One thing even good reporting on Stephen Miller’s attempt to deport hundreds of Venezuelans under Miller’s nested false claims that they are members of Tren de Aragua and that Tren de Aragua is a terrorist group directed by the Venezuelan government to invade the United States misses is that Miller is doing it to aid in false equivalences.
Both Miller and Trump propagandist Mike Davis illustrated this the other day.
Davis falsely claimed that the Supreme Court, in ruling against Trump’s attempt to render detainees over Easter weekend, provided habeas in just 24 hours. But, Davis claimed, it took the same court 30,000 hours to “provide relief” to Jan6ers “persecuted by Biden,” by which he meant those who were prosecuted under 18 USC 1512(c)(2).
Ultimately SCOTUS narrowed the application of the law to those who corruptly tampered with evidence involved in a proceeding. Almost everyone charged with obstruction premeditated their effort to disrupt the vote certification, to deny Joe Biden his victory and his supporters their right to have their vote counted.
Miller called these people who attacked democracy, “innocent Americans.” He, like Davis, called the Venezuelans “terrorists.”
CATO’s David Bier released a report yesterday showing that 50 of the men already sent to to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp were not only not proven to be terrorists, but had been admitted into the United States legally. Most were detained because of their tattoos.
These legal immigrants include a temporary visa holder and four men who were authorized to travel through the US refugee program. The government vetted these refugees abroad and concluded that they would face persecution, letting them resettle in the United States. The other 45 legal immigrants scheduled appointments using the CBP One app, through which they were permitted to seek entry. Among those with appointments, 24 were paroled into the United States, where they could live and work legally for up to two years, while the other 21 were detained at the port of entry.
[snip]
These people came to the United States with advanced US government permission, were vetted and screened before arrival, violated no US immigration law, and the US government turned around and “disappeared” them without due process to a foreign prison. It is paying the Salvadoran government to continue to keep them incarcerated.
[snip]
Most, at least 42, were labeled as gang members primarily based on their tattoos, which Venezuelan gangs do not use to identify members and are not reliable indicators of gang membership. According to court documents, DHS created a checklist to determine that heavily weights “dressing” like a gang member, using “gang signs,” and, most critically, tattoos. No criminal conviction, arrest, or even witness testimony is required.
DHS’s images of “TdA tattoos” include the Jordan logo, an AK-47, a train, a crown, “hijos,” “HJ,” a star, a clock, and a gas mask. But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin Melnick has shown, all of these supposed TdA tattoos were not taken from Venezuelan gang members but rather stolen by DHS from social media accounts that have nothing to do with TdA or Venezuela. For instance, DHS obtained its TdA “Jordan” from a Michael Jordan fan account in the United States. It pulled its AK-47 tattoo from a Turkish tattoo artist.
Because these men were denied due process, the public had no opportunity to obtain a real accounting of any evidence against them.
By comparison, those charged with obstructing the vote count for January 6 were arrested on criminal complaints sworn out to a judge, given initial hearings, and convicted via a trial or confession. They got due process.
Stephen Miller called them innocent, even those who admitted to willfully attempting to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s win.
Monday, SCOTUS lifted the stay on a Temporary Postponement of Kristi Noem’s efforts to deport Venezuelans from whom Trump withdrew Temporary Protected Status. Those with individual challenges can continue their challenges but Trump can move forward with deportations.
As part of the same effort to decriminalize January 6, DOJ has agreed to pay Ashli Babbitt’s estate almost $5 million to settle a wrongful death claim related to Babbitt’s invasion of the Speaker’s Lobby where Congress was trying to escape an armed mob.
The Trump administration has agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Ashli Babbitt’s family filed over her shooting by an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss with The Associated Press terms of a settlement that have not been made public.
The settlement would resolve the $30 million federal lawsuit that Babbitt’s estate filed last year in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol police officer shot Babbitt as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.
The officer who shot her was cleared of wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which concluded that he acted in self-defense and in the defense of members of Congress. The Capitol Police also cleared the officer.
This is Trump’s goal, Stephen Miller’s goal; it is how Miller got Trump elected. Trump has always claimed investigations into himself and his mob were unjust, but his own investigations into Joe Biden’s kid and before that Hillary Clinton was a hunt for corruption.
Trump’s power rests on claiming up is down, attacks on the US are noble and the defense of rule of law is a crime, accountability for anyone on his team is unjust.
Finally, today, Alina Habba announced on Xitter (nothing appears to be filed yet) that she is dismissing the petty trespassing case against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka “for the sake of moving forward” — or, more likely, because video evidence shows that when he was asked to leave Delaney Hall, he did so, and only after that was he arrested. But in the same statement, Habba announced she was has charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, who was shoved while she was objecting to the arrest of Newark’s mayor, which right wingers describe as an attempt to body slam the cops arresting Baraka. McIver is being charged with the same assault charge used against hundreds of Jan6ers who have since been pardoned for their crimes.
Habba claims she,
persistently made efforts to address these issues without bringing criminal charges and [has] given Representative McIver every opportunity to come to a resolution, but she has unfortunately declined.
Uh huh. McIver probably declined to do what CBS is about to, to falsely admit guilt when there is none. In a statement, McIver called the charges political.
McIver, D-10th Dist., called the charges filed by Habba, an appointee and former lawyer for President Donald Trump “purely political.”
“Earlier this month, I joined my colleagues to inspect the treatment of ICE detainees at Delaney Hall in my district,” McIver said in a statement. “We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short.
“Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”
The charge comes amid a WaPo report that Pam Bondi is (was?) considering eliminating the requirement that investigations into Members of Congress and other public officlas involve DOJ’sPublic Integrity Division. The Division would have, in this case, warned DOJ officials that in past cases (most notably with people like Scott Perry and Jim Jordan) DOJ determined charges for such actions might violate separation of powers.
Trump not only doesn’t care about things like that, infringing on Congress’ powers is the point.
As I said to Nicole Sandler Friday, Trump was always going to find a way to charge a Member of Congress, just like he found a way to charge a judge. Habba has done so here where McIver has a clear immunity claim, and has done so as someone who clearly has conflicts. Habba’s statement lacks DOJ’s boilerplate comment asserting that charges are just allegations. And the siren in her tweet will add to any claim McIver makes that this violates due process.
Sure, Habba claims she tried to avoid this. But the entire scene at Delaney Hall was designed to elicit such confrontation, to create nesting legal attacks out of which Stephen Miller can spin his lies.
These developments are all of a piece. They are all an effort — one Trump has been pursuing for a decade — to replace rule of law with rule of mob.
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There’s a story that largely faded into the non-stop stream of stories about corrupt things DOJ is doing under Pam Bondi (or, as this NYT profile of Bondi admits, Stephen Miller’s watch). Reuters first reported it, but NBC’s story is more comprehensive.
The FBI has ordered field offices to shift a significant number — almost half, in some offices — of agents from hunting crime to hunting migrants.
FBI field offices around the country have been ordered to assign significantly more agents to immigration enforcement, a dramatic shift in federal law enforcement priorities that will likely siphon resources away from counterterrorism, counterintelligence and fraud investigations, multiple current and former bureau officials told NBC News.
[snip]
The shift in resources spans the country, according to two FBI officials. In a major change, 45% of all agents in the 25 largest FBI field offices will be working on immigration full time.
The bureau’s Atlanta field office will assign 67 agents to work on immigration “enforcement and removal operations” full time, seven days a week, the officials said. That is around half of all the agents assigned to the Atlanta field office headquarters
In Los Angeles, the field office is creating nine squads to address enforcement and removal operations full time. They will pursue noncitizens who have overstayed their visas, even if they have no criminal history.
And the FBI’s Boston field office was ordered to assign an additional 33 special agents to immigration enforcement.
[snip]
Given that FBI resources are finite, current and former officials say, a significant increase in immigration enforcement will draw agents away from what have long been top FBI priorities, including counterterrorism, counterespionage, fraud and violent crime. [my emphasis]
Regarding the FBI shift, NBC focuses on how this will require the FBI to pull agents from investigating crimes, including terrorism and violent crime: the opportunity cost of doing this, and implicitly, the likelihood that FBI will miss terrorists or spies.
But consider what this says. FBI says they aren’t finding enough migrants to deport by looking for criminals, even by looking for the kinds of crimes that Trump and Stephen Miller have been claiming, for years, migrants commit.
FBI is not finding migrants by looking for terrorists.
FBI is not finding migrants by looking for rapists.
FBI is not finding migrants by looking for murderers.
As a POGO column yesterday noted, CBP is also not finding drug dealers when finding migrants.
Of the over 5.8 million migrants stopped by Border Patrol between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, drugs were seized from only 249 people, CBP migrant encounter data showed.
Marijuana accounted for more than half of those 249 drug seizures; just 1 in 53,965 migrants were caught with drugs other than marijuana. To put that into perspective, the odds of dying from a bee sting are 1 in 41,076.
You can’t find migrants by looking for criminals.
And so you have to move FBI agents from looking for criminals and make them search for migrants another way, for migrants as migrants, rather than for criminals.
By demanding that the FBI take agents who are currently looking for criminals and instead assign them to look for migrants, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are confessing that migrants aren’t the criminals that Trump’s entire political career has been built on claiming they are.
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I meant to write this post last week; I meant to argue that a Stephen Miller-related effort to FOIA the US Courts could be more significant development than Trump’s refusal to tell Kristen Welker he would adhere to the Constitution because he will instead do what “the lawyers” — probably including non-lawyer Stephen Miller among them — tell him to do.
KRISTEN WELKER:
But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.
It didn’t happen. I didn’t write the post.
But the delay proved useful, because the firings of the Librarian of Congress and the Register of Copyrights reflect yet another step in the same process that — I suspect — the lawsuit could one day join.
For all the chaos of the Trump term, after some initial missteps, Trump has preceded relentlessly to use presidential firings to remap government agencies over which the Executive is supposed to have limited or no influence. There has been a certain logical progression. Trump started with agencies entirely within the Executive (like USAID), then proceeded to boards and agencies designed to be independent (starting with the Special Counsel and Merit Systems Protection Board, effectively stripping federal employees of key protections, then moving onto the Federal Elections Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and the Federal Trade Commission, and more recently the Consumer Product Safety Commission). DOGE then started swallowing up independent agencies, like the US African Development Foundation and the Institute for Peace, before moving onto Radio Free Europe and the Postal Service.
Those efforts are all stuck in various stages of legal challenges. Their takeover may not succeed.
But after moving through independent agencies, Trump has turned to an agency of Congress, the Library of Congress, all without even telling Republicans he was coming.
Trump’s firing of the librarian, in particular, was so sudden that the move caught several of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill off guard, according to the two sources, with some GOP lawmakers who help conduct oversight of the Library of Congress unaware that the White House was going to do it; they learned about the firings in the media and elsewhere.
We’re just days into the latest escalation and thus far at least, Congress has prevented replacement staffers from taking over the Copyright Office.
Two men claiming to be newly appointed Trump administration officials tried to enter the US Copyright Office in Washington, DC on Monday, but left before gaining access to the building, sources tell WIRED. Their appearance comes days after the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter, who had held the job since 2020. Perlmutter was removed from her post on Saturday, one day after the agency released a report that raised concerns about the legality in certain cases of using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.
[snip]
The US Copyright Office is a government agency within the Library of Congress that administers the nation’s copyright laws. It processes applications to copyright creative works and maintains a searchable database of existing registrations. Last week, the Trump administration also fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who was the first woman and the first Black person to hold the position.
The document the two men cited also stated that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who previously served as a personal defense lawyer for Trump, was now the acting Librarian of Congress. The Department of Justice announced Monday that Blanche would be replacing Hayden, who had been in the job for nearly a decade. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Hayden’s firing stemmed from “quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in pursuit of DEI.”
Ranking House Committee on Administration Member Joe Morelle has asked the Inspector General to investigate whether this breached Congress’ independence. Politico claims Republicans might object to this — but that’s based off a feckless comment from John Thune (and none from Mike Johnson).
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in a brief interview that congressional leaders “want to make sure we’re following precedent and procedure” in naming a replacement for Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress whom Trump dismissed Thursday.
Thus far, no one has sued, but it often takes a few days to do so.
We’re still just at Day One on Trump’s attempt to take over two entities of Congress, with still more entities — like the Congressional Budget Office or Government Accountability Office, the latter of which is two months into a review of DOGE — Trump might want to undercut next.
In the past such an approach has succeeded in persuading even sympathetic judges that the President can use such firings to remake government. And the assault on Congressional entities matches the model used before: the White House fires someone appointed by the President (in this case, Congressional Librarian Carla Hayden), and then proceeds to claim authority to totally remap the agency, in significant part because it acts like an agency and courts, including SCOTUS, have said the President has unitary authority over agencies.
If that logic were to continue, it would be unsurprising to see Trump attempt a similar method with the Administrative Office of the US Courts. Indeed, DOGE has already probed the limits of Article III authority by including the Courts in the weekly DOGE email, the firing of GSA staffers who maintain Phoenix’s courthouse, and the attempted exclusion of law firms from federal properties, which would include courts.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who first reported this aspect of the lawsuit [docket], included some of these examples to demonstrate what he describes (with justification) as an escalating campaign to erode the independence of the judiciary.
The executive branch has tried to encroach on the power of the judiciary in other ways too, prompting a degree of consternation and alarm unusual for the normally-staid Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. As TPM has documented, DOGE has already caused disorder at the courts and sent out mass emails to judges and other judiciary employees demanding a list of their recent accomplishments. Per one recent report in the New York Times, federal judges have expressed concern that Trump could direct the U.S. Marshals Service — an executive branch agency tasked with protecting judges and carrying out court orders — to withdraw protection.
These are all facets of an escalating campaign to erode the independence of the judiciary, experts told TPM. The lawsuit demonstrates another prong of it: close allies of the president are effectively asking the courts to rule that they should be managed by the White House.
It’s on the basis that experts Kovensky quotes dismiss the seriousness of this challenge, again, with good justification.
“It’s like using an invalid legal claim to taunt the judiciary,” Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor at Stanford University Law School, told TPM.
“To the extent this lawsuit has any value other than clickbait, maybe the underlying message is, we will let our imaginations run wild,” Peter M. Shane, a constitutional law scholar at NYU Law School, told TPM. “The Trump administration and the MAGA community will let our imaginations run wild in our attempts to figure out ways to make the life of the judiciary miserable, to the extent you push back against Trump.”
But against the background of the relentless assault on agencies of government, independent or not, the argument looks very familiar. America First Legal Foundation — Stephen Miller’s NGO, his affiliation with which unserious people sometimes mistake Miller for a lawyer — situates its argument in Sheldon Whitehouse’s efforts to crack down on Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito’s open corruption. Because the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office of the Courts responded to oversight requests from Whitehouse, along with Hank Johnson, AFLF argues, it makes them Executive Agencies.
5. The Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office are central levers for Senator Whitehouse and Representative Johnson’s lawfare enterprise. The Conference and the Administrative Office have actively accommodated oversight requests from these congressmen concerning their allegations against Justices Thomas and Alito. Under our constitutional tradition, accommodations with Congress are the province of the executive branch. The Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office are therefore executive agencies. Such agencies must be overseen by the President, not the courts. Judicial relief here not only preserves the separation of powers but also keeps the courts out of politics.
The Judicial Conference is doing agency stuff, and therefore must be supervised by the Executive Branch, the lawsuit contends.
7. The federal judiciary is the system of courts. These courts are made up of judges who preside over cases and controversies. The executive branch, on the other hand, is responsible for taking care that the laws are faithfully executed and ensuring the proper functioning of the government. Federal courts rely on the executive branch for facility management and security. Federal judges, as officers of the courts, need resources to fulfill their constitutional obligations.
8. Courts definitively do not create agencies to exercise functions beyond resolving cases or controversies or administratively supporting those functions. But the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts does exactly that. The Administrative Office is controlled by the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts. The Administrative Office is run by an officer appointed by—and subject to removal by—Chief Justice Roberts. 28 U.S.C. § 601.
9. Congress cannot constitutionally delegate to an officer improperly appointed pursuant to Article II powers exceeding those that are informative and investigative in nature. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 137–39 (1976).
10. The Judicial Conference’s duties are executive functions and must be supervised by executive officers who are appointed and accountable to other executive officers. United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 594 U.S. 1, 6 (2021) (Officers who engage in executive functions and are not nominated by the President “must be directed and supervised by an officer who has been.”).
11. Thus, the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office exercise executive functions and are accordingly subject to FOIA. Accordingly, their refusal to comply with AFL’s FOIA request is unlawful.
This is packaged up as a FOIA lawsuit. The entire argument — which should be that the Judicial Conference is an agency and therefore must respond to a FOIA — is presented in reverse, so that the outrageous claims about Article III are the primary argument. But it also lays out precisely the kind of argument we’ve seen used to rationalize the takeover of agencies Congress set up to be independent.
As of right now, Trevor McFadden, the Trumpiest DC District Judge (in my experience McFadden also fiercely guards judicial prerogaties), has been assigned the case. On Friday he invited calls from the parties to ask for his recusal.
[T]he undersigned is a member of the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Court Administration and Case Management (CACM). Any party wishing to submit a recusal motion on that basis must do so on or before the due date for Defendants’ Answer.
Like virtually all other legal challenges, it will take some time to see where this will go.
I’m not saying this lawsuit — a naked attempt to get a judge to say that judges’ own infrastructure must be relegated to the Executive Branch, susceptible to takeover just like the Institute of Peace or Radio Free Europe — will succeed.
I’m saying that it adopts the very same pattern that has been used to subsume independent agencies, the same pattern used in recent days in an assault on Congress’ prerogatives.
It’s possible the lawsuit, which named John Roberts as a defendant, will clue SCOTUS in to the use to which Stephen Miller’s minions plan to put Supreme Court precedent, including Roberts’ own fondness for the unitary executive. Notably, Roberts’ comments on the import of judicial independence came after this lawsuit was filed, after former subordinates of Trump’s top advisor argued that the Executive must takeover Article III’s bastions of independence.
Roberts, speaking at a public event in Buffalo, New York, said an independent judiciary is a key feature of the U.S. constitutional system that had not existed in other countries when it was founded.
“In our Constitution … the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” he said.
“And that innovation doesn’t work if … the judiciary is not independent,” he added. “Its job is to, obviously, decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.”
Roberts repeated his concern about the courts yesterday.
So maybe this purported FOIA challenge was a strategically stupid move by Miller’s crowd, showing their hands prematurely to the guy most able to swap cards. Or maybe they took it as a deniable first probe into whether they could use with the courts the same tactic used to dismantle the independence of much of the rest of federal government.
None of us know how this will work out. It might just happen that, by alerting Roberts that he’s next, after Trump finishes off the Institute of Peace and the Library of Congress, Roberts will look more critically at Trump’s arguments in those legal fights, knowing full well that rubber stamping Executive authority may rubber stamp the takeover of the courts, or at least the courthouses, the same way he might look differently at the commission firings knowing that Jerome Powell might be next.
But this is, in my opinion, more than just a troll, more than just an attempt to bully judges. This certainly looks like a test to see whether Miller’s minions can extend their thus far successful takeover plan to encompass the judiciary itself.
Update: In a piece on the Library of Congress firing, Daniel Schuman concludes,
Trump likely can fire the Librarian of Congress. Trump likely cannot appoint an interim replacement. Trump cannot hire or fire subordinates. Congress must provide Robert Newlen support as he protects the independence of the Library of Congress and its ability to serve all members of Congress.
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You should know that the question to Stephen Miller about habeas corpus was a set up.
The male “journalist” who asked it after Miller called on him for the first question at a staged press event posed it in terms of “taking care of the illegal immigration problem.”
President Trump has talked about potentially suspending habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem. When could we see that happen?
So Miller’s misrepresentation of what the Constitution says about habeas corpus — similar to his misrepresentation of the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling that detainees get habeas corpus before they are rendered to El Salvador during the Nayib Bukele presser, Miller’s warning that, “it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” his grotesque claim that “radical rogue judges are at war with the legislative branch” — all of that appears to be a set up, a set up from one of the right wingers the White House has invited in as if they were journalists.
Miller’s “answer” was a response to a question premised on Stephen Miller’s propaganda being true: That undocumented immigration is and remains a problem, even after Trump’s draconian efforts and attacks on his own country have largely shut down border crossings, that suspending habeas corpus will “take care of” it. That the decision will be rolled out like some kind of new benefit, a benefit that doesn’t also risk destroying the rights of citizens.
The reporting on Miller’s comment was not totally negligent. Paragraph 11 of NYT’s story, for example, notes that three judges have already ruled there’s no invasion that might justify suspending habeas corpus, before treating the rulings of judges as something up for political debate.
In addition, three federal judges have in recent weeks issued rulings rejecting the argument that the wave of immigration constitutes an invasion, as Mr. Miller maintained.
Still, the administration has insisted that the courts cannot overrule the president’s decisions regarding how, where and when immigrants are deported.
ABC put the same detail in ¶9, sandwiched between “analysis” that suggests the Constitution is not cut and dry.
But two separate federal judges, including one appointed by Trump, said the use of the Alien Enemies act was unlawful because the Trump administration did not prove United States is being invaded by Tren de Aragua.
And while CNN invited Maggie Haberman on to call all this an “aggressive posture,” its written report sandwiched the legal rulings between 3 ¶¶ of Eli Honig debunking Miller’s claim and 4 ¶¶ of Ilya Somin doing so.
Miller’s comments pick up on ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to use the current state of illegal border crossings to claim that the US is under invasion – which the administration says allows the government to eschew due process protections afforded to migrants. The administration is making a similar argument in defending Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which would allow the government to quickly deport migrants without adherence to such due process procedures.
Multiple judges, including a Trump appointee, have rejected the invocation, saying in rulings that the administration hadn’t shown the United States is under invasion by a hostile foreign power, as laid out under the 18th century statute.
Of course, all three cast Trump and Stephen Miller as the actors here without describing this setup as a staged opportunity for Miller to threaten judges based on his transparently false claim that there was and remains, after Trump shut down border crossings, an invasion.
Of the reporting I’ve seen, just Kyle Cheney foregrounded the judges from both parties who’ve been warning about Trump’s assault on due process for all people, with Miller’s comment appearing in ¶10, after airing warnings from judges from both parties.
A fundamental promise by America’s founders — that no one should be punished by the state without a fair hearing — is under threat, a growing chorus of federal judges say.
That concept of “due process under law,” borrowed from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is most clearly imperiled for the immigrants President Donald Trump intends to summarily deport, they say, but U.S. citizens should be wary, too.
Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties — including Trump himself — are escalating warnings about what they see as an erosion of due process caused by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. What started with a focus on people Trump has deemed “terrorists” and “gang members” — despite their fierce denials — could easily expand to other groups, including Americans, these judges warn.
[snip]
Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller has railed daily against what he’s called a “judicial coup” that has largely centered around rulings upholding due process rights of immigrants. Miller has scoffed at the notion that people Trump claims are terrorists — even if they deny it — must be allowed to contest their deportations, saying they only have the right to be deported. Miller suggested Friday that the White House was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of due process to challenge a person’s detention by the government.
Trump’s legal claims are bullshit (as Steve Vladeck lays out here). But they are bullshit piled on top of underlying bullshit claims and — as Vladeck also notes — the reason Miller is throwing this bullshit is because those judges have already ruled his claim of invasion is bullshit.
Miller gives away the game when he says “a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” It’s not just the mafia-esque threat implicit in this statement (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”); it’s that he’s telling on himself: He’s suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it’s not the judicial review itself that’s imperiling national security; it’s the possibility that the government might lose. That’s not, and has never been, a viable argument for suspending habeas corpus. Were it otherwise, there’d be no point to having the writ in the first place—let alone to enshrining it in the Constitution.
Miller’s problem is that judges are not required to accept his blatantly false claims as true — indeed, are required to test them, as even the Trump judges have done.
Our problem, however, is that the journalists seem to believe it is their job to accept what Miller says as true.
Update: In a worthwhile post on this, Jack Goldsmith IDs two of the three propagandists who set up this discussion of habeas.
The machinations began in a White House press briefing on April 28. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the first question to MAGA influencer Rogan O’Handley. He stated that “[m]any are now calling for Trump to circumvent these radical judges [thwarting his deportation agenda] and consider suspending the writ of habeas corpus solely for these illegal aliens in accordance with the terms of Article I Section 9 of the United States Constitution.” He cited the “strong precedent for this action … by three of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Democrats’ favorite president of all time, FDR.”
[snip]
Ten days later, last Friday, Stephen Miller approached reporters outside the White House, stated that he only had time for a few questions, then pointed to the rear of the gathered reporters and said, “Hold on, I see there’s a question back there first.” The person chosen was Jordan Conradson, the controversial reporter for MAGA-friendly Gateway Pundit, who stated: “President Trump has talked about potentially suspending habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem. When could we see that happen, do you think?”
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After describing in a post that “a budget is a moral document,” Don Moynihan argued that the skinny budget Trump released last week wasn’t even that. It was, instead, propaganda, infested with the same nasty slogans all Trump’s other White House policy documents are. Those slogans, Moynihan argues, serve to convince us to take actions — here, to destroy science and foreign aid — “that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code.” The nasty slogans convince us, or at least convince Trump’s loyal rubes, to let children die.
[P]eople can debate the lab leak hypothesis, but the idea that you would stop providing foreign aid or cut cancer research for this reason is odd. Both USAID and NIH cuts will result in a massive numbers of unnecessary deaths. An analysis in the journal Nature, estimated that 25 million people will die if the USAID money disappears. Around 7 million people died due to COVID.
The purpose of propaganda is to divorce us from reality, to push us to actions that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code. In an administration that formed an anti-Christian bias taskforce, it is hard to think of anything less Christian than condemning millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to die. Of course, mercy and empathy are not just Christian values, but for a certain type of Christian nationalist they are values to be avoided. Propaganda makes such hypocrisies more palatable.
When countries engage in a massive dismantling of their scientific infrastructure, they cannot do it quietly. It is so obviously counterproductive that it can only occur via a broader mobilization, where higher education or experts are treated as part of an evil corrupting the nation. [emphasis original]
But the numbers described in the budget do make the morality of it quite plain. Trump is transferring the money saved by cutting AIDS prevention and cancer cures and using it to massively expand the budget for Stephen Miller’s deportation regime.
As described, Trump cuts $163 billion from what OMB calls discretionary spending and uses the “savings” to increasing funding for DHS by 65%.
The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. The Budget also provides support for air and rail safety as well as key infrastructure and our Nation’s veterans and law enforcement.
This is the lowest non-defense spending level since 2017. Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide.
Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission. [emphasis original]
It’s not just that Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are cutting AIDS prevention and cancer research. They’re doing so to pay for Miller’s gulag. Miller is cutting your access to health care and cancer cures to pay to deport your nurse assistant and cancer researchers (and, given the unnecessary bump in DOD spending, to invade Canada to take their health care away too).
Miller and Vought have targeted cancer cures via many vectors: deportations, cuts to grant funding, and personnel cuts.
Deportations of two of US citizen children with their parents, for example, disrupted their cancer treatment, first with a ten year old brain cancer patient turned away at the border.
Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents.
The family’s ordeal began last month, when they were rushing from Rio Grande City, where they lived, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup.
The parents had done the trip at least five other times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues, according to attorney Danny Woodward from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy and litigation organization representing the family. In previous occasions, the parents showed letters from their doctors and lawyers to the officers at the checkpoint to get through.
But in early February, the letters weren’t enough. When they stopped at the checkpoint, they were arrested after the parents were unable to show legal immigration documentation. The mother, who spoke exclusively to NBC News, said she tried explaining her daughter’s circumstances to the officers, but “they weren’t interested in hearing that.”
More recently a four year old boy with stage 4 cancer was sent to Honduras without his cancer medication.
Another mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her U.S.-born children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer.
Attorneys for the mothers and their children who were sent to Honduras are blasting Trump administration officials, saying the deportations of three U.S. citizen children over the weekend, including the 4-year-old boy who left without access to his cancer medicines, are illegal.
It’s not just cancer patients getting caught up in Miller’s dragnet. Cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova has been in detention for almost two months after CBP accused her of trying to smuggle research materials — frog embryos — into the country.
A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.
The scientist, the 30-year-old Russian-born Kseniia Petrova, worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab until her arrest at a Boston airport in mid-February. She is now being held at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, and fighting possible deportation to Russia, where she said she fears persecution and jail time over her protests against the war in Ukraine.
Broad cuts to NIH, NCI, and NIOSH have stalled research into cures and prevention progress.
Firings at the NIH Clinical Center, the country’s biggest research hospital, have already devastated highly promising research work that aims to use the body’s own immune cells to combat gastrointestinal cancers. Patients’ experimental treatments have already been delayed because of limited staff capacity to make these personalized cell therapies and purchasing stalls. These therapies represent potential lifelines for those with advanced cancers that have not responded to standard drugs. And many of these individuals, who are now increasingly younger in age, cannot afford to wait.
Elsewhere, hiring freezes at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have scuppered work studying elevated cancer rates in firefighters and paused a clinical trial of a new drug for advanced head and neck cancers. Research grants for Columbia University’s cancer center have been canceled because of student-led Gaza protests. Concerns around “wokeness” have ended funding for studies examining cancers in sexual and gender minority individuals — an understudied group with poor cancer outcomes — at various academic institutions such as Emory University and the Mayo Clinic.
And cuts at the VA have disrupted clinical trials helping veterans.
Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”
The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.
“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”
The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.
As entities like Harvard face the effects of these draconian cuts, this is a story that needs to be told. The Trump Administration is deporting and defunding cancer cures so that it can dramatically increase funding for a gulag system that voters don’t want.
The right wing has boasted for months already that Trump has shut down migration across the border, and they’re not wrong.
Yet Stephen Miller is still taking money that had been used to cure cancer and pursue scientific discovery in order to hunt down cancer researchers and, in the name of hunting down cancer researchers, to eliminate the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
This is a moral story. And especially when described as a transfer, money taken from cancer cures and dumped into an expanding gulag, the moral imperative becomes even more clear.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-09-at-10.12.30.png12301306emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-05-09 07:02:102025-05-09 07:02:10Stephen Miller’s War on Cancer Cures
I want to tell the story that NYT reports about Trump’s deal with Nayib Bukele to send people the Administration claims to be members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) to his concentration camp, including the critical details they left out. The entire deportation regime associated with TdA is built on a series of Stephen Miller lies, and as courts move towards discovery with the goal of holding those responsible in contempt, the stakes of Miller’s lies are going up.
Five takeaways (By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Devlin Barrett, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and Annie Correal)
As NYT’s stories lay out, starting at least as early as 2023, Stephen Miller viewed the Alien Enemies Act as a way to deport people with no due process.
Mr. Miller had long been interested in the Alien Enemies Act, a law passed in 1798 that allows the U.S. government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation. The authority has been invoked just three times in the past, all during times of war. He saw it as a powerful weapon to apply to immigration enforcement.
The law “allows you to instantaneously remove any noncitizen foreigner from an invading country, aged 14 or older,” Mr. Miller told the right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in a September 2023 interview, adding: “That allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”
During the campaign, Trump made overblown claims about TdA and Aurora, CO central to his campaign, and in real time associated those false claims with the AEA.
Though not mentioned in NYT’s opus, NYT’s Jonathan Weisman described the source of the false claims in September 2024. The claims about Aurora had been pitched by a slum landlord from NY — a man after Trump’s own heart — trying to project blame for his own neglect in caring for his properties, which quickly turned into a propaganda spiel on Murdoch outlets.
As far back as May 2023, Aurora officials had been trying to force an out-of-state landlord to fix up three blighted apartment complexes in the downtrodden East Colfax Corridor, which connects the cities of Denver and Aurora.
In July 2024, the landlord, CBZ Management, which says it is based in Colorado and Brooklyn, offered a new argument for why it couldn’t repair the buildings: Venezuelan gangs had taken over, and the property managers had been forced to flee.
Mr. Coffman and a Republican City Council member, Danielle Jurinsky, quickly repeated CBZ’s unverified claim in interviews.
“We have areas in our city, unfortunately, that have been taken, and we have to take back,” Mr. Coffman told a local talk radio host on July 31.
On Aug, 5, a public relations agent, Sara Lattman, hired by CBZ, pitched a “tip” to the local Fox television network affiliate in Denver.
“An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” she wrote on Fox 31’s tip line, according to an email obtained by The Times. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”
But it was a viral video that began circulating in late August that shows armed men in the hallway of one of the complexes that ultimately caught Mr. Trump’s attention. The incident was reported as a connection to gang violence, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though documentation was scarce.
On Tuesday, the Aurora Police Department announced it had arrested 10 members of Tren de Aragua on charges of ”felony menacing,” attempted first-degree murder, assault, child abuse, domestic abuse and others. But Todd Chamberlain, Aurora’s new police chief, could not say whether any of those men were among those seen in the video, or whether any in the video had actually done anything criminal.
Still, the clip, taken by a resident and played on endless loops on Fox News Channel and the website of The New York Post, metastasized into grandiose stories of whole buildings, whole sections of town and, in Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole city of Aurora being taken over by migrants carrying weapons of war.
”And getting them out will be a bloody story,” Mr. Trump said of Aurora at a rally in Mosinee, Wis., last Saturday, adding that it was “not going to be easy, but we’ll do it.”
Mr. Coffman and Ms. Jurinsky have both since backtracked.
That culminated in a Trump rally on October 11. Miller served as Trump’s opening act, using posters of alleged TdA members (just like those Trump set up outside the White House the other day) to rile up the crowd.
Here’s how NYT’s Michael Gold and Jonathan Weisman described the rally, including their cautions about Trump’s reading of the AEA, something that didn’t make NYT’s opus yesterday.
Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.
For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”
But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took a campaign detour to Colorado, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 2004, to make the case in person at a rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.
And during a meandering 80-minute speech Mr. Trump repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been “invaded and conquered,” described the United States as an “occupied state,” called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen” and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.
That law allows for the summary deportation of people from nations with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” It was far from clear whether the law could be used in the way that Mr. Trump was proposing.
[snip]
The city put out a statement on Friday pre-emptively fact-checking the former president ahead of his rally.
“A gang has not ‘taken over’ the city,” it said. “The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. It is tragic that select individuals and entities have mischaracterized our city based on some specific incidents.”
Major crimes, it continued, are down more than 17 percent in Aurora. And “the city is actively deploying every legal tool to ensure CBZ Management is accountable for its properties and meets its responsibilities.”
After the rally, Mr. Coffman, the mayor, said that he was “disappointed that the former president did not get to experience more of our city for himself” and that “the reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city — and our state — have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.”
“The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs,” he said. “The incidents that have occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so.” [my emphasis]
Weisman described the opposition from local politicians that same day.
The visit, Mr. Coffman said in a statement to The Times, “is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city — not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs. My public offer to show him our community and meet with our police chief for a briefing still stands.”
It is not a message likely to get through.
In the closing weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts to demonize immigrants, whether they are from Venezuela, Haiti or elsewhere, have gotten ever more lurid — and more impervious to the facts, even those provided by Republican allies such as Mr. Coffman. Last month, the former president began portraying Aurora, a sprawling suburb of Denver, population 404,219, as “a war zone” overrun by a violent Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Despite the entreaties of Aurora city officials in both parties to stay away, Mr. Trump took his case to Aurora itself on Friday. He was there for an afternoon rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, a location that is decidedly not overrun by Venezuelan gangs.
He is not welcome, declared Crystal Murillo, a Democratic city councilwoman and a Mexican American.
“My message is, Trump doesn’t belong here,” she said in an interview. “His divisiveness, his rhetoric, is not what Aurora is about.”
When Tim Walz and others called out the lies Trump was telling in real time, Miller accused them then (as he is now) of defending gang members.
Even though the claims Trump made about Aurora during the campaign were built on exaggerations and lies, ICE did a high profile raid in the city early in Trump’s term, on February 6, with Fox News’ chief immigration propagandist Bill Melugin in tow.
The raid found only one TdA member.
On Thursday, shortly after the raid, the Fox News propagandist whose job it is to stoke fear about migration, Bill Melugin, first celebrated the “massive” raid, only later to reveal the raid had resulted in far fewer arrests than promised and just one arrest of a Tren de Aragua member. ICE immediately blamed its failure to detain more people on leaks.
That same day, Tom Homan announced he may have to halt the kind of embed ICE has been all too happy to give Melugin, because of leaks or operational security; he did not say that truthful reports to Fox viewers about his failures gets him in trouble with the boss. Tom Homan can’t afford to have Trump know that this massive raid found only a single Tren de Aragua member.
Kristi Noem blamed the failure to find numbers of TdA members that might substantiate Stephen Miller’s false claims about the gang on leakers. Tom Homan claimed to have identified the leakers on February 26, but they have not yet been charged.
In the wake of the raid that failed to substantiate the false claims and overblown promises he made during the election, Trump started bitching that ICE wasn’t meeting his promised deportation targets (they still aren’t, though they have shut down new migration). Tom Homan and Stephen Miller were failing to fulfill Trump’s top campaign promise, a promise built on Miller’s lies.
Agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House.
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to “border czar” Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.
“It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” said the person familiar with Trump’s thinking.
[snip]
Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.
In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year.
And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House.
Later that month, on February 26 (the same day Homan claimed to have found the leakers), the Intelligence Committee did an assessment of the relationship between TdA and Nicolás Maduro’s government. Only the FBI believed there was a tie.
The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.
Only one agency, the F.B.I., partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.
“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”
This NYT story is one of only two stories that Pam Bondi claimed to include classified information when she reversed protections on journalists (the other was this April 17 WaPo story reporting that a more formal National Intelligence Estimate also debunked the claim of ties between Maduro and TdA). Bondi wants to find the people who debunked this false claim, and she’s willing to use subpoenas to journalists or even warrants targeting them to do so.
NYT’s story yesterday described this assessment retrospectively — as something that led bureaucrats at State to grow concerned about their reliance on it.
During an internal State Department briefing about issues related to Latin America, some employees were dismayed to hear that weeks earlier, American spy agencies had assessed that Tren de Aragua was not actually controlled by the Venezuelan government — which was the premise for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
What NYT couldn’t fit into a 4,000-word article is that this assessment precededTrump’s AEA declaration — in which the asserted tie between TdA and Maduro was legally central — by more than two weeks.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.
Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.
Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]
That is, Trump knew or should have known, when he made this invocation, it was based on claims his own IC would not substantiate. Only the agency run by Kash Patel would back that claim.
Trump made this invocation, per the NYT story, the same day that Trump finalized a deal with Nayib Bukele (NYT describes elsewhere the MS-13 members to whom Bukele did have a tie, that seem to have been included in the deal, but not here), and previewed its use in a presser at DOJ watched over by Stephen Miller.
On March 14, the Trump administration exchanged diplomatic notes with El Salvador laying out the terms: Mr. Bukele’s government would receive up to 300 members of Tren de Aragua in exchange for financial support from the United States.
That same day, Mr. Trump hinted at the forthcoming deportations during a speech at the Justice Department. Sitting in the front of the audience was Mr. Miller, who had moments earlier conferred with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, about the pending deportations.
“We’ve caught hundreds of them, the Venezuelan gang, which is as bad as it gets,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of loyalists. “And you’ll be reading a lot of stories tomorrow about what we’ve done with them and you’ll be very impressed.”
That’s what triggered a hasty effort to put bodies on planes, a process riddled with error.
That presser is also what led ACLU to try to preempt precisely this AEA invocation, to successfully obtain an order enjoining deportations relying on Trump’s TdA AEA declaration, even as planes were departing enjoining such flights.
The President has invoked—or will imminently invoke—a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), in an attempt to summarily remove noncitizens from the United States and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. 1 In either circumstance, a Temporary Restraining Order is needed because there may not be sufficient time for this Court to intervene between the time when the Act is invoked and when the planes removing Plaintiffs-Petitioners depart the United States. 2
But the United States is not at war, and the prerequisites for invocation of the AEA have not been met. See 50 U.S.C. § 21. The President can invoke the AEA only in a state of “declared war,” or when an “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” Id. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Act has been invoked only three times in our country’s history, all in declared wars: The War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.
The President’s imminent Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens whom the government accuses of being part of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang. But the President’s Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for two plain reasons. First, Tren de Aragua is not a “foreign nation or government.” Second, Tren de Aragua is not engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA, because criminal activity does not meet the longstanding definitions of those statutory requirements—and has never been a sufficient basis for the executive to cast foreign nationals as “alien enemies” subject to arrest, internment, and removal. As a result, the President’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA, violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed elsewhere in the country’s immigration laws for the removal of noncitizens, and violates due process.
Based on reports from Plaintiffs and legal service providers, the government has begun moving Venezuelan men who the government claims are part of Tren de Aragua to facilities in Texas.
1 See Remarks of President Trump, March 14, 2025 (addressing the Department of Justice) (“You will read in the papers tomorrow the bad thing we will do to Tren de Aragua.”).
2 See also Priscilla Alvarez, et al., Trump expected to invoke wartime authority to speed up mass deportation effort in coming days, CNN (Mar. 14, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/politics/alien-enemies-act-deportationconsideration/index.html (“The Trump administration is expected to invoke [the AEA] to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. . . . The primary target remains Tren de Aragua[.]”).
As described in this NYT story (and earlier ones), unnamed senior officials in the White House discussed whether to obey this order or not.
Inside the White House, senior administration officials quickly discussed the order and whether they should move ahead. The team of Trump advisers decided to go forward, believing the planes were safely in international airspace, and well aware that the legal fight was most likely destined for the Supreme Court, where conservatives have a majority.
At 7:36 p.m., the third flight took off. Officials would later say the migrants on that flight were not deported under the Alien Enemies Act, but through regular immigration proceedings.
The White House’s decision to press forward, despite Judge Boasberg’s order, raised questions about whether the administration was defying the court. The Justice Department has argued that a federal judge cannot dictate foreign policy.
No one is saying it, but there are a lot of breadcrumbs in this article and others that Miller was one of those SAOs who instructed that the flights should go even in spite of Judge Boasberg’s order. One big breadcrumb is that, as the story describes, even before inauguration, Miller told others not to worry about legal challenges to the means via which Trump planned to deport migrants, challenges like the one before Boasberg that, in real time, these SAOs assumed SCOTUS would make go away.
Stephen Miller, the main architect of Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda, had a message for other advisers inside the presidential transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla.: Be bold. Do not worry about potential litigation, especially when drafting Mr. Trump’s immigration actions.
It was roughly a month before the inauguration, and Mr. Miller knew he needed to move fast to make good on Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge of mass deportations.
The Administration has invented flimsy excuses for why the planes flew in spite of Boasberg’s order, precisely the claimed belief that NYT accepts unquestionably, that the planes were in international airspace (NYT are more skeptical, as am I, that the third included only men against whom DHS had already obtained deportation orders). In finding probable cause that, “the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Judge Boasberg was far less impressed with these excuses than the NYT.
As this was blowing up in the wake of Boasberg’s order, per the stories, Bukele asked for cover for the people delivered to his custody, for proof they were who Trump had said they were.
[W]eeks earlier, when the three planes of deportees landed, it was the Salvadoran president who had quietly expressed concerns.
As part of the agreement with the Trump administration, Mr. Bukele had agreed to house only what he called “convicted criminals” in the prison. However, many of the Venezuelan men labeled gang members and terrorists by the U.S. government had not been tried in court.
Mr. Bukele wanted assurances from the United States that each of those locked up in the prison was members of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the situation and documents obtained by The New York Times.
The matter was urgent, a senior U.S. official warned his colleagues shortly after the deportations, kicking off a scramble to get the Salvadorans whatever evidence they could.
Mr. Bukele’s demands for more information about some of the deportees, which has not been previously reported, deepen questions about whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed who it dispatched to a foreign prison. [my emphasis]
Something has been misunderstood about this passage, which describes Bukele’s concerns as retrospective (though he did reject Venezuelan women — which NYT notes — and one Nicaraguan — which it does not, and which debunks their claim that Bukele was willing to accept detainees of any nationality — in real time). Bukele asked for proof these people were criminals as this was all blowing up. By deciding to send the planes in defiance of Judge Boasberg’s order, Trump created problems for Bukele, problems that their utter failure to vet any of these people — their decision to let flimsy lies stand in for evidence — exacerbated.
Within a week, Trump was disavowing having signed the AEA proclamation relying on claims that his Intelligence Community had debunked weeks earlier.
President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
But when the conservative majority he banked on ruling for him twice did not, first ruling that detainees had to have an opportunity to challenge their deportation under habeas corpus, and then ruling that Trump had to “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return, Miller blatantly lied at the Bukele Oval Office presser about what SCOTUS said, followed by a colloquy in which Trump got him to repeat his bullshit claims.
[T]here’s an illegal alien from El Salvador. So with respect to you, he’s a citizen of El Salvador. So it’s very arrogant, even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point, as two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13. When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I’m sure you know, you’re very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States.
So he had a deportation order that was valid. Which meant that under our law, he’s not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation. This issue was then, by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and flying back here. That issue was raised with the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court said the District court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who again is a member of MS-13. Which is, I’m sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world. And I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.
REPORTERS: So you don’t plan to ask for-
But the Supreme Court is asking to-
Donald Trump: And what was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve? Was it nine to nothing?
Steve Miller: Yes. It was a 9- 0-
Donald Trump: In our favor?
Steve Miller: In our favor against the District Court. Ruling saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual, at El Salvador’s sole discretion, was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time.
No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he’s a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him.
It’s not just that Trump had Miller perform this for the press and Bukele. He also performed himself taking Miller’s false claims about what SCOTUS said as word, even as he continues to insist unnamed lawyers provide him legal advice that informs his own actions. This was Trump laying out his own plausible deniability in real time. It’s not his fault he continued to defy SCOTUS. He’s just getting demonstrably erroneous advice, from the guy who orchestrated this entire ploy years in advance, orchestrated the propaganda to justify the focus on TdA, and seemingly orchestrated the problematic AEA invocation as well.
It’s not Donald Trump’s fault.
It’s Miller’s, the gatekeeper who prevents any contrary information to make it to Trump.
And that’s the background to the second story describing how, in a week during which DOJ bought time, someone performed asking Bukele to send Abrego Garcia back and Bukele performed refusing to do so.
The Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador to inquire about releasing a Salvadoran immigrant whom government officials have been ordered by the Supreme Court to help free, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
But the authoritarian government of Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, said no, two of the people said. The Bukele administration claimed the man should stay in El Salvador because he was a Salvadoran citizen, according to one of those people.
It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged was improperly expelled to El Salvador last month in violation of a court order expressly prohibiting him from being sent there.
NYT describes that their scoop came after Trump blew all this up in his ABC interview.
The revelation came just hours after the president, reversing course on his administration’s previous statements, said in an interview with ABC News that he had the ability to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back. The president added that he did not believe Mr. Abrego Garcia was a good person and that his administration’s lawyers would decide. The Justice Department is also facing a court-ordered deadline of early next week to provide information about what it has done to seek his freedom.
This was certainly published after Trump’s comments. Is NYT really saying that this entire story came together in the wake of ABC’s interview (or airing thereof)?
Whatever the case, these details — and Judge Paula Xinis’ renewed discovery order — explain the stakes of the twin exchanges between Trump and Terry Moran the other day.
When Trump demanded Moran adopt his false claims about Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, he did so because Stephen Miller has left him politically exposed (though not legally, thanks to SCOTUS’ immunity order last year, which may explain why Trump is so openly defiant). Trump has to affirm Miller’s lies and his belief in them, just as he tripled down on his election lies as it became a criminal problem, because otherwise he has the kind of guilty consciousness and foreknowledge that could become a problem down the road.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wait a minute.
TERRY MORAN: I want —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.
TERRY MORAN: He — he did not have the letter —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don’t do that — M-S-1-3 — It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I — that was Photoshop. So let me just–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can’t do that — he had —
— he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doin’ the interview. I picked you because — frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay —
TERRY MORAN: This — I knew this would come —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you — Terry — but you’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We’ll agree to disagree. I want to move on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: — to something else.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry. Do you want me to show the picture?
TERRY MORAN: I saw the picture. We’ll — we’ll — we’ll agree to disagree —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, and you think it was Photoshop. Well —
TERRY MORAN: Here we go. Here we go.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — don’t Photoshop it. Go look —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — at his hand. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Fair enough, he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way. I’m not an expert on them.
I want to turn to Ukraine, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Terry —
TERRY MORAN: I– I want to get to Ukraine–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not “interpreted.” This is why people —
And when Trump grew hostile after Moran cornered him into admitting that, yes, he had the power to get Abrego Garcia returned, Trump needed to reinforce the plausible deniability he started building as soon as this thing started going to shit.
TERRY MORAN: I’m not saying he’s a good guy. It’s about the rule of law. The order from the Supreme Court stands, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He came into our country illegally.
TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.
TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could
TERRY MORAN: — the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.
TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.
TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —
TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —
TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —
TERRY MORAN: The Supreme Court says what the law is. [my emphasis]
Sure, the buck stops here. Trump is all powerful. But he — the President — is not making the decisions, did not make the AEA invocation based on lies. “The lawyers” did that. And they don’t want him to pick up that phone and facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
There’s no sign that Trump and Stephen Miller plan to give up this campaign, even as conservative Catholic SCOTUS justices break their Easter weekend observances to prevent Trump from pulling this trick a second time, a third adverse ruling. Instead, Stephen Miller will instead target the judges who tell him he (who is not a lawyer) has gotten the law wrong, over and over.
And that will force Trump to continue to insist that journalists affirm whatever Stephen Miller tells him is true.
Update: Trump appointed Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. just ruled that Trump’s invocation of the AEA is unlawful and will move to relieve three plaintiffs held under it.
Those factual statements depict conduct by TdA that unambiguously is harmful to society in this country. And as previously explained, the political question doctrine prohibits the Court from weighing the truth of those factual statements, including whether Maduro directs TdA’s actions or the extent of the referenced criminal activity.
Instead, the Court determines whether the factual statements in the Proclamation, taken as true, describe an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” for purposes of the AEA. Based on the plain, ordinary meaning of those terms in the late 1790’s, the Court concludes that the factual statements do not. The Proclamation makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation. Thus, the Proclamation’s language cannot be read as describing conduct that falls within the meaning of “invasion” for purposes of the AEA. As for “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation does not describe an armed group of individuals entering the United States as an organized unit to attack a city, coastal town, or other defined geographical area, with the purpose of plundering or destroying property and lives. While the Proclamation references that TdA members have harmed lives in the United States and engage in crime, the Proclamation does not suggest that they have done so through an organized armed attack, or that Venezuela has threatened or attempted such an attack through TdA members. As a result, the Proclamation also falls short of describing a “predatory incursion” as that concept was understood at the time of the AEA’s enactment.11
For these reasons, the Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful. Respondents do not possess the lawful authority under the AEA, and based on the Proclamation, to detain Venezuelan aliens, transfer them within the United States, or remove them from the country.
Just before he did that, he certified class status to similarly situated people in SDTX.
You’ve likely seen some clips from Terry Moran’s rather supine interview of Donald Trump.
Moran let Trump get away with a whole range of false claims uncontested. But they got into it over Trump’s efforts to portray Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a bad man.
The clips don’t do the exchange justice.
Trump and Moran went back and forth around 28 times, and then Trump returned to it for another six exchanges (I’ve included two excerpts of the fight over knuckles below).
I actually don’t think this exchange reflects dementia It certainly reflects Trump’s ego. It’s an instance where Moran, as credulous as he otherwise was, refused accept Trump’s chant, 2+2=5.
Close to the beginning of the exchange, Trump held up everything — wait a minute! — when Moran refused to accept Trump’s claim that the tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hands were proof of his MS-13 membership.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: On his knuckles — he had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. There’s dis — there’s a dispute over that —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Well —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — on his knuckles tattooed.
TERRY MORAN: — he — he — he — it didn’t say– oh, he had some tattoos that are inper — interpreted that way. But let’s move on
After Moran insisted on something obvious: that the photo of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles was clearly labeled both with interpretations of his tattoos and from that an annotation turning it into MS-13, Trump told Moran he could not state that because Trump gave him the break of a lifetime: “Terry, you can’t do that — he had — — he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime.” That is, Moran could not state the truth because Trump had granted him this access. Moran tried to move on. Trump claimed this was not an interpretation. Moran tried to move on. Finally, Moran made a half concession.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.
TERRY MORAN: Alright. I —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay?
TERRY MORAN: — we’ll — we’ll take a look at it —
But that was not good enough for Trump. Trump asked Moran, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Yes, he does,’ and, you know, go on to something else –”
Minutes later, after Moran tried to move onto the Ukraine question he had been trying to get out, Trump took a question about Putin and turned it back to Moran himself.
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust [Putin]?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t trust you. I don’t trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You come in all shootin’ for bear. You’re so happy to do the interview.
TERRY MORAN: I am happy —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And then you start hitting me with fake questions. You start tellin’ me that a guy — whose hand is covered with a tattoo —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. We’re back to that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — doesn’t have the tattoo, you know.
He repeated his claim that Moran is excited to have access, but then accused him of asking “fake questions,” all because he refused to say 2+2-5. That’s when Trump labeled Moran dishonest.
This is not dementia.
This is power.
This is precisely the purpose Trump reserves for mainstream journalists: As props in his performance of forced adherence to his reality.
And it works.
After all, Moran was willing to accept as given the last 8 years of forced doctrine, about Ukraine, about Joe Biden, about Trump’s grievances. Moran has already internalized lies Trump has told for years, and wildly grotesque claims about rule of law went uncontested, unnoticed.
Moran could have stood up and walked away when Trump insisted that he repeat, 2+2=5, but instead Moran tried to make a series of half-concessions so he could move on. But even then, Trump still used it as a means to suggest he — Moran — was less trustworthy than Vladimir Putin.
It’s with that background that I want to return to the other noteworthy part of this, where Moran tried to get Trump to concede that SCOTUS had ordered Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return (NYT has a report that in the last week that discovery in Abrego Garcia’s case had been paused, the US requested and Nayib Bukele refused to return him, as well as an even more credulous report on how Stephen Miller dreamt up this entire plan over a year in advance, both of which I’ll return to).
When Terry Moran noted that Trump had the power to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia released, goading him to assert his own power, Trump complied (this was, in my opinion, the smartest thing Moran did in the interview, and it could backfire on Trump in the legal case).
TERRY MORAN: I’m not saying he’s a good guy. It’s about the rule of law. The order from the Supreme Court stands, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He came into our country illegally.
TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.
TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could
TERRY MORAN: — the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.
But then Trump shifted to the slander against Abrego Garcia — to the Administration’s decision, reported by The Atlantic earlier this week, plan to impugn him rather than remedy their mistake.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.
TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.
Here, several belief systems came into conflict.
At once, Moran was saying that Trump should return Abrego Garcia for two reasons, because the Supreme Court ordered he do so and because as President he absolutely has power to do so. In response, Trump disclaimed authority for making the decision. “We have lawyers,” the most powerful man in the world who appointed his defense attorneys to run DOJ said. And from there, Trump said he’s just following the law by doing whatever “the lawyers” tell him to do, not by doing what SCOTUS tells him to do.
TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —
TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —
TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —
TERRY MORAN: The Supreme Court says what the law is.
When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?
Sure, I believe in the court system.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.
Have you asked President Bukele to return him?
I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.
Did you ask him?
But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.
But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?
Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.
Remember, too, that Trump claimed that he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act proclamation that, NYT describes, Stephen Miller has been concocting for over a year.
President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
Two things are going on here, neither of them dementia.
First, Trump is either being compartmented from the most problematic decisions behind his detention program, or claiming to be. I would be unsurprised if the lawyers have compartmented him, but his public claim to CNN should be basis to claim the entire AEA declaration is invalid.
Second, Trump is enforcing a system of belief — inviting journalists in and grinding them down until they they publicly adopt Trump’s false claims — that justifies (in his mind) his detention program. It doesn’t much matter whether Trump really believes Abrego Garcia’s knuckles really say MS-13 based on false briefing from Stephen Miller or whether he’s just parroting the lines Stephen Miller told him to say because he hasn’t tested what Miller told him.
He did the same thing when he stated, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” and got elected anyway. He did the same thing when he adopted Miller’s false claim that Aurora had been taken over by Tren de Aragua, the fiction that Miller was crafting last fall to set up his use of AEA, the fiction that has been debunked by the Intelligence Committee.
It’s far too late to waste time on whether Trump believes the torrent of lies he tells, to ponder whether this latest lie is a sign of dementia when his false claims about winning an election were instead calculation. Trump’s utterances are always utilitarian anyway. Always.
Trump’s fundamental unfitness lies in his need to and success at creating his own reality. Is Stephen Miller managing that unfitness to his own ends? Undoubtedly. But Trump’s unfitness remains — the reason Miller has exploited his genius for propaganda.
Stand up, call him out for doing it, and walk away. Do not be the prop in this display of dominance.
No matter what you think the mental acuity of Donald Trump and his chief advisor is, the ABC interview yesterday displayed both roots of Trump’s power, his success at bullying others into parroting his doctrine, and his use of that to claim those falsehoods legitimize something wildly divorced from American justice and rule of law.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you’ll pick out one man, but even the man that you picked out —
TERRY MORAN: He’s got —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — he said he’d — wasn’t a member of a gang. And then they looked, and —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: On his knuckles — he had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. There’s dis — there’s a dispute over that —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Well —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — on his knuckles tattooed.
TERRY MORAN: — he — he — he — it didn’t say– oh, he had some tattoos that are inper — interpreted that way. But let’s move on
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wait a minute.
TERRY MORAN: I want —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.
TERRY MORAN: He — he did not have the letter —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don’t do that — M-S-1-3 — It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I — that was Photoshop. So let me just–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can’t do that — he had —
— he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doin’ the interview. I picked you because — frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay —
TERRY MORAN: This — I knew this would come —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you — Terry — but you’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We’ll agree to disagree. I want to move on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: — to something else.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry. Do you want me to show the picture?
TERRY MORAN: I saw the picture. We’ll — we’ll — we’ll agree to disagree —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, and you think it was Photoshop. Well —
TERRY MORAN: Here we go. Here we go.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — don’t Photoshop it. Go look —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — at his hand. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Fair enough, he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way. I’m not an expert on them.
I want to turn to Ukraine, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Terry —
TERRY MORAN: I– I want to get to Ukraine–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not “interpreted.” This is why people —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — no longer believe —
TERRY MORAN: Well.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — the news, because it’s fake news —
TERRY MORAN: When he was photographed in El Sal — in– in El Salvador, they aren’t there. But let’s just go on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He is —
TERRY MORAN: They aren’t there when he’s in El Salvador.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –there — oh, oh, they weren’t there —
TERRY MORAN: Take a look at the photograph —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now, right?
TERRY MORAN: No. What —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now?
TERRY MORAN: They’re in your picture.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: Ukraine, sir.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.
TERRY MORAN: Alright. I —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay?
TERRY MORAN: — we’ll — we’ll take a look at it —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s — it’s — you do such a disservice —
TERRY MORAN: We’ll take a look. We’ll take a look at that, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Why don’t you just say, “Yes, he does,” and, you know, go on to something else —
He then returned to it for another four exchanges when discomforted by Moran’s questions about trusting Putin
TERRY MORAN: You think he wants peace?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — this is —
TERRY MORAN: You think Vladimir Putin wants peace?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think he does, yes. I think he does–
TERRY MORAN: Still?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think because of me —
TERRY MORAN: Even with the raining missiles on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think he really — his — his — his dream was to take over the whole country. I think because of me, he’s not gonna do that.
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think —
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t trust you. I don’t trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You come in all shootin’ for bear. You’re so happy to do the interview.
TERRY MORAN: I am happy —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And then you start hitting me with fake questions. You start tellin’ me that a guy — whose hand is covered with a tattoo —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. We’re back to that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — doesn’t have the tattoo, you know.
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I mean, you’re being dishonest.
TERRY MORAN: No, I’m not —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let — let– let me just tell you —
TERRY MORAN: No, I am not, sir.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Do I trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. But I do think this. I think that he — let’s say he respects me. And I believe because of me he’s not gonna take over the whole — but his decision, his choice would be to take over all of Ukraine.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-30-at-18.08.10.png8401642emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-04-30 14:46:112025-04-30 14:46:11How Trump Knuckles Journalists to Parrot His Doctrine
The last paragraph of this NYT story describing absolutely insane plans for the State Department -“eliminating almost all of its Africa operations,” “cutting offices … that address climate change[,] refugee issues, … democracy[,] and human rights concerns,” mandating use of AI for “‘policy development and review’ and ‘operational planning’,” and replacing the Foreign Service exam with loyalty oaths — describes that the Executive Order laying out those plans is not the only proposed plan out there.
It links this story, published by NYT five days earlier, describing more modest plans: closing six embassies in Africa, not the entire continent.
The Trump administration is considering plans to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates and reduce or consolidate the staff of several other foreign missions, according to an internal State Department memo viewed by The New York Times.
The closures and other reductions outlined in the document, which is undated, would pare back the American presence on nearly every continent. They represent an expansion of plans the Trump administration was working on earlier this year for closing a dozen foreign missions and laying off local staff who work in those locations.
The cuts are in keeping with President Trump’s plans to reduce federal spending across the government, as well as a proposal that State Department leaders have been considering to cut nearly 50 percent of the department’s spending.
But the new proposed reductions have raised fresh concerns that the United States will be ceding vital diplomatic space to China, including in areas of the world where Washington has a greater presence than Beijing, compromising American national security, including intelligence gathering.
The competing plans — one a memo, the other an Executive Order that would be signed by Trump and would therefore oblige memo-writers to defer to Trump’s order — comes in the wake of the ouster of Pete Marocco, the Jan6er who effectuated the destruction of USAID, from the State Department.
There are several versions of Marocco’s ouster and his fate, but this Politico story describes that Marco Rubio fired him, in part because of differing opinions about how to destroy USAID (which has long since been accomplished, but during which, Rubio repeatedly made claims about GOP-supported programs like PEPFAR that turned out to be false).
Peter Marocco, the Trump administration official in charge of dismantling USAID, left a meeting at the White House last week to return to his office at the State Department. But when he arrived, Marocco could not enter the building: security told him he was no longer an employee there, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Word of Marocco’s firing quickly tore through the Republican Party and MAGA ecosystem, startling President Donald Trump’s loyalists who viewed the aide as part of an elite cohort of administration true believers. Loud voices on the right piled on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing him of undermining their disruptive agenda.
Yet Marocco’s abrupt termination, which has not been fully reported until now, was not an impulsive dismissal or a case of Rubio going rogue. This report was based on conversations with five people, including administration officials and allies, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. Four of the people said Rubio fired Marocco. They gave varying explanations: one administration official said Rubio and others wanted Marocco out due to what they saw as his bulldozer operating style and failure to work effectively with colleagues; others pointed to substantive disagreements between Rubio and Marocco over how to dismantle USAID. Meanwhile, Marocco allies viewed Rubio and his team as insular, controlling and obstructionist to the DOGE agenda ordered by the president.
One White House official said Rubio went to a senior White House aide for clearance to remove Marocco after tensions reached a boiling point last week. They described Marocco’s firing as “the first MAGA world killing from inside the White House.”
It also describes the backlash targeting Rubio that has resulted.
In the days since his ouster, Marocco’s MAGA allies have come to his defense and raised new suspicions of Rubio, including questions about why he would want to protect USAID and whether he’s loyal to the president.
[snip]
“He’s really not a MAGA guy, he’s a neocon,” a Trump ally said of Rubio, adding that this move “is gonna bite him.”
This is the third instance of an ugly cabinet-level dispute in the Trump Administration in recent weeks.
NYT’s account of Gary Shapley’s installment to head the IRS, without Scott Bessent’s involvement, followed by his removal at the hands of Bessent, incorporates several pieces of intrigue. First, there’s Shapley’s installment by Musk and then Bessent’s reversal of Musk’s plot.
Mr. Bessent had complained to Mr. Trump this week that Mr. Musk had done an end run around him to get Mr. Shapley installed as the interim head of the I.R.S., even though the tax collection agency reports to Mr. Bessent, the people familiar with the situation said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The clash was the latest instance of Mr. Musk’s influence in the Trump administration that has alarmed top officials. It was also the latest upheaval at the tax agency, with much of its staff pushed out or quitting. Mr. Trump earlier this week called for the I.R.S. to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school refused to impose sweeping changes demanded by the administration.
An I.R.S. spokeswoman declined to comment on the leadership changes.
Mr. Shapley, a longtime I.R.S. agent, gained fame among conservatives after he claimed that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.
Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushed Mr. Shapley’s appointment through White House channels, but Mr. Bessent was not consulted or asked for his blessing, according to those with knowledge of the dynamic. Mr. Bessent then got Mr. Trump’s approval to unwind the decision within days, they said. Mr. Shapley had been working from the I.R.S. commissioner’s office as late as Friday morning.
Then, there’s Musk’s magnification of Laura Loomer’s attack on Bessent in response.
The feud between Mr. Musk and Mr. Bessent went public late Thursday night, when Mr. Musk amplified a social media post from the far-right researcher Laura Loomer accusing Mr. Bessent of colluding with a “Trump hater.”
“Troubling,” Mr. Musk wrote about Mr. Bessent’s meeting John Hope Bryant, the chief executive of the nonprofit Operation HOPE. Mr. Bryant is working on a financial literacy effort with Treasury officials.
Ms. Loomer had called that meeting a “vetting failure.”
Finally, there’s an oblique comment about DOGE boy Gavin Kliger’s removal on the same day as Shapley, one that WaPo describes in more detail: Kliger was shut out of IRS systems just as he was about to start a purge of IRS employees in the middle of tax season.
Early Friday morning, the IRS rescinded building and systems access for DOGE official Gavin Kliger, according to the people familiar with the situation. The Post could not immediately confirm the reason for the revocation.
Kliger was managing the massive layoffs at the agency that could cut the tax agency’s headcount by 25 percent. More layoff notices had been planned for Friday afternoon, the people said, but those notifications have been paused.
As laid out in declarations from USAID workers, Kliger left his digital fingerprints all over Marocco’s dismantling of USAID.
Left unsaid is whether Musk installed Shapley so as to empower Kliger to destroy the IRS just as it sets to processing this year’s tax receipts.
Thus far, we have correlation, without any insight into causation.
The far right targeting of Bessent is of particular concern, given the evidence he’s holding together the US (and with it, the global) economy with his own shoestrings. WSJ reported this week that he and Howard Lutnick had to sneak into the Oval Office to override Peter Navarro’s disastrous tariff plans.
On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office.
Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place, even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day” event.
So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention.
They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule.
The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.
And multiple outlets have described Bessent’s thus far successful efforts to prevent Trump from firing Jerome Powell.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly cautioned White House officials that any attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would risk destabilizing financial markets, according to two people close to the White House granted anonymity to share details of private discussions.
Bessent’s private message reinforces what President Donald Trump already knows but comes as the president’s anger with the Fed chair is growing because Powell hasn’t shown signs that he will cut interest rates soon. It also comes against the backdrop of widespread market turmoil over the administration’s far-reaching trade war.
Trump’s fury with Powell burst into public view on Thursday morning, when he said in a post on Truth Social that his “termination cannot come fast enough!”
But Powell’s job looks safe for now.
Bessent is a mediocre Treasury Secretary, in no way the match for his counterparts. Yet he is increasingly all that’s standing between Trump and his most feverish nutjobs and far bigger financial catastrophe.
Given Loomer’s success firing NSA Director Timothy Haugh and six NSC staffers, it may be only a matter of time before the nutjobs get to Bessent, too.
The third cabinet level blowup is more opaque. As laid out here, three of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s top aides were escorted out of the Pentagon in the wake of a leak investigation. Politico reported that they were fired — passive voice — on Friday, but the guy who led the investigation used to explain their ouster is also leaving his current role.
Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.
Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
[snip]
Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.
Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March, which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.
But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.
“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”
The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.
“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.” [my emphasis]
Some of those targeted — who have long-standing ties to Hegseth, going back to his failed non-profit management — are denying any role in leaks.
Whatever the genesis of this upheaval or the partisan explanation for it, it leaves a wildly unqualified man at the top of the world’s largest military with no top aides.
There are other signs of the collapse of all management inside the White House — such as the White House attempt to explain away their attack on Harvard with a bullshit claim that they accidentally sent out a letter demanding to effectively take over Harvard University.
Everywhere you look you have to wonder whether Susie Wiles is as much in charge as Amy Gleason is at DOGE, whether her title of Chief of Staff is just a convenient fiction to cover up for the reality that Trump does whatever the last person in the room tells him to do.
And often as not, the last person in the room is Stephen Miller.
We’ve already seen that the three cabinet secretaries struggling to assert control over their own agencies deferred to Stephen Miller when he told the participants of the famous Signal chat what Trump thought.
That is, it’s not just that Stephen Miller is often the last one in the room with Trump. It’s not just that Stephen Miller’s policy ideas are batshit insane (and that he’s the author of Trump’s most egregious abuses of power). It’s also that Miller often stands in as the Word of DOGE, the Word of Trump.
Kremlinologists are pointing to evidence — his demotion at Trump’s most recent cabinet meeting, for example — that Elon’s power at the White House has started to wane (while ignoring that Elon has moved onto the next phase of takeover, cashing in, cashing in, and cashing in).
But behind all the intrigue, Stephen Miller’s ascendance remains, apparently uncontested and possibly unbound.
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There are a slew of legal challenges to Trump’s war on immigrants: there are people illegally sent to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp, most notably Kilmar Abrego Garcia (whom Chris Van Hollen managed to meet yesterday); people sent to CECOT with no due process (including people with pending asylum claims and others picked up by mistake); grad students targeted for free speech; grad students targeted for low-level run-ins with the law; a US-born citizen, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, detained for unlawful entry but since released; and at least three US citizens informed they must self-deport within seven days because their parole had been withdrawn.
Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos is a fairly unique case. He was arrested to great fanfare in March, with Pam Bondi boasting over and over she had caught one of the top leaders of MS-13.
He was arrested not — as Bondi suggested — based off probable cause he was the top leader of MS-13. Rather, he was arrested based on an outstanding administrative immigration warrant and weapons purportedly found in a plain view search of his house, for which he was charged with possession of a firearm by an alien.
9. After knocking and announcing their presence to no avail, members of the FBI’s Special Weapons and Tactics (“SWAT”) Team breached the front and rear doors of the residence. After breaching the front door, SWAT agents observed VILLATORO in an alcove leading to the residence’s garage. VILLATORO ducked behind a small wall out of view and did not comply with the agents’ demands that he exit the residence. After agents deployed a stun grenade, VILLATORO eventually came close enough to the front door to be pulled out of the residence.
10. VILLATORO was taken into custody on an outstanding administrative immigration warrant. When VILLATORO was being prepared for transport from the residence, he confirmed that the bedroom in the garage was his room and that a jacket inside that room was his.
11. FBI agents and TFOs proceeded to search the residence. Inside the aforementioned garage bedroom, a Taurus, model G2C, 9-millimeter handgun bearing serial no. ACH119455 was observed in plain view on a shelf near the bed. Based on my training and experience, I am aware that Taurus firearms are not manufactured in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Furthermore, the words “TAURUS ARMAS MADE IN BRAZIL” are stamped into the handgun’s slide next to the serial number.
12. In that same garage bedroom, agents located three additional firearms, ammunition, and two suppressors.
Less than two weeks later, DOJ moved to dismiss the case against Villatoro. They moved to get rid of the case, their claims, and Villatoro himself the easy way, by quick and due process-free deportation.
On Tuesday, magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick granted DOJ’s request (without requiring DOJ to offer the reason to dismiss), but granted a continuance to provide Villatoro a way to challenge deportation to CECOT.
Yesterday, Fitzpatrick granted Villatoro’s request for a stay so he can appeal the dismissal and try to stave off deportation to CECOT.
Villatoro’s request for an emergency stay cited the effect that the evidence-free claims that Pam Bondi, among others, has made — just like she has been with Abrego Garcia.
Through its very public pronouncements and attacks on Mr. Villatoro Santos, including bellicose statements by the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the Virginia Governor, and President Trump himself, the Government has effectively placed a target on Mr. Villatoro’s back: if he were to be deported to El Salvador, there is no doubt he will immediately be detained at CECOT without trial, and there will be no way out from there. And to be clear, this life-altering fate would result from the unproven allegations of a government that chose to forego criminal prosecution, where there is due process and a burden of proof to meet, in favor of deportation to a country in which there is little to no respect for the rule of law. Mr. Villatoro Santos faces the risk of an effective life sentence without trial, or worse.
If Abrego Garcia is ever brought back to the country, Pam Bondi’s inflammatory allegations against him may limit the government’s ability to dictate his fate; she obviously has prejudiced his ability to get a fair hearing. But Villatoro (who has not contested he had the guns) is in the country and so may be able to make something of the way Bondi claimed him to be something he’s probably not.
It’s not just that Trump’s Administration is deporting people without due process. He’s deporting people without due process because he needs to sustain false claims about them, to sustain a myth about invasion that Stephen Miller used to get Trump elected.
Meanwhile, Trump’s false claims are collapsing at a more significant level.
On one level, there’s Bukele’s claims to oppose MS-13. As I noted here, there has been isolated reporting on Bukele’s interest in preventing the real story of his relationship with MS-13 from being made public.
Asha Rangappa updates that with a description of how both Bukele and Trump have the need to claim their relationship with MS-13 is something it is not.
El Salvador has suffered from gang violence, led by Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, following decades of civil war from 1979 to 1992. According to an indictment brought by the Eastern District of New York against thirteen MS-13 gang members in 2022, various El Salvadoran administrations since the war ended entered into a “truce” with MS-13, in which the gang agreed to reduce homicides in the city “in exchange for transfers to less secure prisons, improved prison conditions, conjugal visits, cash payments, and other benefits and privileges.” The “truce” came to a halt, however, in 2015 after the U.S. government, which wanted to curb MS-13’s activity in the United States and bring them to justice here, increased pressure on El Salvador to return to restrictive prison conditions for gang members and extradite some of them to the U.S. In retaliation for the “truce” being lifted, MS-13 increased its violence both in El Salvador and in the U.S. In fact, the first Trump Justice Department created a task force, called Task Force Vulcan, to crack down on MS-13 in the U.S. – which is what led to the federal indictment noted earlier.
Enter Bukele. Bukele was elected in 2019, winning on a platform that promised to (once again) “crack down” on gang violence. But his party, Nuevas Ideas, began secretly working to gain the support of a critical group: Yep, MS-13. Bukele and his party negotiated with the gang to bring back the “truce,” which would include (according to the federal indictment) “financial benefits, control of territory, the ability to run the gang from prison, and the early release of gang members.” MS-13 also wanted assurance that they wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., where they would face more punitive measures. (Having studied the drug cartels in Colombia, this was reminiscent of Pablo Escobar’s mantra, “Mejor una tumba en Colombia, que una carcel in los Estados Unidos” – which means, “Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.”) The same day Bukele’s party received a legislative majority in 2021, it removed the Attorney General and five members of the Supreme Court who had been working with the U.S. to take real action against MS-13. Buekele also released a major MS-13 leader whom the U.S. was seeking for extradition from prison.
In exchange, MS-13 “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefitted the government, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate.” Indeed, Bukele’s popularity is the result of his so-called “Territorial Control Plan,” which involved building his supermax prison and his plan of mass incarceration – a plan which he credits for the drop in violence since he took office. Of course, the citizens of El Salvador aren’t privy to the secret negotiations Bukele made with MS-13 – details that were going to be made public when the U.S. government’s case against the MS-13 defendants went to trial. Which may explain why the Trump administration quietly dropped these charges last week and put the charged MS-13 members on the third plane bound for El Slavador (and which included Abrego Garcia). Among the defendants was one of the highest-ranking leaders of MS-13, Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios, who was arrested last June and added to the earlier indictment (and who almost certainly will not face real punishment in El Salvador). A former FBI agent who spent years working on this and other gang cases called it “a historical loss,” especially in terms of getting critical intelligence about MS-13’s operations and members in the United States.
In short, both Trump and Bukele appear to be complicit in a plan to allow MS-13 to operate in El Salvador on its own terms, in exchange for making it look like both are “cracking down” on the gang in their respective countries. Of course, the fact that MS-13 will continue to operate in cahoots with the El Salvadoran government means that citizens of that country who are victims of the gang will continue fleeing to the United States, undercutting the Trump administration’s claim that it is trying to end the “invasion” of asylum seekers. Then again, Trump needs a steady influx of people to continue trying to cross the border in order to keep claiming the “national emergency” he is using to expand his authority.
There’s a flip side to Trump’s propaganda, involving Trump’s false claims about Tren de Aragua.
Even at the Global Threats Hearings on March 26, otherwise focused on Mike Waltz’ Signal chat, Democrats asked Tulsi Gabbard why Tren de Aragua, which Trump had just declared was invading the country in a matter akin to war, was not even mentioned among the IC’s description — prioritized as the primary threat for the first time — of transnational actors threatening the country.
Western Hemisphere-based TCOs and terrorists involved in illicit drug production and trafficking bound for the United States endanger the health and safety of millions of Americans and contribute to regional instability. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids remain the most lethal drugs trafficked into the United States, causing more than 52,000 U.S. deaths in a 12-month period ending in October 2024. This represents a nearly 33 percent decrease in synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths compared to the same reporting time frame the previous year, according to CDC provisional data, and may be because of the availability and accessibility of naloxone.
Mexico-based TCOs—including the Sinaloa Cartel and the New Generation Jalisco Cartel—remain the dominant producers and suppliers of illicit drugs, including fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and South American-sourced cocaine, for the U.S. market. Last year, official points of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border were the main entry point for illicit drugs, often concealed in passenger vehicles and tractor trailers. However, some TCOs likely will at least temporarily change their smuggling techniques and routes in response to increased U.S. security force presence at the border.
Since at least 2020, the growth of Mexico-based independent fentanyl producers—actors who are autonomous or semiautonomous from Mexican cartel control—has increasingly fragmented Mexico’s fentanyl trade. Independent fentanyl producers are attracted to the drug’s profitability and the low barriers to market entry, including the ease of synthesizing it using basic lab equipment and few personnel.
Colombia-based TCOs and illegal armed groups are responsible for producing and exporting the vast majority of cocaine that reaches the United States, some of which is transshipped through Ecuador, contributing to an uptick in violent criminal conflicts that spurs regional migration.
Mexico-based TCOs are ramping up lethal attacks in Mexico against rivals and Mexican security forces using IEDs, including landmines, mortars, and grenades. In 2024, there were nearly 1,600 attacks on Mexican security forces using IEDs, surging from only three reported attacks between 2020- 2021. The sophistication of TCO tactics is reshaping Mexico’s security landscape and has heightened the risk to security forces.
Tren de Aragua is not mentioned in the report; Venezuela is mentioned once (because, with Mexicans and Guatemalans, they are the migrants most commonly trying to enter the country through the Mexican border). El Salvador and MS-13 are likewise not mentioned.
But since then, the IC has done a National Intelligence Estimate that formalizes what became clear in the Threats Hearings. Of the 18 intelligence agencies who contributed to the assessment, only the FBI even claimed that the Venezuelan government was involved with TdA.
The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.
[snip]
The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader. The product builds on U.S. intelligence findings in February, first reported by the New York Times, that the gang is not controlled by Venezuela.
An unnamed person in Tulsi’s office accused the entire IC of a Deep State plot, pitting the DNI aggressively against her subordinates.
When asked about the findings, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dismissed it as the work of “deep state actors” working in conjunction with the media.
“President Trump took necessary and historic action to safeguard our nation when he deported these violent Tren de Aragua terrorists,” the statement said. “Now that America is safer without these terrorists in our cities, deep state actors have resorted to using their propaganda arm to attack the President’s successful policies.”
All of it — all of Trump’s March campaign to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to start deporting people without due process — all of it is based on wildly unfounded propaganda, propaganda about who Bukele is, propaganda about what TdA is, propaganda about who these makeup artists and soccer players are.
There is a great deal of angst among centrist Democratic consultants and pundits that Trump will always have the upper hand on immigration. And while it’s true that that’s what has prevented Trump’s polling from cratering, it is already the case that Americans don’t like specific aspects of Trump’s immigration policy.
The vast majority — 82% — of Americans believe Trump should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them, and 56% think he should stop “deporting people” (again, very vague) specifically:
But the details of the policy Trump is carrying out are even more removed from the polling — even more unpopular, reflecting deep reservations among the public about what the president is doing.
For example, when various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.
But here’s what else the polling never accounted for: even in real time, it was clear Trump’s strength on immigration was based on a massive campaign of propaganda (just as Trump had tried with less success in 2018 and 2020).
More than $247 million was spent in the first six months of this year on television, streaming platform and digital ads that mention immigration, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign advertising. That is $40 million more than ads that mention any other issue.
Over 90 percent of the ads supported Republican candidates and were paid for by their campaigns or political action committees backing them.
The level of spending underscores how important Republicans view border security and immigration in this year’s elections. While polls show voters overall rank issues at the border as less important to them than the economy, inflation and protecting democracy, Republican voters consistently rank it as among the most important.
The Washington Post analyzed the transcripts, images and on-screen text featured in more than 700 campaign ads that mention immigration and that ran from January through June for the presidential and Senate races, as well as congressional primaries and major state campaigns.
Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence. FBI data show U.S. border cities are among the nation’s safest. And a 2023 report from a group of economists found immigrants are at least 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.
Click through to that story, because it was extremely comprehensive, but also just a single story amid a campaign focused on other things.
Donald Trump won election by staging spectacular propaganda in places like Aurora, Colorado, where Stephen Miller tried to drown out the Republican Mayor’s debunking of his false claims. Donald Trump won election by falsely accusing a productive group of Haitian immigrants were eating house pets. Trump won election by claiming that a bunch of criminal aliens safely held in US prisons were, instead wandering the streets.
Donald Trump won, in significant part by stoking fear of immigrants, based off a flood of propaganda that Democrats only responded to with whack-a-mole efforts to combat individual lies.
Thus far, Democrats are still largely fighting a game of whack-a-mole, though one facilitated by human interest and the Fifth Amendment.
Thus far, the campaign to fight back against Trump’s authoritarian immigration crackdown has focused on individual stories: Abrego Garcia’s efforts to raise his three American citizen children, Rumeysa Öztürk’s research on how to make social media useful, Mohsen Mahdawi’s empathy for both Palestinians and Jews. These are individuals, and once they are viewed as individuals, most Americans don’t support their draconian treatment.
But it has yet to account for the fact that it is based on far bigger lies, bigger lies that Stephen Miller manufactured to justify claiming expansive powers in the name of fear.
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Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele, and Kristi Noem love to make fascist spectacle.
They did it with the video showing the arrival of hundreds of people Trump sent to Bukele’s concentration camp. Noem did it with her visit to the camp. And they did it with the planned theater yesterday, including the staged hot mic moment where Trump told Bukele he wanted to send “homegrowns” to the concentration camp at CECOT.
They do it because fascist spectacle inspires fear. They do it because fascist spectacle goes viral, including with the help of data mules who purport to oppose its content.
They do it because it short circuits rational thought, overwhelming such rational thought with emotion.
The effect of yesterday’s fascist spectacle led virtually everyone to focus on a detail that won’t help the immediate fight before us — Trump’s interest in deporting “homegrowns,” an interest he has stated openly over and over, starting during campaign — rather than on details that might help Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and in the process help to prevent similar treatment of other migrants and, ultimately, American citizens.
Few people raised any of the questions posed by Trump’s latest attempt to retcon a legal case he already blew. Let’s start with the big one:
Why did Trump free someone, Abrego Garcia, whom Stephen Miller insists is a dangerous terrorist?
The latest theory about Abrego Garcia — one DOJ first rolled out at the Fourth Circuit — is that when the Trump Administration designated MS-13 a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, it meant Abrego Garcia was no longer eligible for the withholding of removal granted to him in 2019.
It is true that an immigration judge concluded six years ago that Abrego Garcia should not be returned to El Salvador, given his claims about threats from a different gang. Final Removal Order 7–10. That conclusion was dubious then (and increasingly so now). But it has become totally untenable, given the Secretary of State’s designation of MS-13 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February. 90 Fed. Reg. at 10030–31.
As a result of that designation, and Abrego Garcia’s membership in that terrorist organization, he would no longer be eligible for withholding relief under the federal immigration laws. 8 U.S.C. §§ 1231(b)(3)(B)(iv); 1227(a)(4)(B). And as even Plaintiffs admit, the Government had available a procedural mechanism under governing regulations to reopen the immigration judge’s prior order, and terminate its withholding protection. See Reply 8. To be sure, the Government did not avail itself of that procedure in this case. But through the lens of the public interest, the district court’s stunning injunction does not fit that error. A mistake of process does not warrant the unprecedented remedy ordered—one that demands the return of a foreign terrorist from the foreign sovereign that agreed to take him.
Before this claim, DOJ barely mentioned two earlier rulings from 2019 (onetwo) asserting Abrego Garcia could not be released because of hearsay ties to MS-13, relying instead on procedural arguments. In a footnote, Judge Xinis ruled that DOJ did not rely on it before her.
Defendants did not assert—at any point prior to or during the April 4, 2025, hearing—that Abrego Garcia was an “enemy combatant,” an “alien enemy” under the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. § 21, or removable based on MS13’s recent designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under 8 U.S.C. § 1189. Invoking such theories for the first time on appeal cannot cure the failure to present them before this Court. In any event, Defendants have offered no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity. And vague allegations of gang association alone do not supersede the express protections afforded under the INA, including 8 U.S.C. §§ 1231(b)(3)(A), 1229a, and 1229b.
Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” Mot. for Stay at 14–15. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13,8 the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.” Dis.t Ct. Op. at 22 n.19; see also id. at 2 n.2 (“Invoking such theories for the first time on appeal cannot cure the failure to present them before this Court.”). Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court. Dist. Ct. Op. at 22 n.19. The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own9 withholding order. If the Government wanted to prove to the district court that Abrego Garcia was a “prominent” member of MS-13, it has had ample opportunity to do so but has not — nor has it even bothered to try.
The Government’s argument that there is a public interest in removing members of “violent transnational gangs” from this country is no doubt true, but it does nothing to help the Government’s cause here. As noted, the Government has made no effort to demonstrate that Abrego Garcia is, in fact, a member of any gang, nor did the Government avail itself of the “procedural mechanism under governing regulations to reopen the immigration judge’s prior order[] and terminate its withholding protection.” Mot. for Stay at 16–17. The Government may not rely on its own failure to circumvent its own ruling that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador.
8 Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.” S.A. 146 n.5; Mot. for Stay Add. at 10–11.
9 Of note, the IJ’s 2019 decision, which granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal to El Salvador pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A) because he faced threats to his life from an El Salvadoran gang that had targeted him and his family, was during President Trump’s 2016–2020 term in office. That decision became final on November 9, 2019, and was not appealed by this Administration.
But let’s take this retcon on its face. Stephen Miller has now decided, with no evidence provided, that Abrego Garcia is a “prominent” leader of MS-13, a gang on which DOJ focused closely for the entirety of the first Trump Administration. Miller says that Abrego Garcia is a danger to the community. Miller keeps screeching about terrorism.
If what Miller is saying now is true, it means that Trump released a dangerous criminal back in 2019. Why did Trump leave this man on the street to do dangerous things like raising three American citizen children for six years?
Update: Roger Parloff has a good summary of the flimsy case that Abrego Garcia has ties to MS-13.
Why is Trump so weak that he can’t make requests of the dictator of a small country?
Next consider Pam Bondi’s claim that, notwithstanding public reports that the detainees are just being held in CECOT for a year, notwithstanding Kristi Noem’s visit to the concentration camp, notwithstanding that the government just sent another ten people down there, the government is helpless to get Abrego Garcia back.
What does this say about Trump’s weakness as a President?
What kind of weak ass man can’t even make a request of a small Central American nation?
How does Trump think he’ll negotiate with Xi Jinping if he can’t even make a simple request of Bukele?
Will Stephen Miller send adjudged terrorists like Stewart Rhodes and Joe Biggs to Bukele’s concentration camp? Will Miller send DC US Attorney Ed Martin there, for palling around with adjudged terrorist Kelly Meggs, the same kind of associational ties used to send at least one of the men on the flights on March 15 to CECOT?
Next, let’s take Trump at his word that he wants to send “homegrowns” to CECOT.
Should Stewart Rhodes and Joe Biggs — both adjudged to be terrorists, both radicalized in the United States — both be packing their bags for the concentration camp? If Ed Martin has been palling around with adjudged terrorist Kelly Meggs — the same kind of associational guilt used to send at least one of the Venezuelans in the March 15 flight — should he worry about packing his bags?
Will Stephen Miller send his terrorists to the concentration camp?
Is Miller using the designation of terrorism just as a way to criminalize brown people, or will he send terrorists from his own tribe to the concentration camp?
Why is Stephen Miller terrified of — why does he want you to be terrified of — loving fathers?
Miller has been accusing journalists who describe the contributions Abrego Garcia has made as a loving father to three American citizen children of lying, because journalists refuse to repeat his bleated accusations of terrorism with no evidence. Miller and Pam Bondi are working hard to get people to dumbly adopt their accusations.
But why is Miller so afraid of journalists describing Abrego Garcia as what he is, a father from Maryland?
Why does Pam Bondi keep destroying the careers of DOJ attorneys because they tell the truth?
When DOJ decided to retcon this case, they scapegoated the lawyer from whom they had withheld any sound legal basis, Erez Reuvani, along with his supervisor, both of whom were put on leave.
This, in spite of the fact that Drew Ensign called Reuveni “top notched” when he promoted him just weeks earlier.
In a March 21 email announcing Mr. Reuveni’s promotion to acting deputy director of the department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, his boss, Drew C. Ensign, lauded him for working on cases filed against sanctuary cities accused of defying federal immigration laws, and for generally helping to expand the department’s litigation activities.
“I want to thank those who submitted interest for the acting positions — we had outstanding choices, which helps go to show the excellent caliber of our team,” Mr. Ensign wrote.
Mr. Ensign has been handling a separate immigration case, one in which he has been defending the Trump administration’s use of a rarely invoked wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily deport scores of Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the street gang Tren de Aragua.
As DOJ has provided increasingly contemptuous updates to Judge Xinis, the AUSA who had appeared before her, Tarra DeShields, has backed off vouching for the arguments DOJ has made, instead listing her involvement as “fil[ing]” updates.
Finally, Ensign filed a notice of appearance and, apparently, took on this dogshit argument himself, as he did the Alien Enemies Act before Judge Boasberg.
Obviously, even committed immigration lawyers are unwilling to make these arguments. How many career attorneys will Pam Bondi chase away while floating these arguments?? How many careers will she destroy because the actions of the Trump administration have no defense in the law?
Has Bondi’s DOJ lost all presumption of regularity?
And the whole process of admitting fault, suspending the person who (along with several others) told that truth, and then inventing new theories after the fact has to start destroying the entire concept of presumption of regularity for DOJ.
Even before DeShields started getting cold feet, even before Stephen Miller started disclaiming the error that everyone has admitted, Ben Wittes raised this question: At what point are judges entitled to demand proof from DOJ lawyers for their claims?
Will Xinis demand that DOJ document their new theory that Trump’s terrorist designations retroactively make judge’s orders disappear?
Would Marco Rubio deport his own grandfather to a concentration camp if Stephen Miller told him to?
Abrego Garcia’s story — of a man who came to the US to seek a better life without proper paperwork, but who was allowed to stay and build a life — is not all that different from the story of Marco Rubio’s own grandfather, who was almost denied entry in part because of suspicions he had communist sympathies and even then only allowed to stay as a parolee.
It had been almost three years since he had last set foot in the United States, and he no longer had the proper credentials to enter. They told him he could stay for the time being, but if he wanted to avoid deportation, he would have to plead his case.
“I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later. He said that he had previously returned to Cuba because he did not want to be a burden on his family in the United States, but that the Cuban government had grown too oppressive and he feared what might happen if he stayed.
The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.
“It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,” he said matter-of-factly, according to an audio recording of the proceedings stored by the National Archives. He stopped to ask if Mr. Garcia understood.
“Yes, I do,” Mr. Garcia said plaintively.
That easily could have been the end of his American story. But someone in the immigration office on Biscayne Boulevard that day — the paperwork does not make clear exactly who or why — had a change of heart. Mr. Garcia was granted status as a parolee, a gray area of the law that meant he would not get a green card but could remain in the United States.
[snip]
Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal. That charge, had they pursued it, could have led to a conclusion that he was a national security threat. (Details of Mr. Garcia’s immigration odyssey were reported in 2012 by Manuel Roig-Franzia in his book “The Rise of Marco Rubio.”)
In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience. Immigration records also show that other members of Mr. Rubio’s family — two aunts and an uncle — were admitted as refugees.
But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.
“I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”
Last month, Trump announced the cessation of various parole programs, including a recent one including Cubans, effective on April 24. Which means, within days, Cubans could be among the Hispanic migrants that Stephen Miller packages up to send to Bukele’s concentration camp.
How many Cubans will Marco Rubio send away to a concentration camp? How many lives like Rubio’s own will the Secretary of State doom with his enthusiasm to send send loving fathers to concentration camps?
For too long Trump’s lefty opponents (liberals and progressives and those further left; anti-Trump Republicans are, in my opinion, actually far better at this) have largely failed to make Trump’s fascism a political problem. And while lawyers have done a great job of humanizing their clients — including Abrego Garcia — in public opinion, the rest of it, the contradictions and confessions of pathetic weakness, has largely gone unmentioned.
Do not abdicate making Abrego Garcia a political, as well as a legal, case. Do not get distracted by the fascist spectacle from using the fragile story rolled out yesterday against Trump. The stakes in this moment are too high.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-7.01.16 PM.png13042346emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-04-15 06:22:412025-04-15 09:03:15Why Did Donald Trump Free Someone He Purports To Be a Dangerous Terrorist?
