Attention to the Unseen

Wired reports: The Department of Homeland Security is urging local police to consider a wide range of protest activity as violent tactics, including mundane acts like riding a bike or livestreaming a police encounter, WIRED has learned. Threat bulletins issued during last month’s “No Kings” protests warn that the US government’s aggressive immigration raids are almost certain to accelerate domestic unrest, with DHS saying there’s a “high likeliness” more Americans will soon turn against the agency, which could trigger confrontations…

Read More Read More

Wired reports: The United States Department of Justice this week released nearly 11 hours of what it described as “full raw” surveillance footage from a camera positioned near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The release was intended to address conspiracy theories about Epstein’s apparent suicide in federal custody. But instead of putting those suspicions to rest, it may fuel them further. Metadata embedded in the video and analyzed by WIRED and independent video forensics…

Read More Read More

Ruth Marcus writes: In the early days of the first Trump Administration, Erez Reuveni, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, went to court to defend the new President’s travel ban on foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He told the federal judge hearing the case to ignore the unpleasant fact that, as a candidate, Donald Trump had argued for a travel ban on Muslims; those statements, he said, didn’t justify interfering with Trump’s authority to take actions that…

Read More Read More

New American citizens recite the Oath of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony in Miami on Aug. 17, 2018. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee By Cassandra Burke Robertson, Case Western Reserve University and Irina D. Manta, Hofstra University The Trump administration wants to take away citizenship from naturalized Americans on a massive scale. While a recent Justice Department memo prioritizes national security cases, it directs the department to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”…

Read More Read More

Paul Rosenzweig writes: In the American system, courts don’t make law; they interpret it. The act of interpreting the law requires, well, interpretation—not mere pronouncement, but an explanation for that pronouncement, backed up by law, evidence, and logic. That’s why the Supreme Court’s failure to offer any sort of reasoning to justify its order in Department of Homeland Security v. D. V. D is a threat to the rule of law, a reward for defiance, and a horrific example of…

Read More Read More

  Anand Giridharadas: If you look at figures on the Supreme Court, who I’m sure at least at one point you’ve had respect for — maybe you still have respect for them — who now say things like, hold things like, Donald Trump can do whatever he wants as president and there can never be consequence, I wonder which of those situations you think they are more likely to be in: Do you think they’re essentially scared? Do you think…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration can move forward with plans to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies, the Supreme Court announced on Tuesday. The decision could result in job losses for tens of thousands of employees at agencies including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury. The order, which lifted a lower court’s ruling that had blocked mass layoffs, was unsigned and did not include a vote count. That is typical…

Read More Read More

Garrett Graff writes: No healthy law enforcement agency can grow quickly. And ICE is far from a healthy law enforcement agency. ICE’s annual budget is about $10 billion a year, and the new legislation is about to hand it about nearly untold billions more — including $30 billion for hiring staff and conducting deportations and $45 billion for detention operations, as well as about $46 billion for border security construction, which could include the border wall and more detention facilities….

Read More Read More

Politico reports: A trial on a First Amendment lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s drive to deport pro-Palestinian academics quickly confronted a thorny legal issue Monday: whether foreigners in the U.S. enjoy the same free speech rights as American citizens. The administration’s stance on that critical question proved murky. Under questioning by U.S. District Judge William Young in his Boston courtroom, Justice Department attorney Victoria Santora initially said non-citizens have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. “People in the United…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: At least five times in recent weeks, federal judges have forcefully rejected President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport pro-Palestinian student activists, issuing one stinging ruling after another to declare the efforts unconstitutional — with one judge comparing the deportation drive to the Red Scare. The five foreign-born academics, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, Rumeysa Ozturk and Badar Khan Suri, were all targeted by the Trump administration after Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared their presence in the…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Attorney General Pam Bondi told tech companies that they could lawfully violate a statute barring American companies from supporting TikTok based on a sweeping claim that President Trump has the constitutional power to set aside laws, newly disclosed documents show. In letters to companies like Apple and Google, Ms. Bondi wrote that Mr. Trump had decided that shutting down TikTok would interfere with his “constitutional duties,” so the law banning the social media app must…

Read More Read More