Attention to the Unseen

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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The New York Times reports: Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were allowed into the country under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Now, the administration is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and…

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CBS News reports: An immigration judge in Louisiana on Friday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its effort to deport Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, upholding one of the deportation grounds cited by the government. Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ruled that the administration’s determination that Khalil poses “adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S. is “facially reasonable” and makes Khalil deportable. The judge gave Khalil’s lawyers until April 23 to file applications for relief to stop…

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The Associated Press reports: Facing a deadline from an immigration judge to turn over evidence for its attempted deportation of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, the federal government has instead submitted a brief memo, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, citing the Trump administration’s authority to expel noncitizens whose presence in the country damages U.S. foreign policy interests. The two-page memo, which was obtained by The Associated Press, does not allege any criminal conduct by Khalil, a legal permanent…

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The Associated Press reports: An immigration judge in Louisiana said she would terminate the case against Mahmoud Khalil if the government does not provide evidence this week justifying their attempted deportation of the Columbia University student activist. At a hearing Tuesday in Louisiana, Judge Jamee Comans gave the government 24 hours to provide evidence showing that Khalil, a 30-year-old legal permanent resident, should be expelled from the country for his role in campus protests against Israel and the war in…

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  60 Minutes reports: Three weeks ago, 238 Venezuelan migrants were flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. That country’s president offered to take them and the Trump administration used a law not invoked since World War II to send them — claiming they are all terrorists and violent gang members. The government has released very little information about the men. But through internal government documents, we have obtained a list of their identities and found…

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The Associated Press reports: The U.S. government’s decision to arrest a Maryland man and send him to a notorious prison in El Salvador appears to be “wholly lawless,” a federal judge wrote Sunday in a legal opinion explaining why she had ordered the Trump administration to bring him back to the United States. There is little to no evidence to support a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once in the MS-13 street gang, U.S. District Judge Paula…

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The New Republic reports: Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student brazenly abducted by masked immigration agents on a public street in Massachusetts, is suffering serious health issues in Homeland Security custody. Representative Ayanna Pressley, whose district includes the university, posted on Bluesky Thursday night that Öztürk has had three separate asthma attacks in custody while being denied access to her required medications, “a violation of her fundamental right to medical care.” “This is cruelty, it is neglect, and it is…

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Adam Serwer writes: One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have. Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to…

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Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Trump administration inadvertently revealed on Monday that it is attempting to trap Venezuelan migrants in a catch-22 that would effectively block them from challenging their deportation and detention in an El Salvador prison. In a court filing, the government acknowledged that it had deported at least one migrant to El Salvador due to an “administrative error”—but argued that the individual had no right to contest his imprisonment because he is in the custody of a “foreign sovereign.” This…

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