When I saw a headline this morning saying that a judge had blocked ICE from re-detaining Abrego Garcia, I thought I was seeing something left over from yesterday. But no, this happened very early this morning. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia to be released yesterday. And he was. But then ICE directed him to report to its Baltimore office at 8 am this morning. Fearing that ICE planned to re-detain him, his lawyer went to Judge Xinis and got a restraining order against ICE. And, it turns out that ICE really did intend to re-detain the poor guy. Get this:
The basis of Xinis’ order to release Abrego Garcia was that ICE had never issued an order of removal against him — itself an extraordinary development because his wrongful deportation in March to El Salvador and his subsequent detention since he was returned to the United States were entirely predicated on the supposed issuance of an order of removal in 2019.
After Xinis ruled Thursday morning that no such order of removal existed, Philip P. Taylor, the acting regional deputy chief immigration judge in Baltimore, rushed out a new order around 7 p.m. ET that purported to fix the “scrivener’s error” in ICE’s records on Abrego Garcia and retroactively create an order of removal. Taylor’s order was comically subtitled: “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error.”
Taylor’s sudden intervention is procedurally flawed in myriad ways, but that didn’t stop him from purporting to make a number of “corrections” to the record in Abrego Garcia’s 2019 case, waving it all away with a breezy: “These corrections are hereby issued nunc pro tunc to the Immigration Court’s written decision and order of October 10, 2019.”
Judge Xinis was not impressed. Seriously, read the whole thing. But this comes back to why are they so obsessed with this one man? If ICE had just retrieved him from detention when it was first ordered to, most of us would have moved on to more recent atrocities. It appears ICE — and the Trump Administration — simply cannot admit it made a mistake to arrest him in the first place. This is pathological.
Along these lines, see Greg Sargent at The New Republic. Black and Latino voters are shifting hard against Trump, Sargent writes, because they are turned off by his naked bigotry. Sargent is talking to William Saletan, who has a piece at The Bulwark documenting the uglier things Trump has said about immigrants in recent days. This is worth checking out. But for now I want to point to this one bit —
Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.
And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that.
I’ve been thinking this all along, that Miller and Trump both assumed that they could treat immigrants — and people who look to them like immigrants — like disposable garbage, and most (white, I presume) Americans would approve. I’m sure the hard-core MAGAts approve, but most Americans of all ethnicities and races do not. And I don’t think Trump and his people are yet admitting that the tough guy act is hurting them politically. The Trump/Miller immigration policy is nothing but a reflection of Trump’s and Miller’s sick, ignorant bigotries. They can’t even seem to have processed that they are losing the Latino voters that were critical to Trump’s win in 2024. A year ago people were talking about a permanent realignment of Latinos with the Republican party, but that’s already gone.
I have to mention Rep Seth Magaziner’s (D-Rhode Island) skewering of Kristi Noem in a House hearing yesterday. It was glorious.I understand Noem finally got so rattled she excused herself to go to another meeting that had already been cancelled.
Filed under — “more news that will have Trump posting all night in ALL CAPS” — the National Trust has sued to stop Trump’s ballroom construction. About time.
The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.
In other headline news, I see that House Democrats have released a bunch of photos showing Trump and a lot of other famous people — including Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, Alan Dershowitz, the former Prince Andrew, etc. etc., with Epstein. I don’t know that any of it is incriminating.
If anything else significant happens today, I’ll tack it on to this.
Update: I forgot to mention that Trump seems to be even more confused than before about the state-federal thing. Yesterday he pardoned Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of election interference. The problem with that is that Peters was convicted by the state of Colorado, not a federal court, so Trump has no authority to pardon her. He also issued an executive order to stop states from regulating AI. And states are fully within their rights to ignore his executive order.
Also, too, this afternoon the Department of Justice announced actions against people they think “stole” the 2020 election from Donald Trump. See DOJ sues Georgia county as Trump pushes debunked 2020 election fraud claims
This brings up something William Saletan said in the Greg Sargent piece linked above.
I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?
So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.
And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.
It’s hard to know with Trump. He may genuinely believe he rightfully won in 2020. Or, on some fuzzy, subconscious level he may know that Joe Biden got more votes, but he thinks he was entitled to those votes and if he just throws a big enough tantrum the votes will be given to him. And he’s not going to give up as long as he’s breathing.
It may be hard to know with Trump, most of the time, because he'll state a lie, expecting you to agree, and you don't know if he believes the lie or not. In the case of 2020, he knew he lost.
Remember, first, he announced they won (as Giuliani suggested). Then he tried to stop counting in states where he was ahead, and demand continued counting in states where he was behind. So he knows he created a lie.
If you were to respond, "yeah, but random guy, he's repeated it so often, and heard it repeated back so often… do you think he's forgotten he created the lie?" well, then I'd be forced to admit, maybe… maybe.
Still, he had a deliberate strategy of insisting he won, whether he did or not, and he had a plot to have fake electors swear out certificates, etc.. He knew he lost, fair and square, at one point.
I thought you hit on something when you quoted and pondered – Trump and Miller may be convinced that 'real' Americans are as racist as they are, but have had to hide and suppress it. They haven't processed that MOST Americans do not live in fear of people with dark skin. My kids went to integrated schools. My daughter, graduating from college, is still friends with her 'best friend' from kindergarten, a black Muslim girl. Our neighbor across the back yard is a Jewish woman who doted on Kathy for many years. Other friends and neighbors are Hispanic – this is IMO closer to the rule than the exception. I admit the number of bigots in the US seems to be much higher than I expected, but the percentage of white folks who embrace racial and religious bigotry is MUCH higher. The military, in particular, has integrated more completely than any other random group in the US.
Trump and Miller can't process this fact because their worldview demands that most white people feel entitled and will kill to protect their status. They also think that everybody who is being exploited and discriminated against dreams of being on top so they can exact revenge. It's my opinion, but these people who have been victimized have a refined sense of justice (mostly), and aren't out to create reverse discrimination.
IMO, Team Trump expected violent opposition, riots, by minorities. And they expected it to be disorganized, hit and run, with looting. Instead, the protests have been huge peaceful, and mostly white. A disproportionate number are seniors. but that's an observation from Florida and may not be nationwide. This undermines the need for martial law, which they need if/when/since the popular support is collapsing.
"My" judge in DC is frustrating the DOJ by adhering to the law on the Comey case they want to resurrect. But a lot of what the DOJ wants to introduce as evidence wasn't collected legally and they're trying to dance around the improprieties. See Emptywheel for the details.
"It’s hard to know with Trump. He may genuinely believe he rightfully won in 2020"
The only thing diaper don knows is that he cannot accept failure, though his life has been full of failure he was trained by his mentor Roy Cohn to never accept defeat, never admit your wrong, always stay on the offensive. So it doesn't matter what he believes or what he says he always has the same knee jerk reaction. It really shows a stunning level of robot-like ignorance that no matter the details every situation is treated the same, I'm right, your wrong, I won and everyone else is a loser!
O.T. Two US soldiers were killed in an ambush attack in Syria. Stump announced on his way to marine one that the US will retaliate, then he turned and scampered off to his very important event today, a college football game!
As for the Syria thing and the Grump of the Year's vow of retaliation… didn't Grumpy recently have a face to face with the new Syrian president? And I don't think he told the new Syrian president that the US would shortly be declaring war on Syria.
I don't recall if the murderer was killed during the incident, but if not, then it seems like the place that has jurisdiction to deal with the murderer is Syria.
If a Chinese diplomat is murdered in Washing D.C. by a whackjob citizen, does China then have the right to retaliate by murdering a US diplomat in some other country on the planet? I think not. But the world has gotten crazy of late.