Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Immigration and deportation are dominating the news today, with stories about ICE in Los Angeles and developments in the Abrego Garcia story. The Texas flood is still in the news, with articles about failures of local officials and the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, MAGAs are still very worked up about Pam Bondi’s handling of the “Jeffrey Epstein files” and Epstein’s supposed suicide.
A federal judge on Friday found that the Department of Homeland Security has been making stops and arrests in Los Angeles immigration raids without probable cause and ordered the department to stop detaining individuals based solely on race, spoken language or occupation.
US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered that DHS must develop guidance for officers to determine “reasonable suspicion” outside of the apparent race or ethnicity of a person, the language they speak or their accent, “presence at a particular location” such as a bus stop or “the type of work one does.”
Friday’s ruling comes after the ACLU of Southern California brought a case against the Trump administration last week on behalf of five people and immigration advocacy groups, alleging that DHS — which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has made unconstitutional arrests and prevented detainees’ access to attorneys.
The ruling is limited to the seven-county jurisdiction of the US Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
Frimpong said in her ruling that the court needed to decide whether the plaintiffs could prove that the Trump administration “is indeed conducting roving patrols without
reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”
“This Court decides—based on all the evidence presented—that they are,” Frimpong wrote.
Frimpong went on to say that the administration “failed” to provide information about the basis on which they made the arrests. The temporary restraining order also applies to the FBI and the Justice Department, which were also listed as defendants in the lawsuit and have been involved in immigration enforcement.
A farmworker at a Southern California cannabis farm is in critical condition after being injured during a chaotic immigration raid by federal officers, local officials said Friday.
Jaime Alanis Garcia is hospitalized at Ventura County Medical Center and remains in critical condition, county officials said in a statement authorized by the man’s family.
His family told NBC Los Angeles that the man is on life support using an assistive breathing machine and has “catastrophic” injuries. He has a broken neck, broken skull and a severed artery, a niece said.
The United Farm Workers had previously said Garcia, an employee of Glass House Farms, died after falling some 30 feet.
“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,” UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement to NBC News.
More on the incident:
Immigration officials said in a statement that Garcia was not in federal custody at the time of the fall.
“Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a green house and fell 30 feet,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “CBP immediately called a medivac to the scene to get him care as quickly as possible.”
Outside federal agents lobbed less-lethal weapons and tear gas at protesters who gathered at the Camarillo grow house Thursday while employees were being rounded up and arrested inside.
It’s not surprising that this person was terrified. DHS/ICE terror tactics are still responsible, IMO.
The Guardian mistakenly reported that the worker, Jaime Alanis, had died, but still provided important information about the incident, which is likely representative of what ICE is doing.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that authorities executed criminal search warrants in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California, on Thursday. They arrested immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and there were also at least 10 immigrant children on site, the statement said.
Four US citizens were arrested for “assaulting or resisting officers”, the department said. Authorities were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of one person suspected of firing a gun at federal agents. At least one worker was hospitalized with grave injuries.
During the raid, crowds of people gathered outside Glass House Farms at the Camarillo location to demand information about their relatives and protest against immigration enforcement. A chaotic scene developed outside the farm that grows tomatoes, cucumbers and cannabis as authorities clad in helmets and uniforms faced off with the demonstrators. Acrid green and white billowing smoke then forced community members to retreat.
Glass House, a licensed California cannabis grower, said in a statement that immigration agents had valid warrants. The company said workers were detained and it was helping provide them with legal representation.
More details:
Federal authorities formed a line blocking the road leading through farm fields to the company’s greenhouses. Protesters were seen shouting at agents wearing camouflage gear, helmets and gas masks. The billowing smoke drove protesters to retreat. It was unclear why authorities threw the canisters or if they released chemicals such as teargas.
Ventura county fire authorities responding to a 911 call of people having trouble breathing said three people were taken to nearby hospitals.
At the farm, agents arrested workers and removed them by bus. Others, including US citizens, were detained at the site for hours while agents investigated.
The incident came as federal immigration agents have ramped up arrests in southern California at car washes, farms and Home Depot parking lots, stoking widespread fear among immigrant communities.
The mother of an American worker said her son was held at the worksite for 11 hours and told her agents took workers’ cellphones to prevent them from calling family or filming and forced them to erase cellphone video of agents at the site.
George Retes, 25, works as a security guard at Glass House Farms, where the raid took place Thursday. His sister and wife told Eyewitness News that he was trying to leave the area as tensions escalated between federal agents and protesters.
They say they saw AIR7 footage of the scene and were able to see his white vehicle.
“ICE thought he was probably part of the protest, but he wasn’t, he was trying to reverse his car,” said his sister, Destinee Majana. “They broke his window, they pepper-sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor. They detained him.”
Retes’ sister and wife have been trying to call anybody she can to find out where he was taken, but they say nobody can tell them where he is.
“We don’t know what to do, we’re just asking to let my brother go. He’s a U.S. citizen. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car,” Majana added.
His wife, Guadalupe Torres, said he hasn’t seen or spoke to him since Thursday.
At the brand new Everglades immigration detention center that officials have dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz,” people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.
Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.
Days after President Donald Trump toured it, attorneys, advocates, detainees and their relatives are speaking out about the makeshift facility, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration raced to build on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland. Detainees began arriving July 2.
“These are human beings who have inherent rights, and they have a right to dignity,” immigration attorney Josephine Arroyo said. “And they’re violating a lot of their rights by putting them there.”
More details:
Insider accounts in interviews with The Associated Press paint a picture of the place as unsanitary and lacking in adequate medical care, pushing some into a state of extreme distress.
“The conditions in which we are living are inhuman,” a Venezuelan detainee said by phone from the facility. “My main concern is the psychological pressure they are putting on people to sign their self-deportation.”
The man, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, characterized the cells as “zoo cages” with eight beds each, teeming with mosquitoes, crickets and frogs. He said they are locked up 24 hours a day with no windows and no way to know the time. Detainees’ wrists and ankles are cuffed every time they go to see an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, accompanied by two guards who hold their arms and a third who follows behind, he said.
Such conditions make other immigration detention centers where advocates and staff have warned of unsanitary confinement, medical neglect and a lack of food and water seem “advanced,” according to immigration attorney Atara Eig.
The Archdiocese of Miami is condemning a controversial migrant detention facility in Florida — which state officials have named “Alligator Alcatraz” — calling it “unbecoming of public officials” and “corrosive of the common good.”
In a strongly worded statement posted to the archdiocese’s website, Archbishop Thomas Wenski criticized both the conditions at the remote detention site in the Everglades and the rhetoric surrounding it.
He wrote: “It is unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good to speak of the deterrence value of ‘alligators and pythons’ at the Collier-Dade facility.”
Wenski’s statement also highlighted humanitarian concerns, noting the isolation of the facility from medical care and the vulnerability of the temporary tent structures to Florida’s harsh summer weather and hurricane threats. He also called for chaplains and ministers to be granted access to serve those in custody.
Meanwhile, a group of Democratic state lawmakers has filed a lawsuit against the state after being denied entry to the site last week. The complaint argues they are legally entitled to “immediate, unannounced access” to the facility.
A federal judge in Maryland sharply rebuked a Justice Department attorney Friday after an immigration official could not answer basic questions about the Trump administration’s plans to deport Kilmar Abrego García if he is released pending trial on federal human-smuggling charges against him in Tennessee.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has been considering an order that would require the administration to keep Abrego close to Tennessee for 48 hours should the federal judge there decide he can be released pending trial — time enough for her to hold an additional hearing on a motion by Abrego’s lawyers seeking to have him returned to Maryland. But the Maryland judge did not issue a decision Friday, saying an order would be delivered in advance of a hearing in that case next week.
“I can’t assume anything to be regular in this highly irregular case,” Xinis said on Friday during what was continuation of a hearing that began Thursday, suggesting that she did not trust the government’s claims about how it will handle Abrego’s due process rights moving forward after the administration had previously flouted court orders.
In a sharp exchange, Xinis asked Justice Department lawyers if they could produce the detainer filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Abrego’s case. The document would serve as the government’s request for officials in the Nashville jail where Abrego is being held to keep him there until ICE takes him into custody, should the judge in his criminal case determine he could be released during his trial. The lawyers said they did not have the detainer, which Xinis had requested on Thursday. They said they were working to obtain it.
“What’s to work on? It’s a piece of paper,” Xinis said.
She then told the government’s lawyers that she would have doubts about whether the detainer existed until they provided a copy.
“We’re a court of laws, and we don’t operate on ‘take my word for it,’” she said.
About an hour later, the Justice Department lawyers produced the detainer and shared it with the court.
Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.
The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The details on the unanswered calls on July 6, which have not been previously reported, come as FEMA faces intense scrutiny over its response to the floods in Texas that have killed more than 120 people. The agency, which President Trump has called for eliminating, has been slow to activate certain teams that coordinate response and search-and-rescue efforts.
After floods, hurricanes and other disasters, survivors can call FEMA to apply for different types of financial assistance. People who have lost their homes, for instance, can apply for a one-time payment of $750 that can help cover their immediate needs, such as food or other supplies.
On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
Some FEMA officials grew frustrated by the lapse in contracts and that it was taking days for Ms. Noem to act, according to the person briefed on the matter and the documents. “We still do not have a decision, waiver or signature from the DHS Secretary,” a FEMA official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues.
The Texas county where nearly100 people were killedand more than 160 remain missing had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm, but local officials did not do so before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights, inundating campsites and homes, a Washington Post examination found.
Kerr County officials, who have come under increasing scrutiny for their actionsas the Guadalupe River began to flood, eventually sent text-message alerts that morning to residents who had registered to receivethem, according to screenshots of the texts. But The Post’sreview of emergency notifications that night found that even as a federal meteorologist warnedof deteriorating conditions and catastrophic risk, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used to warn of potential flooding. The National Weather Service sent its own alerts through this system, beginning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4.
That mass notification system, known as the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, is used by National Weather Service meteorologists to warn of imminent threats. Warnings of life-threatening weather events sent on that system — similar to Amber Alerts — force phones to vibrate and emit a unique, jarring tone as long as they’re on and have a signal. They also allow qualified local officials to send tailored messages to targeted areas.
The lack of alerts sent through IPAWS from Kerr County officials as the Guadalupe River flooded was a critical misstep in their response, said Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches emergency management. Residents are more likely to trust — and listen to — their local government officials, he said, and the alert could have made a difference for some people despite the spotty cellphone service along the river and the fact that many people were probably asleep as floodwaters surged.
“If the alert had gone out, there might be one or two people who might have still been able to receive that message, who now, through word of mouth, alert people around them,” Sadiq said.
Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain in the years before rushing waters swept away children and counselors, a review by The Associated Press found.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls’ summer camp in a “Special Flood Hazard Area” in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.
That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
Located in a low-lying area along the Guadalupe River in a region known as flash flood alley, Camp Mystic lost at least 27 campers and counselors and longtime owner Dick Eastland when historic floodwaters tore through its property before dawn on July 4.
The flood was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by FEMA, experts said, and moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in a county that lacked a warning system.
But Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.
According to a Friday report from Axios, Bongino and Bondi clashed over President Donald Trump’s administration’s handling of the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department, led by Bondi, released a joint memo with the FBI announcing that the rumored “Epstein list” naming his associates never really existed. That conclusion contradicted Bondi’s previous claims that the supposed list was on her desk.
As a result, Bongino and Bondi reportedly got into it. That led to Bongino taking off from work on Friday “in protest.” The deputy director, according to The Daily Wire’sMary Margaret Olohan, had also made it clear that he would be leaving his post if Bondi kept hers.
Not long after that reporting, Olohan added that Patel has joined Bongino in his stand against Bondi.
“Source close to DOJ says Kash Patel also wants Pam Bondi gone, and that he’d consider leaving if Bongino leaves,” Olohan said. “Also that there are more frustrations with other documents Bondi hasn’t released.”
The Trump administration’s complete dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to backfire as some of the most intense, involved members of his voting base think they’ve lost him to the “deep state.”
As the Student Action Summit conference hosted by Charlie Kirk’s right-wing Turning Point USA group kicked off on Friday, multiple MAGA loyalists expressed anger and exasperation with President Trump’s handling of the case that has dominated much of the conspiratorial far-right.
“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that. It’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why [the Epstein case] is not gonna go away,” MAGA godfather Steve Bannon yelled from the conference stage. He then went on to detail just how important the case is to the deep base. “For this to go away, you’re gonna lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now, we’re gonna lose 40 seats in [20]26, we’re gonna lose the presidency, they won’t even have to steal it … because [the Trump administration] will have disheartened the hardest core populist …”
Trump supporters who felt that the president was the answer to years of liberal and neoconservative deep state corruption are now reeling, feeling lost and confused as their knight in shining armor turns his back on one of their most important issues.
Bannon turned to three young conference attendees and asked them for their take on the situation.
“We need to, we need to enforce the laws of this country and you know, like you said, Steve, there’s no better question than who rules America. It’s not the people. So we need to obviously have the declassification of the Epstein files,” one said before Bannon chimed in.
A bit more:
“You don’t think Donald Trump as president — you would tell Donald Trump in the Oval Office that you think there’s an open question, with him as commander-in-chief and doing all he’s doing, you would actually tell Trump you don’t know, you question who rules this country?”
“I definitely would because it’s a blackmail ring and anybody who wouldn’t is not paying attention. Simply put, Epstein himself said that he was best friends, on the stand, with Donald Trump. So anybody who thought that these files were going to get just declassified because we pressured him enough or you voted harder enough is just lying to yourself frankly.”
“In 2016, we trusted the plan with Trump, but now Trump has become the deep state. The exact thing he we voted him in—”
‘Why do you say he’s become the deep state?” Bannon asked.
“What is more deep state than covering up for pedophiles? Why would you go to that island? Why? Tell me why would you go to that island? Why would you go on the plane? … Why his top donors—why are his top donors neighbors with Epstein?”
It seems that Trump’s most ardent supporters are finally asking the important questions. And while some in the MAGAsphere zero in on Attorney General Pam Bondi, others grasp that the one person with the most power over the case, the one person who could even come close to validating any of their theories, is Trump. And he has expressed no interest whatsoever in doing that. In fact, he can’t even believe that his base is still talking about it. And as we approach one full week of uproar, it’s clear that the Epstein thing won’t be going away anytime soon.
MAGA activist Laura Loomer has set her sights on ousting Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the White House fends off fury from the president’s base over its handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case and death.
Loomer called on FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino to ask for Bondi’s public resignation Friday morning, writing on social media that Patel and Bongino had clashed with Bondi over the investigation.
Loomer also claimed that Bongino had taken the day off from work “to evaluate whether or not he wants to continue his position,” which POLITICO has not independently confirmed. Axios later reported that Bongino did not attend work on Friday after butting heads with Bondi earlier this week.
“Pam Blondi is very damaging to President Trump’s image. She drags the administration down and the base doesn’t want her as AG,” Loomer wrote in a post on X. “She is harming Trump’s administration and she’s embarrassing all of his staff and advisors by creating a PR crisis for them. It’s incredibly unfair to President Trump and his team.”
Read more at Politico.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The House is planning to vote on the Senate version of Trump’s spending and tax cut bill today. The Senate version is very different from the one the House originally sent them, so it’s not clear whether the bill will make it to Trump’s desk by July 4, as he has demanded.
As we all know, the bill will take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans. Trump’s big bill will also vastly expand his power to target people he wants to make disappear. Yesterday Trump openly approved a true concentration camp in our country. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of seeing what these fascists are planning. And now Trump is talking about deporting U.S. citizens. The bill is cruel in so many ways, but mass deportation is Trump’s number 1 goal. I’m going to focus on that in this post.
….THE LEGISLATION SENATE REPUBLICANS passed on Tuesday is probably going to kill a lot of people.
It sounds stark when you put it that way, but death is a stark thing. It’s also what can be reasonably expected from the GOP legislation, especially the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act projected to leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured.
When people can’t pay for medical care they frequently don’t get it. And when people don’t get medical care, they’re more likely to die early from a preventable condition. That’s what you’ll find if you read the latest research, and what you’ll learn if you ask people working on the front lines of medical care.
And death doesn’t even capture the full impact of the bill, which thanks to Tuesday’s vote seems likely to become law.
That outcome is not yet a foregone conclusion, to be clear. The bill requires approval from the House, where a different version passed in May and where several Republicans have already said they object to the Senate’s iteration.
But while those Republicans have enough leverage to block approval, forcing some kind of negotiation between the houses, they are already under enormous pressure from party leaders—and, especially, from President Donald Trump, who has said he wants a bill on his desk by July 4….
Politically, it was a savvy strategy for avoiding scrutiny. So was packaging the entirety of the Trump domestic agenda into one legislative package, making it difficult for opponents to focus—and rally supporters around—any one part.
As of a few days ago, nearly half of America hadn’t heard anything about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” according to Democratic polling from Priorities USA. And only 8 percent had heard it included Medicaid cuts….
But in trying so hard to shield the bill’s true nature from the public, Republican leaders may have also succeeded in hiding parts from their own members, who might not appreciate just how much some features of the bill undercut supposedly cherished MAGA goals like lowering the cost of living and making U.S. industry more competitive.
And that’s to say nothing about the disproportionate effects some elements of the bill will have on their own constituents.
We know about the health care and food assistance cuts; Cohn lists examples of other disastrous cuts in the bill:
YOU CAN SEE IT CLEARLY in the provisions yanking away Biden-era subsidies for clean energy and electric vehicles, in many cases quickly. (The tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles would end in September.) It’s a way to own the libs, now that Trump has turned clean energy into almost as much a bogeyman as trans athletes and woke professors.
Speaker Johnson touts the big ugly bill.
But Biden’s subsidies unleashed a factory-building boom that the legislation will weaken and maybe kill, which is why the bluest of blue-collar unions—electrical workers, building trades, iron workers—spent the last few days blasting the bill as a historic “job killer.” And those jobs are likely to have an outsized effect on red states like Texas, now America’s capital for solar-panel manufacturing, because that’s where a disproportionate share of the subsidies went.
And that’s just the immediate effect. Giving up support for wind and solar means giving up on the easiest, cheapest way to increase generating capacity right now—something tech executives desperately tried to convey to Trump and his allies, with a warning that it will set back U.S. firms in their quest to develop artificial intelligence. That’s on top of ceding industries like battery storage and electric vehicles to competitors, especially the one Trump brings up the most: China.
Look down the road and you’ll see an America that is more reliant on other countries for energy—and, most likely, paying a lot more than it would if it had spent the next few years keeping up in the global alternative-energy race. Americans can expect an extra $170 billion in annual energy bills between now and 2034, according to a projection by the firm Energy Innovation.
Please read the rest of this piece at the link. It’s an excellent summary of what the bill will do to our country.
Senate Republicans certainly lack spine. They are deathly afraid to cross Donald Trump, to put their cushy jobs at risk by provoking a primary challenge, to fall out of favor with the maliciously dishonest right-wing media, and/or to be ostracized from their close circle of sycophants, donors, and staff. But their greatest moral failure is arguably not lack of courage but rather lack of empathy. They simply do not care about the pain they are inflicting on others.
Senate and House Republicans know what this bill does. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and others can repeat the lie that no one will lose coverage, but it does not make it so. Seventeen million people will lose health care (including 11 million Medicaid beneficiaries). Millions will lose food assistance. The debt will grow by over $3 trillion. It is hard to find anyone outside the MAGA cult who thinks this will benefit America. Republicans respond by lying about the bill even when confronted with the misery their handiwork will cause.
“The facts matter. The people matter. The Senate’s Medicaid approach breaks promises and will kick people off of Medicaid who truly need it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said on the floor, finally freed to speak honestly after announcing he would not seek reelection. His fellow Republicans shrugged. They heard the same litany of horrors from constituents, hospitals, doctors, state officials, and even right-wing think tanks.
Republicans still cannot imagine if they or a loved one:
Could not get food because their application for food stamps was snarled in red tape designed to kick people off benefits to which they were entitled;
Could not get preventive care, addiction treatment, nursing home care, or prescription drugs because they have been kicked off Medicaid and priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges;
Could not get to a rural hospital in an emergency after the local one closed;
Could not find a cancer trial after cuts to the National Institutes of Health;
Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them “rats” or “vermin” or “murderers.”
In addition to cutting health care for the poor and providing tax relief for the rich, the legislation provided massive funding increases for the federal agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsession. The bill adds a total of $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement. It roughly triples the annual detention and enforcement budgets for the masked men of Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years.
And according to our vice president, JD Vance, this was the point of it all: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDSAFP via Getty Imag
All those people losing health insurance? “Minutiae.” “Immaterial.” Mass detention and deportation are what matters. They’re not only key to Making America Great Again, they’re what it means to Make America Great Again. That’s the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those foreigners seeking refuge and opportunity here, in our land.
And mass detention and deportation are also key to advancing the other point of it all: authoritarianism. That’s the other part of the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those annoying features of due process and the rule of law, all those restraints of civility and decency, that have kept us from doing what we want.
And so, while his vice president was breaking the tied vote in the Senate, Donald Trump was celebrating a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades. It’s a physical manifestation and apt symbol of the MAGA dream. How proud they all were of its clever name—“Alligator Alcatraz”—and the collection of tents filled with cages to hold immigrants.
What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday.
That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,” Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who “did this in less than a week.”
For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would “check in.”
The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. “People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s a vast wasteland. It’s not.”
The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according toThe Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
Trump and Noem touring Alligator Alcatraz
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
Donald Trump’s tour of the bloodcurdlingly-monikered – and hastily-constructed – “Alligator Alcatraz” migrants detention center in Florida’s Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian.
Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds.
“Between Kristi and Ron, it’s really government working together,” he said. “They have done an amazing job. I’m proud of them.”
Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US….
Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees’ misery at what was termed a round-table discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets.
“It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,” he said. “That’s a spooky one too, isn’t it? That’s a tough site.”
“Our superstar”
As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely-acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him “our superstar”.
Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy’s raison d’être.
White House aide believes it’s more “dehumanizing” to let migrants into the country than it is to detain them in a camp surrounded by man-eating alligators.
“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000 mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.
“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”
And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump’s sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump’s visit to the facility.
“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.
A justice department memo directing the department’s civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country has opened up an new avenue for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, experts say.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. If someone was previously a permanent resident, for example, they will be classified as such again, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The memo, published on 11 June, instructed the justice department’s civil division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”. Immigration matters are civil matters, meaning that immigrants – whether they are naturalized citizens or not – do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank, explained that much of immigration law was based on discretion by government officials. To revoke a person’s citizenship, US officials must demonstrate that they are not of “good moral character” – a subjective and broad term with little defined parameters.
Now, the recent memo lists a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their naturalized citizenship status, providing further guidance as to who is not of good “moral character”. This included “those with a nexus to terrorism” and espionage, war criminals and those who were found to have lied in their naturalization process. Officials still need to prove their case, Chisthi explained.
“[The administration] can’t, on their own, denaturalize people, they still have to go to a federal district court,” said Chisthi. “Denaturalization finally does belong to federal district courts – but they are obviously keen on finding every way they can to denaturalize people they think did not deserve to be naturalized.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump sycophant
A bit more:
However, the justice department’s memo is not solely confined to those expanded categories. It gives more discretion to officials to pursue these cases, prompting a fear for analysts and attorneys that the directive by the Trump administration is overly broad.
For Jorge Loweree, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, a new category in the memo stood out to him: individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Loweree is concerned “because of the way that the administration has treated people that it deems to be gang members”, he said. “ It wasn’t that long ago that the administration flew hundreds of people from the US to a prison in El Salvador on, in most instances, flimsy evidence.”
Although the memo marks an escalation by the Trump administration it is not entirely news, and in recent decades, other nations have also engaged in seeking to strip citizenship from certain people.
Denaturalization in the US has a long history. Throughout the 20th century, those seen by the US government as potential enemies to US interests were stripped of their citizenship. Journalists, activists and labor leaders, accused of being anarchists and communists, were frequently targeted.
I could go on like this for much longer, but this post is long enough. Suffice it to say that we are in big trouble as country. Please take care today. This is all so terrifying.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I’m illustrating this post with relaxing paintings today, because I desperately needed a break from current events.
It seems I may have been wrong about Elon Musk’s departure from the White House. On Saturday, I wrote that I thought he would continue to work with and influence Trump and DOGE. But then Musk began attacking Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Actually, it seems as if Trump has fired Musk, and Musk is not happy about it. Lawrence O’Donnell discussed it on his show last night. Here’s what Lawrence had to say:
Musk has been slamming Trump’s budget bill since their last meeting in the Oval Office, and Trump has not responded so far. Here’s the latest:
Elon Musk continued his rampage against Donald Trump’s spending bill on Tuesday night, setting the stage for an ugly showdown with the president’s faithful.
“Mammoth spending bills are bankrupting America!” he wrote, sharing a graphic depicting rising national debt over the past three decades. “ENOUGH,” he added.
He also responded with a “100″ emoji to an X user who wrote that Musk had “reminded everyone: It’s not about Right vs. Left. It’s about the Establishment vs the People.”
He then posted an American flag emoji under a post from conservative satire site The Babylon Bee, highlighting a story titled, “The Lord Strengthens Elon One Last Time To Push Pillars Of Congress Over And Bring Government Crashing Down.”
Earlier Tuesday, the billionaire unleashed hellfire on Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, lambasting the president’s flagship legislative package as “outrageous,” “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination.”
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” he wrote of the package, which scraped through the House last month solely on Republican votes.
Elon Musk’s full-throttle assault on Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is less about fiscal policy and more about bruised ego, insiders say, claiming the billionaire is “b-tthurt.”
A path in the woods, by Vincent Van Gogh
The drama reportedly began when Musk’s pick for a top federal post, billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman, was rejected by Trump’s inner circle. Sources said it was Sergio Gor, Trump’s longtime aide and current personnel chief, who blocked the nomination.
“This was Sergio’s out-the-door ‘f–k you’ to Musk,” a White House source told Axios.
This triggered a rift which started with the Tesla CEO soft-launching his dissent last week, hours after his time as a “special government employee” had elapsed.
In a sit-down with CBS News’s Sunday Morning, the Department of Government Efficiency architect said he was “disappointed” with the bill, which he said “increases the budget deficit” and undoes his cost-cutting task force’s work.
Not that Musk actually did any real cost-cutting.
He soon went nuclear against the bill in a series of public posts that culminated in him labeling Trump’s economic legislation “outrageous,” “pork-filled,” and a “disgusting abomination.”
“Elon was b-tthurt,” one source said.
Insiders have now told Axios that his dissent has spiraled into a full-blown meltdown. Musk is reportedly rattled because the bill slashes the electric vehicle tax credit—a key benefit for automakers like Musk’s Tesla….
White House officials also reportedly hurt Musk’s feelings by blocking him from staying on in some capacity after his “special government employee” status was up after 130 days of service.
He was similarly annoyed, sources said, when the Federal Aviation Administration decided against using his Starlink satellite system for national air traffic control.
The White House overlooking his ally, Isaacman, served as the final straw on Saturday night, Axios reported.
Donald Trump has so far kept silent on former special government employee Elon Musk’s criticism of his “big, beautiful” spending bill as a “disgusting abomination.”
On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell suggested why the typically “explosively rageful” president has not yet said a thing.
By David Hockney
“That is how you know who Donald Trump fears in this world,” he said. “If you attack Donald Trump and Donald Trump says nothing, Donald Trump’s silence is the biggest expression of fear that he has.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, pumped a fortune into Trump’s 2024 election campaign. Trump rewarded him with the top role at the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, which was tasked with slashing public spending. Musk left last week.
The president likely now fears Musk may use his cash against Trump-backed candidates in GOP primaries, said O’Donnell.
Trump “fears the richest person in the world convincing Republican members of the Senate and the House not to vote for Donald Trump’s budget bill that Elon Musk now calls a ‘disgusting abomination,’” he added.
Tesla (TSLA) stock slumped Wednesday in the immediate fallout of the very public policy blowout between President Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The one-time leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) whined angrily on Tuesday, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” adding, “Shame on those” in the House who voted for it.
Musk added early Wednesday morning, “If the massive deficit spending continues, there will only be money for interest payments and nothing else!”
Musk’s rhetoric on Trump and the Republican-backed “big, beautiful bill” was ramping up recently with Musk’s comments to “CBS News Sunday Morning” and hit detonation levels with Tuesday’s post….
Musk’s closeness to the Trump administration had been seen as a boon for Tesla, given its range of business with SpaceX and NASA and the regulatory levers NHTSA could pull with getting autonomous driving rules in place for Tesla’s robotaxi testing.
But demand weakness in the EU and recent protests at US Tesla showrooms have followed Musk’s controversial foray into politics, causing some Tesla owners to become alienated by Musk, specifically by his right-leaning tendencies, DOGE, and outward support of President Trump.
Tesla’s big robotaxi test is slated for June 12 in Austin. Much of the company’s value is tied to whether it can fully unlock autonomous driving for robotaxi purposes and individual owners.
Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper released its full score Wednesday of the tax and spending package House Republicans passed along party lines last month, predicting that the measure would grow the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion….
Path in the field, Tatiana Karchevskaya, Indonesian artist
And while top Republican lawmakers are expected to downplay the significance of the complete price tag from the Congressional Budget Office, the numbers will influence what lawmakers are able to include in the final package they are endeavoring to send to President Donald Trump’s desk this summer.
The scorekeeper’s analysis will also be used to determine whether the bill follows the strict rules of the reconciliation process Republicans are using to skirt the Senate filibuster and pass the measure along party lines.
Because Republicans in the Senate are now making changes to the package the House passed two weeks ago, the budget office will need to score the cost of each piece of the new version senators are assembling, followed by another full price tag for the whole package.
Unlike the earlier scores CBO released of the separate chunks of the House bill, the analysis released Wednesday takes into account how policies in one part of the package might influence the budget and economic impacts of others. It also shows that the House-passed legislation would lead to nearly 11 million people going uninsured, with more than 7.8 million of those individuals getting kicked off of Medicaid and millions more losing coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Yesterday, the Yale School of Public Health sent a letter to Senate Democratic leaders with a new analysis showing that the One Big Beautiful Bill’s changes to federal health care programs would kill more than 51,000 Americans annually. Nearly 15 million are liable to lose health coverage as a result of the bill, due to enrollment changes on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, Medicaid cuts that are the largest in U.S. history, and the end of support for the Medicare Savings Program, which grants access to subsidized prescriptions. Those cuts would cost about 29,500 people their lives, the Yale researchers estimate. Another 13,000 largely poor nursing home residents would die from the repeal of the Biden administration’s safe staffing rule, which would remove the minimum number of nurses on call in those facilities. And close to 9,000 would die from the government’s failing to extend enhanced premium support for the ACA that expires at the end of the year, making health coverage unaffordable for another five million Americans.
It’s not easy to wring a compelling message out of legislation that will cause 51,000 deaths. You can lie that the cuts aren’t cuts, but that only gets you so far. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), for example, was clearly flummoxed when confronted at a town hall in Butler, Iowa, last Friday with the fact that people will die because of the bill. So she went philosophical.
“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst said, in one of the most misguided attempts to quiet constituent fears I’ve seen in my political lifetime.
The reaction was immediate both in the room and on social media. And instead of walking back the comments, Ernst doubled down with a creepy “apology” video of her walking through a cemetery. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth,” she said, before snarking about the tooth fairy and making a pitch for embracing Jesus Christ as a personal savior who guarantees life in the hereafter.
Now, Ernst may have a challenger for her Senate Seat. From the David Dayen post above:
About 200 miles from Butler, in Sioux City, state representative J.D. Scholten was getting ready for the funeral of a local Democratic activist named Gary Lipshutz. Former Sen. Tom Harkin, whose seat Ernst now holds, was at the memorial service. “What she said was going viral as I walked in,” Scholten told me in an interview. “I thought about all the work Gary was doing, and at a funeral you question your life and your purpose. When she doubled down, which was very disrespectful, I was like, game on.”
Scholten, 45, who nearly beat anti-immigrant nationalist Steve King in a northwest Iowa congressional seat Donald Trump won by 27 points in 2018, had been mentioned on short lists of potential challengers to Ernst. But his timeline was set to later in the year, in part due to his summer gig as a pitcher on the minor league Sioux City Explorers. Then Ernst implanted her foot directly in her mouth. “She was not wrong in that we all are going to die, but we don’t have to die so billionaires can have a bigger tax cut,” Scholten said.
He decided to immediately announce a campaign for Senate, thereby making clear it was a direct response to the choices Republicans are making to skyrocket inequality and harm millions of vulnerable Americans.
The Iowan who became part of a viral moment by recently shouting at U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst that “people will die” because of proposed Medicaid cuts is a Democrat who is using the moment to launch a campaign for the Iowa House.
India May, a 33-year-old from Charles City, drove to Parkersburg on May 30 to attend Ernst’s town hall. As Ernst was answering a question about Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s tax cut bill, May said she “got a little worked up.”
The cost of electricity is rising across the country, forcing Americans to pay more on their monthly bills and squeezing manufacturers and small businesses that rely on cheap power.
And some of President Trump’s policies risk making things worse, despite his promises to slash energy prices, companies and researchers say.
This week, the Senate is taking up Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, which has already passed the House. In its current form, that bill would abruptly end most of the Biden-era federal tax credits for low-carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar, batteries and geothermal power.
Repealing those credits could increase the average family’s energy bill by as much as $400 per year within a decade, according to severalstudiespublished this year.
The studies rely on similar reasoning: Electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, partly because of data centers needed for artificial intelligence, and power companies are already struggling to keep up. Ending tax breaks for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries would make them more expensive and less plentiful, increasing demand for energy from power plants that burn natural gas.
That could push up the price of gas, which currently generates 43 percent of America’s electricity.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s efforts to sell more gas overseas could further hike prices, while Mr. Trump’s new tariffs on steel, aluminum and other materials would raise the cost of transmission lines and other electrical equipment.
These cascading events could lead to further painful increases in electric bills.
The US has doubled tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum imports to 50%, pressing ahead in the face of criticism from key trading partners with a measure that Donald Trump says is intended to revive the American industry.
After imposing and rapidly lifting tariffs on much of the world, only to reduce them, Trump last week refocused on the global steel and aluminum markets – and the dominance of China.
Trump signed an executive order formalizing the move on Tuesday. Higher tariffs “will more effectively counter foreign countries that continue to offload low-priced, excess steel and aluminum in the United States market and thereby undercut the competitiveness of the United States steel and aluminum industries”, the order said.
The increase applies to all trading partners except Britain, the only country so far that has struck a preliminary trade agreement with the US during a 90-day pause on a wider array of Trump tariffs. The rate for steel and aluminum imports from the UK – which does not rank among the top exporters of either metal to the US – will remain at 25% until at least 9 July.
About a quarter of all steel used in the US is imported and data shows the increased levies will hit the closest US trading partners – Canada and Mexico – especially hard. They rank first and third respectively in steel shipment volumes to the US.
Tariffs on steel and aluminum are doubling to 50 percent Wednesday, adding higher costs and new uncertainty for businesses across the country that rely on metal imports for machinery, construction and manufacturing.
In the order doubling the tariffs, which said it would take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time, President Donald Trump wrote that the higher levies “will provide greater support to these industries and reduce or eliminate the national security threat posed by imports of steel and aluminum articles and their derivative articles.”
But for American companies that rely on specialized metals that aren’t available domestically, the order set off a fresh scramble to raise prices and rethink hiring and investment.
“It’s a big, eye-catching tariff: 50 percent is a high number,” said Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Aluminum goes into all kinds of products — aircrafts, autos, construction — and steel is used throughout the economy, so you’re talking higher prices and lost jobs across the U.S. manufacturing industry.” [….]
U.S. manufacturers say the sudden onslaught of tariffs is making it harder to operate. Many rely on foreign sources of steel and aluminum to make their products and say it’s been tough to find domestic suppliers.
Pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos of the U.S. CDC resigned on Tuesday as co-leader of a working group that advises outside experts on COVID-19 vaccines and is leaving the agency, two sources familiar with the move told Reuters.
Panagiotakopoulos said in an email to work group colleagues that her decision to step down was based on the belief she is “no longer able to help the most vulnerable members” of the U.S. population.
In her role at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s working group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, she co-led the gathering of information on topics for presentation.
Her resignation comes one week after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic who oversees the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, said the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women had been removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule.
The move was a departure from the process in which ACIP experts meet and vote on changes to the immunization schedule or recommendations on who should get vaccines before the agency’s director made a final call. The committee had not voted on the changes announced by Kennedy and the CDC does not yet have a permanent director.
Senior US immigration officials over the weekend instructed rank-and-file officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement, including by interviewing and potentially arresting people they called “collaterals”, according to internal agency emails viewed by the Guardian.
Officers were also urged to increase apprehensions and think up tactics to “push the envelope” one email said, with staff encouraged to come up with new ways of increasing arrests and suggesting them to superiors.
“If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” another message said.
The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.
The emails, sent by two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials this past Saturday, instructed officers around the country to increase arrest numbers over the weekend. This followed the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, pressing immigration officials last month to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people per day.
One of the emails, written by Marcos Charles, the acting executive associate director of Ice’s enforcement and removal operations, instructs Ice officials to go after people they may coincidentally encounter.
“All collaterals encounters [sic] need to be interviewed and anyone that is found to be amenable to removal needs to be arrested,” Charles wrote, also saying: “We need to turn up the creative knob up to 11 and push the envelope.”
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would revoke guidance to the nation’s hospitals that directed them to provide emergency abortions for women when they are necessary to stabilize their medical condition.
That guidance was issued to hospitals in 2022, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upended national abortion rights in the U.S. It was an effort by the Biden administration to preserve abortion access for extreme cases in which women were experiencing medical emergencies and needed an abortion to prevent organ loss or severe hemorrhaging, among other serious complications.
The Biden administration had argued that hospitals — including ones in states with near-total bans — needed to provide emergency abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. That law requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare dollars to provide an exam and stabilizing treatment for all patients. Nearly all emergency rooms in the U.S. rely on Medicare funds.
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would no longer enforce that policy.
The move prompted concerns from some doctors and abortion rights advocates that women will not get emergency abortions in states with strict bans.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to take the rare step of renaming a ship, one that bears the name of a gay rights icon, documents and sources show.
Military.com reviewed a memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of the Navy — the official who holds the power to name Navy ships — that showed the sea service had come up with rollout plans for the renaming of the oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk.
A defense official confirmed that the Navy was making preparations to strip the ship of its name but noted that Navy Secretary John Phelan was ordered to do so by Hegseth. The official also said that the timing of the announcement — occurring during Pride month — was intentional.
Military.com reached out to Hegseth’s office for comment on the move but did not immediately receive a response.
However, the memo reviewed by Military.com noted that the renaming was being done so that there is “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture,” apparently referencing President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Phelan.
The U.S. Navy plans to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after the slain gay rights leader and Navy veteran, and is considering renaming multiple naval ships named after civil rights leaders and prominent American voices, CBS News has learned.
U.S. Navy documents obtained by CBS News and used to brief the secretary of the Navy and his chief of staff show proposed timelines for rolling out the name change of the USNS Harvey Milk to the public. While the documents do not say what the ship’s new name would be, the proposal comes during Pride Month, the monthlong observance of the LGBTQ+ community that also coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising of 1969. WorldPride celebrations are being held in Washington, D.C., this year.
The documents obtained by CBS News also show other vessels named after prominent leaders are also on the Navy’s renaming “recommended list.”
Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers.
That is beyond sickening.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Before I get to the news, I want to call attention to the fact that today April 19, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of the first shots fired in the American revolutionary war–commemorated in the Concord Hymn, by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Concord Hymn
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
It’s a big deal here in the Boston area, although I haven’t seen much about it in the news. If you watch Rachel Maddow’s show, she has been talking about this anniversary for the past few days. Towns around where I live have lots of celebrations going on. I think this anniversary is really significant right now, because of Trump’s and Musk’s efforts to destroy our government an install a Russian-style dictatorship.
Now on to today’s momentous news:
The Trump administration’s war on immigrants is running into some serious pushback. Early this morning, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump gang to halt their planned deportment of Venezualan men from a Texas detention camp. Trump must be enraged.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration early Saturday to temporarily halt the deportations of dozens of alleged Venezuelan gang members who immigration advocates say were at imminent risk of being removed from the country.
“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the order reads.
The court did not explain its reasoning in its brief unsigned emergency order. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, with Alito saying he would file a more fulsome statement on his disagreement with the ruling later.
The Trump administration was preparing to deport the Venezuelan men under the Alien Enemies Act, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday as it scrambled to find a court it could persuade to step in and block the removals before it was too late.
In a statement early Saturday, the ACLU’s lead counsel in the case, Lee Gelernt, said the organization was “relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month.”
But the fate of the detainees targeted for this latest round of removals remains unresolved. Attorneys for the migrants had also pressed federal judges in Texas and Washington as well as the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to intervene, arguing that the government had not provided those targeted a meaningful opportunity to challenge the reasons for their removals.
In its order early Saturday, the Supreme Court said it would take further action after the 5th Circuit had weighed in. Around that same time, a three-judge panel from that appellate court denied the ACLU’s emergency request to block the deportations and chided its lawyers for coming to them before a lower court had ruled on the issue.
Just before 1:00 a.m. (ET) last night/very early this morning, the Supreme Court handed down a truly remarkable order in the latest litigation challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to use the Alien Enemy Act (AEA) to summarily remove large numbers of non-citizens to third countries, including El Salvador:
I wanted to write a short1 post to try to put the order into at least a little bit of context—and to sketch out just how big a deal I think this (aggressive but tentative) intervention really is.
I. The J.G.G. Ruling
As I wrote at the time, although I disagreed with the majority’s “habeas-only” analysis, the broader ruling made would’ve made at least a modicum of sense if the Court was dealing with any other administration, but it raised at least the possibility that the Trump administration, specifically, would try to play games to make habeas review effectively inadequate. And all of those games would unfold while no court has ruled, one way or the other, on either the facial legal question (does the AEA apply at all to Tren de Aragua); or case-specific factual/legal questions about whether individual detainees really are “members” of TdA. Lo and behold, that’s what happened.
II. The J.A.V. Ruling
As folks may recall, just 12 days ago, the Court issued a short per curiam opinion in Trump v. J.G.G., in which it held two things: First, a 5-4 majority held that challenges to removal under the AEA must be brought through habeas petitions where detainees are being held, not through Administrative Procedure Act claims in the D.C. district court (like J.G.G.). Second, the Court unanimously held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Court’s April 7 ruling in J.G.G., litigants successfully obtained TROs against AEA removals in three different district courts—the Southern District of New York; the District of Colorado; and, as most relevant here, the Southern District of Texas. In the S.D. Tex. case (J.A.V. v. Trump), Judge Fernando Rodriguez (not that it should matter, but a Trump appointee) barred the government from removing the named plaintiffs or anyone else “that Respondents claim are subject to removal under the [AEA] Proclamation, from the El Valle Detention Center.” (The other rulings were also geographically specific.)
III. The A.A.R.P. Case
Then things got messy. According to media reports, starting on Thursday, a number of non-citizens being held at the Bluebonnet detention facility in Anson, Texas (in the Northern District of Texas) were given notices of their imminent removal under the AEA (in English only), with no guidance as to how they could challenge their removal in advance. Not only did this appear to be in direct contravention of the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.G.G., but it also raised the question of whether the government was moving detainees to Bluebonnet, specifically, to get around the district court orders barring removals of individuals being held at El Valle and other facilities.
The ACLU had already filed a habeas petition on Wednesday in the Northern District of Texas on behalf of two specific (anonymous) plaintiffs and a putative class of all Bluebonnet detainees—captioned A.A.R.P. v. Trump. Judge Hendrix had already denied the ACLU’s initial motion for a TRO—based on government representations that the named plaintiffs were not in imminent threat of removal (he reserved ruling on the request for class-wide relief).
Thus, once the news of the potentially imminent AEA removals started leaking out, the ACLU did two things at once: It sought renewed emergency relief from Judge Hendrix in the A.A.R.P. case, and it went back to Chief Judge Boasberg in the J.G.G. case—which has not yet been dismissed—since that case at least for the moment includes a nationwide class of individuals subject to possible removal under the AEA. And while it waited for both district judges to rule, the ACLU sought emergency relief in A.A.R.P. from both the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court.
You’ll need to head over to One First to read the details, but here some of Vladek’s conclusions. He argues that this is “massively important,” because the court acted very quickly, without waiting for the 5th Circuit to rule, they “didn’t hide behind any technicalities” as they have previously, and “perhaps most significantly, the Court seemed to not be content with relying upon representations by the government’s lawyers.”
Maybe the Court is finally beginning to understand that Trump really wants to make the U.S. a dictatorship.
Yesterday Dakinikat wrote Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting in El Salvador with wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Last night, Van Hollen returned to the U.S. and held a remarkable press conference to report on his experience.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen took aim at President Donald Trump and the El Salvador government over their treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant who the government said in court was erroneously deported to El Salvador, and for trying to deflect from the notion that the U.S. government is flouting court orders to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.
The Maryland Democrat joined Abrego Garcia’s wife and mother and other supporters at Washington Dulles International Airport on Friday and spoke about his three-day visit, providing more details about the one-hour conversation he had with Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen said the Trump administration is lying about the case in attempt to distract from questions about whether Abrego Garcia’s rights were violated by bringing up gang violence.
“This case is not about just one man. It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everyone who resides in the United States of America,” he said….
Van Hollen revealed during the press conference that Abrego Garcia told him during their meeting that he has been moved out of CECOT to another facility that was further away.
“We all thought he was at CECOT, which I didn’t know until I met him,” he said.
Abrego Garcia described being handcuffed, shackled and put on planes with other migrants, noting that they could not see where they were going, according to the senator. Van Hollen added that Abrego Garcia was held in a cell with 25 other people and fearful of other prisoners who taunted him.
The senator said Abrego Garcia told him he was transported to his current facility nine days ago.
“He said the conditions are better, but he said despite the better conditions, he still has no access to news from the outside world and no ability to communicate with the outside world,” Van Hollen said.
I wonder if they moved him to make sure nothing happened to him. Could Trump and Bukele be getting anxious about all the attention? Read more details at the link.
President Donald Trump accused Sen. Chris Van Hollen of political grandstanding after the Maryland Democrat managed to meet this week with an immigrant who had made a life in his state before being wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month.
The case sparked fresh fears that the Trump administration is not particularly interested in respecting the rule of law in the United States.
The president wrote on his social media platform that the senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone.”
He threw in an insult: “GRANDSTANDER!!!”
Trump also lashed out at the immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying he was “not a very innocent guy” on Friday while speaking to reporters….
The White House also mocked Van Hollen’s trip on X, formerly Twitter, marking up a New York Times headline to label Abrego Garcia an “MS-13 illegal alien” who is “never coming back.”
Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.
DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.
The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.
A United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) data lake, or centralized repository, existed at DHS prior to DOGE that included data related to immigration cases, like requests for benefits, supporting evidence in immigration cases, and whether an application has been received and is pending, approved, or denied. Since at least mid-March, however, DOGE has been uploading mass amounts of data to this preexisting USCIS data lake, including data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), SSA, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior DHS official tells WIRED. “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
Since president Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, WIRED and other outlets have reported extensively on DOGE’s attempts to gain unprecedented access to government data, but until recently little has been publicly known about the purpose of such requests or how they would be processed. Reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post has made clear that one aim is to cross-reference datasets and leverage access to sensitive SSA systems to effectively cut immigrants off from participating in the economy, which the administration hopes would force them to leave the county. The scope of DOGE’s efforts to support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown appear to be far broader than this, though. Among other things, it seems to involve centralizing immigrant-related data from across the government to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.
That is seriously frightening.
On a lighter note, this is hilarious. The Trump folks claim their attack on Harvard was all a silly mistake.
Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.
The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.
The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.
The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.
It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.
But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.
Why didn’t the Trump people speak up sooner then? Why did they wait until all the back and forth we’ve been watching?
After Harvard publicly repudiated the demands, the Trump administration raised the pressure, freezing billions in federal funding to the school and warning that its tax-exempt status was in jeopardy.
A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.
“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
So the “misunderstanding” is Harvard’s fault? Anyway the remaining Trump demands are still outrageous.
Still, Ms. Mailman said, there is a potential pathway to resume discussions if the university, among other measures, follows through on what Mr. Trump wants and apologizes to its students for fostering a campus where there was antisemitism.
Mr. Keveney could not be reached for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for the antisemitism task force said, “The task force, and the entire Trump administration, is in lock step on ensuring that entities who receive taxpayer dollars are following all civil rights laws.”
Harvard pushed back on the White House’s claim that it should have checked with the administration lawyers after receiving the letter.
The letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a statement on Friday. “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”
The statement added: “It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world.
Just more evidence that the Trump administration is full of stupid, incompetent assholes.
The recent goings on at the Department of Defense are more evidence of that.
Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.
Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
The latest incidents add to the Pentagon’s broader upheaval in recent months, including fallout from Hegseth’s release of sensitive information in a Signal chat with other national security leaders and a controversial department visit by Elon Musk.
Caldwell, Carroll, Selnick and Kasper declined to comment. Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.
Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March,which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.
But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.
“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”
The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.
“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.”
And of course Hegseth has no fucking clue what he’s doing.
And get this: Trump appointees are trying to censor professional journals.
A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.
The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.
Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.
One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.
The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.
In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”
He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”
And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”
The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.
Unreal.
That’s all I have for you today. I wish you all a nice weekend, and Happy Easter, if you celebrate it.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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.
The Iowan who became part of a viral moment by recently shouting at U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst that “people will die” because of proposed Medicaid cuts is a Democrat who is using the moment to launch a campaign for the Iowa House.
The Guardian: 
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments