emptywheel Archives - Page 3 of 260

LaMonica McIver and Schrödinger’s Baraka

June 13, 2025/33 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

As I noted the other day, Alina Habba rushed to announce the indictment of LaMonica McIver, which names Ras Baraka as Individual-1, at 6:56PM on Tuesday night, an hour before polls closed in the election in which Baraka won the second-most votes. But it took most of a day before the indictment was docketed, meaning most coverage of the indictment relied on Habba’s press release. As a result, that coverage didn’t point out some of the gaping holes and contradictions in the story AUSA Mark McCarren, which Habba’s presser identified as part of a “Special Prosecutions Division,” told to get a grand jury to approve the charges (NPR addressed a few of the issues on Wednesday).

Those gaping holes and contradictions surely explain why McIver continues to express confidence she’ll be exonerated.

The facts of this case will prove was I was simply doing my job and will expose these proceedings for what they are: a brazen attempt at political intimidation. This indictment is no more justified than the original charges, and is an effort by Trump’s administration to dodge accountability for the chaos ICE caused and scare me out of doing the work I was elected to do. But it won’t work–I will not be intimidated. The facts are on our side, I’ll be entering a plea of not guilty, I’m grateful for the support of my community, and I look forward to my day in court.

The holes in the indictment — about permitting concerns raised by Newark, about GEO Group’s ownership of Delaney Hall, about the property lines at the facility, about McIver’s completion of an inspection after she allegedly assaulted several cops — obscure the complexity about who had authority to do what at the facility.

The ways in which DOJ has changed its story about key events will undermine key witnesses, starting with alleged victim Ricky Patel and extending to a guard whose story appears to have changed three times.

And the key disputed facts, about where Mayor Ras Baraka was, when — whom DOJ treats like he is Schrödinger’s cat — may blow this entire case out of the water.

The government has told more than six versions of the story about what happened at Delaney Hall on May 9:

DHS’ initial statement
Alina Habba’s initial tweet and early interview comments
The complaint charging Ras Baraka, sworn out (at uncertain time) by HSI Newark Special Agent in Charge Ricky Patel
The complaint charging McIver, treating Patel as Victim-1, sworn out by HSI Newark Special Agent Robert Tansey (who presumably reports to Patel)
The press release from Habba announcing the indictment
The McIver indictment

In addition, WaPo did a comprehensive analysis of what happened, and Baraka included a detailed timeline in his complaint against Patel and Habba. I’ve tried to document those competing stories in this table.

Start with several key details that do not appear in the McIver indictment — and so may not have been shared with the grand jury.

Unlike the complaint Victim-1 Ricky Patel swore out against Ras Baraka, neither the complaint nor the indictment charging LaMonica McIver mention that GEO owns Delaney Hall, the site of the confrontation (see the pink boxes). In the criminal complaint against Baraka, that relationship was a necessary part of claiming that Baraka trespassed on a federal facility, without which DOJ would not and likely does not have jurisdiction.

The Delaney Hall Facility currently operates as a federal immigration facility pursuant to a contract between the GEO Group, Inc., the entity that owns the Delaney Hall Facility, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). As a result of this contract, the Delaney Hall Facility has been acquired for the use of the United States and is under the jurisdiction of the United States.

That property relationship underlies several key other aspects of the confrontation that don’t show up in either of the McIver charging documents. First, Newark claims that Delaney Hall is not certified for its current use, over which Newark has actually sued the facility. Once you have even a dispute over the certification of the facility, than the Mayor of Newark has official business at the facility.

The fact that GEO, and not ICE, owns the property goes to whether Baraka was even trespassing at all. In the complaint against Baraka, Patel relied exclusively on the normal restrictions on entry — the chainlink fence, the No Trespassing signs, and the guard — to claim Baraka was trespassing. The problem with that is that at one point, a guard employed by GEO invited Baraka in.

The testimony of the guard (yellow boxes) is wildly inconsistent, as follows:

McIver complaint: Baraka was originally told he could not enter but was subsequently admitted because “the guard was under the impression that the Mayor was part of the Congressional delegation”
McIver indictment: Baraka was originally denied entry when he claimed he was part of the Congressional delegation, but then was let in because the guard was concerned for Baraka’s safety
Baraka lawsuit: The guard told Baraka he let him in to “calm the crowd”

That inconsistent testimony is important, because according to Baraka, when Patel told him to leave, Baraka told Patel he was invited on to the property, which the government now concedes but which, in real time, Patel disputed. This is, undoubtedly, a big part of the reason why Habba dismissed the complaint against Baraka. Not only is it not clear she had federal jurisdiction over a private facility in Baraka’s city, but when Patel filed the complaint, he at least knew that Baraka claimed to have been invited onto the property by a representative of GEO, and he may well have known that Baraka was right when he charged Baraka.

In other words, Victim-1 in the McIver indictment, Patel, left out key details in his sworn complaint, if not outright lied to a judge when claiming that Baraka was trespassing at all.

And that — the good faith understanding from both Baraka and the members of Congress that Baraka was not trespassing — is important background to the biggest discrepancy between the claims Baraka has made, what WaPo shows, and what Special Prosecutions Division AUSA Mark McCarren appears to have told the grand jury.

In the McIver charging documents (which include no timeline), Patel ordered Baraka to leave, he told him to place his hands behind his back, the members of Congress came out and started to make a stink, Baraka somehow exited out the gate, which is where the key confrontation took place.

Even in that story, there are two key discrepancies. The McIver charging documents call the land outside the gate, vaguely, “the unsecured area of the facility” or “just outside the security gate for the facility.” That is, the McIver documents imply that GEO (though they don’t mention GEO) owns the property both inside and immediately outside the gate. But Baraka calls that area, “public Newark property.” DOJ says GEO owns the land where the confrontation took place. The Mayor of Newark says it’s the city’s public land.

Perhaps the craziest discrepancy — and the reason I’m treating this as Schrödinger’s Baraka — is the description of how Baraka came to leave (green text).

Baraka complaint: He never left!
McIver complaint: “the Mayor was then moved outside the gate”
Habba presser: “the Mayor was escorted outside the secured gate” (in context, suggesting HSI did it)
McIver indictment: he “was escorted by his security detail”

Both Baraka’s lawsuit and the WaPo describe something totally different: he walked out, “arm-in-arm” with Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (Baraka’s lawsuit mentions that first he retrieved her phone from one of her staffers), by all accounts a successful effort by members of Congress to deescalate the situation.

In none of these scenarios was Baraka moved outside the gate by HSI. He left, whether arm-in-arm with Watson Coleman or escorted by his detail, of his own accord.

And then he was arrested.

He was ordered to leave, he left (even though he believed he had been invited by the property owner), and then he was arrested for trespassing.

Those discrepancies would be bad enough. But there’s a far bigger one. As the McIver charging documents tell it, the attempted arrest, Baraka’s departure, and then the successful arrest were one continuous event: Ricky Patel orders Ras Baraka to leave, attempts to arrest him, is thwarted by McIver, then proceeds outside the gate immediately to conclude the arrest. The effort by members of Congress to deescalate is instead portrayed as the beginning of an effort to thwart the arrest.

WaPo (and Baraka’s lawsuit) say it happened in two phases. First HSI ordered Baraka to leave, the members came out from the GEO waiting room, attempted to de-escalate, he left, then the members returned inside only to hear HSI premeditating a plan to arrest him even though he had already left the facility, after which they re-joined Baraka, this time in that area that DOJ claims is the unsecured property of GEO (only they don’t tell you it is GEO) and that the Mayor of Newark claims is public property.

For nearly 45 minutes, Baraka remained just inside the secured area, occasionally chatting with members of his security detail, according to time-stamped videos. Then, at around 2:33 p.m., Homeland Security agents exited the building and confronted Baraka. In snippets of the conversation captured in video, agents told Baraka he had to leave because he was not a member of Congress. The three members of Congress joined the discussion as it grew tense.

Minutes later, video shows, an agent took a step toward Baraka, and Watson Coleman can be heard urging calm.

Referencing that moment, the Justice Department’s complaint said a Homeland Security agent ordered the mayor to “put his hands behind his back and displayed his handcuffs.”

McIver grew animated, calling the agent’s intervention “unnecessary” and “ugly.” One of the agents can be heard in videos saying: “All right, then. Walk out.”

At 2:39 p.m., within moments of that remark, and six minutes after agents first confronted Baraka, he turned and walked away, arm-in-arm with Watson Coleman. The guard reopened the gate, and Baraka exited to an area in front of the facility, recessed from the sidewalk.

With concerns about Baraka’s presence seemingly resolved, the three House members returned to the building for a tour, according to interviews with congressional staffers. The mayor remained outside the gate, speaking with reporters and protesters. Inside the building, congressional staffers said, lawmakers saw agents huddled and overheard them discussing plans to arrest the mayor.

Menendez then quickly exited the building and approached the gate, videos show. He spoke to Baraka through the chain-link fence, warning that agents were going to arrest him.

According to Baraka’s timeline, five minutes elapsed between the time he left, HSI plotted his arrest, and then everyone came out and had that confrontation. And the members of Congress knew (this detail doesn’t make any DOJ documents and it’s likely they don’t have testimony from any of them) that HSI planned Baraka’s arrest even though he had already left. Or at least left the secured property, whatever the property status of the land outside the gate.

Here I am 1,700 words into this post, and I haven’t even gotten to several other key discrepancies in the documents.

The McIver charging documents mention that McIver was at Delaney Hall “allegedly to conduct a congressional oversight investigation,” but they don’t provide much detail, aside from Patel’s comments distinguishing Baraka from the members, about the legal protection for such things. They certainly don’t mention how long DHS kept the members waiting, which Baraka alleges (and WaPo backs) was over an hour. They claim that the Democrats planned a protest, but Baraka says that, instead, McIver invited Baraka for a press conference after the members toured the facility, which would have happened just before 2PM, over 40 minutes before the alleged assaults, if DHS hadn’t kept the members waiting.

That is, the McIver charging documents totally obscure her right to be on the premises.

Crazier still, even though both the complaint and indictment claim that McIver was “allegedly” there to conduct an inspection, neither explains that she did, in fact, conduct that inspection, nor do they explain that she did so — she was allowed back inside Delaney Hall — after she allegedly assaulted two different officers outside it.

This is how DOJ describes the second alleged assault: “McIVER pushed past V-2 while using each of her forearms to forcibly strike V-2 as she returned inside the secured area of Delaney Hall.” But then the story just ends. It appears that Special Prosecutions Division AUSA Mark McCarren didn’t bother to tell the grand jury that she didn’t just allegedly show up for an inspection, she did in fact conduct that inspection, with the victims’ permission, after she allegedly assaulted them.

Maybe I’m skeptical of cops who lie, but if I were in the jury, I’d acquit on all charges in less time than DHS left the members of Congress waiting that day.

Meanwhile, there’s unrest in Delaney Hall because — detainees say — they’re getting fed shitty food at irregular hours, precisely the kind of problem that oversight from Congress and Newark might have avoided.

Francisco Castillo, a Dominican immigrant who has been held at Delaney Hall since last week, said in a phone interview from the detention center on Tuesday that the facility was so overcrowded when he arrived that some detainees had to sleep on the floor. He said on Tuesday that the crowding issue had been recently resolved.

But he said detainees were being served dismal meals at irregular hours, an issue that was particularly affecting detainees who are diabetic and need to eat at regular times to control their blood sugar levels. He said detainees were often served small cartons of expired milk for breakfast. Dinners were sometimes not served until around 11 p.m., he said.

The living conditions grew so bad, he said, that a group of about 30 detainees had begun drafting a petition detailing the conditions that they could get to the public through their relatives and lawyers.

“Every day is a disaster with the food here,” Mr. Castillo, 36, who was detained by ICE at an immigration courthouse in New York City on June 4, said in Spanish.

At about 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, a woman who lives in Elizabeth, N.J., said she got a call from her partner, who has been detained at Delaney Hall since early last month. He was crying, she said, and described rising tension within the facility linked to frustration over food.

To her great credit, McIver remains on the case, issuing the following statement about the rising unrest at the facility.

I am carefully monitoring the situation unfolding at Delaney Hall, and am in contact with local and state law enforcement and officials. I have serious concerns about the reports of abusive circumstances at the facility. Even now, as we are hearing reports from news organizations and advocates on the ground about a lack of food and basic rights for those inside, the administration appears to be stonewalling efforts to learn the truth. My office has reached out to ICE for answers. ICE has not yet provided them.

This case is dogshit, and it looks likely that Mark McCarren only succeeded in getting his indictment by keeping key details from the grand jury. But it may not even survive to trial, because when laid out side by side, there’s far more evidence of DHS lying to judges than there is of crimes by Democrats trying to fulfill their jobs as Mayor and Members of Congress.

Update: This was just beginning to be reported when I first posted this post. But four detainees at Delaney Hall escaped through an external drywall wall.

Share this entry

Three Data Points from the Padilla Assault

June 13, 2025/66 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

I want to call out three data points regarding the assault of Senator Alex Padilla yesterday.

First, in media appearances and on this video, Senator Padilla explained that he was in the Federal building for a scheduled briefing on the Federal response in Los Angeles. There was a delay so he asked to go to the presser. As he describes it, a Guard and an FBI Agent escorted him to the presser.

While I was waiting for the briefing, I learned that just down the hall from where I was, Secretary Noem from the Department of Homeland Security was having a press conference, Now Secretary Noem and the Department — we have been calling on and we have been sending letters to since the beginning of the year requesting more information as to what and why they are doing, with little to no response. And so I thought let me go over there, listen in on the press conference, maybe they’re sharing some important information. And while I did that, escorted over there by a National Guardsman and an FBI agent, …

This makes Dan Bongino’s description of the event entirely deceptive.

If the FBI brought him to the presser, it doesn’t matter whether he had his Senate pin. The FBI knew his identity. And yet an FBI agent was involved in the assault on Padilla regardless.

Secondly, in a presser, Gavin Newsom returned to comments about his call, last Friday night, with Donald Trump.

Oh, I would love to share the readout but I revere the office of presidency so I’ll keep it in confidence. He has quite literally made up components of that conversation. Um, he’s been a stone cold liar about what he said we talked about. He never discussed the National Guard, period, full stop. I would love to share with you what we actually talked about. That would send shivers up your spine.

[snip]

We discussed for a nanosecond Los Angeles and he immediately zigged and zagged to seven or eight other topics. Some extraordinarily familiar. And some extraordinarily remarkable considering the world we’re living in.

Again, after a hearing before Charles Breyer on the lawsuit, at which the substance of that call — whether Trump actually raised the Guard — was an issue, Newsom accused Trump of making up components of the conversation and then said the actual content of the call “would send shivers up your spine” but he wasn’t sharing it because “I revere the office of the presidency.”

I don’t doubt that some deference to the Office of the President is one reason Newsom hasn’t told us what Trump said. After all, he no doubt still harbors ambitions to one day occupy that office. The tenor of the lawsuit challenging Trump adopts a sober legal approach, avoiding some things — like Whiskey Pete’s apparent ignorance of basic facts about the deployment (such as whether the Marines would come from Camp Pendleton or, as is the case, Twentynine Palms and when they finished training for the deployment) — that would be great politically but shift the focus away from Trump and onto Hegseth’s incompetence. In the lawsuit (as distinct from his public messaging, including this presser) Newsom has been making a constitutional argument, not a political one.

The government seems to understand it is vulnerable to Newsom’s claim that Trump fabricated parts of the conversation. As I noted, in their response to the lawsuit they relied on an erroneous Fox News report on the timing of the call, not the readout of the call that the White House presumably has.

At approximately 10:23pm PT that night, President Trump called Governor Newsom. The President informed Governor Newsom of the dangers that federal personnel and property were being subjected to and directed him to take action to stop the violence.4

4
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-brings-receipts-he-called-newsom-amid-la-riots-california-gov-claims-wasnt-even-voicemail.amp; see also https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/09/watch-governor-newsom-discusses-donald-trumps-mess-inlos-angeles/ (Governor Newsom concurring that the call took place)

They do not include any other source to substantiate the claim that “the President informed Governor Newsom,” and in the hearing yesterday DOJ did not back the specific claims Trump and Steve Cheung made to Fox (though Brett Shumate did claim that something about the call led Trump to conclude the laws were not being executed, one basis DOJ relied on to claim the usurpation was legal).

And so, Newsom hinted at more, but claimed he couldn’t share it — as if threatening to share the real content of the call would damage Trump (or make his depravity clear).

I mean, it’s clear Trump said something. After all, before the call, Trump threatened to cut off all funding to CA (a threat that has not yet manifested, even though it was presented as imminent). After the call, Newsom came out with two messages: Trump is a “Stone cold liar” and “there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.”

I suspect Newsom is daring Trump to make him share the content of the call (and, likely, testing to see what kind of records Trump is willing to show). I suspect Newsom that call is important not just because of what Trump didn’t say, about the Guard deployment, but what he did say before he invaded California.

I suspect Trump tried to make a deal. Trump tried to get Newsom to work for him. And when Newsom refused, Trump invaded.

Which brings me to the last data point. In one clip of the NBC footage from the Padilla assault — which, of course, came just as Kristi Noem claimed she was going to liberate Los Angeles from government by their duly elected Governor and Mayor — Peter Hamby spied Corey Lewandowski overseeing the aftermath of the assault.

Lewandowski, of course, has a history of assaulting people as he removed them from Trump events.

What gets made of the Padilla assault remains very much contested. Right wing propagandists — from Noem and her staffers to Bongino to members of Congress — are trying to claim that a Latino man obviously couldn’t be assumed to be a Senator elected by 6.6 million Californians, not even if an FBI agent escorted him into that room. That response gives up the game, of course: this was Trump’s racist Administration treating one of the most powerful Latino’s in the country just like they’re treating the day laborers and farmworkers they’re chasing down fields.

But it comes amid a larger context — the context in which Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump are directly combatting whether Trump may be king.

Update: Corrected the timing of Newsom’s comment. It happened after Breyer issued his ruling.

Update: NYT quotes Padilla claiming Lewandowski came running down the hall telling people to let him go.

On the videos, Mr. Padilla appeared stunned but repeatedly said he was a U.S. senator. In an interview hours later, Mr. Padilla said that he had demanded to know why he had been detained and where he was being escorted “when of all people, Corey Lewandowski” — a combative former Trump campaign aide and adviser to Ms. Noem — “comes running down the hall and he starts yelling, ‘Let him go! Let him go!’”

Update: In response to James Comer and Clay Higgins’ excitement about targeting Newsom and Karen Bass for investigation, Newsom’s office promises, “some highly unusual communications from the White House” and then, in the next tweet, highlighs Newsom’s comment.

So, yeah, he was hoping someone would force him to turn this over and two of the dumbest members of Congress complied.

Share this entry

Snake Guys: Trump’s Invasion of California Risks a Literal Firestorm in California [Updated]

June 12, 2025/51 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

In Jimmy Kimmel’s attack on Trump’s authoritarian interference in California last night, he recalled how, earlier this year, Trump claimed California had so many fires because they don’t sweep its forest floors.

It was a funny dig. Except it is also dead serious.

As laid out in California’s bid for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order filed Tuesday, among the problems with Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard is not just that Trump usurped Gavin Newsom’s authority to command the Guard and incited further unrest.

It also steals resources that California relies on to combat forest fires (and fentanyl trafficking).

Defendants’ unlawful federalization of 4,000 California National Guard members, over the repeated objections of Governor Newsom, diverts necessary state resources. See Eck Dec. ¶ 32 (noting the California Military Department has “has identified and committed 4,600 service members to achieve state specific missions, which is 38% of the available strength”); id. ¶ 33 (“In 2025, there have already been 3,332 services members activated for 89,061 duty days, indicating the state will need every available service member to meet the State’s operational needs.”). Most members of the California National Guard serve in a reserve capacity, meaning they work in civilian roles when not serving as part-time militia forces, often in specialized positions. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 21, 37. As one pertinent example, 2,500 California National Guard members were activated in response to some of the most destructive fires in Los Angeles County that occurred in early January 2025. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 35-36. Likewise, the federalized force includes elements of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team that serve in Taskforce Rattlesnake, the State’s specialized fire combat unit. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 14, 39-40. The 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team also includes Counterdrug Taskforce members that specialize in providing support to stop the trafficking of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Id. ¶¶ 15, 42-43. Members of the California National Guard also serve key roles in a variety of functions, from defending the state from cyber threats to conducting emergency traffic control. Id. ¶¶ 44-46. In short, Defendants’ federalization of the California National Guard jeopardizes vital resources on which the State depends to protect itself from emergencies, including the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team’s specialized fire suppression and drug interdiction teams. Id. ¶¶ 47-50.

In short, Defendants’ unlawful federalization of a significant subset of the California National Guard for 60 days at the expense of state resources jeopardizes the safety and welfare of the state’s citizens on two fronts: first, it removes these servicemembers from their vital roles combating drug trafficking in California’s border zones and fighting wildfires and second, their deployment risks inflaming an unstable and dangerous situation of Defendants’ own making, putting property and countless lives at unnecessary risk. See id. ¶¶ 13-16. [emphasis original]

The Deputy General Counsel in California’s Military Department, Paul Eck, described the specialized roles the Guard plays in combatting fires in a declaration accompanying the TRO request. There are 14 Task Force Rattlesnake crews that focus full-time on wildfire prevention (the kind of mitigation Trump demanded in January) and response.

38. For example, the California National Guard operates FireGuard, a wildfire satellite detection mission. During the last 18 months, FireGuard activated at least fire Emergency State Active-Duty Force Packages, consisting of 360 personnel total, in support of the Bridge Fire, Line Fire, and Park Fire in California. One hundred-forty additional Emergency State Active-Duty Military Police Soldiers were also activated to operate and augment Traffic Control Points at the Line Fire and Bridge Fire.

39. The California National Guard also operates Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, a joint taskforce with CalFire to mitigate and prevent fires through fuels mitigation projects and direct fire suppression. Task Force Rattlesnake provides 14 full-time, year-round Type I Hand Crews to reduce fuels and respond to fire incidents and other emergencies across the State. Each Task Force Rattlesnake crewmember is trained to Firefighter 1C standards, which require at least 540 hours of training. Each of California’s 14 Crews are staffed with a minimum of 22 California National Guard personnel and maintain a minimum of 22 Firefighter 1C trained crewmembers (308 personnel in total).

40. Over the past 18 months, Task Force Rattlesnake responded to at least 738 wildland firefighting response missions, covering 10,243 acres of land. [my emphasis]

Best as I can tell, those filings were submitted around 11AM on Tuesday.

Around 1:30PM, a wildfire in Apple Valley was reported. The now-4,200 acre fire is currently just 10% contained.

Having predicted that Trump’s usurpation of control over California’s National Guard might deprive the state other other emergency response resources on Tuesday, yesterday at 9AM (my screen cap is Irish time, so ET+5 and PT+8), Newsom pointed to the way Trump’s federalization of the Guard has depleted those dedicated fire response Guardsmen.

Trump’s bozo-the-clown response to the TRO request (which forgot to include its Table of Authorities and cited a Fox News story that misrepresents when Newsom and Trump spoke, all the while hiding that Trump can’t even remember when that happened) mentions fires or fireworks nine times — claiming at one point that protestors “lit fires in dumpsters and trans bins,” whatever “trans bins” are. (Whatever they are, they don’t seem like the kind of federal property to which Whiskey Pete Hegseth can assign Guardsmen and Marines.)

But Trump’s response doesn’t address how he’ll undermine efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking and wildfires. Trump’s response doesn’t address how his actions will make California less safe.

In January, Trump lectured California about preventing fires; then he manufactured an emergency to steal the personnel who perform that role.

In January, Trump declared emergencies because (he claims) Mexico, Canada, and China aren’t doing enough to combat fentanyl trafficking. Then he manufactured a different emergency via which he stole some of the personnel California uses to respond to that threat.

Even on Trump’s own terms, Trump is making California less safe.

Update: Paul Eck filed an updated declaration to accompany the state’s reply. He describes over half of the specialized firefighting members.

6. Task Force Rattlesnake, California’s highly trained fire mitigation and ‘ prevention and direct fire suppression unit, lost 190 out of its total 340 members to the Title 10 federal activation. A reduction of 55.88% of California National Guard’s fire prevention and fighting force.

7. The negative impacts of the reduction in force to Task Force Rattlesnake are imminent.

8. Prior to the Title 10 Federal activation of California National Guard forces, Task Force Rattlesnake (Rattlesnake) maintained Fourteen (14) Type 1 Wildfire Handcrews. Post the mobilization, Rattlesnake has been whittled down to Nine (9) Type 1 crews.

9. The reduction in the number of Rattlesnake Type 1 crews has limited the CMD’s, and consequently Cal Fire’s, ability to conduct ground fuels reduction missions, and more importantly, it has negatively impacted CMD’s ability to respond to wildfires.

10. The consequences may be felt soon. As of June 11 there are 13 fires over 10 acres burning in California, including the Ranch Fire in San Bernardino which has consumed over 4,200 acres. If it continues to grow at its current rate of spread, it would necessitate the use of Rattlesnake. [emphasis mine]

He also described that 31% of CA’s drug interdiction team has been affected.

Docket Newsom v. Trump

Share this entry

Pam Bondi’s Four Political Prosecutions

June 12, 2025/21 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Alina Habba announced the indictment of LaMonica McIver at 6:56PM on Tuesday night, an hour before polls in the New Jersey gubernatorial primary — in which Ras Baraka, referred to as Individual 1 in the indictment, ended up being the second-highest vote-getter — closed. The timing was dictated by a hearing scheduled for the next day, not the primary, but after being admonished by Magistrate Judge André Espionsa, it was an inappropriate rush to announce her trophy before polls closed, particularly since it took almost a day to get the indictment docketed.

There was a lot of shitty reporting based on Habba’s press release about the arrest.

I’ll unpack the indictment (which adds a misdemeanor instance of the two felony charges, 18 USC 111, that were announced in the complaint). The story Alina Habba tells about Baraka keeps changing, and that’s before you consider the parts of the story she doesn’t tell (and undoubtedly didn’t tell the grand jury that indicted the case).

But first I want to lay out elements of a pattern.

This is the fourth instance where Pam Bondi’s DOJ has charged a Democrat who did not meekly collude in DHS’ immigration gulag: Milwaukee Judge Hanna Dugan, Baraka, McIver, and David Huerta (they had to dismiss the charges against Baraka, and he is suing for malicious prosecution).

A pattern is emerging.

All of these cases were charged as complaint, even though both the Dugan and McIver case had time to go before a grand jury.

In the three assault-realted cases, Homeland Security has attested them; these may be men moved from their day job hunting international crime to carrying out Stephen Miller’s gulag.

In all cases, Pam Bondi’s people did something — posting a picture of Hannah Dugan handcuffed, Habba making false claims about Baraka and McIver on her personal Xitter account and then announcing the McIver indictment before polls closed in New Jersey, Acting US Attorney Bill Essayli posting about the Huerta assault before it was charged — that violates DOJ’s media guidelines. In the assault related cases, HSI arguably assaulted a Democrat doing something legal (Congressional and Mayoral oversight in the New Jersey case, peaceful protest on a public sidewalk in Huerta’s case), and charged them for it — though DHS has done that with non-public citizens as well.

None of this means these cases (Baraka’s excepted) will fail. It means the people Bondi keeps charging even after being admonished in the Baraka case (and the Eric Adams case) will be able to point back to an increasing pattern.

Hannah Dugan docket

Ras Baraka criminal docket

Ras Baraka civil docket

LaMonica McIver docket

David Huerta docket

Share this entry

Banging on a Gate: Pam Bondi Found a Cyber Investigator Who Doesn’t Check Phone Logs!

June 10, 2025/97 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Less than three weeks ago, Pam Bondi’s DOJ got admonished by a Magistrate Judge for charging first, investigating latter.

When dismissing Ras Baraka’s charges on May 21, Magistrate Judge André Espinosa scolded the AUSA present — and by proxy, DOJ — for arresting Newark’s Mayor before doing basic investigation.

The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office. An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.

It’s precisely that commitment to rigorous 19 investigation and thoughtful prosecution that has 20 characterized the distinguished history of your Office, Mr. Demanovich, particularly over the last two decades. The bench and the bar have witnessed in that period, the diligence and care demonstrated by prior U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, whose leadership has consistently upheld the highest standards of prosecutorial ethics and professionalism. Their legacy is one of careful deliberate action where charges were brought only after exhaustive evidence gathering and a thorough consideration of all facts That bedrock principle, consistently honored by your predecessors, is the foundation upon which the credibility and effectiveness of your Office rests.

So let this incident serve as an inflection point and a reminder to uphold your solemn oath to the people of this District and to your client, Justice itself, and ensure that every charge brought is the product of rigorous investigation and earned confidence in its merit mirroring the exemplary conduct that has long defined your Office.

The apparent rush in this case culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges suggests failure to adequately investigate to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.

But just 18 days later, Pam Bondi’s DOJ charged another prominent Democrat — this time, SEIU CA President David Huerta — via complaint, without first doing basic investigation. The complaint, which was released before Huerta’s initial appearance yesterday, charges Huerta with one count of conspiring to impede an officer, a felony (h/t to Meghann Cuniff for releasing the complaint).

The incident occurred outside of this fast fashion factory, where officers were conducting a search.

As Bondi’s DOJ did with Ras Baraka (the charges that were dismissed) and LaMonica McIver (she has a hearing tomorrow), ICE team members physically grappled with their target, and then arrested them for the interaction. In this case, agents picked up Heurta and knocked him over, knocking his head into a curb and wrenching what he said was a bad shoulder in the process of cuffing him. He went to the hospital for treatment during his weekend detention.

There are two elements that have to be proven to convict Huerta of this felony: first, that the defendant used force, intimidation, or threats to induce a US official to stop doing his job. When this same charge was used against January 6 militias, prosecutors relied on actual assaults of cops, threats to spray them, military formation and kit, and threats to assassinate members of Congress. All of it threatened physical violence and even death.

The closest such threat to these guys was someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged — who told officers to shoot themselves.

As a crowd gathered outside of the vehicular gate, individuals in the crowd began screaming expletives at law enforcement officers through the gate in an attempt to intimidate them. For example, one individual yelled “I want you to kill yourself! Go home and drink a lot of vodka and shoot yourself with your own god damn revolver!”

As to Huerta specifically, the affiant of this complaint claimed that Huerta’s banging on the gate to the facility was an “attempt to intimidate us,” and pointed to Huerta’s repeated taunts about his mask and claimed that this was necessarily an attempt to dox and intimidate the officers “in the future.”

I told HUERTA that if he continued to block the gate, he would be arrested. HUERTA replied “I can’t hear you through your fucking mask.” Others in the crowd repeatedly asked me and other law enforcement officers to take our masks off and attempted to film our faces and badges in an apparent attempt to intimidate us. Based on my training and experience, I know that protestors often do this so that they can publish identifying information about law enforcement officers online.1 That way, others can harass or threaten the law enforcement officers in the future.

The affiant’s name is redacted in several places in the affidavit, but not in the section where he introduces his background. He doxed himself, while citing the imagined threat of doxing as the intimidation necessary to sustain these charges.

But it’s the conspiracy part of this that is particularly nutty. Prosecutors need to show that Huerta entered into an agreement with at least one other person to intimidate an ICE team to stop them from doing their job.

As a threshold matter, the complaint presents no evidence that Huerta or anyone else knew what the law enforcement officers were doing — executing a judicial search warrant rather than conducting a raid based on an administrative warrant. That may matter to proving intent.

More importantly, the affiant just points to person after person and says, well maybe that indicates a conspiracy.

A woman provided details of the law enforcement presence into her phone. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Protestors who arrived at the site — video-taped by an undercover officer!! — were communicating with each other. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta was “apparently typing text into his digital device while present at the protest.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta lives nine miles away from the garment factory, so had to have learned of ICE activity from someone “coordinating a protest at this location.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Someone — no tie to Huerta is alleged, and there’s no indication he was arrested — attempted to padlock the gate. Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Huerta said, “What are you going to do, you can’t arrest us all,” which the affiant presents as proof that “he and the others had planned in advance of arrival to disrupt the operation.” Maybe that was a conspiracy.

Nowhere does the affiant even allege that Huerta and the others entered into a conspiracy to intimidate the beleaguered ICE officers standing behind a 7-foot steel fence, which protestors didn’t try to breach when it opened, remaining all the time on a public sidewalk. Rather, he alleges a conspiracy to disrupt what the protesters might have thought was an ICE raid, meaning any attempt to provide proof of a conspiracy to impede officers by intimidating or threatening them is almost nonexistent. And he repeatedly calls this a protest, even while describing Huerta using the language of protests and pickets.

One of the nuttiest parts of this is that the affiant — the guy who cited the threat of doxing as proof of intimidation and then doxed himself — is a senior HSI Agent pulled off his normal duty conducting cyber financial investigations, the kind of thing that normally targets international crypto-facilitated crimes.

I am a Supervisory Special Agent (“SSA”) with the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”). I currently supervise the Cyber Financial investigations group at the HSI Los Angeles office.

The bread and butter of cyber investigations are digital tracks: cell phone, social media, and financial records.

The FBI collected reams and reams of such things before charging the aforementioned 18 USC 372 conspiracies against Jan6 militias. There were Signal and Telegram chats, Parler posts, saved communications from walkie-talkie chats during the riot, reported conversations from a number of cooperating witnesses, on top of the actual assaults of cops and weapons and direct threats.

And this guy, whose forté is to collect such things … hasn’t. He refers to Huerta’s digital device twice, but doesn’t say whether he tried to exploit it. He refers to social media posts (even while assuming the woman who first reported from the scene was using a videoconference app rather than just posting to TikTok or something), but he doesn’t cite a single post. He doesn’t even have phone records — available via subpoena even on a weekend — to identify with whom, if any, of the other protestors Huerta was really communicating.

Ryan Ribner, who wouldn’t have gotten where he was in his day job without highly developed skills at collecting and analyzing digital tracks, hasn’t (claimed to have) done any of that.

Another instance of charge first, investigate later.

There are several indications that may be the point.

First, there’s that undercover officer, who was filming the entire time but apparently didn’t produce a single video that could substantiate a conspiracy. This protest was miniscule. Why was there an undercover officer present at all? Did it have everything to do with Huerta’s presence (the undercover, as described, seemed focused on Huerta)?

Our trusty cyber expert also suggests that the van entering the gate of the facility — the predicate for making Huerta move and therefore the predicate to tackling him, injuring him, and then arresting him — may not, after all, be the only entrance. He describes that “as far as I was aware,” it was.

As far as I was aware, this gate was the only location through which vehicles could enter or exit the premises.

I wonder whether his awareness has changed over the weekend.

As this goes forward, it’s likely that our intrepid cyber investigator will actually subpoena some phone records, do the kind of thing he has been doing for over a decade. It’s likely he will then try to substantiate a conspiracy for which he has presented no more than speculation. Given his conflation of what he himself calls a protest and the intimidation and physical force contemplated in 18 USC 372, given the calls — including from Trump — to substantiate some organized background behind the larger protests in a city of 10 million, he may well imagine a conspiracy in SEIU’s organized protests.

Protests are what unions do, and SEIU is an enormously important union with close ties to the Democratic party. Will official and private communications among SEIU personnel planning protests look like plans for protests? Yes, of course. And DOJ will claim that banging on a gate is so intimidating to a bunch of armed law enforcement officers standing behind it that those plans for protests amount to a felony.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ first assaulted and injured, then charged, a very important labor leader with a conspiracy charge the evidence for which they didn’t even bother to look for.

Yet.

And that seems to be the point.

Update: The crack staff in Los Angeles’ US Attorney’s Office finally docketed the case. They asked for Huerta to be detained (which, I guess, is how they got a judge to impose a $50K bond)!

Share this entry

How Can Pete Hegseth Invade California without a Babysitter?

June 9, 2025/135 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Back when Whiskey Pete Hegseth had trusted advisors by his side, he launched an ill-considered escalation against the Houthis based on Stephen Miller’s vibes about Trump’s views. He shared probably-classified details, in advance, about the attack on Signal. According to WSJ, he “drew resources from efforts in Asia to deter China and pushed back maintenance schedules for carriers.” And, after several months and two F/A-18s later, he packed up, having achieved nothing, and went home.

Since then, he fired those trusted advisors. According to the Guardian, the process that led to their firing appears to have been driven by rumor spread by a guy taking them out.

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.

[snip]

In particular, one Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell – or any of the fired aides – had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.

[snip]

Still, the Trump advisers who reeled from the claim also eventually told Hegseth they were concerned by the optics of Parlatore, who had been close to the former chief of staff Kasper, running an investigation that targeted Kasper’s perceived enemies in the office.

Curiously, Guardian’s Hugo Lowell neglects to mention that Tim Parlatore was a Trump defense attorney — indeed, he vouched that Trump wasn’t hoarding any more classified documents — until he blabbed his mouth one day.

So that was then: Hegseth took action. Bungled that action. Fired the competent people around him.

This is now: Donald Trump just gave Whiskey Pete open-ended authority to attack US cities, in the name of protecting ICE deployments.

I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations. Further, I direct and delegate actions as necessary for the Secretary of Defense to coordinate with the Governors of the States and the National Guard Bureau in identifying and ordering into Federal service the appropriate members and units of the National Guard under this authority. The members and units of the National Guard called into Federal service shall be at least 2,000 National Guard personnel and the duration of duty shall be for 60 days or at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense. In addition, the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.

After usurping control of the California National Guard, Hegseth is also prepping a Marine deployment, just in case.

Oh, and he’s also engaged in a whole bunch of dick-wagging on Xitter, on his personal account (he hasn’t posted on his official account since Friday, making me wonder whether he lost the password or the password holder to that account).

Again, he’s doing all that without the kind of trusted advisors he had when he bolloxed the Yemen attack.

In fact, NBC describes that as he is directing an attack on a US city, the White House is attempting, but failing, to find him some babysitters.

The White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a series of missteps that have shaken confidence in his leadership, but it has so far found no suitable takers, according to four current and former administration officials and a Republican congressional aide.

Top Defense Department jobs, including the defense secretary’s chief of staff, are normally considered prestigious and typically attract multiple qualified candidates. But at least three people have already turned down potential roles under Hegseth, according to a former U.S. official, the defense official and a person familiar with the matter.

[snip]

Vance and Wiles have been searching for candidates who could support Hegseth ever since, according to three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official. So far, though, the administration has not had much luck identifying people who are either willing to work for Hegseth or who fit the bill politically. And the White House has rejected some people Hegseth wants to hire, while Hegseth has rejected some of the White House’s candidates.

He is failing to do the day job — like completing a budget (though Kash Patel also failed to get his budget done on time) — of the Secretary of Defense and is primarily supported by an aide the White House doesn’t trust.

Hegseth now leans heavily on a former military aide, Ricky Buria, who retired from the military in April hoping he could serve as Hegseth’s chief of staff, a civilian position. But White House and Pentagon officials view Buria as a political novice who had reportedly been critical of Trump and Vance in private. (A Defense Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from Buria.)

As a result, White House officials rejected Hegseth’s plan to hire Buria as his chief of staff, one of the defense officials and an administration official said. Despite that, Buria was seen with Hegseth during his recent trip to Asia in a workout video posted on social media.

[snip]

The infighting helped delay plans for “Golden Dome,” Trump’s signature missile defense program to defend the U.S. homeland, officials said. It has also contributed to the lack of a Pentagon budget, which raised frustrations among Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom supported Hegseth in his tight confirmation battle.

We’re getting closer and closer to the moment when the White House will have to admit what we all told it, back in January: Whiskey Pete is manifestly unfit for his job. He has neither the temperament nor the experience to do this job.

And at the moment, he doesn’t even have the aides — the White House, after several months of trying, can’t find him those aides — that, he said during his confirmation hearing, would help compensate for his lack of relevant experience.

And that’s the guy that Trump just put in charge of usurping California’s National Guard and — possibly — leading a Marine invasion of Los Angeles?

Update: Oh it gets worse!!

The guy behind the claim that NSA intercepts showed Hegseth’s reliable aides were the leakers was someone Elon implanted via DOGE at DOD. And no one cared that Forbes caught him doctoring his resume.

The adviser, Justin Fulcher, suggested to Hegseth’s then chief of staff Joe Kasper and Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, that he knew of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified the leakers.

Fulcher offered to share the supposed evidence as long as he could help run the investigation, three of the people said. But when he sat down with agents over a week later, it became clear he had no evidence of a wiretap, and the Pentagon had been duped.

The problem was that before investigators debunked the claims by Fulcher, who was previously found to have embellished his resume, the damage was done: Trump advisers had been told by Parlatore about “smoking gun” evidence incriminating three aides, and Hegseth had already fired them.

Share this entry

No, Trump Voters Did Not Vote for This

June 9, 2025/34 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

A disavowal of Stephen Miller’s immigration crackdown by Ileana Garcia, one of the founders of Latinas for Trump, has generated a lot of attention and some outrage.

Many lefties are criticizing Garcia for perceived denial about who and what she voted for, or for being a dumbass for pretending they didn’t enable this. It’s absolutely true that anyone who voted for Trump voted for the way he deployed bigotry, twice, to win. Garcia owns that.

But she didn’t vote for the specific crackdown that is currently going on. And the distinction matters.

The pushback against Garcia’s comment was largely a response to Miami Herald’s headline. “‘Inhumane:’ Latinas for Trump founder condemns White House immigration crackdown,” or a few paragraphs taken out of context.

Her full statement — as well as that of Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, to which she was responding — is more nuanced than that. Both are complaining about the practice of arresting people as they attend court hearings or routine check-ins as part of adjudication of legal claims. Here’s Garcia’s comment.

[W]hat we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings—in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims.

Salazar explained the point at more length.

Arrests in immigration courts, including people with I-220A and pending asylum cases, the termination of the CHNV program, which has left thousands exposed to deportation, and other similar measures, all jeopardize our duty to due process that every democracy must guarantee.

I remain clear in my position: anyone with a pending asylum case, status-adjustment petition, or similar claim deserves to go through the legal process.

That is, both women (and I presume Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez, with whom Salazar says she’ll be meeting with Kristi Noem after several weeks of seeking a meeting) are primarily complaining that, to ratchet up arrests, ICE is arresting people as they arrive for scheduled meetings that are part of their due process to remain in the US.

This is the tactic that lefties have condemned when it happened to people like Mohsen Mahdawi or Carolina or Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda or Carol Hui or VML’s mother, every one of them the subject of local or national attention.

You can argue that these Cuban-Americans are mostly pushing to protect their own communities; Salazar specifically mentioned the parole covering Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants, which Trump recently revoked with SCOTUS approval. You’d be right! Four South Florida politicians are fighting to protect their constituents.

You can argue Garcia should have seen this coming when Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller falsely accused Haitian migrants of eating house pets. You’d be right! Of course, that comment targeted Haitians in Ohio, not Cubans in South Florida. Salazar even specifically excluded Haitians from those migrants fleeing the “most brutal regimes in our hemisphere.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s promise to deport millions was premised on deporting immigrants with no legal basis to be in the US, not those who are abiding by a legal process to stay (of which Florida must have a disproportionate number).

No person voted for that because that’s not what Trump ran on (though Miller and JD did call the Haitians illegal, which should have been the tip-off).

And even if Garcia and Salazar were making a more general comment — that Stephen Miller’s focus on longterm migrants, rather than just criminal aliens (both women use somewhat ambiguous language here, with Garcia using the term “criminal aliens” and Salazar referring to “criminal[s] here illegally”) — they’d have some basis for their argument.

I contemplated reposting this entire post, from Day 8 of Trump 2.0, to address this issue. But the record shows that:

During a key part of the campaign, Trump, Miller, and Republican members of Congress claimed there were hundreds of thousands of aliens known to have committed a crime wandering the streets; it was based on a misrepresentation of DHS’s tracker of aliens anywhere in the US, the vast majority of whom are in prison either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. Those were the people Trump promised to deport; he just lied about how many of them there were.
Miller built another part of his campaign on a lie about Tren de Aragua, and when the Intelligence Community debunked that lie both before and after he relied on it in an attempt to bypass due process, he lied some more. Those were the Venezuelan criminals Miller made up who would be covered by the CHNV parole cited by Salazar.
Within a week of inauguration, as experts began to predict the inevitable outcome of Miller’s ICE quotas (then half of what he has since ratcheted them up to) — that ICE would focus on easy targets who were not known criminals rather than hunting down the far rarer criminal alien Miller lied about during the campaign — Miller started redefining the term “criminal alien” to encompass the easier, peaceful targets his quotas would inevitably target. CATO (currently one of Miller’s favorite targets) reported that this focus on numbers rather than criminals would have the effect of drawing law enforcement away from the most dangerous people.

Those are the people — long-term US residents not known to have violated any law — whom Miller has redefined into the criminal aliens about which he lied during the campaign.

You can absolutely hold politicians like Garcia and Salazar responsible for helping to elect Trump, for enabling his grotesque assault on migrants who don’t happen to be Cuban.

But it is nevertheless the case that Miller got Trump elected promising to round up a bunch of people he portrayed as violent criminals, and has since redefined the term “criminal alien” to justify going after people in the US even if they are pursuing a legal claim of asylum.

Garcia and Salazar let themselves buy into a lie, but it was a lie. A series of lies. All designed to move the goalposts to encompass people that South Florida politicians rightly treat as part of their community.

And even if you think Garcia and Salazar let themselves buy into the bigotry, for the moment, who cares? You’ve got powerful Republicans calling out Trump’s lies, with Garcia targeting Stephen Miller and his quotas by name.

One of the most important things that we could achieve, in the short term, to discredit Trump’s ICE crackdown (and with it, Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles) is to point out that Trump didn’t run on deporting people who were pursuing legal status in the US, and he strongly implied that his promise of mass deportations was a promise to deport actual criminals (about the numbers of which Trump and Miller lied), not long-term US residents who had put down roots. One of the most important things we need the public to understand is that the events in Los Angeles were incited by Miller’s impossible quotas for arrests, 3,000 a day, quotas that from the start were guaranteed to shift ICE’s focus away from dangerous people and onto mothers working at the local waffle restaurant. Even if the only thing such pushback achieves is to end the practice of arresting people when they show up for scheduled check-ins, it would do a lot to keep families together, it eliminate one of the most egregious practices.

Prominent Republicans want to — correctly — blame Stephen Miller for the chaos that has erupted.

Don’t get in their way! At this point, any pushback on Miller’s gulag, any focus on him and his lies, is welcome.

We will not make it through this unless we exploit every single break that Republicans make with Trump. We will not make it through this unless we convince a significant number of Trump voters to push back or better yet disavow their vote.

Only if we do make it through this do we have time for recriminations against the people who allowed themselves to believe a lie.

Share this entry

Stone Cold Liar: Trump Incited Riot after Threatening to Cancel Funding for CA

June 9, 2025/40 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Gavin Newsom is doing a fair amount of press as he monitors the response to the protests and conflict in Los Angeles. In a number of those interviews, including this MSNBC one, Newsom accused Trump of lying when he claimed the two discussed deploying the National Guard on Friday.

Gavin Newsom: We talked for almost twenty minutes. And he barely — this issue never came up. I kept trying to talk about LA, he wanted to talk about all these other issues. We had a very decent conversation.

Jacob Soboroff: When was this?

Newsom: This was late Friday night. About 1:30 plus, his time.

Soboroff: After the protests had started?

Newsom: After the protests. And he never once brought up the National Guard. He’s a Stone Cold Liar. He said he did. Stone Cold Liar. Never did. It was a very civil conversation. I’ve always wanted to approach engagement with the President of the United States in a respectful and responsible way. But there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.

Soboroff: Did you mention to him in that phone call on Friday night the types of raids that were happening in your state on Friday. There were reports that and video of enforcement operations in ways that they haven’t traditionally. ICE officers [went] to Home Depots around Los Angeles and picking off day laborers. Did you bring that up with him?

Newsom: The conversation started with the frame of what’s happening in LA, he immediately pivoted to other things and other interests.

He went on to correct Soboroff’s comment that this was about immigration. After putting it in context with all of Trump’s other attacks on the Constitution, Newsom described, “It is a serious moment under the guise of immigration. but it’s much deeper than that.”

Newsom is giving these interviews in advance of suing Trump to end the National Guard deployment (by the time he sues, some Marines that Pete Hegseth is readying may already be deployed). We may learn more specifics about the time and content of the conversation the two men had on Friday night via that lawsuit.

But as he describes it, Newsom spoke to Trump — in an attempt to talk about LA — in the wake of reports, relying on White House sources, that Trump was threatening to cut funding from CA.

The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California, an effort that could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.

Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. Sources said the administration is specifically considering a full termination of federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems.

“No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement Friday afternoon, criticizing California for its energy, immigration and other policies. “No final decisions, however, on any potential future action by the Administration have been made, and any discussion suggesting otherwise should be considered pure speculation.”

Newsom spoke to Trump late on Friday, wanting to talk about LA. Trump kept pivoting to “other things and other interests.”

And out of that, Newsom stated, “there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.”

Obviously, Newsom is right: As I noted the other day, Stephen Miller loves the racism, but immigration is also one tool of his authoritarianism. The defunding makes clear that the pretext of antisemitism is another.

But this assault on California is an expansion of a pattern.

Trump asked law firms to work for him. Some capitulated, and they’re increasingly paying a price. Others refused and, thus far at least, have survived.

Trump asked Ivy League universities to work for him. Columbia capitulated, and they’re paying a price. Harvard refused and, thus far at least, has survived.

Trump is now seeking to bring California to heel using some of the same tools used with law firms and universities.

California’s governor refused.

And then Trump sent in the Armed Forces.

Share this entry

The Big Ugly: Stephen Miller Uses His War on Home Depot to Invade California

June 8, 2025/75 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Yesterday, Trump used the opportunity of a protest against brutal ICE action staged out of Paramount, CA (close to a Home Depot location) to federalize 2,000 California National Guard for force protection — a step towards, but still short of, invoking the Insurrection Act (see Steve Vladeck for a description of what Trump, legally, did; update: and an even more detailed description from Lawfare). Pete Hegseth has also floated sending the Marines to an American city, a suggestion Gavin Newsom called, “deranged.”

It’s all a transparent confrontation used to invade a blue city.

All this comes comes as the hours longshormen at LA ports work have dropped in half due to Trump’s trade war, and some of the workplaces ICE targeted were in the garment district, where actual manufacturing still occurs. In addition, Trump has promised to start cutting Federal grants to California, which led Gavin Newsom to point out that CA is a net donor to Federal taxes.

This was a natural escalation stemming directly from Stephen Miller’s shrill tantrums demanding that ICE focus more on law-abiding undocumented people rather than the criminal aliens he lied about during the election. The escalation comes in the wake of Elon Musk’s meltdown, which might otherwise make passage of Trump’s reconciliation bill funding a massive expansion of Miller’s gulag. It comes as a few libertarians — Tom Massie called for “Realistic border funding” and “No bloat for military industrial complex” in his pitch for a new “skinny” bill — focus on the huge funding for the gulag.

This inital use of federal troops in a blue city should be understood as an effort to build pressure to help pass the bill. It should also be used as an example of the danger of passing the bill — the kind of authoritarianism that Miller intends to wield if the bill does pass.

As Washington Examiner was the first to report (a testament to the kind of people who were pissed about this tantrum), two weeks ago Miller called senior ICE officials to a meeting in DC to berate them that they’re not meeting his impossible quotas for arrests, 3,000 people a day. During the meltdown he had at the meeting, Miller specifically ordered ICE to start staging arrests at Home Depot and 7-Eleven. Miller specifically berated ICE officials because they were focusing on the criminal aliens around which Miller built Trump’s re-election campaign.

ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.

ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.

The protests started in response to two things: Raids on work places and also the detention of a growing number of people without food in the basement of a federal building — the latter of which Representative Jimmy Gomez was protesting most of the day. At an early tiny peaceful protest, ICE assaulted and then arrested SEIU California President, David Huerta, injuring him badly enough to require hospital treatment, during their assault. He remains in custody. The assault-and-arrest bears similarities to the staged confrontation at Delaney Hall and ICE’s invasion of Jerry Nadler’s office in recent weeks.

Huerta’s treatment drew condemnation from Democratic leaders across the country, including LA Mayor Karen Bass.

Multiple Trump authoritarians, including Miller, responded to Bass’ condemnation of the violence ICE was wielding by insisting that “Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced.”

From there, the protests against ICE grew, many of them mocking ICE. But ICE and LA Sheriffs (the LAPD deployed, but said it saw no violence) escalated. Nevertheless, protests remain localized (around the ICE facility and at the Federal building).

Numerous Administration keyboard warriors, including Miller, are tying the protest in Los Angeles to his Big Ugly bill, using the very same eliminationist language Trump’s used to kick off an assault on the Capitol.

The through-line here is crystal clear.

Ratchet up raids on peaceful people to hit impossible quotas (ICE came close, but did not meet, Miller’s 3,000 arrest quota on two days last week).

Use protests against that draconian invasion to arrest Democratic leaders and invade a blue city.

Point to the chaos created by Miller’s draconian ICE raids to demand passage of the Big Ugly bill, which will codify and expand precisely that kind of draconian ICE raid.

Create chaos, and then use that chaos to try to codify authoritarian power.

Share this entry

The Kilmar Abrego Garcia Indictment

June 7, 2025/71 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

As you’ve heard, the government has done what they claimed they could not do: bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia (KAG) back to the US. They did so to prosecute him on trafficking charges.

I’m going to deal with the indictment against KAG in two separate posts.

In this post, I’ll take the indictment — and only the indictment — on its face to describe how DOJ charged KAG with trafficking charges that span far further than anything for which they have direct evidence.

In a second post, I’ll show how the government has at least three sets of incompatible documents. Not even the indictment and the detention memo are consistent. That’s going to cause problems — potentially very major ones — down the road.

The indictment charges KAG with two crimes, both violations of transporting aliens (18 USC 1324). Count One charges KAG with conspiring with six other people to transport aliens into the United States. Count Two charges KAG, individually, with transporting aliens within the United States. Both charges build out a set of allegations around the November 30, 2022 traffic stop outside of Cookville, Tennessee (which is why this was charged in Nashville) where KAG was driving a van of nine Hispanic men, none of whom had ID, on an expired license.

Effectively the entire indictment tells a story to wrap around that traffic stop, claiming the traffic stop is proof he’s an MS-13 member who was running guns, sometimes drugs, endangering children, and abusing women.

As alleged, there are five Salvadorans involved in the trafficking conspiracy, just three of whom (CC1, CC2, and CC3) allegedly interacted directly with KAG. There’s also a Guatemalan (CC6), who allegedly got migrants into the US that KAG and CC1 and CC2 would allegedly transport within the US for cash payments.

As background to this indictment, let me reup the eight things you need to know about conspiracy law that Elizabeth de la Vega wrote that I always rely on.

CONSPIRACY LAW – EIGHT THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

One: Co-conspirators don’t have to explicitly agree to conspire & there doesn’t need to be a written agreement; in fact, they almost never explicitly agree to conspire & it would be nuts to have a written agreement!

Two: Conspiracies can have more than one object- i.e. conspiracy to defraud U.S. and to obstruct justice. The object is the goal. Members could have completely different reasons (motives) for wanting to achieve that goal.

Three: All co-conspirators have to agree on at least one object of the conspiracy.

Four: Co-conspirators can use multiple means to carry out the conspiracy, i.e., releasing stolen emails, collaborating on fraudulent social media ops, laundering campaign contributions.

Five: Co-conspirators don’t have to know precisely what the others are doing, and, in large conspiracies, they rarely do.

Six: Once someone is found to have knowingly joined a conspiracy, he/she is responsible for all acts of other co-conspirators.

Seven: Statements of any co-conspirator made to further the conspiracy may be introduced into evidence against any other co-conspirator.

Eight: Overt Acts taken in furtherance of a conspiracy need not be illegal. A POTUS’ public statement that “Russia is a hoax,” e.g., might not be illegal (or even make any sense), but it could be an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Conspiracy law allows prosecutors to hold one cog in a larger crime responsible for the actions taken by everyone else with whom he entered into a conspiracy — and the agreement can be implicit (see Rule One). Once prosecutors show that a person has entered into a conspiracy — here, to transport migrants first into the US and then around the US — then he is on the hook for everything else his conspirators do. Conspiracy law allows prosecutors to rely on communications from some members of a conspiracy without requiring them to take the stand to validate those communications.

Two more points. First, it is totally normal for DOJ to refer to co-conspirators anonymously as they do here. In addition, it is not at all unusual for DOJ to throw a great deal of energy — such as (hypothetically) a cooperating agreement with CC1 and possibly even favorable treatment of CC6 to substantiate a case against a lesser member of a conspiracy if they want. That’s likely what happened here.

With that as background, here’s what the conspiracy looks like:

CC1 allegedly recruited KAG into this trafficking conspiracy way back in 2016 (the government claims, with no evidence presented, that it has continued up to present day, but that may simply mean others continued to transport migrants until a recent arrest). Sometime in the past, CC1 was arrested for trafficking, did his sentence, got deported, then returned to the US. When he was in prison, the indictment alleges, he recruited CC2 to take his place.

It seems likely that CC1 and CC2 will be the government’s star witnesses against KAG; there is an exceeding likelihood that they provided that testimony to avoid being sent to CECOT.

CC1 and CC2 generally attest to certain details about how the smuggling worked — they picked up migrants in Houston, usually in batches of 6-10, transported them in a van using varied routes, took away their cell phones, used the cover story of transporting men for construction jobs, and got paid in cash. Those details happen to match the known details of the van in which KAG was stopped in 2022. Both appear to claim they also transported weapons, but that is not charged (if they were transporting weapons but KAG was not, it would provide DOJ additional leverage to flip them).

They apparently had communication with CC6, because (the indictment alleges) that KAG was abusing women which was bad for business so CC6 told CC1 and CC2 to get him to stop (apparently DOJ believes that migrants coming to the US are repeat customers). In addition, CC1 used CC6 to transfer funds, for a fee (that doesn’t make sense either, because if CC1 was worried about customer service for CC6, why would he pay him to transfer funds?).

There are allegations that go through CC3, CC4, and CC5 that money changed hands. That doesn’t seem well fleshed out, but it provides cause to introduce a bunch of Western Union records that may not tie to the cash found in KAG’s pocket when he was stopped in 2022. The government also claims they’ve got evidence of cell phone and social media communication; in the indictment, they don’t quote a single communication involving KAG directly. That’s part of the beauty of a conspiracy charge, if you’re a prosecutor: You can rely on the communications of other co-conspirators to prove elements of the crime (indeed, if Trump had gone to trial for January 6, evidence against him would have relied heavily on communications of Rudy and others).

It’s tough to assess the case based on what they show in the indictment (and without the cooperation deals under which CC1 and CC2 presumably testified). But it’s notable that the testimony of CC1 and CC2 differs as to one key respect: about whether they got paid.

18. KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA and CC-1 regularly required the undocumented aliens they transported to pay KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA and CC-1 in cash for facilitating their transport throughout the United States. The MS-13 members and associates transported by CC-2 refused to pay for CC-2 for his transportation services, but the MS-13 members and associates KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA transported generally treated KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA with respect and also paid him for his transportation services.

CC1 says he got paid, along with KAG. CC2 says he did not, but attests that the alleged MS-13 gang members transported by KAG showed him respect and paid him.

Central to whether they can prove this case or not, they’ll have to prove that 9 gang members paid cash in advance — the $1,400 found on KAG’s person at the 2022 traffic stop — to be transported around the country but did not do anything to steal that money back. If everything was in cash, then the government has no records of KAG getting paid, just Western Union transfers that do not allege his involvement.

Conspiracy law is a powerful tool. But much of this case depends on the credibility of CC1.

Update: Added language about this treatment of co-conspirators fitting the norm for DOJ.

Share this entry

LaMonica McIver and Schrödinger’s Baraka

Three Data Points from the Padilla Assault

Snake Guys: Trump’s Invasion of California Risks a Literal Firestorm in California [Updated]

Pam Bondi’s Four Political Prosecutions

Banging on a Gate: Pam Bondi Found a Cyber Investigator Who Doesn’t Check Phone Logs!

How Can Pete Hegseth Invade California without a Babysitter?

No, Trump Voters Did Not Vote for This

Stone Cold Liar: Trump Incited Riot after Threatening to Cancel Funding for CA

The Big Ugly: Stephen Miller Uses His War on Home Depot to Invade California

The Kilmar Abrego Garcia Indictment

CONSPIRACY LAW – EIGHT THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Interesting links

Pages