“Law enforcement launched 30 tear gas canisters into Amy Hadley’s home, smashed windows, ransacked furniture, destroyed security cameras, and more. The government gave her nothing.
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An Indiana woman whose home sustained severe damage during a police raid set in motion by a faulty investigation is not legally entitled to compensation, a federal court ruled this week, in yet another case that asked what innocent people are owed when the government destroys their property in pursuit of public safety.
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Such suits primarily hinge on one question: Does the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment—which promises that the government cannot take private property without providing “just compensation”—apply when the government is exercising its “police power”?
Several federal courts have answered in the negative.
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Cases with similarly situated plaintiffs have worked their way through the courts in recent years. Leo Lech’s $580,000 family home in Greenwood Village, Colorado, was condemned and demolished after police effectively destroyed it while pursuing a suspect who had broken in and barricaded himself inside. The city gave him $5,000. Los Angeles business owner Carlos Pena saw his printing shop and equipment ruined, and his livelihood crippled, in the same scenario: A fugitive, unrelated to Pena, broke in while trying to evade police. The government declined to pay him damages, which exceed $60,000; a ruling on the matter is forthcoming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.”
Thanks to Trump and Trump supporters, the United States is not currently a strong Constitutional Democracy.
“After the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, many on the political right set out to punish anyone making light of the tragedy, or even simply being insufficiently upset. In one of the more brazen examples, a Tennessee man was arrested, accused of threatening a school shooting, and held on a $2 million bond, for posting a somewhat uncivil meme on Facebook.
Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old former police officer, posted the offending meme last month. In response to a Facebook post about an upcoming vigil for Kirk, Bushart shared an image of President Donald Trump with the quote, “We have to get over it,” which Trump said in January 2024 after a shooting at Iowa’s Perry High School. Text added to the image said, “This seems relevant today.”
Bushart did not elaborate, but the context seems clear: Why should I care about this shooting, when the sitting president said I should “get over” this other shooting?
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According to the Perry County Sheriff’s Office website, Bushart was arrested the following morning on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities—a class E felony punishable by between one and six years in prison and up to a $3,000 fine. Worse, Bushart’s bail is set at an astonishing $2 million.
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In its entirety, the post consists of a direct quote of a statement by the then-former president about a newsworthy event, with text providing context, plus a four-word phrase added. Bushart didn’t even create the meme: The Tennesseean’s Angele Latham noted it had been “posted numerous times across multiple social media platforms not connected to Bushart going back to 2024.”
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In context, it’s clear Bushart meant to suggest that since Trump previously said people should “get over” a school shooting, then they shouldn’t be expected to care about the murder of a conservative public figure. It’s quite a stretch to suggest this constituted a threat to shoot up a high school. Yes, a nearby high school happened to have a similar name, but that was clearly a coincidence, and there is nothing to suggest Bushart intended to carry out violence against the local school.
On social media, some have suggested the meme in question was part of a larger pattern indicating Bushart posed a threat. But in his statement to The Tennesseean, Weems specifically singled out the Trump meme as the offender, saying while the other posts were “hate memes,” they were “not against the law and would be recognized as free speech.”
Perhaps some teachers, parents, or students really did find Bushart’s post threatening—though since it was a reply on a Facebook page for local news, it’s not clear how many people even saw it. And even if people did see and interpret it as a threat of violence, that doesn’t mean it meets the standard for a “true threat,” in violation of the First Amendment.
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Bushart’s arrest would be humorous if it weren’t so serious. He now faces a potential years-long prison sentence for reposting a Facebook meme that doesn’t come anywhere close to qualifying as an exception to the First Amendment. Even if the case gets thrown out, he has already spent two weeks in jail and is set to spend two more months until his first hearing.”
“responsible political movements are embarrassed by hypocrisy, but MAGA displays it as a loyalty test. Vice President J.D. Vance berated the Brits for detaining people over social media posts, then called on Americans to report people to their employers for negative posts about Charlie Kirk. And Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to crack down on “hate speech,” even though Republicans have long viewed such laws as speech controls.
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The clearest image is one of masked ICE agents emerging from unmarked cars, roughing up suspected illegal immigrants—and then “disappearing” them to an unknown location.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That’s how George Orwell put it, but it doesn’t have to be forever if more Americans start caring about their constitutional birthright.
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author Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) got it right: “The recent federal operations in California have created an environment of profound terror, with officers—or people who claim to be officers—wearing what are essentially ski masks, not identifying themselves, grabbing people, putting them in unmarked cars, and disappearing them. If we want the public to trust law enforcement, we cannot allow them to behave like secret police in an authoritarian state.”
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Practically speaking, there is no reason for law-enforcement agents to conceal their identities, wear face masks, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves. How is an ordinary person supposed to know whether their abductor is a legit government agent or kidnappers from a drug cartel? In the former, fighting back will land you in the morgue—in the latter, not fighting back will do so.
Trump supporters claim the masks protect agents from doxing, but that’s just an after-the-fact excuse. This shouldn’t be news to conservatives, but the Constitution is meant to protect ordinary people from their government rather than the other way around. The first concern is to protect our liberties, not to ensure that armed agents have an easier time of it. Doxing is illegal and should be punished, but that’s no excuse to green-light police-state tactics.
“The general public does not distinguish between federal agents and local law enforcement,” said my R Street Institute colleague Jillian Snider in a CNN interview. “So when federal agents go into local jurisdictions wearing masks and not making their identities known, that hinders the operations of local law enforcement because then that community fails to trust the local law enforcement that are trying to keep them safe.”
Then again, perhaps that’s MAGA’s point: to intimidate Americans into submission via a high-profile show of force. We should be shocked by this, but the right response is disgust rather than awe.”
“An Alabama construction worker is challenging the Trump administration’s warrantless construction site raids after he says he was arrested and detained by federal immigration agents—twice—despite being a U.S. citizen with a valid ID in his pocket.
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Venegas was detained twice in May and June during raids on private construction sites where he was working. In both instances, the lawsuit says, masked immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.
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According to the suit, “The officers ran right past the white and black workers without detaining them and went straight for the Latino workers.”
The officers tackled Venegas’ brother, who was also on the crew, and Venegas began filming the scene on his cell phone. One of the officers then approached Venegas and said, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.”
Immediately after, the officer grabbed Venegas and began wrestling him to the ground. Another construction worker also took cell phone video of the two brothers’ arrests, which shows the agent struggling with Venegas who repeatedly yells, “I’m a citizen.”
Two other officers joined in to subdue Venegas, telling him to “Get on the fucking ground.”
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According to the suit, the officers retrieved Venegas’ REAL ID from his pocket, but they called it fake, kept him handcuffed, and detained for more than an hour in the Alabama summer sun, until an officer agreed to run his social security number.
Then on June 12, Venegas was working in a nearly finished house when ICE agents cornered him in a bedroom and ordered him to come with them. Venegas was marched outside to the edge of the subdivision where he was working to have his immigration status checked. According to the lawsuit, two other U.S. citizens had been rounded up with him. Again, officers said his REAL ID could be fake and detained for 20 to 30 minutes before releasing him.
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Venegas is one of many documented cases of U.S. citizens being violently detained and arrested during indiscriminate federal immigration sweeps.
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion in which he waved away concerns that allowing such profiling would lead to citizens and legal residents being unduly harassed.
“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief,” Kavanaugh wrote, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Whatever world Kavanaugh is describing, it’s not the one that Venegas lives in.”
“As is often the case with drug raids, the initial, self-serving police account proved to be inaccurate in several crucial ways. Although Thonetheva supposedly was armed and dangerous, he proved to be neither: He was unarmed when he was arrested later that night at his girlfriend’s apartment without incident (and without the deployment of a “distraction device”). Although Terrell claimed police had no reason to believe they were endangering children, even cursory surveillance could easily have discovered that fact: There were children’s toys, including a plastic wading pool, in the yard, where Bounkham frequently played with his kids. In the driveway was a minivan containing four child seats that was decorated with decals depicting a mother, a father, three little girls, and a baby boy.
Four months after the raid, a local grand jury faulted the task force that executed it for a “hurried” and “sloppy” investigation that was “not in accordance with the best practices and procedures.” Ten months after that, a federal grand jury charged Nikki Autry, the deputy who obtained the no-knock warrant for the raid, with lying in her affidavit. “Without her false statements, there was no probable cause to search the premises for drugs or to make the arrest,” said John Horn, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. “And in this case, the consequences of the unlawful search were tragic.”
The negligence and misconduct discovered after the paramilitary operation that burned and mutilated Bou Bou Phonesavanh are common features of “botched” drug raids that injure or kill people, including nationally notorious incidents such as the 2019 deaths of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas in Houston and the 2020 death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. But beyond the specific failures detailed in the wake of such outrages is the question of what these operations are supposed to accomplish even when they go as planned. In the vain hope of preventing substance abuse, drug prohibition authorizes police conduct that otherwise would be readily recognized as criminal, including violent home invasions that endanger innocent bystanders as well as suspects and police officers.
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what are police trying to achieve when they mount an operation like this one? As the grand jury implicitly conceded, busting one dealer has no measurable impact on the availability of drugs: If police nab someone like Thonetheva, someone else will surely take his place. But from 1995 through 2023, police in the United States arrested people for producing or selling illegal drugs millions of times. Did that massive undertaking make a dent in the drug supply big enough to reduce consumption?
Survey data suggest it did not. The federal government estimated that 25 percent of Americans 12 or older used illegal drugs in 2023, up from 11 percent in 1995. Meanwhile, the age-adjusted overdose death rate rose more than tenfold.
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SWAT teams, originally intended for special situations involving hostages, active shooters, or riots, today are routinely used to execute drug searches.
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Even when drug raids do not technically involve SWAT teams, they frequently feature “dynamic entry” in the middle of the night. Although that approach is supposed to reduce the potential for violence through surprise and a show of overwhelming force, it often has the opposite effect. As the Habersham County grand jury noted, these operations are inherently dangerous, especially since armed men breaking into a home after the residents have gone to bed can easily be mistaken for criminals, with potentially deadly consequences.
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How often does this sort of thing happen? There is no way to know. Prosecutors, judges, and jurors tend to discount the protestations of drug defendants, especially if they have prior convictions, and automatically accept the testimony of cops
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The underlying problem, of course, is the decision to treat that exchange of drugs for money as a crime in the first place. By authorizing the use of force in response to peaceful transactions among consenting adults, prohibition sets the stage for the senseless violence that periodically shocks Americans who are otherwise inclined to support the war on drugs. But like the grand jurors in Habersham County, they typically do not question the basic morality of an enterprise that predictably leads to such outrages.”
“A police officer who had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring cannot be sued, a court confirmed.., because she was acting under color of federal law—a puzzling reminder of the inverse relationship between power and accountability in government.”
“The city of Allentown has spent more than $2 million settling excessive force claims, and yet the police still crack down on civilians exercising their constitutional rights.”
“Former interim NYPD commissioner Tom Donlon is suing the department, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and several former and current police executives alleging the nation’s largest police force operated as a vast criminal enterprise designed to enrich top officials.”