When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Friday that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States to face criminal charges after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador, she sought to portray the move as the White House dutifully upholding the rule of law.

“This,” she said, “is what American justice looks like.”

Her assertion, however, failed to grapple with the fact that for the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against Mr. Abrego Garcia, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to “facilitate” his release.

While the indictment filed against Mr. Abrego Garcia contained serious allegations, accusing him of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants as a member of the street gang MS-13, it had no bearing on the issues that have sat at the heart of the case since his summary expulsion in March.

Those were whether Mr. Abrego Garcia had received due process when he was plucked off the streets without a warrant and expelled days later to a prison in El Salvador, in what even Trump officials have repeatedly admitted was an error. And, moreover, whether administration officials should be held in contempt for repeatedly stonewalling a judge’s effort to get to the bottom of their actions.

Well before Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit seeking to force the White House to release him from El Salvador, administration officials had tried all means at their disposal to keep him overseas as they figured out a solution to the problem they had created, The New York Times found in a recent investigation.

Will Barnet, Interlude

Feuer discusses the Trump administration’s machinations:

In the days before the administration’s error was made public, officials at the Department of Homeland Security discussed portraying Mr. Abrego Garcia as a “leader” of MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim. They considered ways to nullify the original order that had barred his deportation to El Salvador. And they sought to downplay the danger he might face in one of that country’s most notorious prisons.

To Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, it was no surprise that the same officials who had fought so hard against securing his return suddenly agreed to bring him back to U.S. soil after they had obtained an indictment that bolstered the story they had been telling from the start.

“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Andrew Rossman, one of the lawyers. “It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees.”

Questions have already been raised about the criminal case, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville. There was concern and disagreement in recent weeks among prosecutors about how to proceed with the charges, two people familiar with the matter said, leading to the resignation of a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office handling the case.

Use the gift link to read the whole article. You can also read Marcy Wheeler’s take on the indictment at Emptywheel.

The Trump-Musk Split

There are gossipy article at the NYT, the WaPo, and the Atlantic.

Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Theodore Schleifer, and Ryan Mac at The New York Times: Buildup to a Meltdown: How the Trump-Musk Alliance Collapsed.

Just minutes before he walked into the Oval Office for a televised send-off for Elon Musk last week, an aide had handed him a file.

The papers showed that Mr. Trump’s nominee to run NASA — a close associate of Mr. Musk’s — had donated to prominent Democrats in recent years, including some who Mr. Trump was learning about for the first time.

The president set his outrage aside and mustered through a cordial public farewell. But as soon as the cameras left the Oval Office, the president confronted Mr. Musk. He started to read some of the donations out loud, shaking his head.

This was not good, the president said.

Artist Luis Garces Bonhemio y el gato

Mr. Musk, who was sporting a black eye that he blamed on a punch from his young son, tried to explain. He said Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who was set to become the next NASA administrator, cared about getting things done. Yes, he had donated to Democrats, but so had a lot of people.

Maybe it’s a good thing, Mr. Musk told the president — it shows that you’re willing to hire people of all stripes.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. He said that people don’t change. These are the types of people who will turn, he said, and it won’t end up being good for us.

The moment of pique was a signal of the simmering tensions between the two men that would explode into the open less than a week later, upending what had been one of the most extraordinary alliances in American politics.

That’s the NYT take. Obviously, having a friend as head of NASA would be very good for Musk’s businesses.

Cat Zakrzewski, Natalie Allison, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Jeff Stein, and Emily Davies at The Washington Post (gift link): Inside the battles that shattered Trump and Musk’s alliance.

Greg Sargent strips away the gossip and gets to the meat of the Trump-Musk disagreements at The New Republic: The Real Reason for the Trump-Musk Feud is Uglier Than You Think.

As the war between Donald Trump and Elon Musk worsens, what’s truly odd about this whole spectacle is that the actual substantive disagreement between them seems to be of little interest to media observers. And when you strip away the trolling and shitposting, here’s what becomes clear: This is really a battle over how comprehensively to screw over poor and working people, largely to the benefit of the wealthy.

The superficial argument between them, of course, is over Musk’s opposition to the “big, beautiful bill” that the House passed and that Trump wants the Senate to adopt. That opposition is rooted in Musk’s claim that the bill is loaded with “pork” and will explode the deficit. Trump, meanwhile, is infuriated by Musk because he can’t brook criticism and wants the bill to pass to notch a victory.

But the respective positions underlying those stances are mysteriously missing from the whole Trump-Musk discourse. Flush them into the open, and it helps illuminate the true spectrum of the MAGA movement’s ideological goals—and why its “pro-worker populist” pretensions are so thoroughly phony.

The House GOP bill would entail a large upward transfer of resources. The bill, which would continue Trump’s 2017 tax law and add new tax giveaways for wealthy investors, heirs, and others, would deliver a big tax cut to those in the highest income brackets. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the tax cuts enjoyed by those in the bottom 20 percent in 2027 would be one seven-hundredth the size of those reaped by the top 1 percent.

By Theresa Tanner

Worse, those relative table scraps for the bottom could be erased by other changes. The bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid and other health care changes would result in over 10 million people losing health insurance. Add in other cuts to the safety net, and you see why the bill ultimately would lower household resources for the bottom 10 percent while raising them for the top 10 percent—a sizable redistribution upward. As Paul Krugman notes, the bill’s “cruelty is exceptional even by right wing standards.”

Musk is angry about the $2.4 trillion those changes would add to the debt. But, crucially, he’s said little—if anything—about the role that those tax cuts for the rich would have in that outcome. He is primarily obsessed with the bill’s “pork,” meaning that he wants the bill to cut more spending—much, much more.

Where would that money come from? Musk’s cuts via his Department of Government Efficiency have already decimated foreign aid and other programs, producing more starvation, disease, and death among the global poor. Given that DOGE searched for “waste, fraud, and abuse” and found very little, if Musk wants massive additional cuts, by definition they would fall more heavily on important government programs, almost certainly ones that low-income Americans rely upon.

Another way to say this is that their real difference is over how far to push the “waste, fraud, and abuse” scam.

Read the rest at TNR.

What DOGE Is Up To

The New York Times: After His Trump Blowup, Musk May Be Out. But DOGE Is Just Getting Started.

Elon Musk’s blowup with President Trump may have doomed Washington’s most potent partnership, but the billionaire’s signature cost-cutting project has become deeply embedded in Mr. Trump’s administration and could be there to stay.

At the Department of Energy, for example, a former member of the Department of Government Efficiency is now serving as the chief of staff.

At the Interior Department, DOGE members have been converted into federal employees and embedded into the agency, said a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, where a spokeswoman said that there are two senior officials associated with the DOGE mission, work continues apace on efforts to dismantle an agency that Mr. Trump has long targeted.

“They are still internally going forward; we don’t really feel as if anything has stopped here,” said Nicole Cantello, a former lawyer for the E.P.A. who represents its union in Chicago.

Whether DOGE keeps its current Musk-inspired form remains an open question. Some DOGE members on Friday expressed concern that the president could choose to retaliate against Mr. Musk by firing people associated with the initiative. Others could choose to leave on their own, following Mr. Musk out the door. And DOGE’s role, even its legality, remain the subject of legal battles amid questions over its attempts to use sensitive government data.

But the approach that DOGE embodied at the outset — deep cuts in spending, personnel and projects — appears to have taken root.

Even with Mr. Musk on the sidelines, DOGE on Friday notched two legal victories. The Supreme Court said that it can have access to sensitive Social Security data and ruled that, for now, the organization does not have to turn over internal records to a government watchdog group as part of a public records lawsuit.

Yes, the Supreme Court has struck again.

NBC News: Supreme Court allows DOGE to access Social Security data.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security Administration data.

By Will Barnet

The conservative-majority court, with its three liberal justices objecting, granted an emergency application filed by the Trump administration asking the justices to lift an injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland.

The unsigned order said that members of the DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration should have “access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.”

The lawsuit challenging DOGE’s actions was filed by progressive group Democracy Forward on behalf of two unions — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers — as well as the Alliance for Retired Americans.

“This is a sad day for our democracy and a scary day for millions of people,” the groups said in a statement. “This ruling will enable President Trump and DOGE’s affiliates to steal Americans’ private and personal data.” [….]

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion questioning the need for the court to intervene on an emergency basis.

“In essence, the ‘urgency’ underlying the government’s stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes,” she added.

Dramatic Protests Against ICE in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles ICE raids spark protests, fear, outrage. ‘Our community is under attack.’

A series of surprise U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps in downtown Los Angeles on Friday prompted fierce pushback from elected officials and protesters, who decried the enforcement actions as “cruel and unnecessary” and said they stoked fear in the immigrant community.

Tensions remained high in downtown into the evening. The Los Angeles Police Department declared an unlawful assembly and ordered about 200 protesters who remained gathered by the Los Angeles Federal Building to disperse around 7 p.m.

Portrait of Edward Gorey with his cat, by Sam Kalda

The use of so-called less-lethal munitions was authorized at 8 p.m. following reports of a small group of “violent individuals” throwing large pieces of concrete at officers, police said. A citywide tactical alert was issued shortly thereafter.

Chaos erupted earlier in the day in the heart of the Fashion District after federal immigration authorities detained employees inside a clothing wholesaler, and used flash-bang grenades and pepper spray on a crowd protesting the raid around 1:30 p.m.

Hundreds of people then rallied outside the Los Angeles Federal Building at 4 p.m., condemning the crackdown and demanding the release of Service Employees International Union California President David Huerta, who was injured and detained while documenting a raid, according to a statement from the labor union.

“Our community is under attack and has been terrorized,” Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, told the crowd of protesters. “These are workers, these are fathers, these are mothers.”

Forty-four people were administratively arrested and one person was arrested for obstruction during Friday’s immigration action, said Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe, a spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE. Federal agents executed four search warrants related to the suspected harboring of people illegally in the country at three locations in central Los Angeles, she said.

One more at The Washington Post: Protests erupt in Los Angeles after dozens detained in immigration raids.