Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: An immigration judge has found there were no grounds to deport a Turkish graduate student whose arrest by masked agents last year was an early salvo in the Trump Administration’s crackdown on migrants. The decision by the judge, Roopal Patel, came last month and was disclosed in federal court by lawyers for the student, Rumeysa Ozturk, this week. It effectively means that the government has no legal justification to deport Ms. Ozturk, a graduate student…

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Fintan O’Toole writes: Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion…

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The Irish Times reports: For five days, [Seamus] Culleton was held in a small cell overflowing with other detainees, then flown to a Buffalo, New York, Ice facility. In Buffalo he was interviewed by an Ice agent, who asked if he would sign a form agreeing to his deportation. Culleton said he refused, and instead ticked a box where detainees can state they wish to contest their arrest. He wrote down that his grounds for contesting were that he was…

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CBS News reports: Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations…

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Eric Levitz writes: Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections. And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting…

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Politico reports: A federal appeals court Friday night backed the Trump administration’s policy to lock up the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport without offering a chance for bond, even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades. A divided three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the administration’s view — a reversal of every administration’s position for the last 30 years — is the correct interpretation…

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Politico reports: Across the Atlantic, heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations. In Norway, one prominent diplomat has already been suspended and a police investigation has been opened into a former prime minister. In the U.K., the former ambassador to the U.S. has been fired; on Tuesday, he resigned from the House of Lords. Police are reviewing reports he shared market-sensitive information with Epstein. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, was stripped of his royal titles and residence….

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The New York Times reports: Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force. The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating…

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The Guardian reports: Last spring, the National Security Agency (NSA) detected evidence of an unusual phone call between an individual associated with foreign intelligence and a person close to Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower’s attorney briefed on the existence of the call. The highly sensitive communique, which has roiled Washington over the past week, was brought to the attention of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard – but rather than allowing NSA officials to distribute the information…

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Democracy Docket reports: A federal judge in Oregon issued a sweeping rebuke of the Justice Department’s nationwide push to seize state voter rolls, ruling that the department can no longer be presumed to be acting in good faith and warning that its conduct threatens voters and states’ rights. And the judge cited a recent letter sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi linking the voter roll crusade to the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota as one reason…

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Chicago Sun-Times reports: Federal prosecutors say the public release of text messages sent by the Border Patrol agent who shot Chicago’s Marimar Martinez last fall could only serve one purpose: to “sully” his reputation. But the Trump administration has shown “zero concern about the sullying of Ms. Martinez’s reputation,” a federal judge pointed out Friday. That’s partly why U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis said Martinez will be allowed to share the text messages with the public — as long as…

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The Guardian reports: It was the one scandal that Donald Trump seemed unable to shake. No matter his best efforts to convince his supporter base that there was nothing to see here, the demands for the administration to release every document it had on the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only grew. Yet even after the most shocking revelations in the latest drop about Trump’s inner circle – involving everyone from Elon Musk to the Maga honcho Steve Bannon to…

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By Andy Mannix, Melissa Sanchez and Nicole Foy This story was originally published by ProPublica Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting? “Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage. Chief Mike Witz shook his head….

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