Judges Are Starting To Catch On To Trump’s Utter Lawlessness
INSIDE: Hannah Dugan ... Kash Patel ... Ed Martin
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Deportation Cases Are Catalyzing Jurists
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana is among the handful of Trumpiest judges in America and even he can’t countenance the Trump administration’s lawless deportation actions.
In an order Friday, Doughty expressed his suspicion that the Trump administration had just deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen with his undocumented Honduran mother over the objections of the child’s father “with no meaningful process.” In a separate case also out of Louisiana, the ACLU alleges that two children – ages 4 and 7 – who were both U.S. citizens, were also deported Friday to Honduras.
Meanwhile, in the Western District of Texas, U.S. District Judge David Briones ordered the immediate release of a Venezuelan couple that the Trump administration had swept up in its Alien Enemies Act detentions. In a scathing opinion, Briones became the first judge in the country to rule that the Trump administration had wrongly designated detainees as enemy aliens, finding the government had presented nothing but unsubstantiated accusations against the D.C.-area couple that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. “This Court takes clear offense to Respondents wasting judicial resources to admit to the Court it has no evidence,” Briones wrote.
All of these new developments played out against the backdrop of an extraordinary March 14 memo by Attorney General Pam Bondi, obtained by USA Today, that expressly told law enforcement there would be no due process for Alien Enemies Act detainees. “An alien determined to be an Alien Enemy and ordered removed under the Proclamation and 50 U.S.C. § 21 is not entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, to an appeal of the removal order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, or to judicial review of the removal order in any court of the United States.”
The Bondi memo – dated the same day as President Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation – was the administration’s effort to operationalize the AEA detentions, which we now know had been underway for weeks and which would culminate with the notorious March 15 deportation flights. The Supreme Court has since rejected the argument that Alien Enemies Act detainees are not entitled to due process. But the Trump administration got the jump on the judiciary, and dozens of detainees remain imprisoned in El Salvador without having received due process. The effort to free them – and the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia – is now grinding through the courts.
If the brazen lawlessness in the deportation cases has a silver lining it’s that it has quickly made plain to judges nationwide not just how much is at stake but how fast and loose the Trump administration is playing with the rule of law. A cynical view might be that the judiciary’s awakening to the threat has made little difference, but that requires ignoring a growing body of court orders adverse to the administration, including some that have prompted it to retreat in key areas.
Good Read
Writing for the American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik has the backstory on MAGA turning Tren de Aragua into a propaganda set piece: How a Colorado slumlord’s psyop turned into a brand-new ‘forever war’ on Venezuela
The Extraordinary Prosecution Of A Wisconsin Judge
The arrest of a sitting state Judge Hannah Dugan outside of her courthouse was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s two-pronged attack on the judiciary and sanctuary jurisdictions. While targeting a state judge for arrest for allegedly obstructing an attempt to detain a undocumented migrant doesn’t raise the same constitutional concerns as defying federal court judges, the highly unusual handling of the case shows how it is part of a broader campaign of intimidation and eroding the rule of law. It bears noting that President Trump is expected to sign a new executive order today targeting sanctuary cities.
Morning Memo will return to the underlying facts of the case in due time, but for now let’s focus on the highly inappropriate public comments from top DOJ officials. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted-deleted-reposted about the arrest Friday morning then went even further by posting a photo of the arrest on social media. Not normal, not appropriate, not okay.
Attorney General Pam Bondi went further, appearing on Fox News to comment extensively about the case and engage in attacks on the defendant as well as the judiciary as a whole. These are the kinds of public statements about pending cases that are generally barred by DOJ policy and legal ethics rules. But Bondi paid them no heed in order to strut on a Trump-friendly media outlet:
Ed Martin Watch: Empty Apology Edition
Mother Jones: Ed Martin Isn’t Coming Clean About His Ties to an Alleged Nazi Sympathizer
‘Where Is The Remorse?’
A federal judge sentenced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) to 87 months in prison and ordered him to pay almost $374,000 in restitution and more than $200,000 in forfeitures in his campaign finance scheme. Prosecutors had sought an 87-month sentence. After his sentencing, Santos – who pleaded guilty – immediately began lobbying President Trump publicly for clemency.
The Corruption: Presidential Pardons Edition
President Trump pardoned a Florida health care executive whose mother played a role in trying to expose the contents of Ashley Biden’s diary, the NYT reports. The pardon comes just days after Paul Walczak was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution for his conviction in a tax case.
The Corruption: Trump Tariffs Edition
ProPublica: Politically Connected Firms Benefit From Trump Tariff Exemptions Amid Secrecy, Confusion
Higher Ed Begins To Circle Wagons Against Trump
WSJ: Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration
NYT: Emerging From a Collective Silence, Universities Organize to Fight Trump
Headline Of The Day
NYT: From Book Bans to Canceled Lectures, the Naval Academy Is Bending to Trump
DOGE Watch
Anna Bower: “A new court filing reveals the most compelling evidence yet that the government has been spinning a fiction about DOGE in federal court.”
CNN: DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say
The Atlantic, on the next phase of DOGE: “Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?”
The Purges: Fallout Edition
NPR: Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it’s destabilized by Trump’s job cuts.
NYT: A new study estimates that the sloppiness of the DOGE purges will cost the federal government roughly $135 billion this year.
NPR: Some purged-reinstated-repurged federal workers find they’re suddenly uninsured.
DeSantis’ Florida Never Disappoints
Insider Higher Ed: Florida’s Own DOGE Reviews Faculty Research, Grants
NYT: Why Did a Charity Tied to Casey DeSantis Suddenly Get a $10 Million Boost?
WaPo: DeSantis lashes out at Fla. GOP as questions build over wife’s project
Quote Of The Day
“They spent years watching Republicans illegitimately pack the Supreme Court, take away voting rights from people of color, systematically chip away at the constitutional order. Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people and trans kids and immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.”–Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), on an early swing through New Hampshire.
‘Paramount Began To Supervise Our Content In New Ways’
60 Minutes confronted its corporate parent Paramount on the air last night over the loss of journalistic independence at the seminal TV news magazine. Paramount is eager to settle a bogus lawsuit against CBS News by Donald Trump so that it doesn’t interfere with a merger for which the company needs federal regulatory approval. Scott Pelley did the honors:
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My new thing, in view of the 24/7 tsunami of insanity, is to tamp down the fully warranted excesses of cynicism but it's hard.
So I'm just going toss out some things without triggering discussion.
Firstly, there's the belief or whatever in due process. But due process can, like democracy, be so compromised that it reaches a point that whether it exists or not is an irrelevant distinction. There was a news bite last week about one group of immigrants being given a written description of their rights including far too little time to act on their behalf. Suffice to say, odds are there's at least five votes on the Roberts court that that bullshit is sufficient due process.
And to sequence from that, seeing resistance from the judiciary has to be qualified by the reality of the Roberts court which is nearly always happy to put the implementation of party goals before the rule of law or the constitution.
And the we have what one can call Pritzker's exercise in state party/national party diplomacy. Now that I think about it, it looks like Newsom and Whitmer are setting themselves up to be acceptable to the national party for 2028, which is to say moving rightward, while Pritzker is willing to maintain a state level focus. Interesting.
Judge Dugan arrest? I
don't think even
SCOTUS will like the
flavor of this one.
New club opens in DC:
The Executive Branch.
$500 thousand is the
membership fee and
there's a waiting list.
This is definitely the
pay-to-play
administration.