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Category: Law/Crime

Trump executive order targeting Jenner law firm ruled as unconstitutional

Trump executive order targeting Jenner law firm ruled as unconstitutional

NBC reports: President Donald Trump’s executive order against the Jenner & Block law firm is unlawful because it violates the First Amendment, a judge ruled late Friday. U.S. District Judge John Bates said going after law firms the way Trump has “is doubly violative of the Constitution” because it targets Jenner & Block due to the causes the firm champions, the clients they represent, and a lawyer they once employed. “This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation…

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Fear on campus: Harvard’s international students in ‘mass panic’ over Trump move

Fear on campus: Harvard’s international students in ‘mass panic’ over Trump move

The Guardian reports: Harvard’s foreign students described an atmosphere of “fear on campus” following an attempt by the Trump administration to ban international scholars at the oldest university in the US. On lush, grassy quads filled with tents and chairs ready for end of year graduation celebrations, international students said there was “mass panic” after Thursday’s shock announcement by the Department of Homeland Security. The move triggered cancelled flights home for the summer, scrambles for housing to stay in the…

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Federal judge blocks Trump regime from revoking international students’ legal status

Federal judge blocks Trump regime from revoking international students’ legal status

NBC News reports: A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S. In the injunction, District Judge Jeffrey S. White in Oakland also prohibited the administration from arresting or detaining any foreign-born students on the basis of their immigration status while a case challenging previous terminations moves through the courts. In his decision, White said that the Trump administration has “wreaked havoc” on the lives of…

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Judge dismisses charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while reprimanding federal prosecutors

Judge dismisses charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while reprimanding federal prosecutors

New Jersey Globe reports: A federal judge on Wednesday scolded federal prosecutors and announced he will dismiss trespassing charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka related to a standoff at a migrant detention center. Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba announced earlier this week she would drop charges against Baraka (but at the same time announced new charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver stemming from a scuffle during Baraka’s arrest). Federal magistrate judge Andre Espinosa reprimanded the federal prosecutors for…

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Judge finds U.S. violated court order with sudden deportation flight to Africa

Judge finds U.S. violated court order with sudden deportation flight to Africa

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object. The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately…

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Trump administration asks Supreme Court to shield DOGE from Freedom of Information Act

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to shield DOGE from Freedom of Information Act

Politico reports: The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block an effort to open the inner workings of the secretive DOGE cost-cutting effort to public scrutiny. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk….

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Federal judge orders Trump administration to restore environmental grant funding

Federal judge orders Trump administration to restore environmental grant funding

Inside Climate News reports: A federal judge said Monday he would order the Trump administration to restore $176 million granted by Congress to 13 nonprofit groups and six municipalities nationwide. The decision by Judge Richard Gergel, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of South Carolina, represents one of the first final judgments in a case challenging the Trump administration, as it has fired employees, frozen funding and dismantled agencies, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center. The organization,…

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Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

The Washington Post reports: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found. Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime….

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Trump Justice Dept. considers removing key check on lawmaker prosecutions

Trump Justice Dept. considers removing key check on lawmaker prosecutions

The Washington Post reports: Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week. Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that…

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Trump sees the Constitution as an obstacle to be surmounted

Trump sees the Constitution as an obstacle to be surmounted

Richard Primus writes: President Donald Trump is cagey about whether he might try to stay in office after his current term expires. He frequently says that other people want him to do it, and the Trump Organization is selling Trump 2028 hats. In March, he said that he is “not joking” when he refers to a possible third term. More recently, he said that a third term is “something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to…

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Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

NBC News reports: The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News. The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said. In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions…

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The American legal system may never recover from this

The American legal system may never recover from this

Stephen I. Vladeck writes: It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging President Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship is a powerful example of how such technicalities can sometimes be even more important than the substantive legal question the justices are purportedly answering. The Trump administration is asking the justices, in effect, to let the president’s…

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Trump’s sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work

Trump’s sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work

The Associated Press reports: The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen. The Hague-based court’s American staffers have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest. Some nongovernmental organizations have stopped working with the ICC and the leaders of one won’t even reply to emails from court officials. Those are just some of the hurdles facing court staff since U.S. President Donald Trump in February…

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Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

J. Michael Luttig writes: The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law,…

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The ‘cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community’

The ‘cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community’

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration announced criminal smuggling charges on Wednesday against Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist who was detained three months ago after failing to declare scientific samples she was carrying in her luggage. In a hearing in federal district court earlier in the day, a government lawyer told a federal judge that the Trump administration intends to deport Ms. Petrova back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will…

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By trying to take control of the Library of Congress, Trump is attacking Congress itself

By trying to take control of the Library of Congress, Trump is attacking Congress itself

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings. While the takeover has been framed as part of Trump’s broader purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, it is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the…

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