The Cold Civil War
The ICE agent indicted for a shooting during Operation Metro Surge has reportedly been released from jail in Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott successfully stonewalled Minnesota’s extradition request.
Christian Castro’s release this morning came the day after a federal judge in Brownsville ruled against Minnesota in its legal bid to force Abbott to extradite the ICE agent accused of shooting an undocumented immigrant through the front door of a home then lying about it.
While accepting that Abbott “has considered this particular extradition request for an atypically long duration,” U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled that he lacked subject matter jurisdiction to intervene because Abbott had not officially rejected it yet and the law provides no explicit deadline for a governor to respond to an extradition request.
Minnesota’s argument effectively asks the Court to impose into the Extradition Clause, the Extradition Act, and the UCEA a deadline for a state governor to sign a rendition warrant or decline to do so. The Court is unaware of any authority supporting the creation of a court-imposed deadline under these circumstances.
Texas law does, however, only allow the state to keep a fugitive in custody for 90 days while extradition is pending. Castro’s 90 days ended today; hence, his release. Judge Rodriguez also rejected Minnesota’s alternate request to keep Castro in jail while the legal fight plays out to prevent him from fleeing across the border to Mexico.
Abbott managed to pull off his successful political gambit of protecting a fugitive ICE agent wanted on criminal charges in a blue state without ever having to deny outright Minnesota’s extradition request. He slow-rolled the request for two months even as he routinely processed other extraditions to Minnesota. Then when the state prosecutor in Minnesota pressed the issue, Abbott at the last minute ordered a Texas investigation into whether Castro was really a fugitive under extradition law.
In a nod to Minnesota’s legal position, Judge Rodriguez used a lengthy footnote to express skepticism about the legal validity of Abbott’s claim that Castro might not really be a fugitive because he didn’t flee Minnesota but was ordered by ICE to return to his home base in Texas. The Trump DOJ had leaped into the case at the last minute to buttress Abbott’s argument, offering proof that Castro had in fact been ordered by ICE to return to Texas.
“The Court has doubts that caselaw supports the construction of ‘fugitive’ that Texas is considering,” Judge Rodriguez opined in a signal of how he might rule if a riper version of the case comes back to him.
In his ruling, Judge Rodriguez allowed for the possibility that a governor could stonewall an extradition request for so long that it effectively became a refusal to extradite, but that the circumstances of this case didn’t amount to that yet. Regardless, Abbott violated no law but considering Minnesota’s request for three months, Rodriguez ruled.
Minnesota is left with the bleak options of appealing to the 5th Circuit, the most MAGA-ified of the federal appeals courts — or of biding its time until Abbott either officially refuses to extradite Castro or, more likely, enough time has passed without Abbott taking any action to argue that he’s constructively refused the extradition request. Rodriguez offered no signals in his ruling on how long would be long enough to be deemed a constructive denial.
By that time, Castro may be ensconced in Mexico, where Minnesota prosecutors say he owns property and has a romantic partner he plans to marry.
Rep. McIver Not Immune in Delaney Hall Case
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) is not immune from prosecution for the Delaney Hall incident last year even though she was conducting congressional oversight.
“The charged conduct … is unambiguously non-legislative,” the three-judge panel concluded in a 2-1 split decision.
Criminalizing Dissent as Terrorism
The State Department has designated three groups based in Europe as transnational terrorist organizations as part of its effort to breathe life into the myth of far-left political terrorism at home that is tied to an imagined international conspiracy of leftist extremism, the NYT reports:
In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.
Scenes From a Personalist Presidency
The legal fight over adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center may be the most direct confrontation over the gaudy trappings of his personalist regime — and it is doing an amazing job of revealing the absurdity of the current moment.
In their latest filing, lawyers from Washington Litigation Group and Democracy Defenders Action who are representing Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center Board, let it rip. Here’s a small sampling:
“The Department of Justice has offered up a cocktail of fabulous pronouncements and stunning inaccuracies untethered to law or reality.”
“In their words, astonishingly, if the Court prevents them from returning President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, they will ‘be required to’ demolish the Center and build ‘a large outdoor amphitheater’ as a ‘replacement.’
“In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it.’ This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”
“Defendants consciously chose to play a dangerous game of chicken with the law. They voted to defy the Court’s decision and restore Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. They refused to wait for the Court to rule, manufacturing an unnecessary fire drill. And now they have threatened the destruction of the Kennedy Center, a sacred memorial to a fallen President, all in the name of one man’s vanity. Enough is enough. This has to stop.”
You can read the full filing here.
An Ominous Sign
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, the WSJ reports. Ratcliffe’s warning was particularly focused on potential Russian aggression toward the Baltic states, according to Politico.
A Manmade Disaster Decades in the Making
Some of the stunning videos and eyewitness accounts of the catastrophic flash flood in the Himalayas after a glacier collapsed are almost to much to bear. This particular video manages to capture the breathtaking spectacle without having to confront directly the extensive loss of life:
The energy released from the glacial collapse and debris flow initially registered as an earthquake before the U.S. Geological Survey figured out the likely cause. Subsequent satellite imagery seems to have pinpointed the site of the collapse, though the exact mechanism of the disaster remains unclear pending further analysis.
At the risk of sounding smug or pompously dreary, this is a disaster triggered by a warming world, where glaciers around the globe are in retreat — sometimes in sudden and dramatic convulsions. The upper elevations of the Himalayas have been frozen in place for eons and as they become unfrozen, they’re unleashing not just ice and meltwater but millennia of rockfall and till embedded within the glacial ice plus loose boulders and rock fragments on high slopes and ridges only recently freed from the grip of non-glacial ice.
It’s not just happening in the Himalayas, as the WaPo reports: “In the past five years alone, glacier collapses have buried a Swiss village, killed 11 mountaineers in Italy and triggered floods that destroyed two hydropower plants and swept away at least 200 people in India.”
Five years is a long time for us to compute multiple disasters across Eurasia. It seems like a slow-motion disaster happening just beneath our capacity to clock it. But in geological time, this is an incredibly fast-moving epochal change, the seeds of which were sown by human carbon emissions decades ago. The genie is already out of the bottle.
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You had me at "The Cold Civil War" 🔥
The "law and order" right-wing crowd loves their own criminals who shoot and kill, rape, and assault US residents, vandalize their property, and sex traffic kids. The ICE gestapo is practicing to be the felonpotus regime's private militia to terrorize any of us. Republicans want this. As for the Kennedy Center, insanity is a feature of the felonpotus, his enablers love that too. He will destroy the Center if he wants, no law or judge is able to stop him acting out his whims. Too bad our military is compromised so badly now they won't even drag the dictator out of the WH. "Lake America", anyone? His lunacy remaining unchecked is a deadly tragedy for the US. I never thought our constitution, laws, media, universities, law firms, non-profits, and politicians would allow this, enable this. Billionaires running this nation are getting what they want - loot the US Treasury and our tax dollars, end regulations, take over our public lands, compromise our voting, crash 90% of us non-millionaires into poverty, and run amok with their AI software. I am amazed that we citizens are not massively revolting. Alas.....