Trump CBP Accused of Contempt of Court for Coercing Minors into Self-Deporting

INSIDE: Abrego Garcia ... Hannah Natanson ... Jeffery Epstein

A woman shows a cellphone to a Guatemalan migrant deported from the United States inside a bus after his arrival at the Guatemalan Air Force Base in Guatemala City on August 31, 2025. (Photo by Johan ORDÓÑEZ / AFP) (Photo by JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

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SOTU-Free Zone

The State of the Union address has been bled of any civic utility, but if you’re desperate for a recap, we have you covered here.

‘Coercion, Threats, and Fear’

Attorneys who succeeded in blocking a middle-of-the-night effort to deport unaccompanied Guatemalan minors over the Labor Day weekend are now seeking a civil contempt of court ruling against the Trump administration for allegedly circumventing a judge’s order that continues to bar their deportation.

In the new filing in federal court in D.C., the lawyers alleged that Customs and Border Protection is “using misinformation, coercion, threats, and fear” to convince Guatemalan minors who arrive at the border to relinquish their rights and to self-deport before they enter the system designed to give special protections to minors.

In one of the declarations filed in support of the contempt request, the legal director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project recounted several alleged examples of children being coerced to self-deport, including this one:

An indigenous Guatemalan boy at Compass Connections Harlingen told me his father is disabled and his parents cannot protect and support him. CBP agents detained him around October 14, 2025. According to the child, CBP agents shouted, cursed, and threatened the child with a dog and a stun gun. A CBP agent told him he could accept a “voluntary return” or he could remain detained for an extended period of time. The child asked if he could speak with his family before he decided, but the officer refused. The child signed the paperwork. However, an officer then told him he was being sent to a shelter. The child believes his prayers were answered.

The original injunction blocking the Labor Day deportations was issued by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, the emergency duty judge on call over the holiday, who raced to respond to reports that children were already being loaded aboard planes in Texas, in an echo of the swift and secretive Alien Enemies Act flights from last March.

The injunction was later extended by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who found that the administration’s claims about the deportations fell apart on closer examination. Kelly is now being asked to find the administration in civil contempt over the new policy, word of which begin to emerge in November in a separate lawsuit and was spotted by former TPMer Matt Shuham, whose report on the policy is cited in the request for a contempt finding.

Preview: Abrego Garcia Hearing

A quick word ahead of tomorrow’s evidentiary hearing in Nashville on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution claim, which I’ll be attending in person:

With the James Comey and Letitia James cases dismissed for now, the Abrego Garcia case has become the preeminent vindictive prosecution claim pending anywhere in the country. As you know by now, vindictive prosecution claims are notoriously hard to win. Defense attorneys throw those claims against the wall and hope they stick. They rarely do.

But U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr., has found that Abrego Garcia has already cleared the initial hurdle in a vindictive prosecution claim: showing that there is a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.” That opened the door to discovery and to tomorrow’s evidentiary hearing, where the burden will be on the Trump DOJ to, in the judge’s words, “produce objective, on-the-record explanations for Abrego’s prosecution that rebuts the presumption of vindictiveness.”

If the Trump DOJ fails tomorrow to rebut the presumption now in Abrego Garcia’s favor, it loses, and Crenshaw could dismiss the indictment. The stakes are high. See you tomorrow from Nashville.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The Trump DOJ sued to overturn New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s executive order barring ICE from enforcing immigration laws on state property absent a judicial warrant or court order, claiming it violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

• A group of Catholic bishops, mostly from dioceses along the southern border, called for the humane enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.

• The top vote-getter in Chicago’s name a snowplow contest: “Abolish ICE”

Trump’s ‘Law and Order’ Facade

The capacity of the wrecked Trump DOJ is so reduced that it is now unable to prosecute some run-of-the-mill criminal cases.

A felon-in-possession case in Minnesota was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson this week over a speedy trial violation, astonishing even the defendant’s lawyer, the NYT reports: “I’ve been practicing law for 30 years, a lot in federal court, and I’ve never had an indictment dismissed by an order of a judge,” attorney Kevin DeVore said.

In his order dismissing the indictment, the judge additionally noted that the Trump DOJ “failed to comply with the ordered briefing deadline” on the motion to dismiss. The especially beleaguered Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office attributed the missed filing deadline to counsel’s unexpectedly early parental leave for a medical emergency and “other issues relating to staffing turnover at the United States Attorney’s Office.”

The judge considered the government’s late response anyway and still ruled against it.

Thread of the Day

A closer look at the Trump administration’s new lawsuit against University of California system for UCLA’s handling of protests over Israel’s war against Hamas:

Judge Will Search Reporter’s Devices

Rebuffing the Trump DOJ, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter of the Eastern District of Virgina rescinded the portion of the search warrant he signed that allowed it to “open, access,
review, or otherwise examine” the electronic devices seized from WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson last month.

Porter had approved the highly controversial search warrant in a government leak case without being briefed by prosecutors on a federal law that limits seizures of reporters materials. In his ruling, Porter took responsibility for “that gap in its own analysis” but was still mad about the government’s failure to brief him on it: “This omission has seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding.”

Given that and the other circumstances of the case, Porter decided to screen Natanson’s device himself for relevant information rather than allow a DOJ filter team to do it, which he called “the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse.”

Jeffrey Epstein Watch

Following up on reporting by Roger Sollenberger and NPR, CNN has its own version of the story of documents allegedly missing from the tranche of Epstein files released by the Trump DOJ that relate to a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her.

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