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Category: Law/Crime

Immigrants prove they are alive, forcing Social Security to undo death label

Immigrants prove they are alive, forcing Social Security to undo death label

The Washington Post reports: Immigrants falsely labeled dead by the Social Security Administration are showing up at field offices with documents proving they are alive, leading staff to reinstate nearly three dozen people over the past week, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. The immigrants who have requested a reversal and been reinstated in Social Security databases include a Haitian asylum seeker and a child, the records show. Some immigrants have shown up with driver’s licenses and work…

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Court says White House, if it values the rule of law, must play more active role in freeing Abrego Garcia

Court says White House, if it values the rule of law, must play more active role in freeing Abrego Garcia

The New York Times reports: A federal appeals court in Virginia reaffirmed on Thursday that the White House needed to play a more active role in seeking the release of a Maryland man who was deported last month to a prison in El Salvador, despite a court order expressly forbidding that he be sent there. In a sternly worded ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit expressed exasperation at the Trump administration’s continued…

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Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

  Norman Ornstein: “Every student of history — of the history of the growth of tyranny — said over and over again: you need immediate resistance. And the strongest resistance from every entity in the society — from the business community, from the education community, the intellectual community, the scientific community, the press community, the elected officials — have to resist. And if you don’t do it right from the start, they will gobble up more territory until it’s too…

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Trump’s D.C. U.S. attorney pick, Ed Martin, appeared on Russian state media over 150 times

Trump’s D.C. U.S. attorney pick, Ed Martin, appeared on Russian state media over 150 times

The Washington Post reports: Hours before President Donald Trump announced U.S. missile strikes on Syria in response to a chemical attack that killed 90 civilians in April 2017, Ed Martin said on the Russian state television network RT America that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might not be to blame. Instead, Martin told viewers, the situation was “engineered” in Washington “by the people that want war in Syria.” In early 2022, Martin told an interviewer on the same arm of RT’s…

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Tesla accused of hacking odometers to rip off customers

Tesla accused of hacking odometers to rip off customers

Futurism reports: Tesla has been accused of manipulating the odometers in its cars to avoid repair responsibilities and warranty agreements. As The Street reports, a class-action lawsuit filed in February claims that Tesla has been trying to dodge warranty-related obligations by intentionally overstating the distances its vehicles travel. The plaintiff, a man in California who bought a used 2020 Model Y with 36,772 miles, noticed an “abnormal spike in average daily miles driven” — despite a “consistent driving routine” —…

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The flimsy basis of Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13

The flimsy basis of Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13

Roger Parloff reports: In multiple filings, the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to a notorious prison for terrorists in El Salvador on March 15. On April 7, accordingly, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered—with no recorded dissents—that the government “facilitate” his return. But rather than try to right its wrong, the Trump administration has, for weeks, been resisting bringing him back and downplaying the gravity of its error. Both strategies have hinged on the administration’s dubious…

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Trump claims Abrego Garcia’s fate is outside his control. The case of Muneer Subaihani proves otherwise

Trump claims Abrego Garcia’s fate is outside his control. The case of Muneer Subaihani proves otherwise

The New York Times reports: In August 2018, during President Trump’s first term, an Iraqi immigrant named Muneer Subaihani went missing. A refugee who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, Mr. Subaihani was among hundreds of Iraqis who had been protected from deportation under a federal court order. His lawyers figured he was still in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he had been placed after he was swept up in an ICE…

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This is a constitutional crisis

This is a constitutional crisis

Adam Serwer writes: Like most of the men rendered to CECOT, Abrego Garcia has fewer criminal convictions than the current president of the United States. Even the Trump administration acknowledged in federal court that it had deported Abrego Garcia “in error.” This morning, however, Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller claimed on Fox News that the acknowledgment that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported had been made by a “saboteur” in the Department of Justice and that “he was not mistakenly sent to…

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Military contractors pitch unprecedented prison plan for detained immigrants

Military contractors pitch unprecedented prison plan for detained immigrants

Politico reports: Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and a team of defense contractors are pitching the White House on a plan to vastly expand deportations to El Salvador — transporting thousands of immigrants from U.S. holding facilities to a sprawling maximum security prison in Central America. The proposal, exclusively obtained by POLITICO, says it would target “criminal illegal aliens” and would attempt to avoid legal challenges by designating part of the prison — which has drawn accusations of violence and…

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American rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s journey from Ph.D. scholar to Trump target languishing in Louisiana cell

American rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s journey from Ph.D. scholar to Trump target languishing in Louisiana cell

By Hannah Allam This story was originally published by ProPublica With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined. Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the…

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No evidence linking Tufts student, Rümeysa Öztürk, to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. found

No evidence linking Tufts student, Rümeysa Öztürk, to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. found

The Washington Post reports: Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged. The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for…

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Cornell sues DOE for ‘unlawful’ cuts to indirect costs for research grants

Cornell sues DOE for ‘unlawful’ cuts to indirect costs for research grants

The Cornell Daily Sun reports: The University joined litigation against the U.S. Department of Energy and DOE Secretary Chris Wright, according to a Monday email from President Michael Kotlikoff and Provost Kavita Bala. The plaintiffs of the case are alleging that proposed immediate cuts to indirect costs for University research grants are unlawful by violating federal regulations. This is the second time this semester that the University has had to take “the unprecedented step of seeking emergency judicial intervention after…

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Trump admin remains silent on whether it is attempting to facilitate return of wrongly deported man

Trump admin remains silent on whether it is attempting to facilitate return of wrongly deported man

Politico reports: The Trump administration confirmed Saturday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man illegally deported to El Salvador, is alive but confined in a notorious anti-terrorism prison under the control of the Salvadoran government. “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador,” Michael Kozak, a top State Department official, said in a two-page, written declaration submitted to a judge under penalty of perjury. Kozak’s submission came shortly…

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Team Trump is gaming out how to send American citizens to prison in El Salvador

Team Trump is gaming out how to send American citizens to prison in El Salvador

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump and his White House have moved to deport green-card holders for espousing pro-Palestinian views, shipped hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison without due process (in defiance of a judge’s order), and are now publicly musing about sending United States citizens to prison in El Salvador. Trump said last weekend he would “love” to send American criminals there — and would even be “honored” to, depending on “what the law says.” White House Press…

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EFF: Cybersecurity community must not remain silent on executive order targeting Chris Krebs

EFF: Cybersecurity community must not remain silent on executive order targeting Chris Krebs

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Cybersecurity professionals and the infosec community have essential roles to play in protecting our democracy, securing our elections, and building, testing, and safeguarding government infrastructure. It is critically important for us to speak up to ensure that essential work continues and that those engaged in these good faith efforts are not maligned by an administration that has tried to make examples of its enemies in many other fields. President Trump has targeted the former Director of the…

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Will Trump defy the Supreme Court?

Will Trump defy the Supreme Court?

Adam Serwer writes: America has reached a very dangerous moment, as the Supreme Court’s indulgence of President Donald Trump’s belief in his own untrammeled authority collides with the justices’ expectation that he will abide by their decisions. This evening, the Supreme Court upheld part of a lower-court decision ordering the Trump administration to seek to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom—as The Atlantic first reported—the administration has acknowledged it mistakenly dispatched to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or…

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