Do Elected Democrats Actually Plan to Do About ICE?
This story was originally reported by Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
A week after an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fatally shot a Minneapolis woman, half of American women are in favor of abolishing the law enforcement agency altogether, according to one new poll.
Dismantling ICE was a policy embraced by a number of Democratic politicians under President Donald Trump’s first administration, particularly the progressive Squad made up largely of women of color legislators. But whether to double down on a renewed push to abolish the agency is a divisive issue within the party.
Continue reading “What Do Elected Democrats Actually Plan to Do About ICE?”With Blood on His Hands, Trump Is Eager To Invoke Insurrection Act
Programming Note
We’re hosting our first Morning Memo Live event on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. Find details and tickets here — and TPM members should look out for a special discount code in your inboxes today.
Another Federal Shooting in Minneapolis
I was in the midst of preparing a Morning Memo arguing that Minneapolis is shaping up to be the catalyzing moment that President Trump was looking for to justify doing what he has wanted to do since his first term: invoke the Insurrection Act … when he posted exactly that to Truth Social:
For months, Trump has been trying to instigate civil unrest that would provide the pretext for a U.S. military crackdown on protestors by provoking clashes with federal agents first in Los Angeles, then in Portland, and finally in Chicago. I’ve been puzzling over why he may succeed in Minneapolis when he failed elsewhere, but I don’t think it has much to do with Minnesotans or the elected Democrats in the blue state, but rather with the escalating use of violence that culminated with the shooting of U.S. citizen Renee Good which, critically, was captured on video from multiple angles.
That eruption of violence, while spontaneous, was an entirely foreseeable result of a mass deportation policy built on provocation, retribution against blue states, a rotten policing culture, inadequate training of new agents, machismo, and swaggering belligerence operating under the color of law.
The bellicosity of thousands of masked armed agents swarming the streets of Minneapolis has been amplified, echoed, and reinforced by the highest officials in the land, including President Trump, rather than tamped down.
Last night, in a startlingly provocative social media post after another shooting involving a federal agent, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called the protests there an “insurrection,” baselessly accused Minnesota elected Democratic leaders of “terrorism” for “encouraging violence against law enforcement,” and threatened to “take whatever means necessary” to stop them. Not whatever legal means or whatever constitutional means or whatever prosecutorial means but a bare “whatever means.” Whatever that means.
Blanche’s Rambo rhetoric came the same evening that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz gave a brief six-minute televised address to the state. “This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government,” Walz said.
In a remarkably stark assessment of the clash between a blue state and the Trump administration, Walz warned the people of Minnesota: “Donald Trump wants this chaos. He wants confusion. And, yes, he wants more violence on our streets. We cannot give him what he wants. We can, we must, protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. … We cannot and will not let violence prevail.”
The latest rhetorical clash came on an evening when a federal agent in Minneapolis shot an undocumented Venezuelan man in the leg. Both men were hospitalized after the incident. According to official account from the Department Homeland Security — which has been notoriously unreliable throughout the nationwide mass deportation operation — the agent was chasing the man after he fled a traffic stop and crashed his vehicle:
The law enforcement officer caught up to the subject on foot and attempted to apprehend him when the subject began to resist and violently assault the officer. While the subject and law enforcement were in a struggle on the ground, two subjects came out of a nearby apartment and also attacked the law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle.
As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, the original subject got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick.
Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. The initial subject was hit in the leg.
Like Blanche, the DHS statement also accused Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “actively encouraging an organized resistance to ICE and federal law enforcement officers.”
Protests erupted after the latest shooting incident, and protestors clashed with state and federal law enforcement. “For several hours Wednesday evening, law enforcement and about 200 demonstrators confronted each other in the street, with chemical irritants and flash bangs being deployed and some protesters vandalizing vehicles at the end of the night,” the Star Tribune reported.
We are edging closer to crossing that fateful line when the military is called to put down civil unrest that has not just been provoked but sought after by a president eager to use retributive violence against his political foes while DHS puts out snuff videos that are, as Greg Sargent put it, “consciously depicting the unleashing of ICE on wicked, urban, cosmopolitan, non-MAGA America as a sustained act of cleansing, restorative violence.”
Chart of the Day
The Latest on the Renee Good Shooting
- Mary Moriarty, the top prosecutor in Minneapolis, said that lack of access to the federal investigation was “not a complete barrier” to the prosecution of the ICE agent on state charges for the shooting of Renee Good.
- The six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office who resigned rather than investigate the political activities of Good’s widow have been deemed “fired” by at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, the NYT reports: “That move cut off pay and benefits they would otherwise have received for weeks after having resigned.”
Mass Deportation Watch
- Minnesota Public Radio: Minnesotans describe their encounters with ICE, being detained: ‘I was flooded with fear’
- NYT: How ICE Crackdowns Set Off a Resistance in American Cities
- WaPo: ICE and activists clash over doxing and privacy, in court and streets
- TPM’s Kate Riga: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson takes a swipe at “Kavanaugh stops” in unrelated dissent
- AP: US apologizes for mistake in deporting 19-year-old Babson College freshman Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, but defends her removal.
Quote of the Day
“For those who were there, imagine the flood in New Orleans but instead of federal neglect it’s federal violence. Again and again. And wracked with rage and sadness, people are showing up for each other, again and again.”–Minnesota author Michael Tisserand, who wrote a book about being displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, on the federal occupation of his home state
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
The Landmines Under the Water
For a few hours, we didn’t know why several top prosecutors, including the recent acting head of the office, Joe Thompson, resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota in the wake of the shooting of Renee Good. As David Kurtz explains here, it appears to have been a reaction to freezing local authorities out of the investigation into Good’s death combined with an order to open a criminal investigation into the activism of Good’s widow, Rebecca Good. So we know what this was about, or we’re as close as we’re going to get to knowing. But often in these cases, we don’t ever find out the full picture. Or we don’t find out precisely why the person resigned. I’ve been thinking about this. And the whole terrain is similar to the gravitation surrounding other big scandals. At the beginning, at least, you can’t really see what’s at the center of the scandal, but you can see the force of the gravity around it. There’s something similar to these firings
Continue reading “The Landmines Under the Water”Trump Yells and Jeanine Pirro Listens
The DC US Attorney’s Office Takes Up Trump Retribution
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that when a group of U.S. attorneys gathered at the White House last week for an event, President Trump berated the group for being “weak” and not “moving fast enough to prosecute his favored targets,” in WSJ’s words. Trump’s outburst, during which he also called the group of U.S. attorneys ineffective, happened during a photo shoot, according to the Journal. He reportedly told the group gathered that they weren’t doing enough to help Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche do their work. It’s been clear for some time that Trump believes DOJ leadership’s job is to serve as his personal lawyers and, as such, to enact his own personal retribution.
Continue reading “Trump Yells and Jeanine Pirro Listens”Jackson Takes a Swipe at ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ in Dissent Over Candidates’ Ability To Challenge Voting Laws
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson bemoaned in a dissent that the Court’s majority had, in a Wednesday opinion, crafted a “bespoke” doctrine allowing candidates to challenge voting laws with far more leeway than it had even been willing to give victims of law enforcement violence.
Continue reading “Jackson Takes a Swipe at ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ in Dissent Over Candidates’ Ability To Challenge Voting Laws”Mass Resignations Rock DOJ in Wake of Fatal ICE Shooting
Programming Note
Join me for the first Morning Memo Live event on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. Find details and tickets here.
A Dozen Resignations Since Friday
Mass resignations at the Justice Department over its handling of the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good extended into a second day and spread from Washington, D.C., to Minnesota.
In D.C., the number of reported resignations in the criminal section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division rose from four to six — a reaction to the decision by assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon not to investigate the Minneapolis shooting. Most of the resignations were by supervisor-level prosecutors, according to CBS News, which had previously reported that career prosecutors in the section had offered to drop all of their work to help investigate the shooting. The Civil Rights Division had already been decimated under Dhillon.
In the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, an additional six career prosecutors — a majority of the leadership team — resigned over the decision to squeeze state investigators out of the federal investigation into the incident and a related DOJ request to investigate Good’s widow for her protest activities, according to the Star Tribune.
Among the resignations in Minnesota was Joe Thompson, who as the first assistant U.S. attorney was the No. 2 in the office and had previously served as acting U.S. attorney. Ironically, Thompson was the lead prosecutor on the big fraud case in the state that had swept up a number of Somali-Americans and was loudly trumpeted by President Trump and the right wing. The chief of the criminal division also resigned.
Of particular concern is the Trump DOJ’s decision to launch an investigation into the political protest activities of Rebecca Good for possible federal charges. According to the NYT:
Mr. Thompson strenuously objected to the decision not to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to the people familiar with the developments, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
The resignation of Thompson and the others is all but certain to cripple the fraud prosecution in similar fashion to how key resignations in the Eastern District of Virginia hobbled the attempts to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James.
Mass Deportation Watch: Somali Edition
Somali refugees in Minnesota legally in the country are being rounded up and shipped to detention centers in Texas, according to reports and refugee advocates.
Good Read
Journalist Laura Jedeed applied to work for ICE and after minimal vetting was offered a job.
Fed Subpoenas Came After Trump Blasted US Attorneys
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s subpoenas to the Federal Reserve on Friday came the day after President Trump blasted a roomful of U.S. attorneys at the White House for being weak and slow in pursuing his vindictive prosecutions, the WSJ reports.
In related news, the NYT reports that Main Justice was “stunned” by Pirro’s Fed subpoeanas:
Senior officials at the department were stunned, and annoyed, that Ms. Pirro did not consult them on an investigation of such international importance, the officials with knowledge of her actions said. …
Ms. Pirro’s decades-long relationship with Mr. Trump gives her the self-confidence to make consequential decisions without first seeking sign-off from her superiors.
Pirro continues to act like the subpoena is all the Feds’ fault for not responding to her earlier demand for documents, telling the NYT: “The drama is all Powell.”
DOJ Defends Halligan in Screed Against Judge
In an unhinged filing in response to a direct court order, the Trump DOJ went off on U.S. District Judge David J. Novak, a Trump appointee in Richmond, Virginia.
Novak had ordered former Trump personal attorney Lindsey Halligan to explain why she persists in identifying herself as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia even after another federal judge had ruled her appointment invalid.
In its response — over the names of Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Halligan, among others — the Justice Department savaged Novak, accusing him of:
- violating the Rules of Criminal Procedure;
- launching a “quest”;
- fundamentally “misunderstanding” the ruling invaliding Halligan’s appointment;
- flouting Supreme Court precedent and “elementary” legal principles;
- engaging in “a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers”;
- being “flat wrong”;
- operating under a “misimpression”;
- making a “rudimentary legal error”;
- blinded by a “fixation” that is is “untethered from how federal courts actually operate”;
- making “a fundamental category error.”
I eagerly await Novak’s response to this scorched-earth approach to willfully refusing to abide by court orders.
Quote of the Day
“If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, in transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case obtained by the NYT
Oops …
A Trump administration effort to prove widespread illegal voting by undocumented immigrants is coming up short.
The Retribution: Elissa Slotkin Edition
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said prosecutors are now involved in investigating the video she and other members of Congress made urging members of the military and the intelligence community to abide by their legal obligation not to follow unlawful orders.
Slotkin had previously announced in November that she had learned she and the others were the target of an FBI counterterrorism investigation over the video she organized. On Tuesday, Slotkin said the Senate sergeant-at-arms was approached by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office about scheduling an interview with her or her private counsel.
“I’ve studied this kind of political authoritarianism in other countries my entire professional life,” Slotkin told the NYT. “I just can’t believe I am talking about it in my own country.”
Thread of the Day
A quick assessment of the Office of Legal Counsel permission slip for U.S. military action in Venezuela — without a congressional approval — a redacted version of which was released yesterday:
SCOTUS Hears Trans Athletes Case
If you’re piecing together how the oral arguments went yesterday in the two trans athletes cases before the high court, let me recommend:
- TPM’s Kate Riga: Right-Wing Justices Warm to Idea that Trans Minority Too Small to Challenge Sports Ban
- LawDork Chris Geidner: SCOTUS likely to allow state trans sports bans, but a changed tone could signal a narrow ruling
RIP
The Post-Gazette’s announcement that it will cease operations in May threatens to make Pittsburgh the largest city in the country without a real daily newspaper, Joshua Benton writes:
While there are debates to be had about what it means to be a “city without a newspaper,” the largest thus far is probably Youngstown, Ohio — another Rust Belt burg just across the Ohio line. But metro Pittsburgh’s almost six times the size of metro Youngstown — this would be a new scale of loss.
To be clear, the Post-Gazette will shut down entirely, not merely cease printing and shift to digital publishing.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
How the Supreme Court’s Corruption Is Locking Down Reform Public Policy in Its Tracks
I’ve written again and again that reforming the Supreme Court — neutralizing the corruption represented by the current rogue majority — is the sine qua non of any good future for the American republic. I want to give you another example of this centrality.
Recently I was talking to someone very versed in federal employment law, the framework that undergirds the employment of the people who make the federal government run. There’s a neverending stream of proposed regulations and rules. We were discussing some new news on this front, how it might play out in the future, etc. When I have these kinds of conversations with knowledgable people, I’ll generally ask what they are hearing about groups emerging in their area for the purpose of creating Project 2029-like lists of reforms to undo the damage we are seeing today. It’s not just turning things back to the status quo ante, as we’ve discussed. We’re in an era in which it’s critical to make major structural changes when the opportunity arises and build new structures that are more durable than the ones which have fallen so quickly over the last decade and specifically the last year. So you need smart people putting time into this work during the next three years, really thinking it through and having that list of reforms ready, support built them, etc. You get the idea. We’ve discussed this before.
Continue reading “How the Supreme Court’s Corruption Is Locking Down Reform Public Policy in Its Tracks”Trump Is Now Framing His Blue State Retribution Campaign as Some Sort Of Deliverance
‘Fear Not’
The Trump administration is continuing to escalate in Minnesota.
It has mobilized thousands of ICE agents to carry out its occupation of Minneapolis, and this week is sending still more. An ICE officer shot and killed a mother of three there last week, and the Trump administration has smeared her as a “domestic terrorist.” The administration has, today, sparked a slew of high profile resignations from career federal prosectors over its decision to cut Minnesota authorities out of DOJ investigations into the shooting and by pushing to investigate the woman’s widow. It also has seized on legitimate fraud investigations in the state to justify freezing $10 billion in congressionally-approved federal funding for child welfare programs in Minnesota and four other blue states, a directive a federal judge promptly blocked.
The ways in which the Trump administration is carrying out its immigration enforcement agenda — attempts at shock and awe and provocation, aimed at protestors and people of color — are demonstrative of how closely it is intertwined with another top goal of the president’s second term: retribution. Specifically, looking for ways to exert control over the blue pockets of America that he believes to be populated by his political enemies. Blue state governors and mayors have always fallen into that category, whether he has personal beef with the elected Democrat or not. It’s something we’ve been discussing since Trump began federalizing the National Guard early last year to clamp down on the protests and unrest that he created with his ICE operations in blue cities like Los Angeles and Chicago last year.
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump made his “retribution” objective explicit, and spun his administration’s plans to clamp down on First Amendment rights and his withholding of federal funding as some sort of deliverance for the “GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA” from their duly-elected leaders.
“Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people,” he wrote, inflating the figure by an order of magnitude. “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
Hours later, he alluded to more potential attempts to freeze federal funding for municipalities or states that have sanctuary policies in place to provide services to undocumented immigrants.
The “RETRIBUTION” is upon us, alright.
— Nicole LaFond
The Irony of Prosecutor Joseph Thompson’s Resignation in Minnesota
The federal prosecutor behind the prominent Minnesota social services fraud investigations resigned Tuesday, reportedly due to the Trump administration’s push to investigate the widow of Renee Good, the woman killed in Minnesota by ICE agents last week, according to the New York Times.
Joseph Thompson is a career prosecutor appointed by Trump to help lead the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Minnesota after Thompson’s prosecution of Minnesota fraud rings during Biden’s administration, including investigating the Feeding Our Future group at the heart of the ongoing fraud scandal in Minnesota. At least five other attorneys resigned along with Thompson Tuesday.
Thompson’s resignation seems like an ironic self-own for the Trump administration which latched on to Thompson’s legitimate legal investigations to advance its own anti-immigrant political aims. At a time when you’d think the Trump administration would want to laud his work, just weeks after he announced an investigation into the theft of potentially more than $9 billion federal dollars, Thompson chose to step down rather than carry out the Trump administration’s directives to weaponize the rule of law. The Times reports:
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
In the process, the administration has now lost its star resource for accomplishing its purported top goal: “rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.”
A quote from Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara to the Minnesota Star Tribune summarizes the contradiction of Thompson’s actual work in Minnesota, versus the administration’s cartoonish takeover and subsequent violent immigration enforcement.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this [immigration enforcement] isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” O’Hara said.
— Layla A. Jones
Bipartisan Senate Group Punts Release of Plan to Address Expired Obamacare Subsidies
The bipartisan group of senators who have been negotiating a health care plan to revive the expired Affordable Care Act subsidies will punt the release of their legislative text until the last week of January — after the previously scheduled, upcoming Senate recess.
“We have to make sure we get it right,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said Tuesday morning, per Politico.
The group had previously indicated they would release a plan sometime this week.
The punt comes less than a week after the House passed a Democratic-led bill that would revive the expired Obamacare subsidies for three years. Seventeen House Republicans, who are largely in a vulnerable position in the upcoming midterms, rebelled against President Donald Trump and House GOP leadership and joined all House Democrats to pass the bill, seemingly in an attempt to save face with voters.
The Senate is unlikely to take up the bill with a simple three year extension which is why a bipartisan Senate group has been negotiating for months on the issue. Though negotiations continue, the urgency around the issue — which Democrats relied on during and before the recent historic shutdown — has dampened significantly, especially after the subsidies expired at the end of 2025.
Moreno told reporters that the bipartisan group would continue their meetings in order to iron out the details of the proposal, adding that the senators who have been negotiating need to “make sure that everybody’s all set with all the framework elements, see if there’s any still areas of angst we still have to resolve.”
One sticking point for the negotiations are reportedly on how to address the amendment that mandates federal funding can’t cover abortions.
— Emine Yücel
In Case You Missed It
Josh Kovensky: How a Grainy Video of Renee Good’s Anguished Wife Convinced Right-Wing Media to Blame the Widow
Kate Riga’s coverage of today’s SCOTUS oral arguments in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J.: Right-Wing Justices Warm to Idea that Trans Minority Too Small to Challenge Sports Bans
Alito and Kavanaugh Give Fox News-esque Recitation of Anti-Trans Talking Points
Morning Memo: Career DOJers Resign Over Handling of Fatal ICE Shooting
NEW this morning from Khaya Himmelman and Emine Yücel: How Redistricting and the Fate of the Voting Rights Act Might (Not) Impact the Midterms
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Five Points on the Trump DOJ’s Attack on Fed Chair Jerome Powell
What We Are Reading
US national parks staff say new $100 fee for non-residents risks ‘alienating visitors for decades’
Overseas Travel to the U.S. Slumps for 8th Straight Month
Trump Blasted Federal Prosecutors at White House Event, Calling Them Weak