“CBP agents shot the Chicago woman and U.S. citizen five times last October after her vehicle was involved in a collision with an SUV with Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum.
The federal government charged Marimar with ramming border patrol agents.
Those charges were later dropped. Marimar was one of many, calling the administration’s narratives into question on Tuesday.
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Martinez followed the agents for several blocks before the vehicles collided, resulting in minor dents and scrapes on both vehicles.
According to testimony and documents from Martinez’s now-dropped assault case, she stopped her vehicle directly after the collision and the agents’ SUV came to a halt just ahead of Martinez. She then accelerated away, testifying in court that she swerved left to avoid hitting the agents, who were exiting their vehicle.
That’s when the agents opened fire, ultimately striking Martinez five times in the arm, chest and both legs. Only one of the three agents had a body camera activated at the time.
While the body camera footage hasn’t been released publicly, lawyers for Martinez have said in court that it shows an officer shouting “do something b–.”
The agent who shot her allegedly said in a group text to friends: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.””
The FBI raided the wrong house and arrested an innocent family, and tried to resist paying out when that family sued. The Supreme Court ruled that they don’t have special protection in these circumstances, but the government is using similar arguments to still not pay out.
“A federal judge handling a lawsuit over the deportation of pro-Palestinian activists excoriated top administration officials, including President Donald Trump, for trampling on the First Amendment and for what the judge described as a fearful approach to freedom.
“There was no policy here,” said U.S. District Judge William Young, an 85-year-old Reagan appointee who has been on the federal bench in Boston for 40 years. “What happened here is an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people.”
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“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said. “These cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”
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Young used extraordinarily stark language during the hearing, describing Trump as an “authoritarian” while insisting that he was choosing the term carefully, rather than simply using a “pejorative.”
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The judge found the president and his aides targeted the members of the group for their First Amendment-protected views and speech, guided by an anonymously run private website targeting Palestinian students in the United States.
“I’ve asked myself why — how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” the judge continued. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”
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“These professionals were taken off anti-terrorist investigations. They were taken off human trafficking investigations all to look up … what dirt they could find on this group that some private agency, at the very highest levels of the DHS decided — that’s the best use of those people,” Young said. “If ever you want chapter and verse about how the government can be weaponized against a disfavored group, that’s the record of it.””
“First, the men at the center of the 60 Minutes segment were in fact shipped off to CECOT without any sort of judicial review. Second, even after the Supreme Court ruled that alleged “alien enemies” have a due process right to challenge their removal via habeas corpus petitions, the administration made that option nearly impossible to pursue in practice, as the Court subsequently recognized. Third, the government maintains that federal courts have, at most, a highly circumscribed role in these cases, saying they have no authority to question Trump’s historically unprecedented invocation of the AEA against alleged gang members.
Trump’s assertion of unreviewable power under the AEA is part of a broader pattern that became clear during his first year in office. He has made similar claims regarding his tariffs and National Guard deployments. In these and other cases, Trump’s position undermines civil liberties, the rule of law, and the separation of powers by attacking the crucial role that the judicial branch plays in making sure that presidents respect statutory and constitutional limits on their authority.”
The Supreme Court has always had elements of reverse engineering where justices reach their conclusions based on political ideology, then reverse engineer a legal argument. Their political ideology may even design their legal philosophy from the very beginning of their legal thinking! However, the justices on the right seem to even be dropping the reverse engineering, and getting more sloppy in their legal thinking, pushing forward their political ideology and partisanship even more. Bush V Gore may have been the moment that the conservative justices crossed the Rubicon and realized that they can get away with pushing partisan, ideological agendas.
The Trump administration told Texas to gerrymander based on race. Texas did as asked. A judge said the gerrymander was illegal because it was based on race. The Supreme Court said that despite the detailed investigation by the lower court that showed a race-based gerrymander, they don’t think it was based on race. They based that opinion on very little, and overturning a lower court based on one’s opinions of the facts is illegal, unless the lower court decision was overwhelmingly erroneous, which it was not in this case. The Supreme court also said it is too close to an election to make a change even though the elections are a year out. This means state legislatures can illegally gerrymander half the years because House elections are every two years.
The Supreme Court is clearly ruling on freedom of religion cases in a way that is biased toward Christianity and that allows Christians to risk and hurt non-Christians as long as they consider it a part of their religion.
“The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” …in Bridges v. Wilson (1945), the Supreme Court unambiguously stated that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.””
“A federal judge in Chicago ordered roughly 600 people to be released from immigration detention…The individuals, the judge found, had been arrested in violation of a 2022 consent decree designed to ensure immigration agents have probable cause before making warrantless arrests.”