I don’t see any good news out there today. I wonder if things are just going to continue getting worse until fascism completely takes over our country. It’s already true that we are a failing democracy; and it’s not clear whether we can recover.
We still have some hope that the federal courts can rescue us, but the Supreme Court is making that less likely with each passing day. Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the latest nightmare decision from SCOTUS in the birthright citizenship case, and reactions to that decision are still dominating today’s news and opinion, and there are differing opinions about the fallout from the decision.
I also want to highlight some immigration horror stories that demonstrate how fascism really is coming to America, as Dakinikat suggested yesterday.
Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision in Trump v. Casa, the United States Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case involving an executive order that purports to eliminate birthright citizenship.
Confusingly, the Court’s decision wasn’t about the constitutionality of the birthright-citizenship order. Instead, the case proceeded on the assumption that the order was unconstitutional. The only question for the justices was about remedy: What kind of relief should federal courts provide when a plaintiff successfully challenges a government policy?
The lower courts had, in several birthright-citizenship cases across the country, entered what are known as “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. These injunctions prevented the executive order from applying to anyone, anywhere—even if they were not a party to the case. The Trump administration argued that nationwide injunctions were inappropriate and impermissible—injunctions should give relief only to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, no one else.
In a majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and put nationwide injunctions to the torch. That’s a big deal. Not only does it represent a major setback to the states and advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, it also amounts to a revolution in the remedial practices of the lower federal courts.
But it is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, “an existential threat to the rule of law.” It won’t even mean the end of sweeping injunctions in the lower federal courts. To the contrary, the opinion suggests that relief tantamount to a nationwide injunction will still be available in many cases—including, in all likelihood, in the birthright-citizenship case itself.
Cat of Morocco by Isy Ochoa
The author, Nicholas Bagley, is a law professor at the University of Michigan and in the past served as legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He writes that Barrett’s decision was based on history. Nationwide injunctions did not become commonplace until fairly recently in U.S. history; therefore she argued that ‘The federal courts thus lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Period. Full stop.” Bagley’s take:
In my book, that’s a positive development. In 2020 testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate, I argued that nationwide injunctions “enable opportunistic behavior by politically motivated litigants and judges, short-circuit a process in which multiple judges address hard legal questions, and inhibit the federal government’s ability to do its work. By inflating the judicial role, they also reinforce the sense that we ought to look to the courts for salvation from our political problems—a view that is difficult to square with basic principles of democratic self-governance.”
Although the Supreme Court divided along partisan lines, with the liberal justices dissenting, I don’t see this as a partisan issue. (The outrageous illegality and sheer ugliness of President Donald Trump’s executive order that lies underneath this fight may go some distance to explain why the three liberals dissented.) Nationwide injunctions are equal-opportunity offenders, thwarting Republican and Democratic initiatives alike. Today, it’s Trump’s birthright-citizenship order and USAID spending freezes. Yesterday it was mifepristone, the cancellation of student debt, and a COVID-vaccine mandate. Why should one federal judge—perhaps a very extreme judge, on either side—have the power to dictate government policy for the entire country? Good riddance.
ven as it ended nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court left the door open for other forms of relief that are not nationwide injunctions—but that look a whole lot like them. That’s good news for opponents of the birthright-citizenship order.
You’ll need to read the rest at The Atlantic to understand Bagley’s arguments.
The Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship ruling this morning and it’s worse than just about everyone feared it could be.
The Court’s ruling is composed of two main parts.
The first is its declaration that it is possible that the president can contradict the plain-text reading of the Constitution by issuing an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship.
The second is that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions against blatantly unconstitutional policies imposed by the executive. Injunctions must now be created on a patchwork basis.
I want to impress upon you how dangerous this is. SCOTUS has empowered the president to impose whatever he likes—irrespective of its constitutionality—and then prevented judicial overview except at the localized level.1 Meaning that we will now have two sets of laws. One that operates in Red America and one that Operates in Blue America.
Separate, but unequal. A house divided against itself.
I think the majority believes it is being clever—that it has found a way to pretend to give Trump a win while (they tell themselves) ackshually delaying a substantive verdict.
But what they have done is not mere make-believe. They have set in motion a calamity.
Mr. Angel, Sir, Some Other Dude Done It, Elisheva Nesis, Israeli artist
I’m going to give you a bit more, because this article is behind a paywall. Last notes that the case before the SCOTUS was not about birthright citizenship, so they didn’t need to deal with that, and they didn’t specifically do that. That question will require further litigation.
The Supreme Court could have jumped ahead and simply ruled that the action proposed by the president’s executive order was unconstitutional. This would have meant widening the scope of the specific question in Trumpv.Casa. But scope gets widened all the time.2 The Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. It can do whatever it wants.
The fact that the majority chose to delay answering this question is, all on its own, a statement. My theory is that at least two members of the majority do not believe that the birthright citizenship order is constitutional—but they want to delay making that judgment as long as possible.
And so, by constructing this new idea—that universal stays are now verboten—they tell themselves that they have handed Trump a tactical victory but set him up for a strategic defeat on the substance of his EO later on.
The Supreme Court majority thinks it’s being clever by playing within the rules. They’re actually being fools, because Trump isn’t playing within the rules. Their conception that injunctions should be limited just to the parties in each particular case works only if (1) similar cases will be decided similarly, and (2) the government knows this fact and won’t try to break the law. But the government is, right now, in the process of finding ways to ignore the courts—including the Supreme Court—with as little political price as possible. And the government has shown already—repeatedly—that it will break the law.
An emboldened Trump administration plans to aggressively challenge blocks on the president’s top priorities, a White House official said, following a major Supreme Court ruling that limitsthe power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
Government attorneys will press judges to pare back the dozens of sweeping rulings thwarting the president’s agenda “as soon as possible,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Priorities for the administration include injunctions related to the Education Department and the Department of Government Efficiency, as well as an order halting the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the official said.
“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” President Donald Trump said Friday at a news conference in which he thanked by name members of the conservative high court majority he helped build.
Trump on Friday cast the narrowing of judicial power as a consequential, needed correction in his battle with a court system that has restrained his authority.
Scholars and plaintiffs in the lawsuits over Trump’s orders agreed that the high court ruling could profoundly reshape legal battles over executive power that have defined Trump’s second term — even as other legal experts said the effects would be more muted. Some predicted it would embolden Trump to push his expansive view of presidential power.
“The Supreme Court has fundamentally reset the relationship between the federal courts and the executive branch,” Notre Dame Law School Professor Samuel Bray, who has studied nationwide injunctions, said in a statement. “Since the Obama administration, almost every major presidential initiative has been frozen by federal district courts issuing ‘universal injunctions.’”
Immigrants rights’ advocates on Friday filed a nationwide class action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship, just hours after the Supreme Court partially blocked nationwide injunctions challenging Trump’s order.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Defense Fund and other groups, was brought on behalf of a class of babies subject to the executive order, along with their parents. It charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
Bohemio et el gato, Luis Garcés
It is also a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision earlier Friday that puts new limits on nationwide injunctions, and reflects a new legal pathway that groups will likely turn to when challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful actions.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court struck down nationwide injunctions against Trump’s birthright citizenship order, narrowing their scope to provide relief to the specific plaintiff who is suing in a case rather than anyone who would be affected by the order. In addition to drawing sharp criticism from constitutional experts, the court’s decision is a major blow to pro-democracy groups that have been successfully challenging Trump’s lawlessness through the use of injunctions.
But the justices left the door open to challenging the administration in other ways, like class action lawsuits. The ACLU and its cohorts wasted no time using this legal pathway.
In a statement, the groups behind the new lawsuit noted that three lawsuits previously obtained nationwide injunctions protecting everyone subject to Trump’s executive order, but the Supreme Court’s decision narrowed those injunctions and potentially leaves children without protections.
“Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in this case, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.”
Read the rest at HuffPost.
Immigration Horror Stories
First, two incidents in California, which is still under Trump’s thumb with his commandeering of the National Guard and his stationing marines in Los Angeles and with masked ICE gangs roaming the streets. We aren’t getting as much coverage about the situation in California, but protests and ICE raids are still going on.
Federal agents blasted their way into a residential home in Huntington Park, California, on Friday. Security-camera video obtained by the local NBC station showed border patrol agents setting up an explosive device near the door of the house and then detonating it – causing a window to be shattered. Around a dozen armed agents in full tactical gear then charged toward the home.
Jenny Ramirez, who lives in the house with her boyfriend and one-year-old and six-year-old children, told NBC through tears that it was one of the loudest explosions she heard in her life.
“I told them, ‘You guys didn’t have to do this, you scared by son, my baby,’” Ramirez said.
Ramirez said she was not given any warning from the authorities that they wanted to enter her home and that everyone who lives there is a US citizen.
The raid comes as federal agents have ramped up immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and across southern California over the last few weeks. Huntington Park is in Los Angeles county. Immigrants have been swept up in raids at court houses, restaurants and straight off the street. Some of the people targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have been US citizens. In one incident, Ice agents detained a Honduran woman seeking asylum and her children, one of which was a six-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with leukemia.
The agents who raided Ramirez’s home in Huntington Park on Friday also reportedly sent a drone into the house after setting off the explosive device.
Two cats on a colorful cushion, woodcut by Theophile Steinlen
Dramatic video shows the moment federal agents blew up the front door of a residence in Huntington Park early Friday morning, using a drone to search room by room for a man they say rammed a federal vehicle last week during immigration raids.
“They were right here with their rifles and we heard some screaming up in the front but we couldn’t see because everything was blocked, but it was pretty shocking,” said Lourdes Salazar.
That man, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, was not home at the time, but his girlfriend and two young children were, leaving them shaking with fear due to the aggressive tactics of those agents.
He is now back home with his family after turning himself in Friday.
After the break-in and drone search:
Once the drone went out, at least nine agents moved in with guns drawn. They eventually escorted Ramirez and her children outside.
“They didn’t identify themselves until I came out, they told me they were from Homeland Security, from ICE,” said Ramirez.
She said pleaded with them to give her an explanation, but instead of giving her an answer, they said “when we find him he’s going to know why.” [….]
The agents claimed that Ramirez’s car ran into a truck carrying federal agents. It’s not clear if it was deliberate. The agents were also angry because protesters were throwing rocks at them during the incident. Why does that justify terrorizing a mother and two small children? DHS and ICE are on an out-of-control power trip.
A 32-year-old U.S. citizen was released from federal custody Thursday evening after her family said she was wrongfully detained by agents during an immigration enforcement operation in downtown Los Angeles.
According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer. The Department of Homeland Security said Velez “forcefully obstructed an ICE officer,” but her family said that’s not the case.
Estrella Rosas documented the frantic moments as she saw her sister being thrown to the ground before being arrested and forced into an unmarked car by unidentified officers near 9th and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Woman with a cat, by Marijan Trepše.
“We dropped off my sister to go to work like we always do, all of a sudden, my mom in the rearview mirror she saw how a man went on top of her. Basically, dropped her on the floor and started putting her in handcuffs and trying to arrest her,” said Rosas, recounting the arrest.
In the video, Velez’s mother and sister can be heard pleading for help. “That’s my sister. They’re taking her. Help her, someone. She’s a U.S. citizen,” said Rosas.
In the criminal complaint, prosecutors alleged that during an immigration enforcement Tuesday morning, “Velez stepped into an officer’s path and extended one of her arms in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending a male subject he was chasing and that Velez’s outstretched arm struck that officer in the face.”
In her court appearance Thursday, Velez did not enter a plea in federal court. Velez’s family said she was just walking on her way to work as a marketing designer and did nothing wrong.
Both sisters are U.S. citizens, but these days that doesn’t seem to matter.
The Trump administration announced an end to temporary legal protections for Haitian migrants in the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation.
The temporary protected status for Haitian nationals in the United States, granted after a 2010 earthquake near Port-au- Prince caused up to 200,000 deaths, will terminate Sept. 2, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Friday.
“This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary,” DHS said in a statement Friday. The “environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home,” DHS said, and Haitian nationals may “pursue lawful status” through other means if they are eligible.
The statement did not elaborate on why it considered Haiti safe for citizens.
That’s because Haiti is not safe.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to advise Americans against all travel to Haiti, which has been under a state of emergency since March 2024 because of “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.” The State Department’s travel advisory adds that “mob killings and assaults by the public have increased” and that crimes including “robbery, carjackings, sexual assault and kidnappings for ransom” are common.
Bedtime Story, by Jeanette Lassen
The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince this week noted that some domestic air travel had resumed, and urged Americans to leave the country “as soon as possible.”
In a federal register notice of the decision, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem said she decided to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti “because it is contrary to the national interest to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”
“Widespread gang violence in Haiti is sustained by the country’s lack of functional government authority. This breakdown in governance directly impacts U.S. national security interests, particularly in the context of uncontrolled migration,” she said in the notice. While the situation in Haiti was “concerning,” she wrote, “the United States must prioritize its national interests.”
Donald Trump is not happy. He’s not happy with Israel because they kept bombing Iran after Trump has announced a cease fire. He’s not happy because the U.S. intelligence community has found that his bombing raid on Iran didn’t destroy their nuclear capabilities. He’s not happy that he will likely never get the Nobel Peace Prize that he desperately wants.
Yesterday, Trump spoke to the press on the way to Marine One to travel to the NATO summit in the Netherlands. He appeared disheveled, wearing a rumpled suit with no tie. In angrily criticizing Israel and Iran for not abiding by his cease fire announcement, he broke another presidential norm by swearing in public.
President Trump on Tuesday emphatically dropped an f-bomb, on camera, expressing frustration that Israel and Iran appeared to be violating the ceasefire that he just celebrated going into effect.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing,” Trump said to reporters as he left the White House.
More than any other president, Trump has been known to use coarse language in speeches and other public appearances. But even for him, this on-camera utterance of the f-word was new. American presidents have typically refrained from using it publicly, even when angry or frustrated.
“Politics is sometimes a dirty and ugly business, and so people use language there that might be better preserved in the locker room — but in no instance do I recall a president openly using this term in a public forum,” said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
Donald Trump’s f-bomb outburst Tuesday morning over the botched Iran-Israel ceasefire was due to the two embattled countries “ruining” the president’s “perfect war,” journalist Michael Wolff argued on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Trump drops the “F” bomb on the way to Marine One
Wolff also told host Joanna Coles that the context behind Trump’s comment—“You basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing!”—was that the president, unlike his predecessors, doesn’t intend on shepherding the conflict through to its end.
“The difference between all those other people getting sucked into these extended and incredibly damaging commitments is that they have the attention span to do that,“ Wolff said. ”He does not. So in a sense, that’s the weird silver lining. He’s not going to go forward with this.”
“And I don’t see him going down and becoming a wartime president and seeing this as something that he has to see to the end,” Wolff explained. “Trump’s whole impulse is exactly the opposite of that.” [….]
“Many wars are provoked by headlines, by propaganda, by people advocating for their position, trying to push people into wars. That’s certainly what the neocons did for so long,” he said. “But this is kind of the opposite; this is war to create a headline, and the headline is, ‘We won.’”
It’s all part of Trump’s childish personality. He bombed Iran and announced that their nuclear sites were “obliterated.” Right before he had to head to NATO meeting, it came out that that wasn’t true. He’s still publicly insisting that Iran’s nuclear program is dead, but he knows now that it’s a lie.
Trump’s Insane Claims about the Iran Strikes and His Wished-For Cease Fire
If the cease-fire holds, this episode would appear to mark a major foreign-policy victory for the president. But Trump may have made a crucial mistake that could bring about the very outcome that successive American presidents have sought to prevent: an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The problem is that the cease-fire is not linked to a diplomatic agreement with Iran on the future of its nuclear program. Trump apparently sees no need for further negotiation, because the military strikes were, to him, an unqualified success. But as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday morning, assessing the damage to the sites will take some time. A preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that the strikes had failed to destroy some core components of the nuclear program, CNN reported today.
If parts of the program survived, or if Iran stockpiled and hid enriched uranium in advance of the strikes, then Tehran’s next steps seem clear. It will end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Without eyes and ears on the ground, the international community will lose the ability to monitor Iran’s program. Iran could then choose to build a bomb covertly.
There is a worrisome parallel here to North Korea, which ended cooperation with the IAEA, pulled out of the NPT, and slowly resumed production of highly enriched uranium. A few years later, Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, much to everyone’s surprise.
The Iranian regime may conclude that withdrawing from the NPT is its most effective form of retaliation.
Our childish “president” doesn’t have the patience to deal with anything except instant gratification.
The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by seven people briefed on it.
The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.
Discouraged looking Trump arrives at NATO summit, still no tie.
The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.”
Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes….
The White House acknowledged the existence of the assessment but said they disagreed with it.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Trump, who’s in the Netherlands attending this week’s NATO summit, pushed back on CNN’s report in a Truth Social post. “One of the most successful military strikes in history,” Trump wrote in the all-caps post adding, “The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!”
Netanyahu must be trying to suck up to Trump, because Israel has released their evaluation of the U.S. strikes.
The Israeli government’s nuclear authority says US and Israeli strikes on Iran have rendered the Fordo underground enrichment site “inoperable”.
In a statement the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) says the “devastating” strike “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure”.
“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” it says.
The IAEC adds that the “achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material”.
The statement was initially shared by the White House, which distributed it to reporters earlier. It was later released by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As he embarked on his attacks on Iran, President Donald Trump was clear that his initial bombing run would be followed by unbelievable destruction, if the government in Tehran angered him too much. But then after giving war a chance, he was clear that he wanted “peace” for all nations involved. Then, he toyed with the idea of a “regime change” war. And then he announced a supposed cease-fire. But then he got very mad on the internet that nobody was following his huffy cease-fire demands. Then, he got really mad online, again. And then… who the hell knows? Even senior members of his own administration sometimes don’t seem to know what to make of this Trumpian blitz of war and supposed peace.
One thing is for sure: Trump wants you to believe that he can shitpost, bully, and even bomb his way to lasting, durable peace.
For years, Trump has wanted to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and both in and out of office, he has routinely brought up the topic of this elusive honor, people close to him say. However, you do not need to take their word for it, largely because the president often complains in public and on the internet about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize that he can mount in his office.
One reason for that is, despite his anti-neocon rhetoric, Trump has developed a markedly pro-war track record during both of his administrations, and the body count to go with it. His warfare against Iran is just the latest exhibit in that long record.
To this day, Trump still gets visibly upset when the issue is brought up in private conversations, according to a source who’s discussed it with him recently in this presidency, and he will lament that he might have to “save the whole world” in order to win the prize this term — but even doing that, he believes, might not be enough to win over the Norwegian committee due to perceived anti-Trump bias.
Suebsaeng and Perez write that the bombing of Iran is not necessarily popular with members of his administration.
But even within Trump’s second administration — which he packed full of yes-men, yes-women, and venal MAGAheads — there is some degree of hurt feelings over Trump’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend, even if no one expects this disappointment to lead to resignations or anything useful, rather than anonymous venting to reporters.
Vice President J.D. Vance, a former Trump critic, has said repeatedly that one of the things that drew him to his new boss was Trump’s professed commitment to “ending endless wars,” and bucking the GOP’s old guard on militarism overseas. Trump’s big talk on being the “candidate of peace” was, of course, always a gigantic fraud, and Vance is still assuming the role of committed Trump uber-loyalist, backing Trump’s war to the hilt.
One quietly frustrated Trump appointee told Rolling Stone that the president’s haphazard Iran bombing policy reflects the kind of “warmonger shit that we’re supposed to be against.” But as this week progressed, this source said that “at least he’s a lazy warmonger.”
Trump’s one accomplishment at the NATO summit is that NATO countries have agreed to spend 5% of their GDP on military preparedness.
Trump at the NATO Summit
Speaking at the NATO summit, Trump continued obsessing over the bombing and the intel assessment that it didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.
President Donald Trump lashed out at “scum” who revealed his much-championed strikes against Iran were likely far less effective than he claims.
Speaking at a NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump also conceded that the report from his own intelligence community was “correct,” even while continuing to insist that his strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities caused “total obliteration” and having previously dismissed the report as fake news.
Trump speaks at the NATO summit.
“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump raged Wednesday.
“What they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less,” Trump went on. “The generals and all of the people who did a good job, they get demeaned by these idiots at CNN, who can’t get ratings. The place is dying, nobody even wants to waste their time going on any of their shows, so they form what [sic] The New York Times, which is dying also. Without Trump, you wouldn’t have a New York Times.”
It follows after both publications reported leaked findings from a classified military intelligence report that suggested Trump’s weekend strikes against three separate nuclear sites in Iran fell far short of an “obliteration,” as Trump claims, and had likely only set the country’s nuclear program back by a mere matter of months.
The coverage of the leaked documents had already prompted a flurry of typically bellicose Truth Social posts from Trump stretching into the small hours of the night.
“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY,” he wrote, adding: “THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!
Immigration is also in the news today, because the corrupt Supreme Court has handed Trump permission to ship immigrants to third countries with no due process.
With one anodyne paragraph, the Court simultaneously cut the legs out from under lower court judges and consigned countless immigrants to be renditioned to a system of global gulags.
It’s a decision that will have long lasting corrosive effects on American civil society and respect for the courts.
“I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her impassioned dissent.
The case involves a challenge to third country removals — that is, immigrants who cannot be repatriated to their home countries and are instead being dumped in some other nation which will accept them.
Immigration protesters in front of Supreme Court
Like most of the people swept up in Trump’s deportation dragnet, the vast majority of affected immigrants were released into the community years ago and have been doing harm to no one — a reality the administration tries to hide by blasting out mugshots of the tiny minority of deportees with serious criminal records.
But The Intercept reports that, in its bloodthirsty quest to shove out as many people as fast as possible, the White House “explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.”
On March 23, a group of detainees sued in the District Court of Massachusetts seeking an injunction barring the government from deporting them to third countries without notice and an opportunity to object under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). Citing the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Alien Enemies Act cases, Judge Brian Murphy reasoned that telling people as they are being loaded onto planes that they’re about to be dropped in a country they’ve never seen clearly violates due process:
“This case presents a simple question: before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there? Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation. All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree.”
Judge Murphy ordered the government to provide detainees written notice “in a language the alien can understand,” with “meaningful opportunity for the alien to raise a fear of return for eligibility for CAT protections and … if the alien is not found to have demonstrated ‘reasonable fear,’ provide meaningful opportunity, and a minimum of 15 days, for that alien to seek to move to reopen immigration proceedings to challenge the potential third-country removal.”
The Trump administration is planning to dismiss asylum claims for potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States and then make them immediately deportable as part of the president’s sweeping immigration crackdown, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
It marks the latest in a series of moves by the administration to bar migrants from receiving protections in the US. As federal authorities come under pressure to deliver historic immigration arrest numbers, administration officials have quietly been working on efforts to make more people eligible for removal.
Masked ICE agents
The people being targeted in this case are those who entered the US unlawfully and later applied for asylum, the sources said. Their cases are expected to be closed, therefore leaving them at risk of deportation. It could affect hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants.
Over the last decade, the majority of applicants who applied for asylum with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, self-reported how they entered the US, with around 25 percent saying they entered the US unlawfully. That amounts to at least a quarter of a million people, according to a federal report analyzing asylees in 2023. The others entered legally via a port of entry through various visas.
Under US law, people who are seeking protection from violence or persecution in their home country can claim asylum to remain in the United States. Trump effectively sealed off access to claiming asylum at the US southern border upon taking office.
There are currently around 1.45 million people with pending affirmative asylum applications, federal data shows. People who are not in deportation proceedings can apply for affirmative asylum through USCIS.
USCIS — which falls under the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for managing federal immigration benefits — has also been delegated the authority by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to place those individuals in fast-track deportation proceedings as well as “take additional actions to enforce civil and criminal violations of the immigration laws,” according to a memo obtained by CNN. That marks an unprecedented departure from decades-long protocol for USCIS.
They have already been doing this by asking immigration judges to dismiss people’s cases and then having ICE grab them as they leave the courtroom. Read more CNN.
After six months of aggressive immigration enforcement and promises to focus on deporting violent criminals, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a small fraction of the undocumented immigrants already known to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as having been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, internal ICE data obtained by NBC News shows.
The data is a tally of every person booked by ICE from Oct. 1 through May 31, part of which was during the Biden administration. It shows a total of 185,042 people arrested and booked into ICE facilities during that time; 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes. The most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.
Almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted of nor charged with any crime, other ICE data shows.
Last fall, ICE told Congress that 13,099 people convicted of homicide and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault were on its non-detained docket, meaning it knew who they were but did not have them in custody. A spokesperson said at the time that ICE had some information about but did not know the exact whereabouts of all the immigrants on the non-detained docket and that some could have left the United States or could be in prison.
Running for president at the time, Donald Trump used those figures to criticize his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“These are hard, tough, vicious criminals that are free to roam in our country,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan.
One more, from Sherrilyn Ifill at Sherrilyn’s Newsletter: Masked Terror.
At this point, we have all seen the videos. Men dressed in plaid shirts, jeans and boots descending on constructions sites, chasing migrants in fields, lurking in courthouse hallways at courthouses, knocking on doors of homes, and surrounding cars. We see them wrestling men and women to the ground. Beating them in some instances. Chasing them. Jumping out of cars and descending. Surrounding unarmed women. Pointing their guns and demanding that people exit their cars. They have shown up at elementary schools demanding to see children of migrants.[i] They purport to be working for the Department of Homeland Security. They are ICE agents, we surmise. But often we don’t know. Because these men, for the most part, display no badges or names.
Masked ICE agents in Seattle courthouse
And they are masked. Their masks are not “government issue” or of the N-95 variety with which we became familiar during COVID. Often these masks are just large, black or green pieces of cloth, or bandanas covering the entire face, save for the eyes. A hat pushed down low also appears to be part of the required uniform.
Despite strong opposition from ordinary Americans to the appearance of a force that many liken to “secret police” in totalitarian regimes, Republican senators have doubled down on ICE agent anonymity, introducing legislation that would make it a felony to release the names of ICE agents.[ii]
There is something particularly menacing about being attacked by faceless people. The mask not only terrorizes the victim of the attack, but it also uniquely empowers the perpetrator. We see this in many of the videos as those who claim to be federal officers, speak crudely and cruelly, and behave with unspeakable brutality against unarmed laborers and their families. The mask prevents their victims from identifying the “officers.” But perhaps the anonymity offered by the mask also encourages these agents to obscure their own humanity from each other and from themselves.
This country has a unique history with the particular terror of masked attackers. The Ku Klux Klan, the violent white supremacist organization terrorized Black people in the American South in the first years after the end of the Civil War and through much of the 20th century. So rampant was Klan violence in the years immediately after the Civil War, that it threatened to derail the promise of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and was designed to ensure that Black people would equal citizens in post-Civil War America.
Read the rest at the link.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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As usual, there’s quite a bit happening the news today, but I’m going to focus on immigration. Trump’s war on Los Angeles is still going on, even though there hasn’t been much reporting about it lately. LA is apparently a test case for what the Trump wants to do in other blue states. Public outrage is building over the violent and un-American behavior of ICE agents, but will it be enough to save our democracy?
A 37-year-old U.S. citizen who was tackled to the ground and arrested after filming federal agents at Home Depot on Thursday said he was held for more than an hour near Dodger Stadium, where agents boasted about how many immigrants they arrested.
“How many bodies did you guys grab today?” he said one agent asked.
“Oh, we grabbed 31,“ the other replied.
“That was a good day today,” the first agent responded.
The two high-fived, as he sat on the asphalt under the sun, Job Garcia said.
Garcia was released on Friday from a downtown federal detention center. No apparent criminal charges have yet to be filed. He is one of several U.S citizens arrested during enforcement operations in recent days. Department of Homeland Security officials say some have illegally interfered with agents’ jobs….
Garcia said he was shaken by what he heard while he was detained.
“They call them ‘bodies,’ they reduce them to bodies,” he said. “My blood was boiling.”
Here’s what happened:
Garcia, a photographer and doctoral student Claremont Graduate University, had been picking up a delivery at Home Depot when someone approached the customer desk and said something was unfolding outside.
“La migra, La migra,” he heard as he walked out. He quickly grabbed his phone and followed agents around the parking lot, telling them they were “f— useless” until he came to a group of them forming a half-circle around a box truck.
A Border Patrol agent radioed someone and then slammed his baton against the passenger window, his video shows. Glass shattered. He unlocked the door as people shouted.
In the video, a stunned man can be seen texting behind the wheel. He had apparently refused to open his door.
It’s unclear from the footage what happened next, but Garcia said an agent lunged toward him and pushed him.
“My first reaction was to like push his hand off,” he recalled. Then, he said, the agent grabbed his left arm, twisted it behind his back and threw his phone.
The agent brought him to the ground and three other agents jumped in, Garcia said
“Get the f— down sir” and “give me your f— hand. You want it, you got it, sir, you f— got it. You want to go to jail, fine. You got it,” an agent can be heard saying in the video.
“You wanted it, you got it,” the man yelled.
An agent handcuffed him so hard “that there was no circulation running to my fingers,” Garcia said.
Pinned down, Garcia had difficulty breathing.
“That moment, I thought I could probably die here,” he said.
There’s more at the LA Times link.
Yesterday, JD Vance traveled to Los Angles to stir up more trouble.
Eight days ago, Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a news conference and handcuffed by federal agents after he interrupted Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles.
In the Kitchen, by Natalya Bagaskaya
At the same building on Friday, Vice President JD Vance disparaged Mr. Padilla for engaging in “political theater” and called him by the wrong name.
“Well, I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question, but unfortunately, I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t the theater,” Mr. Vance said during a news conference in response to a reporter. “I think everybody realizes that’s what this is. It’s pure political theater.”
Mr. Vance’s spokeswoman later said that he misspoke when he said the senator’s name.
The vice president spent much of his news conference blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles for the violence caused by some protesters in the city and the obstruction of immigration enforcement. Mr. Vance, who shook the hands of about 20 Marines who were at the federal building, alternated between attacks on California Democrats and praise for law enforcement.
“Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, they decided to go to war against the people trying to keep our community safe,” Mr. Vance said. “That’s a disgrace. That’s a terrible commentary on their qualities as leaders.”
Several California Democrats slammed Vice President Vance after he referred to Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) as “Jose” during a Friday presser in Los Angeles.
“I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,” Vance said, referring to Padilla’s forcible removal from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press conference last week.
“I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater,” he continued.
Democrats railed against Vance for misnaming the state’s first Latino senator, who the vice president served alongside before his successful White House bid.
“Calling him ‘Jose Padilla’ is not an accident,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a Friday post on the social media platform X.
Mayor Karen Bass took aim at JD Vance Friday for the comments he made during his visit to Los Angeles, accusing the vice president of “spewing lies” and disrespecting Sen. Alex Padilla….
“The vice president of the United States spent three or four hours in LA before holding a press conference and spewing lies and utter nonsense in an attempt to provoke division and conflict in our city,” said Bass. “This is consistent with the provocation from Washington that began two weeks ago, when our city was calm and many and millions of Angelenos were going about working and contributing to our city.”
The mayor also criticized Vance for referring to Sen. Alex Padilla as “Jose Padilla,” someone he served with before serving as vice president….
The mayor emphasized that the protests, which Vance criticized harshly, were mostly peaceful, and that the city has streets have been quiet since they lifted the curfew.
“Even when there was vandalism at its height, you were talking about a couple of hundred people who were not necessarily associated with any of the peaceful protests,” said Bass. “Los Angeles is a city that is 500 square miles and any disruption took place took place in about two square miles in our city. The most – over 100 people were arrested. We are a city of 3.8 million people.”
Stephen Miller wanted to keep the planes in the air—and that is where they stayed.
When a federal judge in March told the Trump administration to turn around flights of deported migrants headed to El Salvador, senior officials hastily convened a Saturday evening conference call to figure out what to do.
JIf they didn’t return the passengers, they would be defying a court order, some administration officials worried. Miller, who is President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, pushed for the planes to keep flying, which they ultimately did. The judge would later say that allowing officials to defy court judgments would make a “solemn mockery” of the Constitution.
Uninvited by Lucia Heffernan
The 39-year-old immigration hawk, who has been by Trump’s side since the 2016 campaign, has emerged as a singular figure in the second Trump administration, wielding more power than almost any other White House staffer in recent memory—and eager to circumvent legal limitations on his agenda.
He has his own staff of about 30 and a Secret Service detail, which White House officials said was because he had received death threats and serves as homeland security adviser. He has been responsible for the administration’s broadsides against universities, law firms and even museums. He has written or edited every executive order that Trump has signed…..
Some of Miller’s colleagues said they were alarmed by some of the legal maneuvers that Miller has proposed for executing the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, and Trump has gently ribbed him for being too “happy” about deportations.
A bit more:
Miller, who isn’t a lawyer, is the official who first suggested using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, which the Justice Department pursued. He also privately, then publicly, floated suspending habeas corpus, or the right for prisoners to challenge their detention in court, which the administration hasn’t tried. That prompted pushback from other senior White House and Justice Department officials.
His orders to increase arrests regardless of migrants’ criminal histories set off days of protests in Los Angeles. Miller coordinated the federal government’s response, giving orders to agencies including the Pentagon, when Trump sent in the Marines and the National Guard, according to officials familiar with the matter….
Several White House staffers said Miller always takes the most “extreme” view of any issue, and his positions have cost the administration in court. In Trump’s first 100 days back in office, courts issued nationwide injunctions in 25 cases against the federal government, compared with six in his entire first term and four during the Biden administration, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Several cases have already reached the Supreme Court, which has ruled against Trump on some immigration cases.
According to the latest data published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday, the number of immigrants held in detention on June 15 reached 56,397.1 This might be the largest detained population on record. It is certainly the largest detained population since ICE began reporting detention data during the first Trump administration. The previous high was 55,654 in August 2019—and I have used that number as the benchmark high in the past to put ICE’s detention numbers in context….
The biggest growth in recent weeks has been the number of people in civil detention with nothing more than civil immigration violations on their record. The chart and table below focus only on people in detention as a result of ICE arrests. This number increased from 7,781 to 11,763. The increases for people with pending criminal charges or criminal convictions increased much less.
In fact, nearly a third of all people held in ICE detention now have no criminal history, up from 6 percent in January. The percent of immigrants held with criminal convictions has actually decreased from 62 percent to 37 percent. See the previous post in January for my prediction that this would take place and a detailed description explaining why….
To put the growth of detained people with no criminal histories in context, we can compare the current totals with the totals at the start of the Trump administration to visualize their relative growth over the past six months. There has been nearly a 14x growth in the number of people detained at any one time without criminal histories.
The majority of ICE detainees were arrested by ICE, rather than CBP—an indication that most of the immigration enforcement happening in the country right now is happening throughout the interior while the border is less active as a site of enforcement. That said, I encourage you to listen to my conversation with Reece Jones about the expansive enforcement geography of Border Patrol. They are not only operating at the border, but also in places across the country.
Go to the link to see charts and graphs.
Commentary on the authoritarian behavior of ICE
Heather Cox Richardson at Letter from an American: June 20, 2025.
Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.” [….]
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.
Bella et Miso, by L. Roche
On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.
Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.
The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest….
…the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.
Day by passing day, we are watching what amounts to a national police riot by ICE.
Social media is filled with disturbingvideos of masked ICE officers — or, I should say, people suspected of being or self-identifying as ICE officers, since for the most part they’re not wearing any identifiable police insignia — manhandling people, including the comptroller of New York, US citizens, suspected aliens, and even journalists alike. In recent days, ICE has also begun resistingcongressionaloversight efforts — oversight that clearly and legally it needs to provide. In fact, yesterday ICE announced a new “policy” that says it doesn’t have to provide congress access to its facilities that Congress itself wrote into law. (It goes without saying that you can’t create a “policy” that negates an actual bona fide law—and it’s worth explaining that the reason Congress created this very explicit law allowing ICE oversight is because of its past struggles in doing that exact thing! It’s not like there’s much ambiguity or “open to interpretation” here.)
ICE in just a few weeks has transformed itself into the closest thing that the US has ever had to a “secret police,” with more seemingly culturally in common with the Klan nightriders of Reconstruction than their federal agency brethren like the FBI or ATF.
Graff’s point of view:
What really worries me about ICE’s collective actions nationwide, though, is bigger than any single raid or social media post — what worries me is that what we’re witnessing nationwide are not the actions of an agency that believes it will ever be subject to meaningful oversight or legal authority ever again.
Cat, by Rahanin Ratanapahol
This is not an agency that is treating members of Congress as if it will ever be held to account by the men and women who control its budget.
This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions on the streets will be subject to meaningful review by judicial authorities — or that any of its actions will be litigated in the courts.
This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions will be subject to meaningful review by the DHS inspector general, either for policy violations or criminal use-of-force abuses, nor reviewed by US attorneys or federal prosecutors at any level.
This is not an agency leadership that believes that anyone in government — at the Justice Department, the White House, or DHS — currently cares about public perception, misconduct, or violations of civil rights and civil liberties.
And this is not an agency that believes that Democrats will ever be back in charge.
That’s what should terrify us.
It does terrify me. Please go read the rest at Doomsday Scenario.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump scored a temporary victory after an appeals court ruled that he can continue deploying the National Guard as part of his watch-me-play-fascist-on-TV response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. The decision accepted Trump’s premise that conditions in L.A. permit him to take control of the guard—but it rejected his claim that such decisions should be entirely unreviewable by courts.
That latter part of the ruling is important. It’s potentially something of an obstacle to his ongoing effort to assume quasi-dictatorial powers for himself—for now, anyway.
Trump apparently processed only the first part. He posted the following, in a reference to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who’s suing to block Trump from taking over his state’s guard (emphasis added):
The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done.
In short, Trump seized on this mixed ruling to threaten to send in the National Guard anywhere in the United States if and when he decrees it “necessary.” The scare quotes are mine, because on many fronts, Trump is testing how far he can get by inventing ways to claim such actions are “necessary,” a power he and his advisers see as boundless.
All of which highlights a deeper conundrum here: What can the courts—and the rest of us—do in the face of a president whose bad faith and willingness to concoct pretexts for abusing his powers basically have no bottom?
As ICE agents dragged Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate for mayor, down the hallway of a federal courthouse this week, he repeatedly—and politely—asked to see their judicial warrant. Lander had locked arms with an undocumented man he identified as Edgardo, and refused to let go. Eventually, the ICE agents yanked Lander away from the man, shoved him against a wall, and handcuffed him. Lander told them that they didn’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens. They arrested him anyway.
The courthouse is only a few blocks away from the one where Donald Trump was convicted last year of 34 felony crimes for falsifying business records. His supporters painted the criminal-justice process as a politically motivated witch hunt. But none of them seems to mind now that masked ICE agents are lurking behind corners in the halls of justice to snatch up undocumented migrants who show up for their hearings. This was not the first time Lander had accompanied someone to the courthouse, and it wouldn’t be his last.
Sharyn bursic, Lady on Couch with Cat
The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Lander had been “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.” The whole thing is on video, so anyone can see that there was no assault. Lander is about as mild-mannered a politician as they come. Matt Welch, a libertarian blogger and no fan of Lander, wrote on X that the only things Lander had ever assaulted were “Coney Island hot dogs and school-zone speed limits.” He’s the kind of old-fashioned elected official who doesn’t much exist anymore, the kind you see at public-library events or can call when your kid’s day care is shut down and know he’ll actually do something about it. A different kind of politician would have milked the attention for all it was worth. But if Brad Lander were a different kind of politician, he might be first and not third in the polls. “I did not come today expecting to be arrested,” he told reporters after being released. “But I really think I failed today, because my goal was really to get Edgardo out of the building.”
More link him, please.
People who are used to living in a democracy tend to find it unsettling when elected officials are arrested, or thrown to the ground and handcuffed for asking questions at press conferences. They don’t like to see elected officials indicted for trying to intervene in the arrest of other elected officials. And they find it traumatizing when, as has been happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere, they see law-abiding neighbors and co-workers they’ve known for years grabbed and deported.
The question now is what Americans are going to do about it.
Los Angeles has offered one model of response. Although Trump campaigned on finding and deporting undocumented criminals, in order to hit aggressive quotas, ICE has changed its tactics and started barging into workplaces. Citizens have reported being detained simply because they look Hispanic. Residents of one Latino neighborhood recorded ICE officers driving in an armored vehicle. Many residents felt that the raids were an invasion by the president’s personal storm troopers, and marched into the streets in response.
The first groups of protesters were organized by unions, but soon, other Angelenos—of many ages and backgrounds—joined them. Most of the protesters were peaceful, chanting and marching and performing mariachi around federal buildings in downtown L.A. But others were not. They defaced buildings with graffiti and summoned Waymos, the driverless taxis, in order to set them on fire.
Of course right-wingers reacted predictably, blaming Democrats. But what explains the reactions from some Democrats and journalists?
I would have thought that the reaction to the protests from anyone outside the MAGAverse would have been pretty uniform. Democrats have been warning Americans for years about Trump’s descent into authoritarianism. Now it is happening—the deportations, the arrests, the president’s face on banners across government buildings, the tank parade. “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” Newsom said. And yet, so many Democratic leaders, public intellectuals, and members of the media seemed distinctly uneasy about the protests. Yes, they seem to say, ICE has been acting illegally, but what about the Waymos?
In The Washington Post, David Ignatius fretted about protesters waving Mexican flags and wondered if the “activists” were actually working for Trump. Democratic leaders were “worried the confrontation elevates a losing issue for the party,” The New York Times reported. Politico raised a more cynical question: “Which Party Should Be More Worried About the Politics of the LA Protests?”
Many Democrats denounced vandalism while supporting the right to protest. But the Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was harsh in his criticism of the protesters, lamenting that the random acts of violence and property damage by a few bad actors would cause Democrats to lose the “moral high ground.”
There is a time for politicians to fine-tune a message for maximum appeal. But this is a case of actual public outrage against the trampling of inalienable rights. This is not a fight for the moral high ground; this is a fight against authoritarianism.
Use the gift link to read the entire article.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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Here comes the summer sun! We’ve got an extreme heat warning all day. This is getting to be our normal summer these days. The most interesting thing of the day is something I have always associated with the active volcano ring of fire in the Pacific Ocean. This was a new thing for me.
This is a weather phenomenon as explained by Accuweather. “‘Ring of fire’ thunderstorms to erupt on building heat dome in central, eastern US Rounds of thunderstorms will form a “ring of fire” around a massive dome of building heat in the central and eastern United States into next week.” Well, that sounds pretty hellish.
As a major heat wave builds and takes center stage in the weather from late this week to next week, groups of severe thunderstorms will erupt on the edge of the dome of hot air, AccuWeather meteorologists advise.
The storms will take on a “ring of fire” effect, erupting first over parts of the northern Plains and Midwest, followed by portions of the Northeast and finally the Southwest and central Plains.
The intense high pressure and sinking air within a heat dome make it difficult for thunderstorms to form in large numbers. However, thunderstorms tend to erupt on the edges of the heat dome, as the high pressure area is weakest in these areas, allowing columns of air to rise and form towering clouds and gusty downpours.
Everyone from Kansas City east to the Atlantic will be impacted. It’s huge! Yes, Boston is included! It goes as far south as Asheville and will go way up into Canada. Be prepared to stay home! Europe is getting directly involved in pushing both Iran and Israel to the negotiation table. This is from Reuters. “Iran says no nuclear talks under fire, UN atomic watchdog urges maximum restraint.” It’s reported by Parisa Hafezi, Crispian Balmer, and Jana Choukeir.
Iran said on Friday it would not discuss the future of its nuclear programme while under attack by Israel, as Europe tried to coax Tehran back into negotiations and the United States considers whether to get involved in the conflict.
A week into its campaign, Israel said it had struck dozens of military targets overnight, including missile production sites, a research body it said was involved in nuclear weapons development in Tehran and military facilities in western and central Iran. The Israel Defense Forces later said they had also struck surface-to-air missile batteries in southwestern Iran as part of efforts to achieve air superiority over the country.
At least five people were injured when Israel hit a five-storey building in Tehran housing a bakery and a hairdresser’s, Fars news agency reported.
Iran fired missiles at Beersheba in southern Israel early on Friday and Israeli media said initial reports pointed to missile impacts in Tel Aviv, the Negev and Haifa after further attacks hours later.
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog warned against attacks on nuclear facilities and called for maximum restraint.
You may ask yourself, Where is my beautiful country in these peace-seeking negotiations? Well, the answer is we’re trapped in the Trump Two Week Twist. You really have to watch this clip from Jen Psaki’s show last night. The explanation and the incredible number of times he’s used the Two Week Twist is surreal. It’s laughable even though it turns the United States of America into a feckless and shammy place run by a feckless and shammy nepobaby. The New York Times heading is trying to make Yam Tits look thoughtful. Why do they keep carrying his water? Or perhaps, better put, why is he carrying his colostomy bag? This is the headline. “Trump Buys Himself Time, and Opens Up Some New Options. While President Trump appears to be offering one more off ramp to the Iranians, he also is bolstering his own military options.” Here are the feckless reporters who executed the Trump Two-Week Twist: David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager. Sanger covers Iran’s nuclear programs. Pager is from the merry band of White House Reporters who don’t do their job. That’s a gift link if you want to read all about it.
President Trump’s sudden announcement that he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict is being advertised by the White House as giving diplomacy one more chance to work.
But it also opens a host of new military and covert options.
Assuming he makes full use of it, Mr. Trump will now have time to determine whether six days of relentless bombing and killing by Israeli forces — which has taken out one of Iran’s two biggest uranium enrichment centers, much of its missile fleet and its most senior officers and nuclear scientists — has changed minds in Tehran.
Look, it’s the Trump Two Week Twist! It’s a ploy, boys! It’s his fallback version of Homer Simpson’s d’oh.
Yam Tits is also using his basic staged reality show strategic moves as he tries to drag the minds of his knuckle dragging MAGA voters off his past promises of no new endless wars. This was likely predictable, too. ABC Newsreports that “Trump calls for special prosecutor for 2020 election, after again claiming fraud with no evidence.” We don’t need no stiking evidence! We’re the Reality Show Administration! Bondi will likely go along with it.
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Friday morning to again make unverified claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. He called for a special prosecutor.
“The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” Trump claimed without giving more details. “A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America!”
There has been no evidence that the 2020 election was filled with fraud following numerous investigations, audits and other reviews over the last four and a half years.
An Associated Press investigation found fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud in six battleground states during the 2020 presidential election — a number far too little to have make any different in the outcome of that election.
Meanwhile, we now have to report the news about ongoing attempts at political assassinations. In sad news, MSNBC reports that “Minnesota lawmaker shot 9 times at his home in ‘targeted’ attack is in a critical condition. Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were both shot multiple times and are continuing their recovery, according to a statement from the couple.”
The Minnesota lawmaker who survived an attack by a gunman on his doorstep is still in a critical condition and has revealed details of the terrifying moment he and his wife were shot multiple times.
Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, released a statement Thursday, obtained by NBC affiliate KARE of Minneapolis, outlining the events in the early hours of June 14.
The Hoffmans continue their recovery in the hospital — Sen. Hoffman is in a critical but stable condition, while his wife is in a stable condition, the statement said.
We also have a new possible attempt in Ohio as reported by CNN. “Man arrested after Ohio GOP congressman says he was run off the road and threatened.” We’re not sure atm if this was politically motivated or what, but it’s being investigated.
A man in Ohio has been arrested and charged after allegedly threatening Rep. Max Miller during an incident in which the Republican US congressman says he was driven off the road, according to documents provided to CNN.
Feras S. Hamdan, 36, was arrested after Miller filed and signed a complaint with police for aggravated menacing, as well as requested a protective order against him, according to the Rocky River Police Department in Ohio.
Hamdan, accompanied by legal counsel, voluntarily turned himself in and is awaiting a court appearance, according to police.
CNN is attempting to reach Hamdan’s attorney.
Miller on Thursday called the Rocky River Police Department via 911 to report that an individual on the highway was threatening him and his family.
“I’m on the freeway. I have somebody who has cut me off, who is flipping me off, who is showing me a Palestinian flag and is yelling to kill me,” Miller said, according to a recording of the call obtained by CNN.
He told the 911 operator at one point: “I’m a little shaken at the moment because I got death threats.”
Miller called police on his way to work and read the license plate of the alleged perpetrator. At one point, he held out his phone for the 911 dispatcher to hear the honking and yelling, though the sounds were largely unintelligible. His call was transferred to a different police department based on the location of the incident.
Well, have to wait to learn more about this one. Meanwhile, the big bad budget-busting bill is hung up in the Senate. This is from The Hill. “Trump’s megabill hits more trouble as Senate conservatives demand changes.”
The Senate version of legislation to enact President Trump’s agenda is hitting new turbulence as conservatives led by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are demanding deeper spending cuts to address the nation’s $2.2 trillion annual deficit.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has focused this week on addressing the concerns of Senate GOP colleagues such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who raised alarms about cuts to federal Medicaid spending.
But Thune has to worry about his right flank as Johnson and his allies are threatening to hold up the bill unless GOP leaders agree to deeper cuts to federal Medicaid spending and a faster rollback of the renewable energy tax credits enacted under former President Biden.
Johnson, Lee and Scott are threatening to vote as a bloc against the bill next week unless it undergoes significant changes.
Thune plans to bring the bill to the floor Wednesday or Thursday next week, but he may not have enough votes to proceed on the legislation, Republican senators say.
Additionally, the Senate Parlimentarian has deleted some of the bill. This is reported in Politico. “Parliamentarian nixes key pieces of Tim Scott’s megabill proposal. Senate Banking Republicans will be forced to go back to the drawing board on the core components of their proposal for the GOP’s “big beautiful bill.”
The Senate parliamentarian ruled Thursday that several key provisions in Banking Chair Tim Scott’s proposed contribution to the GOP’s “big beautiful bill” violate the upper chamber’s rules for the budget reconciliation process, according to Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley’s office.
Scott’s proposals to zero out funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slash some Federal Reserve employees’ pay, cut Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board are all ineligible to be included in a simple-majority budget reconciliation bill.
The ruling from Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is a major blow to Scott and Banking Committee Republicans, who will be forced to go back to the drawing board on the core pieces of their proposal for the GOP megabill. The panel is required to find $1 billion in cuts over the next 10 years under a budget resolution adopted by both chambers of Congress — a narrow fraction of the overall bill.
Scott said in a statement that he remains “committed to advancing legislation that cuts waste and duplication in our federal government and saves taxpayer dollars.”
Only measures that are aimed at changing spending or revenues are allowed under the strict rules governing the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process. MacDonough is responsible for determining which proposals comply with the body’s rules. Banking Committee staffers from both parties met with the parliamentarian’s office earlier this week to discuss Scott’s plan.
Here’s a sad headline from the New York Times. I’ve gifted this one too, so you may read the entire thing. “Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.A panel rejected a lower court’s finding that it was likely illegal for President Trump to use state troops to protect immigration agents from protests.”
A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.
A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely-triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.
Mr. Trump praised the decision, saying in a Truth Social post late Thursday that it supported his argument for using the National Guard “all over the United States” if local law enforcement can’t “get the job done.”
Mr. Newsom, in a response on Thursday, focused on how the appeals court had rejected the Trump administration’s argument that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard could not be reviewed by a judge.
“The president is not a king and is not above the law,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of U.S. military soldiers against citizens.”
This bill is on a long path. Be sure to stay on top of it. I’m pretty sure a lot of the reality show attractions are still to keep us out of the loop. Also, do not forget the importance of this Supreme Court decision, which basically says state Religionists have more control over your children and your body than you do. This is from Chris Geidner writing on his blog Law Dork. “Where is the outrage over Skrmetti? On the far right’s campaign to create uncertainty over gender-affirming medical care for minors — and the powerful institutions that helped along the way.” We’re living under a situation where there are safe states under attack from the Trump administration, and states are trying to get their kids out of living under the same kinds of craziness of States’ Rights we fought a long time to get rid of. It’s nuts!
The response to Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee’s law barring transgender minors from obtaining gender-affirming medical care has been muted at best.
In its U.S. v. Skrmetti ruling, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees shaved off the edges — if not more central parts — of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in order to uphold laws that bar an exceptionally small number of teens from receiving a type of medical care that only one group of teens need.
Addressing this formal attack on transgender people by the government — de jure discrimination, one might even call it — is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor made clear in her dissent on Wednesday, the work that the Equal Protection Clause is supposed to do.
One would expect more outrage.
But Wednesday was the result of a long-term campaign that ultimately succeeded. As same-sex couples succeeded in obtaining marriage equality in 2015, the far-right organizations who had used their opposition to those couples’ marriage rights to fund their work needed a new cause.
The far right moved on to attacking transgender people. The animosity from the right — and others — toward trans people wasn’t new, but as the marriage outcome became clear, the shift of focus began.
They went after trans people’s use of bathrooms. North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill“ backfired. Gov. Pat McCrory lost re-election, and the swing state has been led by Democratic governors since. But, bathrooms have always been targets for moral panic, so the issue eventually returned.
Starting in Idaho in 2020, they went after trans people’s participation in sports. That got some traction, particularly as the campaign moved on.
Then, starting in Arkansas the next year, they went after trans kids’ medical care.
They were just going to keep going until they got something that pushed them into the spotlight.
Even when lawmakers started passing bans on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, however, judges of all stripes started blocking them as likely unconstitutional.
This was not, Trump appointees even agreed, a close question.
“At bottom, sex-based classifications are not just present in [Indiana]’s prohibitions; they’re determinative,” U.S. District Judge Patrick Hanlon, a Trump appointee, wrote in blocking Indiana’s law back in June 2023.
As another Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson, wrote later that month in blocking Tennessee’s ban, “Though the Court would not hesitate to be an outlier if it found such an outcome to be required, the Court finds it noteworthy that its resolution of the present Motion brings it into the ranks of courts that have (unanimously) come to the same conclusion when considering very similar laws.“
Read more at the link.
Anyway, we’ve made it through another year, oops season, oops week with Yam Tit’s ongoing decline and falls. I can’t imagine going through any more of this, but it will get worse here, I’m sure. The idiot who’s now our Governor has already volunteered to help federal troops and ICE. State Law enforcement will definitely be there aiding and abetting. I’m hoping we can do better here in New Orleans, but who knows? This is what he signed last month, as reported by the Shreveport Times.
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order, Operation GEAUX, directing state law enforcement to assist federal immigration operations.
Landry emphasized the program’s focus on deporting individuals in the country illegally who engage in criminal activity.
The initiative includes enhanced screening, identification, and a public awareness campaign.
The only crimes related to immigration we’ve had are business owners grabbing immigrants’ passports and papers while not giving them back, and essentially enslaving them. I’m not sure the state would file charges even if this happened again.
Have a very restful and good weekend. Stay Cool!
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The epic spat between Trump and Musk is still dominating the media landscape, but that childish story should get some competition soon from the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. The Trump administration finally decided to bring him back after they invented some “crimes” to charge him with and took them to a grand jury in Tennessee. The trumped up charges led a long-time prosecutor there to abruptly resign. Meanwhile, even though Musk is gone, DOGE is still working to steal all our private data. On the ICE/mass deportation front, Los Angeles looked like a war zone yesterday.
I’ll get to each of these stories, beginning with Abrego Garcia.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, has been returned to the United States to face federal criminal charges, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday.
For months, the Trump administration has been locked in an intense standoff with the federal judiciary over court orders for the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, where he was mistakenly deported in mid-March, in a situation that one federal judge warned could present an “incipient crisis” between the two branches.
Abrego Garcia has been indicted on two criminal counts in the Middle District of Tennessee: conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain and unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain.
The indictment unsealed Friday afternoon accuses Abrego Garcia and others of partaking in a conspiracy in recent years in which they “knowingly and unlawfully transported thousands of undocumented aliens who had no authorization to be present in the United States, and many of whom were MS-13 members and associates.”
Abrego Garcia and his family say he fled gang violence in El Salvador and have denied allegations he’s associated with MS-13.
The White House and the State Department made the decision to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney for Abrego Garcia, accused the Trump administration of “playing games” with the legal system and said his client should appear in immigration court, not criminal court.
“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order. Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. This shows that they were playing games with the court all along,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statement to CNN. “Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after. This is an abuse of power, not justice.”
The alleged “crimes”:
The allegations date back to 2016 and involve a half-dozen alleged unnamed co-conspirators, with one, identified as CC-6 of Guatemala, described as being a “primary sources of supply of undocumented aliens for the conspiracy.”
Man with cat, Theresa Tanner
The conspiracy allegations outline how, over the years, Abrego Garcia and others worked to move undocumented aliens between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.
Working with another co-conspirator, referred to as CC-1, Abrego Garcia and that unnamed individual “ordinarily picked up the undocumented aliens in the Houston, Texas area after the aliens had unlawfully crossed the Southern border of the United States from Mexico,” the indictment said.
The two “then transported the undocumented aliens from Texas to other parts of the United States to further the aliens’ unlawful presence in the United States.”
You can read more details on the trumped up charges at the CNN link.
The decision to pursue the indictment against Kilmar Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News.
Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. A
ttorney’s Office in Nashville, and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, did not respond to messages from ABC News seeking comment.
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.
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.
President Donald Trump was dejected, processing his very public split with the world’s richest man.
Rattled in the wake of Elon Musk’s public attacks and apparent call for his impeachment, Trump worked the phones, debriefing close confidants and casual acquaintances alike. His former ally was “a big-time drug addict,” Trump said at one point as he tried to make sense of Musk’s behavior, according to a person with knowledge of the call, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Musk has acknowledged using ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, which he says was prescribed for him to treat depression. The New York Times recently reported that he was using so much ketamine on the campaign trail that he told people it was affecting his bladder, and he traveled with a pill box with medication with the marking of Adderall. White House officials said that Trump’s concern about Musk’s drug use, stemming in part from media reports, was one factor driving the two men apart.
But the president, who historically hasn’t hesitated to fire off deeply personal, blistering social media posts about others who have insulted him, was more muted regarding Musk than friends and advisers expected. In the aftermath of his Thursday faceoff with Musk, he urged those around him not to pour gasoline on the fire, according to two people with knowledge of his behavior. He told Vice President JD Vance to be cautious with how he spoke publicly about the Musk situation.
But although the break between Musk and Trump only exploded into public view on Thursday, cracks in the alliance began to appear much earlier. As Musk’s “move fast and break things” bravado complicated the White House’s ambitions to remake American society, the billionaire alienated key members of the White House staff, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and quarreled with Cabinet members, physically coming to blows with one.
That’s the introduction; read all the gossip at the WaPo. I’ve included a gift link, because it’s an interesting article.
Jonathan Lemire, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Russell Berman at The Atlantic (gift link): Inside the Trump-Musk Breakup.
For once, President Donald Trump was trying to be the adult in the room.
Trump and Elon Musk, two billionaires with massive egos and combustible temperaments, had forged an unlikely friendship over the past year, one built on proximity, political expediency, and, yes, a touch of genuine warmth. Relations between the president and his top benefactor had grown somewhat strained in recent weeks, as Trump began to feel that Musk had overstayed his welcome in the West Wing. Musk had suggested privately that he could stay on at the White House, an offer that Trump gently declined, two people familiar with the situation told us. (They, like others we talked with for this story, spoke anonymously in order to share candid details about a sensitive feud.) But Musk was still given a gracious send-off last Friday—complete with a large golden, albeit ceremonial, key—aimed at keeping the mercurial tech baron more friend than foe.
Will Barnet, The Closed Window
The peace didn’t last even a week.
On Tuesday, Musk took to X to attack the Republican spending bill being debated in the Senate, trashing Trump’s signature piece of legislation as “a disgusting abomination.” Even as the White House tried to downplay any differences, Musk couldn’t let go of his grievances—the exclusion of electric-vehicle tax credits from the bill, and Trump’s rejection of Musk’s pick to run NASA.
Yesterday, the planet’s richest man attacked its most powerful. Each took aim at the other from their respective social-media platform, forcing rubberneckers into a madcap toggle between Truth Social and X. Trump deemed his former aide “CRAZY,” while Musk went much further, dramatically escalating the feud by calling for Trump’s impeachment, suggesting that the president had been part of Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious sex-trafficking ring, and—likely worst of all in Trump’s mind—taking credit for the president’s election in November.
For one day, Musk made X great again. The spectacle seemed to subside today, as Trump showed—at least by his standards—some restraint. The president insisted that he was not thinking about Musk and wanted only to pass the reconciliation bill that had featured in the brawl. Musk, meanwhile, has far more to lose: his newfound stardom within the MAGA movement, his personal wealth, and government contracts worth billions to his businesses.
Steven Bannon, the influential Trump adviser who has long been critical of Musk, crowed that the tech billionaire’s attacks on Trump were so personal that he won’t be forgiven by the MAGA crowd. “Only the fanboys are going to stick with him—he’s a man without a country,” Bannon told us.
Use the gift link to read the whole thing if you’re intersted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Multiple ICE raids in Los Angeles on Friday set off a wave of protests that were met with a show of force by officers in tactical gear, as the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrationescalates.
Aerial video footage from local media showed officers outside clothing wholesaler Ambiance Apparel, one of the reported locations of the raids, putting handcuffed individuals into white vans, with protesters trying to stop themfrom leaving.Later footage shows officers in tactical gear riding armored vehicles as stun grenades go off throughout the crowd.
Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said at a news conference that as of Friday afternoon, there were seven raids happening throughout the city, including at two Home Depots, a doughnut shop and the clothing wholesaler. She said the organization had confirmed that more than 45 people were detained in the operations, which she described as “random sweeps” that appeared to be carried out without a warrant. The Washington Post could not independently confirm the nature of the raids.
“This has to stop. Immigration enforcement that is terrorizing our families throughout this country and picking up our people that we love must stop now,” Salas said.
Photos from Friday show police wearing riot gear and holding shields, batons, guns that shoot pepper balls, and zip ties, as well as chaotic scenes with tear gas going off and demonstrators running away. In a video captured by local media, one protester tries to stop one of law enforcement’s SUVs and is knocked down when the vehicle keeps moving forward….
Among demonstrators detained Friday was David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California, the state’s largest public-sector union, who was injured at one of the ICE raids and treated in custody. SEIU California is calling for his immediate release.
Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, a Trump appointee, responded to Huerta’s arrest on social media, writing, “Federal agents were executing a lawful judicial warrant” when Huerta “deliberately obstructed their access.”
“I don’t care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,” Essayli said.
That’s it for me–sorry this is so long. Have a great weekend, Sky Dancers!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Everyone from Kansas City east to the Atlantic will be impacted. It’s huge! Yes, Boston is included! It goes as far south as Asheville and will go way up into Canada. Be prepared to stay home! Europe is getting directly involved in pushing both Iran and Israel to the negotiation table. This is from 
You may ask yourself, Where is my beautiful country in these peace-seeking negotiations? Well, the answer is we’re trapped in the Trump Two Week Twist. You really have to watch this clip from Jen Psaki’s show last night. The explanation and the incredible number of times he’s used the Two Week Twist is surreal. It’s laughable even though it turns the United States of America into a feckless and shammy place run by a feckless and shammy nepobaby. The New York Times heading is trying to make Yam Tits look thoughtful. Why do they keep carrying his water? Or perhaps, better put, why is he carrying his colostomy bag? This is the headline. 
Meanwhile, we now have to report the news about ongoing attempts at political assassinations. In sad news, 
Well, have to wait to learn more about this one. Meanwhile, the big bad budget-busting bill is hung up in the Senate. This is from 
Here’s a sad headline from the
This bill is on a long path. Be sure to stay on top of it. I’m pretty sure a lot of the reality show attractions are still to keep us out of the loop. Also, do not forget the importance of this Supreme Court decision, which basically says state Religionists have more control over your children and your body than you do. This is from Chris Geidner writing on his blog 
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