Judge Demands Answers by Noon
A 19-year-old asylum seeker — who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March in violation of a court-ordered settlement agreement, then returned Aug. 7 by the Trump administration — was wrongfully deported again Monday to El Salvador, where he fears persecution.
The revelation comes in J.O.P. v. DHS, a long-running class action lawsuit in Maryland over the treatment of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers nationwide. The latest wrongful removal comes after repeated violations by the Trump administration of the settlement agreement and of multiple subsequent court orders by U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher seeking to enforce it, including a July order that found the administration in contempt of court.
Counsel for the class of plaintiffs notified Judge Gallagher of the latest (repeat) wrongful deportation yesterday, describing a mad scramble Monday to determine what had happened to their client, identified in court records only as E.L.A.
They asked the judge to order DHS to answer a series of seven questions to get to the bottom of what happened to the teen. Gallagher obliged, giving the administration a noon deadline today to provide answers, while adding an eighth question in her order: “What is the plan for promptly rectifying this error?”
Trump DOJ Blocked Charging ICE Agent
ProPublica has gone a long way towards confirming what Morning Memo suggested Monday: Main Justice scotched the effort by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring charges against ICE agent Christian Castro for the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in January during Operation Metro Surge.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to bring civil rights charges against Castro and had gone as far as alerting attorneys for the victims of the impending charges. But then nothing happened.
ProPublica has since obtained a Tuesday evening email from assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans updating the victims’ lawyers that Castro will likely now only face a lesser false statements charge for lying about the circumstances of the shooting.
“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email, ProPublica reports. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”
The Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is led by Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon, who was in a prime position to block the civil rights charges.
Castro also faces state charges over the shooting, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to extradite him to Minnesota after he was arrested in Texas. Castro was released from jail in Brownsville last week after the Trump DOJ sided with Abbott in a federal court battle over the extradition request.
Sosa-Celis and another man were originally charged by the Trump DOJ for the incident, which culminated with Castro shooting through the front door of their home, but the case quickly unraveled and the charges were dropped.
In his email alerting the victims’ attorneys that the civil rights case against Castro had been stymied, the federal prosecutor ended by saying: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”
IMPORTANT
The Trump DOJ has adopted a sweeping new legal interpretation designed to compel state governments to report undocumented immigrants or risk losing federal funding, Politico reports.
A new memo from the Office of Legal Counsel reinterprets longstanding law and formally withdraws a prior 1998 OLC memo that administrations had relied on for almost 30 years.
The move is reminiscent of the Trump administration’s reinterpretation last year of a 1996 law — which suddenly allowed millions of undocumented immigrants to be detained without a right to bond hearings. That shift flooded federal courts with habeas cases in which judges have overwhelmingly rejected the administration’s interpretation, but produced a circuit court split that the Supreme Court is expected to resolve as soon as its next term.
Trump Loses Again on Birthright Citizenship
U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman of Maryland has blocked President Trump’s second executive order on birthright citizenship, leaning heavily on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the first one in June. “The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman wrote in her ruling.
DHS and the Threat to Voting
ICE is “preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters,” Wired reports.
The NYT has obtained internal documents and training materials showing new details about the new DHS effort to target the bogeyman of illegal noncitizen voting, which the administration is privately calling the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”
The Left-Wing Terrorism Canard
DHS is using an anti-terrorism provision in the PATRIOT Act that allows warrantless access to financial information to target opposition groups, TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports.
Quote of the Day
“Things have gotten so much more dangerous. I think we are headed in the wrong direction. And if I could ever be more concerned than I was after my only child was murdered, I am.”—U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was murdered at her New Jersey home in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer, on the increase in threats to judges
‘More Bismarck, Less Hitler’
With the far-right Alternative for Germany party poised to win big in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt in the Sept. 6 election, Politico profiles AFD lawmaker Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and explores the right-wing resurgence in the former East Germany:
It’s perhaps no coincidence that such a revolution in German identity would take root in the former East Germany, where the AfD is ascendant. While West Germany was attempting to undertake a confrontation with the past, imperfect as it was, the state narrative in the former East Germany was that its people had vanquished fascism, which in any case was a product of the West. Many of the AfD’s supporters in the East believe a West German narrative about the Nazi past was imposed on them after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Art Is Dangerous
Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill pulls together Trump’s multi-front attack on public art — from last week’s removal by the State Department of a painting by Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley to the sustained assault on the Kennedy Center — into a coherent whole that whitewashes the American story:
The point of taking down Kehinde Wiley’s painting was not to replace it with some more “aesthetically calming” work of art. The idea is to make art devoid of meaning and imagination so that it cannot inspire thinking that challenges the hegemony this Administration is bent on imposing on 350 million Americans. Doing that requires the brutal reduction of art to works that are “woke” and those that are “patriotic.”
Gloria Steinem, 1934-2026
The feminist leader and cultural icon Gloria Steinem has died at 92.
Gloria Steinem is due honors for her lifelong advocacy for the furtherance of all women’s rights in this world! Thank you, Gloria!