June 13, 2025

ICE agents get green light to make unjustified warrantless arrests

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/ice-warrantless-arrests-castanon-nava

On Wednesday an email landed in the inboxes of all ICE employees with the subject: “Termination of Castañon-Nava Settlement Agreement.” For those unfamiliar, the settlement was the outcome of a class action lawsuit brought by people who had been subjected to unjustified warrantless arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration when now-Border Czar Tom Homan was Deputy Director. The parties involved entered into the agreement in May of 2022 wherein it became nationwide ICE policy that warrantless arrests must be documented in a specific manner to remain in compliance with the law.

The terms of the settlement were given a three year duration, meaning it —by ICE’s definition, at least—expired last month. The email on Wednesday—a copy of which was shared with The Handbasket—was sent by ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor Charles Wall, and it made one thing clear: Agents are no longer constrained by the need to justify their warrantless arrests.

“What they are encouraging is for all the officers to violate the law, and now you don't even have to document it,” Mark Fleming, the Associate Director of Federal Litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) who served as one of the attorneys on the case, told me on Thursday.

In Wall’s email he wrote: “Despite a pending motion to enforce the settlement agreement and a motion to extend the settlement agreement, it remains terminated. Accordingly, I hereby rescind the May 27, 2022, Castañon-Nava Settlement Obligation statement of policy.” Fleming disagreed with ICE’s assessment that the settlement is still terminated in the face of ongoing litigation.

*snip*

May 30, 2025

The MAHA Report Has Been Updated With Fresh Errors

https://www.notus.org/health-science/maha-report-update-citation-errors

No paywall link
https://archive.li/sqT8z

The Trump administration’s clean up of the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s hallmark and error-riddled report is opening new questions about how the report’s authors drew some of its sweeping conclusions about the state of Americans’ health.

At least 18 of the original report’s citations have been edited or completely swapped out for new references since NOTUS first revealed the errors Thursday morning. While some of the original report’s inconsistencies have been changed, a few of the new updated citations continue to misinterpret scientific studies.

One study NOTUS identified as misinterpreted in the original report was intended to support the claim that psychotherapy is more effective for children than medication for treating mental health concerns. That study was swapped out with a new “systematic overview” authored by psychologist Pim Cuijpers, who told NOTUS via email that MAHA’s new citation is also wrong.

Cuijpers said his referenced study doesn’t cover psychiatric medications in children at all — the research was focused on adults. The citation is located in a section of the MAHA report titled, “American children are highly medicated – and it’s not working.”

“Treatments of depression in adolescents have a different efficacy than treatments in adults, so they cannot be compared, and this reference is therefore not usable in adolescents,” said Cuijpers, one of Amsterdam’s most-cited psychologists. “It also fails to state that the combination of therapy and antidepressants is superior to therapy or antidepressants alone.”

He added that there is no evidence that psychotherapy is more effective than antidepressants in adolescents.

*snip*

May 30, 2025

Your guide to Cryptogate, Trump's $4 billion corruption scandal that's 10X bigger than Watergate

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/trump-cryptocurrency-scandal-corruption-billions-20250529.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/8tcrR

Since Donald Trump became the 47th American president on Jan. 20, the White House has been up for sale to the highest bidder. And like most big-city real estate these days, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has an astronomical price tag.

You might have seen the report a couple of weeks ago that in 2025, the net worth of Donald Trump has increased by a whopping $2.9 billion, thanks to his recent plunge into cryptocurrency. That’s a shocking number, but it doesn’t capture the full extent of the worst presidential corruption in U.S. history.

It doesn’t include the $400 million jumbo jet from Qatar that Trump hopes to take home in 2029 as property of his presidential library, after a short stint as Air Force One.

It doesn’t include what for a corrupt and contented Trump must seem like the change under his couch cushions, like the $28 million that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is paying Melania Trump for a documentary no one is asking to see.

It doesn’t include the new “deals” that just keep coming, like a scheme for Trump Media to get into crypto.

*snip*

May 23, 2025

Kristi Noem's proud MAGA bimbo act builds on the legacy of Sarah Palin

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/23/kristi-noems-proud-maga-bimbo-act-builds-on-the-legacy-of-sarah-palin/

Does Kristi Noem know what habeas corpus is? One thing we know for certain: She would very much like Americans to believe she does not. On Tuesday, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used a Senate hearing to insist the legal term means the opposite of its actual definition. "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to," Noem said through her unnervingly Botox-inflated lips. She was interrupted by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who explained to a smug-looking Noem that, no, habeas corpus "requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people" and is the reason it's illegal for Donald Trump to round up immigrants and imprison them in foreign gulags without offering a legal reason why.

Was Noem legitimately confused? Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic thinks so, writing that Noem's "ignorance appears to be utterly genuine." After all, "habeas corpus" is a Latin term used by lawyers but not much by laypeople, especially those, like Noem, who got a college degree through online courses at age 40. But I'm not so sure that Noem, who has been neck-deep in this debate about basic human rights for months, is as dumb as she seemed in that moment. Those who keep watching will notice that Noem doesn't act embarrassed when she's corrected, like normal people do when they get something so terribly wrong. Instead, she insists that "the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not." In this lie, Noem admitted that Trump is trying to suspend habeas corpus, not uphold it. It suggests that she knows full well what the actual legal battle is about.

There was much mockery of Noem for being so dumb in mainstream and left-leaning media, but notably, neither Noem nor her allies have shown any shame or defensiveness about her alleged mistake. Whether Noem comes by her confusion honestly or she was just play-acting, she's there to play the role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like Sarah Palin. The MAGA bimbo isn't just ignorant. She's contemptuous of people who actually know what they're talking about, especially if those facts-laden human beings are fellow women.

In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty. Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul. Especially if said man, in this case Donald Trump, is himself dumber than a box of rocks. It's so much easier to be a yes-woman for such a man if you turn your own brain off completely.

*snip*

May 20, 2025

Jay Kuo: The Cruelty Is The Point, But What's The Goal?

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-administration-cruelty-goal

When I write about the latest horrific policy or action by the Trump administration, often a reader will comment, “The cruelty is the point.” We all sense, and in many ways accept, this as true. How could we not, given everything we have seen and experienced for years under Trump?

But there has always been something unsatisfactory and circular about this assessment. It asserts that Trump and his lackeys are cruel just to be cruel, presumably because that is their nature and they enjoy it.

That feels correct, but also incomplete.

Cruelty serves a number of other purposes beyond the sadism of those who inflict it. We’ve witnessed this wherever atrocities occur anywhere in the world. Soldiers not only kill enemy soldiers but systematically rape, torture, and execute innocent civilians. Vulnerable minorities, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or LGBTQs in Uganda, become targets for cruelty not only because they are easy targets and people are awful, but because the state has an agenda and the cruelty is a twisted part of it.

The United States is not somehow immune to this and never has been. Throughout our history, our government, acting through our military and our courts, has repeatedly inflicted intentional cruelty upon whole populations within our borders. This has led to the worst chapters of our nation’s story: Indigenous genocide, centuries of Black slavery, and the Japanese American internment.

*snip*

May 18, 2025

The Tariff on Hatred is Here, Trumpers. It's Time for You to Pay

https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/the-tariff-on-hatred-is-here-trumpers

It's time to pay up, Trumpers.

The deferred invoice for collectively selling your souls is here.

It's time to pay for every incendiary campaign boast you cheered,
every baseless diatribe you vigorously applauded,
every nonsensical middle-of-the-night tweet you boosted,
every dehumanizing stereotype and slur you shared,
every callous rally insult you passionately amen-ed.

It’s time to pay for every denial of Scientific evidence,
every terminated qualified conscientious objector,
every attack on factual, responsible journalism,
every vicious assault on objective reality,
every nepotistic Cabinet appointment,
every dog-and-pony show distraction,
every lazy xenophobic caricature,
every tired racist tirade.

This is how your beloved capitalism works, isn't it: someone was always going to pay for services rendered? Nothing is free, isn't that what you've been saying—no handouts? Well, dig deep, friend, because you are on the hook for this.

Many people have been footing the bill for a long time: migrants and Muslims and transgender people, young black men, refugees, the sick and the poor, already vulnerable communities pushed to the brink—and now past it.

You were paying, too, of course, you were just too willfully ignorant or intellectually negligent to realize it. Over and over we tried to tell you about the cost: the civil rights you were sacrificing too, the environmental protections you were losing as well as we were, the safety and security you were relinquishing alongside us. We tried to tell you that this hardship was not a partisan expense, that his moral bankruptcy would eventually hit you hard too.

*snip*

May 9, 2025

Steve Vladeck: Suspending Habeas Corpus

https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/148-suspending-habeas-corpus


*snip*

I know there’s a lot going on, and that Miller says lots of incendiary (and blatantly false) stuff. But this strikes me as raising the temperature to a whole new level—and thus meriting a brief explanation of all of the ways in which this statement is both (1) wrong; and (2) profoundly dangerous. Specifically, it seems worth making five basic points:

First, the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which is in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 is meant to limit the circumstances in which habeas can be foreclosed (Article I, Section 9 includes limits on Congress’s powers)—thereby ensuring that judicial review of detentions are otherwise available. (Note that it’s in the original Constitution—adopted before even the Bill of Rights.) I spent a good chunk of the first half of my career writing about habeas and its history, but the short version is that the Founders were hell-bent on limiting, to the most egregious emergencies, the circumstances in which courts could be cut out of the loop. To casually suggest that habeas might be suspended because courts have ruled against the courts in a handful of immigration cases is to turn the Suspension Clause entirely on its head.

Second, Miller is being slippery about the actual text of the Constitution (notwithstanding his claim that it is “clear”). The Suspension Clause does not say habeas can be suspended during any invasion; it says “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This last part, with my emphasis, is not just window-dressing; again, the whole point is that the default is for judicial review except when there is a specific national security emergency in which judicial review could itself exacerbate the emergency. The emergency itself isn’t enough. Releasing someone like Rümeysa Öztürk from immigration detention poses no threat to public safety—all the more so when the release is predicated on a judicial determination that Ozturk … poses no threat to public safety.

Third, even if the textual triggers for suspending habeas corpus were satisfied, Miller also doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional. I’ve written before about the Merryman case at the outset of the Civil War, which provides perhaps the strongest possible counterexample: that the President might be able to claim a unilateral suspension power if Congress is out of session (as it was from the outset of the Civil War in 1861 until July 4). Whatever the merits of that argument, it clearly has no applicability at this moment.

Fourth, Miller is wrong, as a matter of fact, about the relationship between Article III courts (our usual federal courts) and immigration cases. It’s true that the Immigration and Nationality Act (especially as amended in 1996 and 2005) includes a series of “jurisdiction-stripping” provisions. But most of those provisions simply channel judicial review in immigration cases into immigration courts (which are part of the executive branch) in the first instance, with appeals to Article III courts. And as the district courts (and Second Circuit) have explained in cases like Khalil and Öztürk, even those provisions don’t categorically preclude any review by Article III courts prior to those appeals.

*snip*

May 2, 2025

Elon Musk's SpaceX Hits Jackpot Under New Trump Budget Plan

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-spacex-hits-jackpot-under-new-trump-budget-plan/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/5eKW0

President Donald Trump‘s new budget proposal would give SpaceX, Elon Musk‘s rocket company, a huge payday—despite making steep cuts to many areas of government spending.

Trump said in the proposal, sent to Congress Friday, that he wants to make “a down-payment on the development and deployment of a Golden Dome for America, a next-generation missile defense shield” that SpaceX will help build, The New York Times reported.

That project alone could generate billions in federal contracts for the company, the Times observed.

The spending plan also makes Musk’s ambitions to reach Mars a top priority for the government, arguing that “U.S. space dominance” will “strengthen U.S. national security and strategic advantage.”
While slashing NASA’s budget by nearly 25 percent ($6 billion), Trump’s plan would re-center the space agency around two primary goals: sending astronauts to the Moon and to Mars.

*snip*

May 2, 2025

US down-ballot races in 2025 deserve close attention

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/us-down-ballot-races-in-2025-deserve-close-attention/

As U.S. elections have come increasingly under threat in recent years— including from misinformation, unlawful certification refusals, and legislation that disenfranchises groups of voters—it is more vital than ever that state elections are able to run fairly and without interference. While much attention is paid to federal elections, less is given to the administration of so-called down-ballot races, such as state gubernatorial, legislative, and judicial elections. However, these and other state-level elections (including for other down-ballot offices such as attorneys general and secretaries of state) have a significant impact on the lives of everyday Americans.

Safe, free, and fair elections, including at the state level, are a critical pillar of a functioning American democracy.

In this article, we focus specifically on the down-ballot races for state legislature, governor, and supreme court that have taken and will take place in 2025, selecting those that are most critical to monitor for potential election subversion and for voter suppression. We limited the dataset to these most high-profile statewide elections because of their relative importance and therefore relatively increased susceptibility to subversion and suppression. We also included three other discrete races that met that threshold for the sake of completeness: the Lieutenant Governor races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the attorney general race in Virginia. With respect to election subversion, we selected races that could change the balance of power. With respect to voter suppression, we selected states that have passed new and suppressive legislation between 2021 and 2025 that remains in effect. We here follow Professor Lisa Marshall Manheim’s definition of election subversion as “the exploitation of a breakdown in the rule of law to install a candidate into elected office.” Voter suppression (creating access challenges to voting) is often considered the other side of the coin of election subversion, and we therefore separate the two here to highlight both complementary challenges.

In sections 1 and 2, we examine the 232 races for state legislature, governor, and supreme court in 2025 post-May 1 that have yet to take place across 15 states, including special elections.

*snip*

April 30, 2025

Disappeared in America: The Faces of Trump's Immigration Dragnet

https://theimmigrationhub.shorthandstories.com/disappeared-in-america/