“Attorney General Pam Bondi has decided that instead of working to facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as the Supreme Court has ordered, she will instead take to X to release documents from his 2019 arrest, in which a detective claimed he was an MS-13 member.”
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“These documents had already been publicly available, if you cared to look through the prior court proceedings. The Gang Field Interview Sheet, drafted up by Ivan Mendez, then an officer with the Prince George’s County Police Department, says Abrego Garcia was arrested with purported MS-13 members in a Home Depot parking lot, that he was wearing clothing that they believe to be affiliated with MS-13 (“a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations” which “officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture”), and that a confidential informant said he was part of MS-13.
Interestingly, reporting by The New Republic notes that Mendez was suspended the next month for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.” (“The information he provided focused on an on-going police investigation,” per the county’s news release.)
Information has also come out about Abrego Garcia allegedly beating his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, stemming from a protection order she filed against him in 2021: “At this point, I am afraid to be close to him,” she wrote in the protection order. “I have multiple photos/videos of how violent he can be and all the bruises he [has] left me.” She cites specific examples from August 2020 and November 2020 in which he was violent toward her. Vasquez Sura told CNN that “she sought a civil protective order in 2021 after a disagreement with Abrego Garcia” and that “she had survived a previous relationship that included domestic violence.” She says she did not appear at a court hearing and pursue the matter further: “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling.””
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” the administration keeps implying that you cannot both support due process for Abrego Garcia and have empathy for the victims of violence from illegal immigrants.”
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“The Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration continues to demur on this front, instead choosing to release, via X…the protective order Vasquez Sura filed”
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“most people are neither angels nor demons, and even very bad and violent people—if that is what Abrego Garcia is—deserve due process. The punishment for wifebeating in Maryland, or entering the country illegally, is not indefinite confinement in a Salvadoran prison. He has not just been deported, he has been locked up in CECOT. (“A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world,” writes The New York Times’ Ezra Klein. “It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.”)”
“North Carolina’s top court cleared the way for some voters’ ballots in a contested state Supreme Court race to be tossed months after the election, opening a path for Republican Jefferson Griffin to potentially overturn an apparent narrow loss.
However, the extraordinary decision from the Republican-controlled court — which drew angry rebukes from Democrats and a sitting GOP justice in the state — still may see more litigation in federal court.”
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“Griffin argued three categories of votes should be tossed: Voters who were registered to vote with incomplete voter registration data; military and overseas voters who did not meet the state’s voter ID requirements; and overseas voters who have never lived in the state or expressed an intent to do so, a small category of voters who are generally family members of expats or service members.
Tossing out wide swaths of ballots after the election would be a near-unprecedented decision that voting rights groups, Democrats and even some Republicans condemned as violating voters’ due process rights and changing the rules of an election after it has already been run.”
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“The state’s high court ruled Friday that most of those ballots — coming from roughly 60,000 voters with incomplete registration data, which could include missing driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers — should still be counted for this election, placing the blame on the state board of elections.
But the court’s order has the latter two categories of voters at risk. The court ruled that military and overseas voters who didn’t meet the identification requirement must prove their identity within 30 days — known as a “cure process” — or their votes could be invalidated, while affirming the lower court order that “never residents” ballots, which amount to a couple hundred votes, should be disqualified.
Friday’s majority decision elicited scathing dissents from two of the court’s justices — Anita Earls, the lone Democrat who participated in the case, and Republican Justice Richard Dietz.”
“the administration’s maneuvering appears to represent a concerted effort to evade longstanding American law by intentionally sending people to a legal black hole with no process, no rights and no recourse.”
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“”the U.S. is labeling people ‘enemies’ with little or no process, and then shipping them offshore””
“Basically all major colleges and universities are tax-exempt organizations, and the government revoking that status over policy disagreements would be unprecedented. The U.S. tax code also grants exemptions to a wide swath of organizations, including charities, religious institutions — and even some political organizations.
But Republicans have taken aim at the Ivy League through the tax code in the past.
Congress imposed a 1.4 percent tax on high-dollar university endowments, like Harvard’s, in 2017 and Republicans may expand the levy in the tax package they are currently assembling.
Trump’s threats follow his administration pulling over $2.2 billion of Harvard’s federal funding in response to the university announcing it would not comply with a list of demands to curb what the White House views as antisemitism on campus.
Educational institutions can lose their tax-exempt status if found to be participating in activities related to political campaigning for or against candidates, or substantial amounts of lobbying by the Internal Revenue Service. There is no public evidence of Harvard violating IRS rules.”
“Bukele is actively helping Trump sidestep court orders in the United States.
During a White House visit Monday in which the two leaders bantered like old friends, Bukele insisted on one thing: He will not release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native Salvadoran who was living in Maryland until the U.S. illegally deported him last month. The upshot of that declaration: It gives Trump cover to maintain that he is powerless to implement a judge’s directive that the U.S. “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s immediate return from a brutal El Salvador prison. The Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.
Trump’s “nothing I can do here” stance is unusual for a president who prides himself on strong-arming other world leaders to do his bidding. And it escalates a clash with the courts in advance of a crucial Tuesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who ordered Abrego Garcia’s return and is growing frustrated with the administration’s recalcitrance.
Hours after Bukele’s White House visit, the Trump administration quoted some of his comments in a daily report Xinis has demanded. Also in that document, the acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Mazzara, declared that “DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.” The filing included no information in response to Xinis’ substantive questions.
The burgeoning partnership between Trump and Bukele is not limited to Abrego Garcia. Trump sent hundreds of other deportees to El Salvador last month, many without due process. And on Monday, he intensified his threats of lawless deportations even further: He openly mused about sending U.S. citizens to the Salvadoran prison.”
“My trepidation boils down to two things. First, for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington. It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short.
That’s in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.
The probability may be higher, however, that they will fail to make a significant difference at all. If that is the case, we will be left with both a presidency on steroids and no meaningful reduction in government.”
“”Refusing to follow a court order crosses a very clear, very dangerous line…If Trump refuses to follow court orders, especially from the Supreme Court, we will have tipped from chaos into dire crisis.””
“If Trump decided he wanted to hold onto power past 2028, there are at least four paths he could try:
He could generate a movement to repeal the 22nd Amendment directly.
He could exploit a little-noticed loophole in the amendment that might allow him to run for vice president and then immediately ascend back to the presidency.
He could run for president again on the bet that a pliant Supreme Court won’t stop him.
Or he could simply refuse to leave — and put a formal end to America’s democratic experiment.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/31/trump-defy-constitution-third-term-00200239
“A third major law firm has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to escape a punishing executive order that would cost it government business.
Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, which has more than 1,200 attorneys, will provide at least $100 million in legal services to causes favored by the White House and end diversity programs under terms of a deal President Donald Trump announced Tuesday on social media.”
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“Trump has deployed executive orders and memos to punish law firms he views as adversaries. Among them are longtime Democratic Party partner Perkins Coie and Covington and Burling — which provided legal services to former special counsel Jack Smith.
Several firms, including Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, have fought back against Trump’s punishing orders, suing to block the orders.”
“In recent weeks, two large law firms reached settlements with the Trump administration that stunned the legal profession — the first with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which pledged to commit $40 million in free legal work “to support the Administration’s initiatives,” and the second with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which upped the ante to a $100 million commitment. The deals allowed the firms to avoid sanctions imposed by Trump’s executive orders, including revocations of government security clearances held by the firms’ lawyers and prohibitions on entering federal buildings.”
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“You can attribute the two deals mostly to the fact that what Trump is doing — using the power of the presidency to target law firms that he personally dislikes — is legitimately unprecedented. The full scope of the consequences from Trump’s orders are far from clear, and large law firms are temperamentally conservative by nature. Faced with such uncertainty, surrender becomes an option.
The bottom line is that large law firms exist to make money — ideally lots of it — and they are generally not paragons of virtue, principle or self-sacrifice.”
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“it is a crime under federal law for public officials to engage in extortion, and the Justice Department’s public guidance explains that the theory has been used against public officials “serving on the federal, state and local levels.”
Trump is not the direct beneficiary of the pro bono work agreed to by the firms, but the DOJ guidance explains that the law applies even if the “corrupt payment went to a third party.” Moreover, a person or company can be liable under the law if they are “truly the instigator of the transaction,” so both sides of these deals could conceivably be held accountable.
You could make similar arguments under federal bribery law — the line between bribery and extortion is often hard to parse in particular fact patterns — but of course, the Justice Department is not going to do anything about it, and Trump enjoys broad criminal immunity even after he leaves office. In theory, the law firms are at greater risk — a Justice Department in a new administration could always take an interest — but that seems highly unlikely.”
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“two effects are conceivable, at least at the margins. The first is that law firms will be less willing to take on political clients. The second is that law firms may prove less willing to hire former government lawyers involved in politically controversial cases — or even lawyers who they think may go on to do that sort of work.
More broadly, law firms may pull back on supporting pro bono work that could be controversial with the Trump administration or the Republican Party, including immigration-related cases.”
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” In a democratic society, lawyers should not have to worry about whether the government will punish them for having clients or colleagues who are somehow associated with the political opposition. Likewise, private parties should be free to choose their own lawyers without having to worry that the government will be biased against their attorneys or will hamper their work for improper reasons.”