“It would appear that Kavanaugh has finally come to recognize what has been apparent to some of us all along. Namely, that Trump’s immigration crackdown actively imperils the rights of many U.S. citizens.
Good for Kavanaugh, right? Better late than never? Well, maybe. Because it is also worth noting that Kavanaugh’s December opinion makes no reference to his September opinion. How should we make sense of this mysterious and rather glaring absence or omission?
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It seems impossible that these two Kavanaugh opinions are unrelated to each other. So what are we left to conclude about their connection? What is Kavanaugh not saying about the link?
One conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now seeks to walk back his unfortunate past statement without explicitly acknowledging his past misjudgment.
Another conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now hopes to apologize for butchering the Fourth Amendment without doing any actual apologizing. Call it a mea culpa minus the mea.
Needless to say, none of this reflects well on Kavanaugh and his possible motivations. Perhaps we’ll get a more forthright account from him in a future case.”
“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.”
“These bogus numbers would be merely amusing if Trump were not deploying them to justify a policy of killing suspected cocaine couriers, at a distance and in cold blood, without legal authorization or any semblance of due process.”
“President Donald Trump has sought to justify the summary execution of suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs.
Those positions are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. But they are otherwise hard to reconcile with each other, and their implications underline the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty antidrug tactics.”
“For the past two weeks, Juan Barbosa Gomez has been in federal immigration detention, but he doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. His family says he has valid work permit and no criminal record.
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For the past two weeks, Barbosa, a 60-year-old grandfather from Mexico, has been incarcerated in the federal immigration detention system, and his family says there’s been a terrible mistake. They say he has a valid work visa and no criminal record. He’s lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, working as a welder.
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Barbosa’s family has been unable to secure his release or even find out any information on his case. He’s been transferred to three different detention facilities in under two weeks and doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. The transfers made it difficult for his family to keep track of him or keep his commissary fund filled, and more importantly, it has short-circuited their attempts to find an immigration attorney to look at his case.
Barbosa isn’t the only such alleged wrongful ICE arrest in Portland. The local TV news outlet KOIN 6 reported that another Portland-area grandfather, Victor Cruz, was arrested by ICE officers on October 14 despite having Temporary Protected Status, a valid work permit, and no criminal record.
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To handle the surge of tens of thousands of detainees, the administration is relying on a secretive network of federal, state, and local lockups. To encourage detainees to self-deport, the administration holds them in miserable conditions and shuttles them between facilities, making it hard for them to mount a legal defense. This raises massive constitutional issues: People are being imprisoned for weeks without transparency, without adequate access to legal counsel or means to challenge their detention, and without basic information on the case against them.
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“His grandson is six years old, and he’s trying to figure out how to navigate through this difficult time, with his grandmother in distress and his whole family right now really going through a hard time,” Smith-Mason says. “It’s a really, really hard time trying to deal with that and keep normalcy for him as well, especially because grandpa has been a constant in his life since the day he came home from the hospital.””
“Trump conflates cocaine, which is produced mainly in Colombia and is often transported by sea, with fentanyl, which is produced in Mexico and overwhelmingly enters the United States in small packages by land over the southern border. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl accounts for nearly 70 percent of drug-related deaths in the United States.
The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics says two milligrams of fentanyl is a potentially lethal dose. Trump therefore seems to be assuming that each of the boats destroyed on his orders was carrying 50 grams of fentanyl. That is pretty large for a fentanyl shipment: Between 2018 and 2023, according to a recent study, most fentanyl powder seizures weighed less than 40 grams. Even so, 50 grams (less than two ounces) is not large enough that you would see “fentanyl all over the ocean” after blowing up a boat carrying it, which underlines the point that Trump’s fentanyl is imaginary.
Even if we join Trump in pretending that cocaine is fentanyl, his claim relies on two other fallacious assumptions. If those 50 grams of fanciful fentanyl had not been intercepted, he implicitly posits, they would have been delivered to 25,000 different American consumers, each of whom would have consumed his share in a single sitting, with fatal results. Trump also imagines, contrary to more than a century of experience with drug interdiction, that traffickers do not compensate for intercepted shipments by sending more. When drugs are seized or destroyed, he seems to think, the total supply available to Americans is reduced by that amount. If that were true, it would be hard to understand why Trump says drug interdiction is “totally ineffective.”
Leaving aside these inconvenient details, Trump’s account of what he is accomplishing by ordering the deaths of suspected smugglers, like Bondi’s estimate of lives saved by less lethal anti-drug efforts that Trump now concedes were “totally ineffective,” is impossible on its face. Last year, the CDC estimates, illegal drug use resulted in about 82,000 U.S. “overdose deaths.” By Trump’s account, he has somehow prevented more than four times as many drug-related fatalities by destroying a tiny portion of the total supply.
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Trump is trying to justify murder as self-defense, obscuring the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty anti-drug tactics. Trump’s unprecedented policy of killing suspected drug smugglers instead of arresting them—which has already become the new normal—simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and undermines long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. But he hopes his extravagant claims about hypothetical deaths prevented by intercepting imaginary fentanyl will distract the public from the actual deaths he is ordering.”
“Venegas isn’t the only U.S. citizen to run afoul of the increased emphasis on immigration enforcement. Just days ago, according to 16-year-old Arnoldo Bazan, ICE officers in an unmarked car and without uniform insignia beat and choked him in Houston. He was finally released but his father was deported.
Two weeks ago, ProPublica reported it had found more than 170 cases of “agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests.” In some cases, U.S. citizens were initially accused of assaulting or impeding officers, but charges were rarely brought, suggesting there was little substance to the accusations. “Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.”
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The problem with emphasizing mass arrests without warrants of supposedly foreign-looking people over targeted actions is that the government doesn’t just drive up the numbers; it scoops up many people who have every right to be where they are and do what they’re doing without being molested by agents of the state.”
Trump is using the power of the federal government to arrest and harass people in his way or who even criticize him.
Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself.
Trump is using powers not given to him by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is not stopping him in many cases.
Trump is using the military to patrol and intimidate U.S. cities.
Trump is using ICE to assault, arrest, and deport people without due process.
Trump fires statisticians because the actual stats make him look bad.
Trump fires analysts because he doesn’t like the accurate information they bring him.
All over the government and military, Trump has fired watch dogs whose job it is to report corruption and abuses of power.
Trump uses the government’s power to limit what major media outlets can say.
Trump gets legitimate prosecutions dropped because he wants the accused as a political ally.
Trump uses the pardon power based on whether the guilty are his political allies, rather than whether they are unjustly being punished.
Trump fires prosecutors for legitimately prosecuting his political allies.
Trump’s advisors and business leaders suck-up to Trump like he is a monarch or a dictator, showering him in bullshit praise that would be a sarcastic insult to anyone else.
The Trump family makes money from dictatorships who want things from the United States.
By these actions, Trump is greatly damaging U.S. democracy. If you don’t recognize this, you either have not been paying attention, or you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. U.S. democracy is under attack, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.
“People who enter the country illegally may still “have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process under the Fifth Amendment,” a new federal court ruling says.
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The judge suggests that “prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the Government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process,” since “most noncitizens living in the interior have been here longer than two years, rendering them ineligible for expedited removal, and many are seeking asylum or another form of immigration relief, entitling them to further process before they can be removed.””