Trump’s Open Defiance Of Federal Courts Is Now At Hand
INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Pam Bondi ... Elon Musk
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
We Are Crossing The Rubicon
The major news of the weekend was the rapid-fire series of events following President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act that culminated with the White House chortling over its defiance of a federal court order blocking deportations under the act and ordering outbound flights to return to the United States.
The Trump administration’s immediate deportation to El Salvador of Venezuelan nationals claimed to be part of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang is its own saga, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio taunting the federal court, El Salvador’s president releasing grim videos of dehumanizing treatment of the detainees, and the White House trumpeting how it ignored a federal judge to create a fait accompli.
But the big stakes here are not immigration law but the rule of law itself. At the same time the Alien Enemies Act was playing out, the Trump administration apparently deported a professor at Brown University’s medical school in direct contravention of a federal court blocking her expulsion (more below). It’s hard not to see the two cases as related and further evidence that we have arrived – two months to the day after Trump’s second inaugural – at the falling-over-the-cliff’s-edge moment we’ve long thought would mark an irreversible-in-the-short-term descent into authoritarianism.
Now, the analytical part of my brain still wants to wait to see if the judges in the two cases I’ve mentioned conclude that these were instances of willful denial of their orders. We may know their answers today, in a matter of hours. But we can see from the White House’s preening and posturing that it is eager to embark down this slippery slope.
The Timeline
A couple of differently designed timelines matching up the deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act and the court proceedings in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C.:
Adam Isacson: Timeline of What Appears to be Defiance of a Judicial Order
WaPo: Deportation flights landed after judge said planes should turn around
Commentary And Analysis: The Alien Enemies Act
Steve Vladeck: 5 Big Questions in the Alien Enemies Act Litigation
Joyce Vance: “If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?”
Mattathias Schwartz: With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch
A New Pattern Is Emerging
Two non-citizens with proper paperwork that allows them to be legally in the United States were detained at Boston’s Logan Airport late last week while trying to re-enter the country:
A professor at Brown University’s medical school who is a Lebanese citizen with a valid U.S. visa was detained and quickly deported despite a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion.
A New Hampshire electrical engineer who is a German national with a green card remains in federal detention in Rhode Island without official explanation for why he was stopped after returning from a visit to Luxembourg.
Worth Watching
In a speech Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche continued to vilify Columbia University, speak publicly about ongoing investigations, and cast vague aspersions about associations with Hamas:
Trump DOJ Leads The Attack On Federal Judges
As the right-wing backlash against court rulings adverse to President Trump gains steam, top Trump DOJ officials are fanning the flames:
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a press release accusing the federal judge who blocked Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of supporting terrorists: “Tonight, a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.”
DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle, who has been moonlighting as acting associate attorney general, raged on social media about the court order to reinstate fired federal workers: “We now have an unelected federal judge who has ‘hired’ more executive branch employees than President Trump. This is a judicial power grab. Plain and simple.”
Trump Gives Enemies Speech At DOJ
President Trump said all the quiet parts loudly and proudly in a speech Friday in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, openly and unreservedly politicizing the department that has long prized its independence as a bulwark against political interference.
The backward-looking parts of the speech were a victory lap for having evaded criminal prosecution. The forward-looking parts of the speech painted targets on perceived foes, threats to his own power, and civil society institutions for federal law enforcement to go after.
Breaking New Ground In Lawlessness
President Trump late Sunday night purported to invalidate Joe Biden’s pardons of members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
Trump Targets Yet Another Major Law Firm
On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked as wildly unconstitutional President Trump’s executive order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm. On Saturday, the president issued a similar executive order targeting Paul Weiss, a major NYC-based law firm.
Appeals Court Allows Trump To Enforce DEI EOs
In a case out of Maryland, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court ruling that blocked two of President Trump’s executive orders banning DEI while the case was on appeal. Under the ruling, the executive orders will remain in place as the appeal proceeds.
Trump Purports To Shutter VOA
NPR’s David Folkenflik on the carnage at Voice of America and other government broadcasters as President Trump’s Friday night executive order began to take effect.
The Destruction
President Trump’s executive order targeting VOA also purported to dismantle six other federal agencies:
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
Woodrow Wilson Center
Institute of Museum and Library Services
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
Community Development Financial Institutions Fund
Minority Business Development Agency
WaPo: “Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.”
KFF Health News: “National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research.”
NIH has taken down a portrait of Anthony Fauci.
The Purges
NNSA: DOGE cuts hit nuclear scientists, bomb engineers and safety experts
Bureau of Reclamation: Nearly 400 agency workers have been cut by the Trump administration.
Doge Watch
ProPublica: Who’s Running the DOGE Wrecking Machine: The World’s Richest Man or a Little-Known Bureaucrat?
Wired: Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’
NYT: Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants, has taken a new role in the Social Security Administration.
Trump II Abroad: The March Of Folly
Ukraine: U.S. withdraws from multinational group investigating responsibility for Russia’s invasion.
South Africa: Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, persona non grata, forcing the him to be recalled the day after Breitbart reported comments the envoy had made about Trump, MAGA, and white supremacism.
Gaza: The U.S. and Israel have contacted officials from Sudan, Somalia and the breakaway region of Somaliland to discuss using their territories as potential destinations for Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza under a possible Trump administration plan.
Quote Of The Day
Lee Bollinger, former longtime president of Columbia University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
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It's one thing to quietly and surreptitiously defy the federal courts, however it's quite something else to publicly boast about it and taunt the judges who attempted to stop apparently lawless actions. Now that they feel that they've gotten away with it, you can bet that more acts of defiance are planned by the tRump crowd...after all, who is it that can either force compliance or order prompt cessation of failure-to-comply actions by the government?
After all, the position of "Go on, we dare you to make us conform to court orders!" is so radical a stance that the courts - up to and including SCOTUS - are soon to realize that in fact there IS NO enforcement mechanism to ensure adherence to judicial rulings when "the rule of law" is supplanted by authoritarian diktats...yet, here we are,staring into the abyss, with apparently no checks operating on flouting the law. Now what?
We already crossed the
Rubicon in Nov. 24. If
you didn't see this
coming you were asleep.