Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: A federal team in El Paso that once pursued child traffickers has been disbanded. A Kansas task force focused on stemming the flow of fentanyl has been redirected. Highway checkpoints near the southwest border—some on roads long identified as major drug-trafficking routes—have gone unstaffed. The shift reflects a broader realignment in federal law enforcement. Thousands of federal agents once tasked with investigating drug smuggling, sexual exploitation and organized crime have been redirected to immigration enforcement…

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The New York Times reports: More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public. At issue are the quick-turn orders the Supreme Court has issued dictating whether Trump administration policies should be left in place while they are litigated through…

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The New York Times reports: Escalating a standoff with federal prosecutors, a judge in Washington on Thursday formally declined to accept an indictment against a man whose case he said had morphed into an “unprecedented workaround” of the normal system of justice. The highly unusual rejection came from Judge Zia M. Faruqui, a magistrate judge, who refused to accept an indictment that prosecutors secured from a local grand jury in Washington only after a federal grand jury had declined to…

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  The Oregonian reports: A nine-day-old snippet of testimony in front of Oregon lawmakers is rocketing around social media as Portland awaits word from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on President Trump’s troop deployment plans. Oregon’s top military leader offered some reassuring — or infuriating, depending on one’s political perspective — comments about the role of National Guard soldiers during a proposed federal troop deployment to Portland. Speaking before a state Senate subcommittee, Brigadier General Alan…

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