The Conversation -- April 16, 2025
Steve Thompson of the Washington Post: “A federal judge on Tuesday said she will require Trump administration officials to produce in-depth details about the U.S. governments attempts, or lack thereof, to return a Maryland resident who was apprehended by immigration authorities and mistakenly sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The decision from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to require documents and written explanations marks another escalation in the legal showdown with the White House. The case has widespread implications, with Justice Department lawyers arguing that the judge lacks the authority to force them to coordinate with the Salvadoran government to bring Kilmar Abrego García back to the United States. 'It’s going to be two weeks of intense discovery,' Xinis told Justice Department attorneys at the hearing.” (Also linked yesterday.) The story has been updated. The New York Times report is here. Politico's report is here. ~~~
~~~ Thin “Evidence” Gets Thinner. Greg Sargent of the New Republic, republished by Yahoo! News: “As Trump administration officials seek to defend their refusal to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after deporting him in 'error,' one of the government’s chief justifications has been that he was a member of the MS-13 gang. One Trump official after another has lodged the charge, though Abrego Garcia denies this and the evidence for it is conspicuously thin.... The administration’s case that Abrego Garcia is a gang member and violent criminal is running into more trouble. The Maryland police officer who formally attested to Abrego Garcia’s supposed gang affiliation in 2019 — when he was detained the first time — was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker....” ~~~
~~~ ⭐Yes, Trump 2.0 Is Much Worse Than Trump 1.0. Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times: In 2018, the previous Trump administration erroneously deported an Iraqi immigrant to Iraq, Muneer Subaihani, who had been living in the U.S. for 25 years under the protection of a federal court order. “The case has striking similarities to one that is playing out now in Mr. Trump’s second term, after the United States deported a Salvadoran man because of what the government has acknowledged was an 'administrative error.' But the Trump administration’s response in the two cases could not be more different, a sign of how emboldened Mr. Trump has become in his defiance of the courts and in his determination to take a hard line on deportations, regardless of legal constraints. In Mr. Subaihani’s case, the government recognized its error to the federal court, setting off a monthslong odyssey to track down and retrieve a man who never should have been deported in the first place.” ~~~
~~~ Adam Liptak of the New York Times: “The Trump administration’s compliance with court orders started with foot-dragging, moved to semantic gymnastics and has now arrived at the cusp of outright defiance. Large swaths of President Trump’s agenda have been tied up in court, challenged in scores of lawsuits. The administration has frozen money that the courts have ordered it to spend. It has blocked The Associated Press from the White House press pool despite a court order saying that the news organization be allowed to participate. And it ignored a judge’s instruction to return planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants bound for a notorious prison in El Salvador. But Exhibit A in what legal scholars say is a deeply worrisome and escalating trend is the administration’s combative response to the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in the case of a Salvadoran immigrant. The administration deported the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge specifically and directly prohibiting that very thing....
“Assessing whether, when and how much the administration is defying the courts is complicated by a new phenomenon, legal scholars said, pointing to what they called a collapse in the credibility of representations by the Justice Department. These days, its lawyers are sometimes sent to court with no information, sometimes instructed to make arguments that are factually or legally baseless and sometimes punished for being honest.” Liptak goes into detail about the administration's obfuscations. ~~~
~~~ Marie: Donald Trump's press secretaries have been historically, hysterically awful, and Karoline Leavitt is doing her best to keep up with the likes of Sean Spicer & Sarah Huckleberry. Here's Leavitt making fun of one young man the Trump administration wrongfully deported to a foreign torture prison and excoriating Democrats & journalists for treating him like "a candidate for Father of the Year."
~~~ Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: “More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of 'transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.'” Bouie compares the plight of Americans now to that of “the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States.” Emphasis added.
~~~ "State Terror." Timothy Snyder on Substack: "Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps. This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.... Basic to the [U.S.] Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does.... Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by 'legal' what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it. It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse.... In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness." In the third instance, Snyder compares Abrego Garcia's rendition to El Salvador from which Trump claims he is unable to retrieve the wrongly-jailed man to the Nazis concentration camps, most of which were outside of Germany, and the Nazis claimed they were beyong German control. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Edward Luce of the Financial Times: "At around noon on April 14 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government.... On Monday..., Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man. He even claimed the judges ruled in his favour. The US president’s middle finger to the court was echoed by his attorney-general, secretary of state, vice-president and El Salvador’s vigilante president Nayib Bukele. The latter is playing host to what resembles an embryonic US gulag. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. In terms of clarifying moments, Trump’s meeting with Bukele compares with his dressing down of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late February. Zelenskyy was berated for being insufficiently thankful for US military aid and for failing to wear a suit. A tieless Bukele, by contrast, got royal treatment. Trump’s team nodded when Bukele said he would not consider returning the wrongly deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. All baselessly agreed that Garcia was in fact a terrorist. The Oval Office drama offered a civics lesson to the world: America’s government pays greater respect to a foreign strongman than its own Supreme Court." MB: I had to sign up for FT, which was annoying. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Then, there are stories like these: ~~~
(1) Hard to Tell Who the Criminal Is. Gerardo Salinas of the New Bedford (Mass.) Light: "A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday on Tallman Street after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive. Juan Francisco Méndez, 29, who was taken to an undisclosed location, has been in the United States for two years and was undocumented, but pursuing an adjustment of his immigration status, according to his attorney, Ondine Gálvez. Méndez’s wife, Marilú, a beneficiary of an asylum program, had petitioned for him so he could regularize his status. They are the parents of one child.... In video shot by Marilú and shared with The Light, one of the agents demanded that they open the door. Méndez replied that he would comply once his lawyer arrived, who was already on her way to assist him." ~~~
(2) Jericho Tran of NBC 10 Boston: "A New Hampshire real estate attorney and American citizen returning home from Canada says he was detained at the border without an explanation. Bachir Atallah and his wife, Jessica Fakhri, were traveling back from a quick family trip Sunday when they say U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped them when reentering the country in Vermont. 'I literally drove my car to Canada for the weekend, and on the way back, I was treated like a criminal,' said Atallah, who has been a U.S. citizen for 10 years. An official for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol on Tuesday called Atallah's account 'blatantly false and sensationalized.'... Atallah recalled being forced from his car. 'He asked me, "Exit the vehicle right now," and he reached for his gun,' he said. 'I said, "OK, I'm exiting the vehicle, keep your gun at your waist."'... After nearly five hours, Bachir Atallah says he and his wife were released." The Border Patrol statement appears at the bottom of the report. MB: Seems obvious to me the couple's offense was travelling while Arab. Weirdly, Atallah said he had thought Trump would "change things for the better."
Zach Montague of the New York Times: “A federal judge on Tuesday blocked ... [Donald] Trump from punishing the law firm Susman Godfrey, calling the retribution campaign he has waged from the White House against the nation’s top firms 'a shocking abuse of power.' In her ruling, the judge, Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said that the executive order Mr. Trump signed last week targeting the firm stemmed from a 'personal vendetta.' Susman Godfrey represented Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines that lawyers allied with Mr. Trump falsely attacked when he lost the 2020 election. The court decision grants the firm’s request for temporary relief and blocks the Trump administration from carrying out many of the order’s punishments, including one directing agencies to turn the firm’s lawyers away from federal buildings and another aimed at terminating any federal contracts Susman Godfrey holds.” (Also linked yesterday.)
Julie Bosman, et al., of the New York Times: “Joseph R. Biden Jr. forcefully defended Social Security in a speech to disability advocates in Chicago on Tuesday, condemning the Trump administration for 'taking a hatchet' to the Social Security Administration. In his first expansive public comments since leaving the White House, Mr. Biden said that President Trump had taken aim at Social Security, doing 'damage and destruction' to a program that millions of Americans depend on. 'Social Security deserves to be protected for the good of the nation as a whole,' Mr. Biden said, adding that Trump officials are applying a Silicon Valley mantra of 'move fast and break things' to the government. 'Well, they’re certainly breaking things. They’re shooting first and aiming later.'... Mr. Biden said that during his own administration, the Social Security Administration cut wait times, improved antifraud measures and made the appeals system for benefits more uniform. 'It all became more efficient and more effective,' he said, drawing applause from the audience, a group of hundreds of lawyers and other professionals who advocate on behalf of people with disabilities.”
Amanda Friedman of Politico: “... Donald Trump threatened to eliminate Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, following the Ivy League school’s refusal to implement policy changes demanded by his administration. 'Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?’” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday.... He added: 'Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!' Basically all major colleges and universities are tax-exempt organizations, and the government revoking that status over policy disagreements would be unprecedented.” MB: This is entirely consistent with Trump's “L'État, c'est moi” frame. In his view, the “public interest” is indistinguishable from his interest. (Also linked yesterday.)
Praveena Somasundarum of the Washington Post: “Five government agencies must release billions of dollars in funding for climate and infrastructure-related projects that had been paused by the Trump administration, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary injunction that instructs the administration to release the funds while the lawsuit proceeds. The injunction applies nationwide.... The lawsuit names as defendants the Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Housing departments, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Management and Budget. It alleges that the funding freeze they carried out was illegal and imperiled climate and infrastructure projects, including programs to protect ancient trees and monitor species that can infest and kill them.... Donald Trump paused the awards given through the two statutes — the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — with an executive order on his first day in office.”
Shannon Najmabadi & Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration on Tuesday named a political ally who raised concerns about Hunter Biden’s taxes as the new acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, according to two people familiar with the matter. Gary Shapley was elevated in March to become the deputy chief of IRS criminal investigations and a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He was previously a mid-level career investigator. But soon after his promotion, IRS acting commissioner Melanie Krause announced plans to leave the agency, making her the third IRS leader to step down since ... Donald Trump took office.... Shapley’s swift elevation alarmed some current and former IRS officials, who told The Washington Post they were concerned that his roles within criminal investigations — and atop the agency — could consolidate the Trump administration’s power over both criminal and civil tax investigations, as well as audits, for the first time since Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.”
Maeve Reston of the Washington Post: “California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) are suing the Trump administration in federal court — claiming that ... Donald Trump exceeded his authority in imposing tariffs that they say are creating immediate and irreparable harm to California’s economy, the fifth-largest in the world. In the lawsuit that will be filed Wednesday morning in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Bonta and Newsom are challenging Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. They say the president cannot impose tariffs or direct Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security to enforce them without the consent of Congress.... Newsom argued that the tariffs have already inflicted billions of dollars in damage on the state’s economy.... California is the nation’s top agricultural producer, and it has a huge manufacturing sector that employs more than a million people. Mexico, Canada and China are California’s top three trade partners, and more than 40 percent of California’s imports come from those three countries — accounting for $203 billion of the $491 billion in goods that the state imported last year.” Politico's story is here.
David Lynch of the Washington Post: “The U.S. dollar is an early casualty of ... Donald Trump’s us-against-the-world trade war. The dollar has lost almost 10 percent of its value since Inauguration Day, with more than half of that decline coming this month after the president’s decision to lift taxes on imported goods to their highest level since 1909. The weaker dollar — now near a three-year low against the euro — is bad news for Americans traveling abroad and could also aggravate inflation by making foreign goods more expensive. U.S. exporters, however, should gain.”
The Insidious, Creeping DOGE Monster. Perry Stein of the Washington Post: “U.S. DOGE Service representatives told leaders of a nonprofit group Tuesday that it wants to assign members of its team to work at all institutes or agencies that receive federal funds, highlighting its aggressiveness as it attempts to reshape the federal government.... A 20-minute phone call involved two members of DOGE and attorneys for the Vera Institute of Justice, with DOGE representatives revealing plans to potentially attach its team members to more organizations and institutes that receive government funding, according to representatives of the institute.... A member of DOGE last week emailed the Vera Institute of Justice — an independent nonprofit organization that advocates for lower incarceration rates — to schedule a meeting about 'getting a DOGE team assigned to the organization.'...” The Raw Story has a derivative report here.
Mohar Chatterjee of Politico: “Under pressure from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, nearly all the staff of the Defense Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech development arm — are resigning over the coming month.... The resignations will effectively shut down the decade-old program after the end of April.... Without the program, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech talent pipeline and counter adversarial drones will be sunset, one soon-to-be former employee said. Once dubbed the Pentagon’s 'SWAT team of nerds,' DDS was one of the department’s earliest efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy.... 'The reason we stuck it out as long as we have is that we thought we were going to be called in,' said [Jennifer] Hay[, the director of the office]. Instead, according to interviews, they were sidelined by DOGE’s efforts. Several other digital modernization efforts within the government have met similar fates.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: I suspect DOGE is sidelining these digital workers throughout the government because they are the only ones who can tell right away what DOGE is doing. Once users realize DOGE has screwed up their systems, it may be too late to fix them.
Greg Jaffe of the New York Times: “A top adviser of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was escorted from the Pentagon on Tuesday as part of an investigation into an unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, a U.S. defense official said. Dan Caldwell, who was identified as part of an ongoing leak investigation, was placed on administrative leave, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Since arriving at the Pentagon with Mr. Hegseth in January, Mr. Caldwell has accompanied the defense secretary to some of his meetings with key foreign leaders. In a Signal text chain first disclosed by The Atlantic last month, Mr. Caldwell was listed as Mr. Hegseth’s representative to the White House as it prepared to launch strikes in Yemen.... Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Hegseth have a long relationship....” The Reuters report, which broke the news, is here. ~~~
~~~ Daniel Lippman & Jack Detsch of Politico: “Dan Caldwell ... was escorted out of the Pentagon by security officers and had his building access suspended pending further investigation.... Darin Selnick, the Pentagon’s deputy chief of staff, was also suspended as part of the same probe and escorted out of the building, according to one of the officials. The leaks under investigation include military operational plans for the Panama canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Elon Musk’s controversial visit to the Pentagon and pausing the collection of intelligence to Ukraine, the other official said.” MB: Ha ha. The Reuters & NYT reports, as well as Politico's report, of course, all are the result of leaks.
Marc Caputo of Axios: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended two top Pentagon officials, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, as part of an investigation into who leaked word of a planned top-secret briefing on China for Elon Musk.... Axios learned that Musk or Hegseth didn't just decide to call off that briefing after the leak.... [Donald] Trump himself ordered staffers to kill it. 'What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn't go,' Trump said, a top official recalled to Axios.... [After the New York Times reported on March 20 that Musk was slated for the Pentagon China briefing], Musk wrote on X: 'I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT. They will be found.'" And so they were.
Maegan Vazquez & Jeremy Barr of the Washington Post: “The White House said Tuesday that it has eliminated a permanent spot for wire services in the White House press pool, ending a long-standing tradition that allowed the outlets to have expanded access to the president’s public activities. According to a White House official, the pool will consist of one print journalist to serve as print pooler; one additional print journalist; a television network crew; a secondary television network or streaming service; one radio journalist; one 'new media/independent journalist'; and four photographers. The wire services in the pool usually included the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Reuters.... But since February, the Associated Press had been banned from White House events over the outlet’s decision to continue using the name Gulf of Mexico rather than Gulf of America.... White House Correspondents’ Association President Eugene Daniels said in a statement on Tuesday that the latest changes to the structure of the pool 'show that the White House is just using a new means to do the same thing: retaliate against news organizations for coverage the White House doesn’t like.'” The AP's story is here.
Comrade Martin: “A Brilliant Choice.” Spencer Hsu & Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post: Ed “Martin is now interim U.S. attorney for D.C. and Trump’s pick to serve full time in the role. But as a conservative activist and former Missouri Republican official, he appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik — networks funded and directed by the Russian government — as a guest commentator from August 2016 to April 2024, according to a search of their websites and the Internet Archive’s database of television broadcasts. Martin did not disclose the appearances last month on a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, which asks nominees to list all media interviews.... Martin’s frequent appearances, reviewed by The Washington Post, drew rebukes from some national security analysts, who accused him of amplifying anti-American propaganda on Russian outlets that the State Department last year said had moved beyond disinformation to engage in covert influence activities aimed at undermining democracies worldwide for President Vladimir Putin’s regime.... He is among a segment of American conservatives who appear to agree with Moscow’s geopolitical views and foreign policy aims, while embracing a worldview distrustful of U.S. institutions and experts, similar to disinformation pushed by the Kremlin.” MB: Too bad there's no senator for D.C. to blue-slip Comrade Martin. ~~~
~~~ Carl Hulse of the New York Times: “Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, will be the first to challenge Mr. Trump on his selections [of federal prosecutors], by refusing to return blue slips consenting to consider the nominees for two top posts in New York: Jay Clayton to be the U.S. attorney for the Southern District and Joseph Nocella Jr. to be the lead prosecutor in the Eastern District.... In a recent interview, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, said that he intended to respect the blue slip tradition. Given Mr. Schumer’s stance, that means the two high-priority nominations of Mr. Trump are on track to die in the committee without receiving a vote.... The blue slip tradition is neither a law nor a rule. But like many things in the Senate, it has taken hold over time and is now considered sacrosanct.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: It is heartening to see White rural Iowans stand up for Abrego Garcia, just as it was the other day when mostly White National Building Trades Union members cheered President Sean McGarvey's demand that Abrego Garcia (a union member apprentice) be returned to the U.S.
Michael Gold of the New York Times: “Angry constituents on Tuesday confronted Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, about President ... [Donald] Trump’s refusal to bring back a Salvadoran immigrant mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador. In the most heated exchange of an hourlong town hall in the Southeast corner of his state, Mr. Grassley, 91, was asked by a shouting audience member whether he would do anything to help secure the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was deported last month.... 'Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?' The question was met with enthusiastic claps from many in the crowd of about 100. 'I’m not going to,' Mr. Grassley said. Pressed to explain his stance, he added, 'Because that’s not a power of Congress.'... Others in the audience began piling on. Some noted that Mr. Grassley chairs the Judiciary Committee, which oversees immigration policy and judges, prompting the senator to stammer, then fall silent and wait for the shouting to die down before trying to respond. 'El Salvador is an independent country,' Mr. Grassley said. 'The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court.' The crowd practically erupted in jeers. The discussion was representative of the tone throughout the town hall, a standing-room-only event in Fort Madison, Iowa, in which the eight-term senator was repeatedly pressed about why he was not doing more to rein in the Trump administration.”
Maya Miller of the New York Times: “A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters. Ms. Greene ... had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her.... Several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as Andrew Russell Nelms of Atlanta, and dragged him out of the room. 'I can’t breathe!' Mr. Nelms shouted, interjecting with expletives as he was told to put his arms behind his back. The police then used a stun gun on him twice.... Minutes later..., police forcibly removed and used a stun gun on a second man, identified later as Johnny Keith Williams of Dallas, Ga., who had stood up and started to heckle.... Over the next hour, as Ms. Greene trumpeted the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government and played clips of herself railing against witnesses in committee hearings, police officers escorted at least six people from the room.... Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.” The AP report is here.
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Tennessee. Ruby Mellen & Ian Livingston of the Washington Post: “Tucker Humphrey and his brother Justin, both farmers in Bogota, Tennessee, used an excavator to build a levee that protected their family’s home as a catastrophic storm ripped through the middle of the country earlier this month.... Aerial footage that showed the Humphrey home as the only untouched residence in a sea of brown floodwater went viral.... The family has always built levees when floods threatened the home. It’s a technique perfected by the brothers’ father, who died several years ago. Tucker said he wasn’t used to the internet attention, but he thought his father would be proud. 'He’d like seeing that,' Tucker said. 'He’d know we were listening when we were kids. 'The barrier, which rose up to nine feet tall in some places, Tucker said, walled the house off from flooding that soaked the rest of the community. As heavy rain pelted Bogota at the beginning of April, the Obion River, which runs adjacent to the town, rose about nine feet in as many hours during the storm. It then continued to rise as water funneled into the area.” Aerial video & photo, included with the article, are striking.
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