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

What Will Judge Xinis Do Now?

The slo-mo constitutional clash in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia inched forward with a new filing overnight in which his attorneys are now seeking sanctions against the Trump administration – including individual officials – for stonewalling and defying court-ordered discovery into his wrongful deportation to prison in El Salvador.

Among the wide-ranging sanctions Abrego Garcia is seeking is a possible court order for Attorney General Pam Bondi and other key officials to turn over their personal devices for U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to review privately in her chambers.

The move to impose sanctions comes after what was supposed to be an expedited two-week discovery sprint ordered by Xinis on April 15 turned into a nearly two-month discovery marathon. Xinis ordered the discovery in part to determine if the Trump administration should be held in contempt of court for refusing to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. In court the day she ordered the discovery, Xinis was adamant that she would brook no more delays or foot-dragging and ordered lawyers to cancel vacations and drop everything else.

“Nearly sixty days, ten orders, three depositions, three discovery disputes, three motions for stay, two hearings, a week-long stay, and a failed appeal later, the Plaintiffs still have seen no evidence to suggest that the Defendants took any steps, much less ‘all available steps,’ to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States ‘as soon as possible’ so that his case could be handled as it would have been had he not been unlawfully deported,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argue in the latest filing.

The sanctions Abrego Garcia seeks asks the judge:

1. to make factual determinations that are adverse to the administration, such as formally finding that it did not communicate with El Salvador to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release prior to his May 21 indictment;
2. order the administration over its objections to produce the documents it has withheld in discovery thus far, deeming some its privileges waived by its misconduct;
3. or appoint a special master to investigate the administration’s “willful noncompliance” and identify which officials by name “willfully evaded” the court-ordered discovery, including possibly ordering the personal devices of key officials like Bondi turned over for the judge’s review;
4. impose accumulating fines on officials for each day the discovery defiance continues; and
5. hold the administration in civil contempt of court.

Notably Abrego Garcia, who was secretly indicted while this discovery dispute raged and subsequently returned to the United States to face charges of conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants, is not yet seeking sanctions for the weeks-long delay in complying with the court’s order to facilitate his return. Instead, he is focused on the administration’s alleged misconduct in defying the court’s discovery order by failing to produce the required materials and witness and raising frivolous objections and privileges.

That seems to be a strategic decision to avoid the harder questions of whether the courts can order the president to engage in negotiations with a foreign country, to demand the release from a foreign prison of someone wrongfully deported to their home country, and other stickier elements of this case about which the Supreme Court has already expressed reservations.

Meanwhile, in his criminal case, Abrego Garcia asked the judge to release him pending trial.

Trump Admin Admits To ‘Perfect Storm Of Errors’

In another wrongful deportation case, the Trump administration claimed a “perfect storm of errors” led it to deport Jordin Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador on May 7 despite an order from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals barring his removal. In the new filing this week, the administration also changed what it had previously told the appeals court about how the wrongful deportation happened.

Khalil Wins Initial Round

It took long enough, but U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of New Jersey ruled that the Trump administration cannot detain or deport Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. But Khalil won’t be released immediately, as the judge stayed his order until tomorrow to give the administration time to appeal his ruling.

The Purges: DOJ Edition

The Trump DOJ fired two more people who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the Mar-a-Lago classified documents, including a non-lawyer member of the support staff, Reuters reports.

Tina Peters Revenge?

Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has made an unprecedented demand for a huge volume of 2020 and 2024 election data from the state of Colorado, NPR reports. While the data demand is not explicitly connected to the criminal conviction of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, the Trump DOJ has already taken the unprecedented step of intervening in her federal appeal.

Trump’s Disturbing Ft. Bragg Speech Was Staged

New reporting from Military.com on the highly politicized speech President Trump gave this week at Ft. Bragg:

Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump’s recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance.

One unit-level message bluntly saying: “No fat soldiers.”

“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” another note to troops said.

Wasn’t Hard To See This Coming

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced eight new appointees to the CDC vaccine advisory committee he sacked – and at least a couple of them are real doozies, he NYT reports.

Fulbright Board Resigns Over Political Interference

The entire board of the Fulbright program resigned over what it said was political interference from the Trump administration in its selection of this year’s Fulbright scholars.

The NYT reported:

The board approved those scholars over the winter after a yearlong selection process, and the State Department was supposed to send acceptance letters by April, the people said. But instead, the board learned that the office of public diplomacy at the agency had begun sending rejection letters to the scholars based mainly on their research topics, they said.

The board posted its resignation statement here.

Quote Of The Day

“It angers me when I see these rioters trying to pull barricades out of the hands of police officers and shoving police officers to try and grab the barricades and break the perimeter … I can tell you that if they try to do that in Mobile, Alabama, the orthopedic hand surgeons will have one hell of a weekend fixing hands. That barricade can become a weapon.”–Mobile County, Alabama Sheriff Paul Burch, commenting on this weekend’s planned “No Kings” rally

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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.

Coming Up Snake Eyes

In a deeply unfortunate roll of the dice, the only three Trump appointees on the 16-judge D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ended up being randomly selected for June’s three-judge motion panel. That means they get the first bite at the apple on various emergency motions that come to the court and a chance to shape dramatically the procedural posture of some of the most important cases against the lawlessness of the Trump administration.

Yesterday, the three judges – Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker – issued an administrative stay blocking a major order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in the original Alien Enemies Case. The stay came as the Trump administration faced a deadline of today to propose to Boasberg how it would provide the due process that the Alien Enemies Act detainees at CECOT had been denied when they were removed in March.

If you want to get a little deeper into the history and procedure of the appeals court move, Chris Geidner has you covered. But one point he makes that I want to highlight is the administration’s foot-dragging for almost a week since Boasberg’s ruling, and then rushing to the appeals court at the last-minute while concurrently asking Boasberg to stay his own order. It looks like a tactic designed to add as much delay as possible into the calendar.

The temporary administrative stay won’t be the last word from the three-judge panel. They still must decide whether to freeze the order while the entire appeal proceeds, but the odds aren’t good. For what it’s worth, there’s no reason to believe the selection of the three Trump appointees for this month’s motion panel was anything more than random chance.

Still Waiting …

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is still blocking Judge Boasberg’s contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case. Because the appeals court entered what was supposed to be a temporary administrative stay, Boasberg has been unable to move forward since April 18, a “temporary” delay of almost two months now.

Pure Gaslighting

The Trump administration is trying to bring a swift end to the contempt of court proceeding in the Maryland case of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, arguing that the case is moot now that he has been returned to the United States.

In a new filing yesterday, the Trump DOJ didn’t just ignore the history of the administration’s repeated brazen defiance of court orders in the case. It pretended none of that ever happened: “In the face of Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, [plaintiffs] baselessly accuse Defendants of ‘foot-dragging and ‘intentionally disregard[ing] this Court’s and the Supreme Court’s orders,’ when just the opposite is true.”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are fiercely resisting the case being dismissed, urging Judge Paula Xinis to continue her inquiry into whether the administration was in contempt of court. Given her prior dismayed reactions in-court to the government’s misconduct, I would expect her to continue her inquiry if she finds a legal basis for doing so.

Trump Admin Still Drags Its Feet In Cristian Case

Still no word on the court-ordered return of Cristian from El Salvador in the other Maryland “facilitate” case. The Trump administration filed an update Friday that for the first time confirmed that Cristian remains at CECOT. But the administration has erected a fictional wall between DHS and State, with DHS (a party to the case) responding to the court that it’s up to the State Department (which is not a party) to negotiate Cristian’s return. I would anticipate the court or plaintiff counsel making moves at some point to get answers directly from State.

Trump’s Military Move: Live Coverage

TPM continues to run a liveblog with the major developments on President Trump’s military escalation in Los Angeles.

Gitmo Back In Play For Holding Migrants

The Trump administration could resume sending undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay as soon as today. The planned operation, reported by Politico and the WaPo, would be dramatically larger than the short-lived effort a few months ago to use Gitmo as a detention facility for migrants.

The migrants targeted for transfer to the base in Cuba come from a range of countries that includes U.S. allies in Europe. The home countries of the foreign nationals are reportedly not being notified of the transfers to Gitmo.

First Amendment Under Siege

I keep going back to the Trump memo calling up the National Guard equating protests – even absent violence – with rebellion. It wasn’t an accident or one-off, as this threat towards any protestors of his military parade this coming weekend in DC shows:

Trump says anybody who protests the military parade on Sunday will be met with “very heavy force”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-10T16:47:27.985Z

Terry Moran Gets The Boot From ABC News

ABC News, which kicked off the spate of dubious post-election settlement agreements with Donald Trump, has sent 28-year network veteran Terry Moran packing over his social media post critical of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Moran’s contract was reportedly set to expire Friday and will not be renewed.

Back To The Future

Here’s the key thing to note about President Trump’s decision to revert to the Confederate names of U.S. military installations: He’s re-naming the bases ostensibly in honor of people with the same names and initials as the original Confederate honorees in order to get around the law mandating the removal of Confederate symbols from the military. So it’s a squirrelly way to have all the racism without having to repeal the law.

Trump announces he's restoring the name to "Fort Robert E Lee" and other military installations that were named for Confederates

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-10T20:39:23.319Z

Smithsonian Bends The Knee

In an Orwellian irony, the board of the Smithsonian Institute has bowed to political influence from President Trump and ordered a full review of its public-facing content to make sure it contains no … political influence.

Meanwhile, In The Climate Space …

The Trump EPA is poised to announce the easing of a Biden-era regulation limiting mercury emissions from power plants and the elimination entirely of the limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Elon Musk Watch

In 2022-23, DOJ and DHS were sufficiently concerned that Elon Musk was a vector for malign foreign influence that they were actively tracking the foreign nationals coming and going to his properties, the WSJ reports.

Trump Tariffs Will Remain In Place For Now

“A federal appeals court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration’s request to keep the president’s far-reaching tariffs in effect for now but agreed to fast track its consideration of the case this summer,” the WSJ reports. 

Quote Of The Day

“It is clear that the bureau’s current leadership has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way. While I wish you all the best, I worry for American consumers.”–Cara Petersen, the acting head of enforcement for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a fiery farewell email after she resigned her position

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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.

Indiscriminate Numbers Games

President Trump’s dream of mass deportations has always suffered from logistical and practical obstacles that make the entire exercise part cruelty, part performance, and part salve of his fragile ego.

It falls to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to keep all the plates spinning, a role he happily embraces, but which comes with the inherent challenge of putting the “mass” in mass deportations.

And so it was that ICE officials found themselves being berated by Miller in late May that their arrest numbers weren’t high enough and the rhetorical focus on the worst of the worst needed to shift on the ground to focus on all undocumented immigrants, the WSJ reports:

Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.  

That kind of indiscriminate enforcement action has had the effect of sweeping up documented and undocumented, citizen and noncitizen, workers and criminals in a Kafkaesque crackdown that was sure to enflame tensions in immigrant and minority communities that were hardest hit.

The WSJ report on the indiscriminate and aggressive nature of the ICE sweeps is worth your time. No one anecdote captures the entire picture, but repeated over and over across the country, a pattern emerges – and the grievances associated with it.

It’s not hard to draw a straight line from reckless roundups to civil unrest to military action from Trump.

In other developments:

• In federal court in San Francisco, California sued Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth over the deployment of the National Guard over state objections.
• Some 2,000 guardsman and 500-700 marines have been deployed to Los Angeles, and the Pentagon said Monday night that another 2,000 National Guard troops were being mobilized.
• Attorney General Pam Bondi said violent Los Angeles protesters will face federal charges. At least nine have been charged so far.

What’s The End Game Here?

With unclear rules of engagement for the military and a vague, open-ended mission, it’s not clear what the path to deescalation might be – or if that’s even the plan.

As Politico reports about Trump’s troop deployment:

Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission.

The Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein cut through some of the legalese with a good thread that makes this important point: “But it would be a mistake to focus too much on which statutory power is being used here. What matters it that Trump is federalizing the Guard for the purpose of policing Americans’ protest activity. That’s dangerous for both public safety and democracy.”

For The Record

Kristi Noem on LA: "They're not a city of immigrants. They're a city of criminals."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-10T01:22:15.081Z

Pete Hegseth Watch

While overseeing a historic deployment of U.S. troops on American streets, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is, well, still Pete Hegseth:

• The White House is struggling to find qualified people to fill roles as senior advisers to Pete Hegseth because they either don’t want to work for him or don’t fit the bill politically, NBC News reports.
• The Pentagon inspector general looking into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal group chats is focused on whether the details of a military operation he shared were classified and if anyone ordered texts to be deleted, the WSJ reports.
• The Pentagon was allegedly “duped” by a DOGE staffer who falsely claimed to know of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified DoD leakers, The Guardian reports. The DOGE staffer denies the allegation.

Anti-Immigration Cases: Rule Of Law Update

• Alien Enemies Act: U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso ruled on the substance that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target the Tren de Aragua gang was unlawful.
• CECOT detainees: The Trump administration is appealing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling last week that it violated the due process rights of Venezuelan nationals when it deported them to a prison in El Salvador without notice or hearing.
• South Sudan: The detainees originally slated to be deported to South Sudan remain at a military base in Djibouti, the Trump administration told a court yesterday, and have been given attorney contact info and will be given access to telephones.

The Corruption: DOJ Edition

The White House dismantling of the crime-fighting capabilities of the Justice Department in the white collar realm is going to end up being the defining issue of this decade, with a cascading series of consequences ranging from simply more unbridled public corruption to the dire risk of a culture of corruption developing and implanting itself in American life. (I’ll concede that there’s a good argument such a culture already exists and produced two Trump presidencies.) Here’s the latest:

• Reuters goes deep on the Trump White House’s crippling of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section: dismantling its staff, bypassing it on charging decisions, and stripping its authority to file new cases.
• The Trump DOJ will only pursue a parred down range of foreign-bribery cases, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced. This come after a Trump executive order in February essentially froze cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

IMPORTANT: Déjà Vu All Over Again

The Trump White House is pushing hard for a rare and super controversial midterm redistricting in Texas to try to redraw the congressional map and give it a few more GOP seats so that it can hold on to the House majority.

In a sign of how serious the move is, the Texas House GOP delegation held an emergency meeting on the Hill last evening, the NYT reports. There’s a natural tension in such a scheme because drawing a map more favorable to the GOP overall means narrowing the partisan margins in the districts of GOP incumbents, which makes them more vulnerable.

You’ll recall that former Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX) muscled through a hugely controversial midterm redistricting in Texas in 2003 that shaped the national political landscape for years.

RFK Jr. Watch: Anti-Vax Edition

In an extraordinary move, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced in a WSJ op-ed that he has fired all 17 members of the committee that advises the CDC on immunizations. The decision directly contradicts a promise Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the decisive vote during his confirmation hearings, when he said he would not alter the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the NYT reports.

The Last True Fascist

John Ganz on the recent passing of Michael Leeden:

Ledeen might appear like a mere callous political opportunist, a dirty trickster, and he was, but it seems to me he was also a secret idealist, holding on to a dream of a non- or even anti-Nazi fascismo vero, something he took very seriously as an ideological project as he strenuously rejected the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism.

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