Boasberg Bashes Trump DOJ’s Latest Conduct in AEA Case

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

“The quagmire without solution”

In a cautious, incremental and modulated decision designed to withstand an almost certain appeal from Trump’s DOJ, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. ordered the administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a subset of Venezuelan nationals kicked out of the country 11 months ago under the Wartime Foreign Enemies Act.

This is the second time Boasberg has ordered the return of AEA detainees. The first time was in the emergency rulings he issued as the AEA deportations were unfolding over a weekend last March, when he ordered the deportations to stop and planes carrying the detainees to El Salvador turned around. The Trump administration defied those orders, but Boasberg’s subsequent efforts to hold officials in contempt of court were twice thwarted by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the administration’s second appeal currently drags on.

Throughout the latest round of litigation over how to grant AEA detainees the due process they were initially denied, Trump’s DOJ has mocked Boasberg, rejecting the premises of his orders and barely responding to his requests for information and proposed solutions. In yesterday’s order, Boasberg noted this trend: “Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the government’s responses essentially asked the Court to pound sand.” »

Boasberg sprinkled similar warnings throughout his decision, which I have excerpted and condensed here:

At every point, the defendants opposed the plaintiffs’ legitimate proposals without offering a single option to repair the harm they inflicted on the evictees. … [I]It is up to the Government to remedy the wrong it has committed here and to provide the means to do so. … [M]Mindful of the egregious nature of the Government’s violations of the due process rights of deportees that have placed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the unresolved quagmire proposed by Defendants.

It’s unclear how many, if any, of the 137 former detainees who were held for months in El Salvador’s CECOT prison want to return to the United States, where they face some detention and the threat of being deported again to a third country. But for those exiting Venezuela to third countries and wishing to return, Boasberg wrote his order to grant them relief similar to that granted by the Supreme Court to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported the same weekend in March but on a different flight and not as a suspected enemy alien.

Boasberg has so far refrained from ordering the same measures for detainees still in Venezuela, so as not to interfere in the conduct of the executive branch’s foreign relations and risk being overturned on appeal. Those still in Venezuela, however, will be allowed to begin legal challenges to President Trump’s AEA proclamation and their designation as members of the Tren del Aragua gang. Boasberg saved the issue of remote hearings for overseas detainees for another day.

All this only sets the stage for a new round of appeals, which could drag on for months, further delaying any accountability for the administration’s misconduct.

Monitoring mass deportations

• Minnesota: In an extraordinary outcome, Trump’s DOJ has decided to dismiss with prejudice criminal charges of assault against an ICE agent against two immigrants in Minneapolis, one of whom was shot and killed by the agent in a widely publicized incident on January 14. “The newly discovered evidence in this case is materially inconsistent with the allegations contained in the complaint affidavit… as well as the preliminary hearing testimony… which was based on information presented to the affiant,” federal prosecutors said in their motion to dismiss the case. The judge granted the motion this morning and dismissed the case.
• Chicago: Newly released body camera footage of the three Border Patrol agents who shot Chicago’s Marimar Martinez five times records one agent saying, “Do something, bitch,” before another saying, “It’s time to get aggressive and get the hell out.”
• Minnesota: U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ruled that ICE was involved in the mass deprivation of constitutional rights of detainees at the Whipple Federal Building, just outside Minneapolis. “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of people and then trample on their constitutional rights, because it would be too difficult to respect those rights,” Brasel wrote.

For the record…

Last Friday’s Morning Memo began with a story in the Star Tribune that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI were poised to announce a joint investigation into the murder of Alex Pretti. No such announcement has been made, and yesterday Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told senators that the federal government continues to prevent state and local authorities from participating in investigations into the shootings of Pretti and Renee Good.

Happy reading

Everything you want to know — and a lot you don’t want to know — about how Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski run DHS, via WSJ.

Retribution: Mark Kelly Edition

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C., long a colorful jurist, let the exclamation points fly by ruling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the constitutional rights of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) by attempting to downgrade his rank and retirement benefits because of his participation in a video reminding troops of their duty not to follow illegal orders.

It was Jared

The controversial whistleblower complaint that DNI Tulsi Gabbard allegedly tried to bury concerns an intercepted communication between two foreign nationals who were discussing President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the WSJ and a corresponding New York Times article.

Their phone call was intercepted by a foreign intelligence service and forwarded to the National Security Agency, the New York Times reported.

“It could not be determined which country the foreign nationals were from or what they talked about regarding Kushner,” the WSJ reported, but both newspapers noted that the conversation was at least partly about Iran.

The New York Times went a little further:

The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration. At a time last year when Mr. Kushner’s role in Middle East peace talks was less public than it is today, foreign officials were recorded saying he was the person to talk to in order to influence the talks.

The intercept also included what officials described as “gossip” or speculation about Mr. Kushner that was not supported by other intelligence.

One last piece of information, via the New York Times: “Mr. Kushner’s name was redacted in the original National Security Agency report, but people who read it, including the whistleblower, were able to determine that it was a reference to him. »

Justices don’t oppose firing U.S. attorney

Federal judges in the Northern District of New York issued a rather ridiculous statement suggesting that they will not oppose Trump’s DOJ’s immediate firing of the acting U.S. Attorney they themselves had just appointed:

Retribution: Blue States Edition

U.S. District Judge Manish S. Shah in Chicago blocked the Trump administration from clawing back $600 million in public health care funds in four blue states — California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — ruling that the evidence showed his decision was “based on arbitrary, capricious or unconstitutional justifications.”

Topic of the day

Germany prepares for war

This is not a title I expected to see in my lifetime.

As President Trump abandons 80 years of American defense of Europe and Russia’s territorial ambitions go unchecked, Germany is preparing for armed conflict, the WSJ reports:

Germany’s military intelligence agency estimates that over the next three years, Russia, whose armies invade Ukraine in 2022, will have amassed enough weapons and trained enough troops to be able to start a wider war across Europe. [Germany’s top military officer] said a smaller attack could happen at any time.

Future generations cry

President Trump personally announced at the White House that he was rescinding the Environmental Protection Agency’s nearly 17-year-old scientific findings that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health. Eliminating the hazard statement – ​​the basis for federal regulation of GHG emissions – takes the United States, already an international laggard on climate change policy, back to square one.

“Reversing the threat findings has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. Indeed, if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from reinstating regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gases,” wrote climate change journalist Lisa Friedman in an article that adopts the typically sober style of the New York Times, but still manages to vibrate with barely concealed outrage.

Beating back the flames of fascism while fascists fan the flames of global warming is the double-threat apocalypse of the 21st century that I still struggle to understand.

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