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Category: Law

Trump says he didn’t sign proclamation invoking Alien Enemies Act

Trump says he didn’t sign proclamation invoking Alien Enemies Act

CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move. “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening. The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court…

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Stephen Miller is pursuing a strategy that bedevils his opponents and could provoke a constitutional crisis

Stephen Miller is pursuing a strategy that bedevils his opponents and could provoke a constitutional crisis

Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire writes: During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker. LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry. No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff,…

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Tesla accounting raises red flags as report shows $1.4 billion missing

Tesla accounting raises red flags as report shows $1.4 billion missing

electrek reports: Tesla’s (TSLA) accounting practices are raising red flags as a new report from the Financial Times shows that $1.4 billion is missing. Many Tesla shorts and detractors have questioned Tesla’s accounting for years, but they have never gained much traction – until now. Today, the Financial Times has released a new report pointing to a $1.4 billion gap in assets: Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that…

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Trump’s defiance of courts is worse than in other authoritarian states such as Hungary

Trump’s defiance of courts is worse than in other authoritarian states such as Hungary

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.” “We look at these comparative cases…

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Acting head threatens to shut down Social Security Administration after court ruling

Acting head threatens to shut down Social Security Administration after court ruling

The Washington Post reports: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek said Friday that he is consulting with agency lawyers and the Justice Department as he threatens to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive taxpayer data. Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a two-week temporary restraining order Thursday that prohibits Social Security officials from sharing personally identifiable information with Musk’s U.S….

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Venezuelan migrant deportations based on conjecture instead of hard evidence

Venezuelan migrant deportations based on conjecture instead of hard evidence

Slate reports: After the Trump administration rounded up hundreds of Venezuelan migrants around the country—without notice or court hearings—and sent them off to a prison in El Salvador, we’re finally getting details on who was deported and why. And the more we learn, the more obvious it becomes why the government is so eager to expel these individuals without any semblance of due process. It claims that these men are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren…

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After Roberts’ rebuke, Trump responds with weasel words

After Roberts’ rebuke, Trump responds with weasel words

USA Today reports: The growing clash between President Donald Trump and the judiciary took a major turn Tuesday as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked Trump’s call for the impeachment of a federal judge. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a rare public statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Trump’s call for impeachment escalated his increasing…

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Top IRS lawyer warned that Trump firings, based on false statements, were a ‘fraud’ on the courts

Top IRS lawyer warned that Trump firings, based on false statements, were a ‘fraud’ on the courts

By Andy Kroll This story was originally published by ProPublica On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance. Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned…

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Arrest of immigrant-rights advocate is a ‘Putin-style persecution of political dissidents’

Arrest of immigrant-rights advocate is a ‘Putin-style persecution of political dissidents’

The New York Times reports: An undocumented woman in Denver who became a symbol of immigrant resistance during President Trump’s first term as she evaded deportation was arrested at work on Monday by federal immigration agents, her family and immigrant activists said. Jeanette Vizguerra, 53, had been on her break at a Target store near Denver when immigration agents took her into custody, said Jordan Garcia, an immigrant-rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee who has known Ms. Vizguerra…

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I’m the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

I’m the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

Jasmine Mooney writes: I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it. Hours passed, with many confused opinions about my case. The officer I spoke to was kind but told me that, due to my previous issues, I needed to apply for my visa through the consulate. I told her I hadn’t been aware I needed to apply that…

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U.S. Institute of Peace sues to stop DOGE ‘takeover by force’

U.S. Institute of Peace sues to stop DOGE ‘takeover by force’

Democracy Docket reports: An independent nonprofit created by Congress to promote peace efforts around the world filed a lawsuit late Tuesday to block an aggressive takeover by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) board members, including former U.S. ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, asked the D.C. District Court to stop DOGE from “completing the unlawful dismantling of the Institute and irreparably impairing Plaintiffs’ ability to perform their vital peace promotion and conflict resolution…

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Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

The Guardian reports: A jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago. Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had sued Greenpeace, alleging defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, claiming the organization…

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‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefs

‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefs

The Guardian reports: In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs. “I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and…

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Why GOP efforts to impeach federal judges will fail

Why GOP efforts to impeach federal judges will fail

NBC News reports: Donald Trump’s allies have been calling for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg after he blocked the deportation of migrants under the Alien Enemies Act. On Tuesday, the push to get rid of Boasberg became more serious when the president himself weighed in and agreed. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump posted on social media. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a rare…

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DOGE rampage may have ‘immediate,’ ‘long-term’ effects for courts, judicial branch warns

DOGE rampage may have ‘immediate,’ ‘long-term’ effects for courts, judicial branch warns

TPM reports: The federal court system warned its employees that DOGE’s cuts to building services and to executive branch staff could cause “immediate and long-term effects on court operations,” according to a Monday memo obtained by TPM . The letter focused on cuts to staff at the General Services Administration, the agency that manages buildings and maintenance across the federal government, and to the contracts maintained by that agency. GSA’s portfolio includes multiple federal court buildings, as well as services…

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Is this the start of true constitutional crisis?

Is this the start of true constitutional crisis?

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States. The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where…

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