The humiliation is the point.
ICE is fitting Haitian immigrants with ankle monitors, as if these residents who came to the U.S. legally were criminals.
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SHACKLES FOR SANCTUARY SEEKERS. Earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered hundreds of thousands of people with legal asylum in the United States to be sent back to their home countries, despite many of those places still being war-torn, dangerous, and economically unstable. While the government figures out how to deport them all, they’re using ankle bracelets to track them. ICE is fitting Haitians in Springfield and Cincinnati, Ohio, with monitors usually reserved for criminals, and limiting them to a 75-mile travel radius. Senator Chris Murphy called it “an embarrassment for the United States of America,” adding, “there is no safe place to return for TPS [Temporary Protected Status] holders from places like Haiti and Yemen and Venezuela and Syria. In fact, in those places I just mentioned, the situation is not stabilizing, getting better. It is getting worse.” Trump and JD Vance, of course, famously made smearing this same Haitian community with debunked pet-eating conspiracy theories a part of their 2024 campaign, so the humiliation is very much on point. Lawyers are continuing to challenge the termination of protected status in court, and we’ll be tracking closely.
BLANCHE’S CONFESSION HOUR. Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination advanced out of committee yesterday but promptly hit another bump in the road. On a private “prayer call” with religious hardliners last week, the acting AG promised he’s working to make the Dobbs decision—the Supreme Court ruling that ended Roe v. Wade’s guaranteed access to abortion—“permanent in every single state,” including states that currently protect abortion access. The Justice Department insists this was all about mifepristone, the mail-order abortion pill that the Supreme Court has okayed, and not “a broader expansion of federal control over states.” Sure. In the meantime, Senator Susan Collins announced she’ll vote no on Blanche, citing a growing list of DOJ independence concerns. That leaves Blanche able to lose just one more Republican vote, with Senators Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy still up in the air.
THE POOL KEEPS DRAINING TRUMP’S CREDIBILITY. The Reflecting Pool saga continues, after U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro dropped vandalism charges against Olympian David Hearn and others last Friday. Her admission in court that a rushed, botched renovation job was the true cause of the pool damage leads one to wonder why Pirro pressed charges in the first place. Pressure from above? Taking the word of the administration at face value? Either is not only possible but probable. In any case, her job is still hanging in the balance after a fiery confrontation with Trump at the White House, to which she brought receipts, proving his “vandalism” accusations were false. Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum struggles to keep up the official Trump narrative, posting on X, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” And as for Trump, he’s trying to decide whether he knew the pool contractor or not.
BILLABLE HOURS, DWINDLING BACKBONE. A New York Times investigation into Paul, Weiss, the Big Law firm that struck an early capitulation deal with Trump, reveals just how far the firm bent. Partners reportedly debated letting Trump aides Boris Epshteyn and Stephen Miller sign off on the firm’s own anti-hate website copy, and firm leadership avoided taking any cases that might irritate Trump. Not long after, four of the firm’s top litigators walked out the door to start their own shop where they could, in their words, sue whomever they pleased. Turns out defiance is better for business, not just for democracy.
“FREE SPEECH” BY THE NUMBERS. Trump promised in his inaugural address to end “government censorship,” but Reuters just did the math: federal judges have ruled against his administration on First Amendment grounds in 75 separate cases. That’s more than double the total First Amendment cases Joe Biden faced in his entire term, and nearly six times the number he actually lost. U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, wrote that Trump has a “palpable misunderstanding,” and “the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains” According to Timothy Zick, author of the book Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment, no president has moved this aggressively against speech since Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare deportations over a century ago. Sounds about right.
0 FOR 20. Trump’s Justice Department just lost its 20th consecutive lawsuit seeking state voter rolls—this time in Colorado, where a George W. Bush-appointed judge dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the DOJ can’t even try again. The suit was part of a broader, unprecedented nationwide legal campaign, demanding unredacted statewide voter registration data from 30 states and Washington, D.C. The judge found the department never had a legitimate reason to demand Coloradans’ driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers in the first place. Colorado’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold didn’t mince words: “Trump and his DOJ are attacking elections and democracy. We will not let them win.” And Colorado did not.
BUREAU VETS PUSH BACK. FBI Director Kash Patel has spent the last year and a half purging agents connected to investigations of Trump, including three fired for their roles in the probe into his 2020 election scheme. Those agents sued, and they’re getting some serious support. Five separate legal briefs have landed in their defense in the past week, from the FBI Agents Association to a coalition of First Amendment scholars to Justice Connection, a network of DOJ alumni. A filing from the latter warned that a “politicized” FBI could easily move from its own staff to everyday citizens. “The Constitution,” the filing said, “is designed to prevent precisely this kind of abuse.”
BONUS ACT OF DEFIANCE: EXPOSING THE PAPER TRAIL. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) just sued the Treasury Department for illegally concealing who’s cashing in on taxpayer-funded settlements, including whether January 6th defendants and Trump allies are quietly getting paid through the government’s Judgment Fund. Michael Flynn alone pocketed $1.25 million in one of these settlements for “wrongful prosecution,” despite having pleaded guilty to his crimes. The suit comes after Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund was “terminated,” though it’s still unclear whether the rescission even holds up legally. Treasury is legally required to disclose settlement details, but has reportedly stonewalled with vague, sometimes misleading descriptions. CREW wants to shed some daylight. Good on them.
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