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Category: Law/Crime

Life during wartime in New Orleans as feds terrorize Latinos who saved a city

Life during wartime in New Orleans as feds terrorize Latinos who saved a city

Will Bunch writes: When the day New Orleans had feared for weeks finally came on Wednesday, it began with a lie as wide as the meandering Mississippi River. A port city somehow dubbed the Big Easy despite its centuries of big trouble woke up to a frigid blast of Arctic air and a claim from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that local immigration raids it’s named the “Catahoula Crunch” would narrowly target “criminal illegal aliens roaming free thanks to…

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Federal judge bars some warrantless immigration arrests in D.C.

Federal judge bars some warrantless immigration arrests in D.C.

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests there without a warrant unless they could show that a suspect was a flight risk. It is the latest in a series of decisions in lower courts that have challenged President Trump’s immigration tactics as he escalates his mass deportation agenda and expands his deployment of law enforcement officers to major urban centers across the country. Some of those…

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ICE recruits violent misfits ‘not ready to tie their own laces’

ICE recruits violent misfits ‘not ready to tie their own laces’

The Daily Mail reports: The Trump administration’s frantic push to hire 10,000 new deportation officers by year’s end has spiraled into what insiders describe as a national embarrassment – with lax vetting and a signing bonus of up to $50,000 luring in a wave of woefully unfit recruits. An exhaustive Daily Mail investigation has exposed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lowered standards so dramatically that the new cohort now includes recent high school graduates and applicants who can ‘barely…

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Killing shipwrecked survivors isn’t just illegal — it endangers U.S. servicemembers

Killing shipwrecked survivors isn’t just illegal — it endangers U.S. servicemembers

Mark Nevitt writes: According to recent media reports, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth verbally ordered special forces to “kill everybody” ahead of a Sept. 2 operation targeting alleged drug traffickers in international waters. That order allegedly resulted in a follow-on “double tap” strike that killed two survivors who were clinging to wreckage. I agree with Professor Jack Goldsmith that if the media reporting is accurate, this military operation is a “dishonorable strike” that is illegal under international law and the laws…

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Family of Colombian fisherman killed in U.S. boat strike files complaint alleging he was murdered

Family of Colombian fisherman killed in U.S. boat strike files complaint alleging he was murdered

ABC News reports: The family of a Colombian fisherman who died in a U.S. military boat strike in September has filed a formal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging the U.S. government illegally killed him. Alejandro Carranza was killed in a strike in the Caribbean on Sept. 15, according to the petition, filed on Tuesday. “From numerous news reports, we know that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like…

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FBI headquarters seeks ‘seditious conspiracy’ probe of Democratic lawmakers

FBI headquarters seeks ‘seditious conspiracy’ probe of Democratic lawmakers

Bloomberg Law reports: FBI headquarters is pressuring the bureau’s domestic terrorism agents to open a seditious conspiracy investigation into six Democratic lawmakers who advised military service members to defy unlawful orders, according to three people familiar with the situation. Such an investigation, which has not yet been opened, would mark a more serious step than the FBI’s voluntary inquiry that several of the Democrats derided last week and would escalate the administration’s use of law enforcement to probe the president’s…

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Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump, who has cast himself as a relentless foe of illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, freeing him from a 45-year sentence for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump’s extraordinary move undermines decades of U.S. efforts to combat transnational drug networks, potentially damages Washington’s credibility in Latin America, and signals to corrupt actors that political connections can outweigh criminal accountability. Trump signed the pardon for Hernandez on Monday…

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Trump denigrates Somali immigrants as he orders ICE to target them. Local officials push back

Trump denigrates Somali immigrants as he orders ICE to target them. Local officials push back

The New Republic reports: Donald Trump is openly threatening Minnesota’s Somali American community and making racist attacks against them. After the president’s Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump told reporters that he heard “Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars. Billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare’s like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody would say, ‘Ooh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t…

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Entire chain of command could be held liable for killing boat strike survivors, say sources

Entire chain of command could be held liable for killing boat strike survivors, say sources

The Intercept reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under increasing fire for a double-tap strike, first reported by The Intercept in early September, in which the U.S. military killed two survivors of the Trump administration’s initial boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.” Multiple military legal experts, lawmakers, and now confidential sources within the government who spoke with The…

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How Israel entrenched apartheid rule during Gaza war

How Israel entrenched apartheid rule during Gaza war

+972 reports: For over two years, Israeli public life has been shrouded in a heavy, disorienting fog. There has been an unending churn of crises, conflicts, and anxieties at home and abroad: the shock of the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal campaign of revenge on Gaza, the fight to bring back the hostages and against the state’s vilification of their families, the reckless confrontations with Iran. Together, these have left Israeli society suspended in a collective stupor,…

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‘This is murder’: Hegseth could face prosecution for alleged order to ‘kill everyone’ on boat in Caribbean

‘This is murder’: Hegseth could face prosecution for alleged order to ‘kill everyone’ on boat in Caribbean

Time reports: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could face criminal liability for a strike on a boat in the Caribbean in September, legal experts have told TIME, as lawmakers announced a rare bipartisan investigation of the incident in which 11 people were allegedly killed in two separate strikes. The September 2 strikes, among the first in the Trump Administration’s months-long bombing campaign against what it claims are drug-trafficking boats operating in the Caribbean, were carried out by SEAL Team 6 at…

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Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

Tom Phillips writes: He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine. “[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state. The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who…

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FBI is a ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — he and Bongino are focused on social media, report says

FBI is a ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — he and Bongino are focused on social media, report says

The New York Post reports: FBI Director Kash Patel is facing withering criticism from an alliance of active-duty and retired agents and analysts, days after the White House denied media reports that the president is about to fire him. A troubling new report card on the first six months of Patel’s leadership concludes he is “in over his head” and his deputy, Dan Bongino, is “something of a clown,” according to the alliance, which in two previous reports warned about…

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Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Wired and 404 Media report: Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the United States, according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company. The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people…

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Costco sues Trump administration, seeking refund of tariffs

Costco sues Trump administration, seeking refund of tariffs

NBC News reports: Costco Wholesale has sued the Trump administration, asking the Court of International Trade to consider all tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act unlawful. The company said in a filing Friday that it is seeking a “full refund” of all duties under the act paid as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order that imposed what he called “reciprocal” tariffs. “Because IEEPA does not clearly authorize the President to set tariffs … the Challenged…

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The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board

The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board

The Wall Street Journal reports: Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine. But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends….

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