Who Deserves to Be Snatched Up Off the Street?
Kidnapping by Presidential Proclamation in Progress
Two planes, carrying Venezuelans deported by the US and bound for El Salvador were ordered to return by US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday. They continued to their destination. Another plane took off, while Justice Department attorneys were supposed to be researching any other flights preparing to leave.
Deportations of this sort without due process, according to the court order issued by judge Boasberg, were supposed to be halted until a March 21 hearing.
The presidential proclamation ordering their removal invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the centuries old wartime law that was also used to justify the internment of Japanese residents in WWII.
El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, took to social media to proclaim that 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had arrived, along with 23 members of the Mexican gang MS-13. He made fun of the judicial order in a later post: "Oopsie... Too late," he said. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted the post.
The Trump administration said it ignored the court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller "orchestrated" the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Sources told Axios that they didn't actually set out to defy a court order. "We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out," said an official.
Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge's order. They want to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.
If past experiences with Trump stunts can be considered, chances are there were non-criminal immigrants deported, and by the time this information gets to the public, nobody will care.
"If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios when asked about the case.
The White House was looking for a fight over invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, and they believe this is a case where they can win in front of the Supreme Court. They are asserting that the president has the power to determine that the country is at war.
Such an assertion, if upheld, will give the administration the power to arrest, detain, and deport all migrants over the age of 14 without due process. Trump alone will have the power to pick out who is a gang member without due process and will say he can do so via the powers vested in him by Article II of the Constitution.
A video of the deportees was posted by the El Salvadorian president on X, and promoted by administration mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt. "The American people voted for this," she said.
"On Tyranny" author Timothy Snyder said
Understand that this El Salvador gulag deportation was done partly in order to make the fascist video that the president now transmits, with his fascist message. The cameras are all set up in advance.
Meanwhile, Vice President Vance painted critics of the operation as pro-criminal…
There were violent criminals and rapists in our country. Democrats fought to keep them here.
Court filings show that Judge Boasberg did consider safety concerns — and concluded that given all the deportees were already in custody, the risk in delaying their deportation was effectively zero. He also made no judgement on their possible crimes.
The issue, he said, was whether Trump really has the authority under a wartime act of Congress to declare a terrorist group an invading power and use emergency powers to throw out migrants without due process. “These are hard questions,” he said, “and I may end up coming out the other way on some of them after I have had more time.”
Does anybody want to bet on whether this judge is experiencing an uptick in threats?
Texas Republican Brandon Gill said he would file articles of impeachment against Boasberg. Elon Musk shared Gill's post to X announcing the planned impeachment move, calling the action "necessary." In short order, pictures of the judge and his phone number appeared in a chain of comments agreeing with the call for impeachment.
(Removing a judge would need 67 members of the Senate to agree, so this obviously bs)
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The plane to El Salvador was just one episode of the deportation drama being played out over the weekend. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have taken upon themselves the authority to detain tourists with paperwork issues.
Via Salon:
A number of tourists from European countries have been detained by ICE in recent weeks when attempting to enter the United States, their planned vacations instead turning into long stretches in detention. Experts say their arrests are an apparent escalation in enforcement action as President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown rages on.
In the last month, at least three tourists — two from Germany and one from the United Kingdom — were stopped at a U.S. port of entry and detained for at least two weeks. The latest incident involves 28-year-old Welsh artist Rebecca Burke, who was handcuffed and detained when attempting to re-enter the country in Washington after being turned away by Canadian border officials, according to her father, Paul Burke. In a plea for help on Facebook, he said that his daughter was denied entry into Canada due to "an incorrect visa" and was refused re-entry and classified as an "illegal alien" by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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In another case that didn’t involve alleged criminals or pro-Palestinian activists, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a citizen of Lebanon holding an H-1B visa, was detained last week upon her arrival at a Boston airport. She had obtained a work permit on March 11, and was traveling to Brown University where she’d be offered an assistant professorship.
She had traveled to Lebanon to visit her parents after six years as a U.S. resident and a doctor working for the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension at Brown Medicine.
Upon hearing of her detention thru a petition filed by the woman’s cousin, federal Judge Leo T. Sorokin on Friday mandated 48 hours' notice before Alawieh could be deported. Nonetheless, she was placed on a flight to Paris on Saturday.
On Sunday, Sorokin ordered the government to respond by Monday morning to the "serious allegations" that it intentionally breached a court order. The Trump administration has not responded to media inquiries about why Alawieh was detained, or why she was removed from the country despite the order.
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It is the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro Palestinian activist active at Columbia University that brought media attention to the breadth of the administration’s aims when it comes to deportations. Again, there were no accusations of criminal behavior, just speech that offended the administration.
Via The New Yorker:
Khalil is thirty years old, has earned a master’s degree in public administration, and once interned at the United Nations. (His wife, an American citizen of Syrian descent, is about to give birth.) Within the protests that he was associated with, a university task force found a “serious and pervasive” atmosphere of antisemitism, in which Jewish students were targeted and harassed. But Khalil had served as an interlocutor with the university administration, and in public statements he disavowed antisemitism and insisted that a change in the government of Israel would represent liberation for Palestinians and Jews alike. Was this really the fight the Trump Administration wanted to pick?
As it turned out, once the Administration explained what it was up to, this was exactly the fight it wanted. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” a White House official told the Free Press. A statement from D.H.S. said, vaguely, that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas,” wording that smudges the crucial distinction between antisemitism and opposition to Israeli policy. The government’s deportation order relied on an obscure 1952 immigration statute that allows the Secretary of State to revoke permanent residency from anyone he judges to be undermining U.S. foreign policy. The Administration seemed prepared to argue that Khalil’s “continued presence in this country,” as the Times put it, made the American goal of combatting antisemitism more difficult. No specific actions were even alleged; Khalil was evidently being deported simply because the Administration did not like what he had to say.
What is receiving scant mention in various media accounts is the harassment Khalil underwent in recent weeks. Khalil was targeted because he never wore a mask (he thought he’d done nothing wrong and served as a negotiator for protesting students. He was accused of something he didn’t do by a vigilante-style group, offering the Trump administration a chance to go after some low-hanging fruit.
Via the New York Times:
The same night, an X account of a Zionist group singled out Mr. Khalil. It accused him, without evidence, of saying that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and said that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had his home address. “He’s on our deport list,” the post said.
It included a video of Mr. Khalil speaking in a CNN interview, during which he made no such statement. Mr. Khalil has said he had “unequivocally” never spoken those words — another student had, and was suspended.
Mr. Khalil saw himself and other student protesters as victims of doxxing, finding their personal information spread on social media. On Jan. 31, he emailed Columbia administrators asking for protection for international students, such as himself, who he said were facing “severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment and very possibly deportation.”
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There is no foreign military action to justify President Trump’s intended invocation of this act, making his actions not only unlawful but an outright assault on fundamental rights. This is yet another dangerous overreach by the administration, designed to support an unchecked mass deportation program, all while bypassing the necessary judicial review,” — Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at the ACLU of the District of Columbia.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Everyone’s Irish - Except Donald Trump by Charlie Angus at The Resistance
Donald, you are not going to crash our party. But I want you to know that on St. Patrick’s Day, I will be saying a special prayer to St. Patrick - asking him to help banish the snakes out of Washington.
Consider yourself warned.
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Opinion: California Sheriffs Are Becoming MAGA Allies and Threatening Democracy by Joe Mathews at Zocalo via The Times of San Diego
But there is an urgent need for more action. Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta should issue a legal opinion declaring that sheriffs and deputies who defy state law in immigration enforcement lose their “qualified immunity,” which protects government officials from being sued for their official conduct.
And if sheriffs participate in immigration enforcement that removes legal residents or U.S. citizens — which sometimes happens in immigration cases — they should be subject to kidnapping charges.
Beyond bringing accountability to individual sheriffs, Californians also must change the systems that give them power. The best way would be a constitutional amendment that makes sheriffs appointed positions, just like police chiefs, and makes clear that these law enforcement leaders can be fired when they break the law
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EXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration by Judd Legum at Popular Information
The memo anticipates creating a huge surge in demand for in-person appointments as the SSA slashes staff and closes offices. Acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek has announced that he will terminate 7,000 workers, about 12% of the workforce. Meanwhile, dozens of SSA offices are being shuttered. Some people need to travel more than 100 miles to get to the nearest location. As the SSA limits services that could be provided over the phone, it is ending in-person services at some offices, converting them to phone-only.
An SSA source told Popular Information that there are "no significant concerns about fraud at intake" because no benefits are being distributed. And there are already multiple layers of identity verification in place before a claim is approved. The source said they believe the new ID verification steps are an effort to "create additional hurdles to filing claims and overwhelm the system."
The memo acknowledges that the policy changes would create increased "challenges for vulnerable populations." This seems to concede that many elderly and disabled people are physically unable to travel to an in-person office. It is unclear how these populations will be able to receive benefits at all.
