Kristi Noem Records Chilling Video At Jail Holding Alien Enemies Act Detainees
INSIDE: Beryl Howell ... James Boasberg ... Mike Waltz
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Editor’s Note: While Morning Memo has mostly focused on the legal and historical implications of the Trump administration’s lawless detention and deportation policies, today’s Morning Memo contains disturbing video and images of what is happening on the ground.
Trigger Warning: Noem’s Propaganda Video
In a bewildering move that could undermine some of the Trump administration’s legal arguments, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made a highly publicized visit to the prison in El Salvador where her department deported Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act.
But things only got worse.
In a stunning departure from humanitarian norms, Noem was photographed and filmed in front of jail cells front of prison cells packed with shaved-headed prisoners. Here’s an AP mashup of her trip that includes footage of her recording a direct-to-the-camera propaganda video:
Here’s the video Noem produced, with tattooed prisoners used as props:
Correction: Noem shot the video in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, not the Venezuelan detainees housed elsewhere in the prison. I regret the error.
‘You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos’
As TPM’s Josh Kovensky reported earlier this week, some of the Venezuelan nationals deported under the Alien Enemies Act were initially detained on the basis of their tattoos, many of which were innocuous and not Tren de Aragua gang symbols. Now Mother Jones has a new report zeroing in on the tattoos as the pretext for detention.
Appeals Court Stands Up For Judicial Branch
In one of the most significant appeals court rulings so far in President Trump’s second term, the D.C. Circuit let stand the order blocking further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
In the 2-1 decision, a George Bush I appointee vigorously defended a role for the judiciary in reviewing Alien Enemies Act cases. The ruling, while not a final decision on the merits, also called into question numerous aspect of the government’s case and set the stage for a full ventilation of the issues raised by the Trump administration’s conduct.
The case now returns to U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is separately considering whether the Trump administration violated the terms of his order.
More Foreign Students Whisked Off American Streets
A Tufts University PhD candidate on a student visa was detained outside of Boston and whisked to a detention facility in Louisiana – despite an emergency court order not to take her out of Massachusetts without notice.
Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish citizen who had been outspoken in her support for Palestinians. The pattern of detentions shows the Trump administration is targeting foreign students for their pro-Palestinian political views. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Ozturk was detained under the same law used to detain Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist.
The incident was caught in a disturbing video:
Meanwhile, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama was also detained by federal authorities. It’s not clear on what grounds Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian citizen, was detained or what his legal status was at the time he was picked up off campus.
MUST READ
With the Trump DOJ making a ham-fisted attempt to disqualify her from an important case, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell took the opportunity to school President Trump on the independent judiciary and to rebuke the Trump DOJ for its “ad hominem attack.”
“This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented.” Howell wrote in her opinion declining to recuse herself from overseeing the lawsuit by the law firm Perkins Coie challenging Trump’s executive order targeting it.
EXCLUSIVE
The NYT reports that the federal judiciary has created a new “Judicial Security and Independence Task Force” composed of federal judges that is expected to hold its first meeting within the next 10 days.
BOOM: The Atlantic Has The Receipts
In response to the Trump administration’s campaign of lying and obfuscation over the Signal group chat fiasco, The Atlantic published the messages themselves.
In other developments:
The information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed in the Signal chat was highly classified at the time he wrote it, CNN reports.
A watchdog group is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent destruction of the Signal messages. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg was assigned the case.
National security adviser Mike Waltz, who mistakenly invited The Atlantic executive editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat left his Venmo friends list public, Wired discovered.
The Rule Of Law Doesn’t Even Get A Funeral
The WSJ, on the Signal group chat fiasco:
In past years, such a breach would likely have given rise to a separate and more thorough investigation by the FBI and Justice Department’s national security division to assess the extent of the potential harm and whether any laws were violated. But top Justice Department officials appear not to be mounting such an inquiry.
The Autocratic Legal Playbook
UCLA law professor Scott Cummings, with a reminder on where we are:
To understand what action to take requires clarity about the democratic assault now being advanced with brutal efficiency against the United States. Trump and his legal team have carefully studied how democracies die. And they have learned the key lesson: democratic backsliding occurs when elected leaders claim a mandate to erode the pillars of democracy—free and fair elections, fundamental rights, and checks and balances—to enlarge executive power.
The “autocratic legal playbook” is the strategic roadmap to this consolidation. The targets are well-established: capture the courts; erase internal pockets of independence within the public bureaucracy; silent sources of free thought and expression in universities, civil society, and the media; replace independent public prosecutors and government lawyers with loyalists; and disable legal resistance by coopting law firms and the professional bar.
The Five Pillars Of Trumpian Repression
Benjamin Wittes has categorized the authoritarian moves by Trump so far, and they fall into similar themes as the above “autocratic legal playbook”:
attack on the government’s own power to spend money;
internal retributions and restructurings within government itself—most importantly, in the power agencies: DoD, FBI, and DOJ;
the overt creation of a zone of impunity for political allies and friends;
non-criminal legal pressures on a variety of universities, law firms, news media outlets, and others;
willingness to deploy liberally overt threats of criminal investigation or prosecution.
Trump II Clown Show
TPM’s Hunter Walker on how L. Brent Bozell III, Trump’s new pick to be ambassador to South Africa, actively opposed the fight to end apartheid.
The Destruction
NYT: U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries
Politico: Documents reveal scope of Trump’s foreign aid cuts
WaPo: Trump officials working to strip FEMA’s role in disaster recovery by Oct. 1
NYT: Trump Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions From State Health Services
WARNING: GOP’s Funny Math Ploy
Republicans on the Hill intend to rely on never-before-used magic math to make passing its massive bill containing major elements of President Trump’s agenda possible with only a majority vote in the Senate.
With everything else going on, it’s been difficult to sustain a focus on this crucial bit of chicanery. The funny math would dramatically reduce the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts and lower size of the spending cuts needed to offset it. All of which would facilitate passing the mega bill via a simple majority vote in a reconciliation package.
The key obstacle to this tactic is the Senate parliamentarian, who is expected to rule soon on whether this scheme passes muster under Senate rules.
The larger historical context should be clear by this point: The GOP touts policies like tax cuts and purports to have staunch principles like deploring deficit spending that don’t add up and aren’t popular so when push comes to shove they change the rules, fuzz the math, and otherwise obscure the disconnect between what they say and what they actually do.
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As a Jew who is deeply disturbed by Israel's actions against the Palestinians, I do not appreciate Trump’s using antisemitism as a pretext for deporting anyone on the basis of his or her support for the Palestinian cause. Not in my name.
I saw that video. Utterly repulsive. She is a terrible person and unfit to hold any office