“One of the issues here is that in the press, everything is conflated as being ICE. But Border Patrol had a big presence here, and, you know, Border Patrol are trained differently. They’re trained for operation at ports of entry, and it’s a different use of force policy, it is a different method of training. It’s a different environment totally. And I noticed Bovino himself came from the border patrol. He was acting like just a cowboy.”
“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.””
Young person was standing there holding a loudspeaker, probably ignoring orders to back up, when ICE grabbed him and pulled him away. Another young man with a loudspeaker ran toward his kidnapped comrade, where ICE shot him point blank in the face with some sort of non-lethal weapon. He has serious eye damage and may be blind in one eye. DHS then lied about the severity of the wound. DHS also claimed that they were rioters, although the video made it look like they were standing there talking into loudspeakers when DHS grabbed one of them.
“”Observing, following, and recording law enforcement are unambiguously protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Bier tells Reason. “They are not obstruction of justice. The right to record helps guarantee justice by ensuring accountability and an accurate record of events.”
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The guiding First Amendment principle behind these court decisions was most memorably expressed in the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Houston v. Hill, which struck down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer: “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state,” Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote.”
“Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID.
But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.”
“The federal surge, which took place after Trump signed an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, brought with it a spike in immigration-related arrests. But despite the pretense of curbing and targeting violent crime, more than 80 percent of the 1,100 people arrested for immigration offenses had no prior criminal record. And according to United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Beryl A. Howell, many of these warrantless immigration arrests may have been unlawful.
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her determination that the DHS has, in fact, adopted an unlawful policy and practice of conducting warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause that runs counter to federal law and “well-settled constitutional principles,” and reveals an “abandonment of the probable cause standard.””
“A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans
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The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.
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Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”
Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months.”
“Five major U.S. cities are suing the Trump administration over funding to prevent nuclear attacks and terrorism that they argue has been illegally withheld by the Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit filed by Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Boston alleges that the administration has not reimbursed cities for relevant security expenses since February and has failed to award funding for 2025.”
“there’s little evidence that DHS has any interest or ability when it comes to admitting and correcting its flaws. Even the people specifically assigned to keep an eye on DHS seem more concerned with shielding the department from consequences for bad behavior than with tempering its malignancy.
“The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and his top aides directed staff members to remove damaging findings from investigative reports on domestic violence and sexual misconduct by officers in the department’s law enforcement agencies,” Chris Cameron of The New York Times reported earlier this month. Among the information suppressed were descriptions of cash payouts to settle sexual harassment claims without going through formal procedures. “The inspector general, Joseph V. Cuffari, also directed his staff to remove parts of another draft report showing internal investigations had found that dozens of officers working at the agencies had committed domestic violence, but that they had received ‘little to no discipline.'”
The documents were obtained and published by the Project on Government Oversight. Their existence was subsequently acknowledged by Mayorkas in an internal DHS memo. If history is any guide, don’t hold your breath waiting for big reforms. Charles K. Edwards, a former DHS acting inspector general, was charged with stealing proprietary software and confidential databases from the federal government. He pleaded guilty in January of this year.
Don’t harbor too much hope that DHS will improve its respect for people’s rights. A federal agency whose official watchdog hides details of abusive conduct by its employees against their colleagues and family members when it’s not pilfering property can’t be trusted to be diligent about addressing civil liberties violations against the general public. That’s especially true when those violations are seemingly a baked-in part of how the agency justifies its existence. To repeat the Brennan Center’s warning, DHS suffers from “a dangerous combination of broad authorities, weak safeguards, and insufficient oversight,” and it’s not at all obvious how to fix what’s so profoundly broken.”
“In the 24-page report and a seven-page supplement, Murphy alleges four main incidents of wrongdoing by his superiors at the agency:
That then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly, and perhaps knowingly, exaggerated the number of suspected terrorists crossing the southern border into the US in official documents and sessions with lawmakers — despite having been briefed numerous times by Murphy that the numbers she was citing were not accurate.
That DHS acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told Murphy to alter an intelligence report detailing the high levels of corruption, violence, and economic problems in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to make those countries look like safe destinations for migrants, a judgment that would aid Trump’s restrictive asylum policy.
That DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf, at the request of White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, ordered Murphy to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”
That Cuccinelli and Wolf at different times instructed Murphy to modify domestic terrorism threat assessments to downplay the threat from white supremacists and add information on the prominence of violent left-wing groups like antifa “to ensure [the assessments] matched up with the public comments by President Trump.””
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“A word of caution: Multiple people familiar with Murphy’s time at DHS told me he’d often engaged in the same kind of behavior he now accuses his superiors of doing, namely altering assessments to fit the administration’s policies. In addition, news reports in late July revealed that Murphy’s office had been compiling “intelligence reports” on journalists and protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Murphy fiercely denies those allegations, but shortly after the reports were published, he was demoted from his position and reassigned to an administrative support role. Some people I spoke to said Murphy’s whistleblower report is “definitely” meant as retaliation against his superiors for his demotion.
His credibility, then, is somewhat suspect.”
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“two sources I spoke to confirmed one of the claims in Murphy’s complaint: that National Security Adviser O’Brien directed DHS to minimize intelligence reports on Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election and instead focus on interference by China and Iran.”