We’re under two weeks out from our first Morning Memo Live event featuring a really smart panel of people deeply knowledgeable on the story I care about most: the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department.
It is the sine qua non of Trump’s drive toward a uniquely American form of authoritarianism. There can be no rule of law without the fair, consistent, and independent enforcement of the law for everyone. But over the past year, Trump has brought the Justice Department under the direct control of (and even into!) the White House and used it as a sword against his foes and shield for his allies.
To talk about this historic shift and the many permutations of it that are still unfolding, I’ll be moderating a discussion with Stacey Young from Justice Connection, which is providing support to current and recent DOJ employees; former assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky, who served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and led the prosecution of Roger Stone; and Anna Bower, who covers these issues closely for Lawfare (while fielding occasional Signal messages from Lindsey Halligan).
In addition to the panel discussion, it’ll be a TPM community event with a Q&A and a light reception to follow. Come on out and help us make it a great evening. Details and tickets available here(TPM members should have a special discount code in their inboxes).
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. Reach out to talk@talkingpointsmemo.com if you didn’t receive or can’t find it.
Wrapping Up a Dynamic Week
I hope you’ll forgive a less narrated Morning Memo today. Instead I wanted to pull together a slew of developments on the mass deportation front and sweep up a few other important stories that I hadn’t gotten to this week. I think it still provides a striking snapshot of where things are right now, domestically and internationally.
The Killing of Renee Good
Renee Good had two gunshots wounds to the right side of her chest, one to her left forearm, and a possible fourth on the left side of her head, according to a fire department report released Thursday along with police reports and 911 transcripts.
A group of 33 former federal prosecutors in Minnesota are asking the Trump administration to reconsider its decision to exclude the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation into the Good shooting.
Lawfare: Minnesota Can Prosecute Jonathan Ross—But It May Not Be Easy
Latest from Minnesota …
The ACLU has filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court in Minnesota alleging that it is engaging in racial profiling by targeting Latinos and Somalis for detention. The case was brought on behalf of three U.S. citizens with Latino and Somali backgrounds who were detained by federal agents.
“Listen. Have y’all not learned from the last couple of days?” a federal agent was recorded last week telling an observer after a minor collision with concerned citizens trailing a federal convoy two days after the Renee Good shooting.
A Minneapolis couple accused ICE agents of deploying tear gas and stun grenades around them and their six children, causing their 6 month old to lose consciousness and require CPR.
Thread of the Day
President Trump is once again threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, this time in Minneapolis. That would be a flagrant and particularly dangerous abuse of the Act—one that would threaten the rule of law and public safety alike. 1/13
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem suggests virtually anyone could face a Kavanaugh stop.
Quote of the Day
“Those people that are arrested for interference or impeding, assault, we’re going to make them famous. We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers and their neighborhoods and their schools know who these people are.”—White House “border czar” Tom Homan
Potential Homicide in ICE Custody
A medical examiner in Texas is reportedly poised to rule that the Jan. 3 death of detainee in ICE custody was a homicide, the WaPo reports: “A 55-year-old Cuban immigrant, Lunas Campos died following a struggle with detention staff, according to an eyewitness account and an internal ICE document reviewed by The Post.”
‘Stunningly Vindictive’
The fight over discovery into Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution claim continues in the criminal case in Tennessee, with his lawyers now accusing federal prosecutors of having “reneged” on earlier promises to hand over evidence ahead of an important hearing later this month.
Judge Blasts Trump Admin’s Targeted Deportations
U.S. District Judge William Young of Boston, a Reagan appointee, condemned in open court the Trump administration policy of targeting pro-Palestinian activists for deportation:
I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States. These cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.
Young has yet to rule on a remedy for the constitutional violations he found.
Mahmoud Khalil Loses Appeal
In a significant setback for legal immigrants targeted by the Trump administration for their political views, an appeals court said federal district courts are without jurisdiction to hear the constitutional claims of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil until he exhausts his claims in the executive branch’s immigration court system.
2026 Ephemera
OH-09: Madison Sheahan is resigning as the deputy director of ICE to seek the GOP nomination against Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D), the longest-serving woman in Congress.
Judge Blocks DOJ From Getting Voter Rolls
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of Santa Ana has blocked the Trump DOJ from obtaining California’s voter rolls.
Just a Coincidence?
Perhaps it’s unrelated, but the following overt investigative moves in controversial cases came within days of President Trump’s excoriation of federal prosecutors last week at the White House for being too slow and weak in pursuing his favored cases:
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro issued subpoenas to the Federal Reserve on Jan. 9;
Since late last week, Pirro sought interviews with five Democratic members of Congress involved in the video urging service members to perform their duty not to abide by unlawful orders;
The FBI searched the Virginia home of WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson on Wednesday in a purported leak case that included a subpoena to the WaPo itself, all of which followed a Jan. 9 complaint against a government contractor in Maryland federal court for unlawful detention of national defense information.
I would caution that the overt moves in the case of the WaPo are more complicated with a longer lead time and therefore harder to move on a dime in response to a rant from the President.
Must Read
The Purged: “Donald Trump’s destruction of the civil service is a tragedy not just for the roughly 300,000 workers who have been discarded, but for an entire nation.”
‘The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard’
Watch NATO fall apart in real time as President Trump continues to threaten to seize Greenland from Denmark, even as some Republicans on the Hill try to reassure the beleaguered U.S. ally.
A World Without Rules
At Foreign Affairs, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro warn that President Trump isn’t just jeopardizing the international legal system but the existence of any rules constraining state power:
In the short term, the world faces deep instability; leaders may sometimes invoke the postwar rules but may also increasingly ignore them, depending on what is convenient. This is a recipe for unrelenting conflict, as states would be in doubt about what the rules are and therefore unsure of how to avoid provoking violence. Until a clear set of rules takes hold, the world will be a profoundly dangerous place.
A longer-term possibility is a world in which states are no longer prohibited from resorting to force and at least one superpower acts as if there are no rules at all. In this world, not only would the rules be unpredictable, they would depend entirely on the impulses of whoever happens to command the most coercive power at a given moment.
What a Big Boy
President Trump accepted the Nobel Prize from its most recent recipient like the cheap club championships he awards himself at his own golf courses — and with just as much self-awareness:
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The Senate on Thursday passed three appropriations bills in a largely bipartisan 82-15vote. The three bills, grouped into a minibus, will fund the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Interior and Justice, the EPA, water programs and federal science initiatives through the end of the current fiscal year.
You’ve probably seen that the FBI asserted exclusive control over the investigation into the death of Renee Good. This is a bigger deal than I think most people think. If I understand correctly, since this case involved federal officers and a crime scene controlled by federal officers the practicalities of the situation are relatively straightforward. The feds collected the evidence. The shooter is a federal agent. They can say, don’t talk to the locals. And clearly the shooter is happy to oblige. So in this particular case the nature of the incident means the feds have all the stuff and they simply don’t share it. As far as I know the FBI has not claimed any ability to overrule or remove the case from local authority. They’re just making bogus claims about jurisdiction and refusing to share the evidence. And in this case, especially with an increasingly obedient federal judiciary, possession is 9/10s of the law.
The Trump administration has flooded Minneapolis with thousands of immigration enforcement officials who have killed, shot and brutalized its inhabitants.
Protests have ramped up accordingly. Videos show ICE officers using force against the protesters, in some cases reportedly tauntingthem with ICE officer Jonathan Ross’ killing of U.S. citizen Renee Good last week. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) has put the National Guard on standby.
And Thursday morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT…”
The Trump administration’s pressure campaign to get red states across the country to engage in midcycle redistricting has hit another roadblock.
A panel of federal judges rejected a Trump DOJ and California Republican Party request to block California’s new map on Wednesday — once again calling into question the efficacy of the Trump administration’s larger gerrymandering crusade. And although Republicans may appeal, experts tell TPM that given the precedent of a recent Supreme Court ruling upholding Texas’ gerrymandered map, it would be unusual for the Supreme Court to step in.
In a 2-1 ruling on Wednesday, a panel of federal judges ruled in favor of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and rejected Republicans’ argument that the maps were racially gerrymandered, specifically to favor Latino voters.
“We find that Challengers have failed to show that racial gerrymandering occurred, and we conclude that there is no basis for issuing a preliminary injunction,” Judge Josephine Staton, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote.
“Having carefully reviewed and weighed the relevant evidence, we find that the evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats,” Staton continued.
In response to Republicans’ passage of a new gerrymandered map in Texas last year, Newsom worked with Democratic state lawmakers to spearhead a voter referendum known as Prop 50, allowing lawmakers to temporarily bypass the state’s independent map-drawing commission and approve new congressional district lines for several Republican-dominated and swing districts in the state.
Voters approved Prop 50 this past November, paving the way for new congressional maps that will likely flip five Republican-held seats in California for Democrats in the U.S. House — offsetting the impact of Texas’ maps that are expected to flip five Democratic seats for Republicans.
Wednesday’s ruling comes against the backdrop of a recent Supreme Court ruling that approved the use of a gerrymandered map in Texas for the midterm elections.
Wednesday’s ruling explicitly mentioned that California’s map is similar to Texas’ in that both are partisan, but not racially gerrymandered. That earlier Texas ruling seems to have laid the groundwork for Wednesday’s ruling on California’s map.
Last month, the Supreme Court put on hold a lower court ruling that had initially blocked Texas’ gerrymandered maps from being used in the midterms, finding instead that the District Court’s decision was made too close to the midterm elections. The Supreme Court also ruled that Texas’ map was indeed partisan, but not racially gerrymandered. The court found that a partisan motivation for the new congressional maps was acceptable, but a racial motivation for the map would violate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
In a concurring opinion on the Texas map, Justice Sam Alito, who was joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, referenced California specifically, writing that “the impetus for the adoption map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Given this context, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would step in and rule that California’s process was different than Texas’, experts say.
“The facts on the ground for the plaintiffs in Texas were always much stronger. And SCOTUS said there, despite an extraordinarily thorough opinion from the trial court, ‘not strong enough,’” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, told TPM. “It’s not really credible for the Court to say that a much weaker set of facts in California are strong enough.”
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.
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.
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.
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 Star Tribune had an insane graphic about the presence of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis. There are more immigration officers in the metro right now than local police officers.
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
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