Attention to the Unseen

Judge J. Michael Luttig writes: Judge Boasberg doesn’t want to assume the role of president; the president wants to assume the role of judge. At a hearing on Friday, in a further development in this showdown between the president and the judiciary, Judge Boasberg expressed skepticism about the administration’s use of a wartime statute to deport immigrants without a hearing to challenge whether they were gang members, as the government has asserted. “The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome…

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The New York Times reports: When Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations while a Columbia University student, was detained this month, the Trump administration argued he should be deported to help prevent the spread of antisemitism, invoking a rarely used law. Lawyers for Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident who is being detained in Louisiana, quickly responded that the administration was retaliating against their client for his constitutionally protected speech criticizing Israel and promoting Palestinian rights. Last week, the…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration. The memorandum directs the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies. Mr….

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The New York Times reports: Since President Trump’s first term, Brad S. Karp, the chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, championed himself as a bulwark against what he saw as an unlawful and unpredictable presidency. Mr. Karp, who has a long history of fund-raising for Democrats, sought to unite major law firms in “a call to arms” to fight Mr. Trump in court on issues like his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their…

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Stephen I. Vladeck writes: For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground. Much of the unlawfully frozen federal money is still frozen; many of the unlawfully fired federal workers are still out of work. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested March 8 in New York on exceptionally tenuous legal grounds, remains in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. The…

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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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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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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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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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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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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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