Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims. The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been…

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The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from…

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Politico reports: A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished. Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even…

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The Guardian reports: Keir Starmer has suggested the US is trying to interfere in British democracy after JD Vance, the US vice-president, blamed the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration. The prime minister’s office responded after the senior Republican politician claimed in a post on X that Nowak would be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of…

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The Washington Post reports: More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group. Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window,…

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  Will Judge Williams find that Trump “Defrauded” the Court in his IRS suit and “weaponization fund” case? On a special Legal AF, J. Michael Luttig, retired federal appellate judge and one of the leaders of the 35 judges that got Judge Williams to reopen the case and determine if there has been fraud on the court, and Andres Rivero, local counsel for the judges, joins Michael Popok to brief the audience on what Judge Luttig says is the END…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The debate over how to respond to Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group to create the world’s largest advertising business came down to two people: Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson—and President Trump. Sitting in the Oval Office with Ferguson last August to discuss the deal, once considered a run-of-the-mill review left to FTC staff, Trump invited an interested party to weigh in. He dialed his friend Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who had…

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By Robert Faturechi This story was originally published by ProPublica A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son. ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,”…

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Politico reports: The Trump administration will drop its $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that was widely criticized as a payout for the president’s allies, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” said Blanche in remarks before the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Justice. Republican blowback from the announcement of the fund has stalled movement on an immigration enforcement bill in the Senate, where GOP…

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The Washington Post reports: A convicted Jan. 6 rioter who later said that he regretted his participation in the U.S. Capitol attack has been hired by the Trump administration to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations, according to four people familiar with the matter. The appointment of Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time of the riot in 2021, to a post in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office has…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump is retreating from plans for a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” after a fierce backlash from congressional Republicans, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the decision. White House officials communicated the move Monday to top Republicans on Capitol Hill, the people said. The Justice Department, which was set to administer the fund, also indicated Monday it would “abide by the Court’s ruling” to halt progress after a federal judge in Virginia on Friday temporarily…

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The New York Times reports: In late April, a lawyer for the Justice Department told a federal judge that her colleagues had been in the midst of negotiations with a Rhode Island hospital about turning over gender-transition treatment health records, only for the hospital’s lawyers to stop responding. But Judge Mary S. McElroy of Federal District Court in Rhode Island concluded that was not true. While the government claimed it had not heard from the hospital since February, emails showed…

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Paul Krugman writes: There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born. If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And…

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