It looks like yet another political use of the criminal justice system by the Trump administration, and yet another dent in U.S. democracy.
“The federal officer who arrested the mayor of New Jersey’s largest city outside an immigration detention center in May suggested that he was making the arrest at the direction of the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche, according to law enforcement body camera footage described in a new court filing.
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Witness accounts and other video footage taken that day showed the mayor had been allowed inside a gated area by a guard, stood there peacefully for the better part of an hour and left the gated area when federal agents threatened him with arrest. That day, Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) told POLITICO that he’d witnessed an agent inside the gated area talking on the phone with someone who told the agent to arrest Baraka, who by the time of the call was outside the gate. McIver gave a similar account in a press conference at the time.
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Less than two weeks later, federal prosecutors dropped a trespassing charge against Baraka. But a federal judge chided the effort to charge him in the first place. Magistrate Judge André M. Espinosa called it an “embarrassing retraction” that “suggests a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.””
Trump and his supporters had spread falsehoods and exaggerated that Democrats were using the justice system against Trump, then Trump gets into power and straightforwardly uses the justice system to prosecute Democrats. This hypocrisy is one of the many reasons Trump is damaging U.S. democracy and basic justice in the USA.
Trump administration ruins an FBI agent’s career because he’s friends with the wrong guy. Every other agent now has to worry that if they do something that bothers Trump, even something that is legal and legitimate!, they might lose their job.
This is not the way to retain the best employees for our government! Nor how a democratic country operates.
Trump removes people with great experience for bad reasons, then puts in shills he thinks are loyal. The remaining underlings see that the way to keep their jobs is to shut up, and do what they’re told, even if the shills at the top don’t know what they’re doing.
“The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to punish lawyers whom it sees as obstacles to the president’s agenda.
The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to impose “substantial monetary sanctions” on a California lawyer who briefly halted but ultimately failed to block the deportation of an immigrant from Laos who pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the 1990s.”
President Trump literally arrested a legal resident based on his speech. This is a huge, massive infringement of basic democratic rights by a president who ran on free speech.
Because the man was educated, in custody, people getting deported would talk to him and ask him questions. A man who had been in the country for over 20 years and had four children under 11, was showing up to his immigration hearing when he was grabbed to be deported. Another person asked him what a paper he signed was. The paper said he was to be deported. Another 19-year old asked if it would be safe for his mom to visit him, the answer was no. The immigration detention center had a lot of crying people in it. These people were depicted as criminals by the administration when they were picked up at their immigration hearings and their jobs.
Khalil missed the birth of his child because Trump decided to arrest him based on speech. The justification required the Secretary of State to go along with it. Marco Rubio did, losing what little dignity he had left. Khalil requested to be temporarily let out for the birth of his child. HIs request was denied.
I disagree with a lot of what he says about Palestine and Israel, but his detention was an insult to the principles that democracy stands on.
“El Salvador’s congress has approved constitutional reforms to abolish presidential term limits, allowing President Nayib Bukele to run an unlimited number of times.”
The Supreme Court used to use the shadow docket, where it gives a quick and binding decision without explanation, mostly for death penalty cases. For Trump, the court has done these more often, often giving Trump powers that seem unconstitutional, allowing him to take actions difficult to reverse even if he loses later.
Trump is destroying the Department of Education and making it so they cannot fulfill their law-mandated duties. The Constitution states that Congress makes the laws, and the executive faithfully executes them. This is not faithfully executing them.