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Category: Law/Crime

DHS made a big claim about noncitizen voting. Now it can’t prove it

DHS made a big claim about noncitizen voting. Now it can’t prove it

The New York Times reports: A month after the Trump administration declared without evidence that thousands of noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Nevada, officials with the Department of Homeland Security were unable to substantiate the claim. The administration claimed to have identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada. But during a meeting last week with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials said they had identified just 185 potential…

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DOJ appears to have hired lawyer convicted of hacking election sites to check ‘integrity’

DOJ appears to have hired lawyer convicted of hacking election sites to check ‘integrity’

Democracy Docket reports: A Florida lawyer who pleaded guilty after illegally accessing government election websites appears to have joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) — and taken part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota. The apparent hiring of David Michael Levin would be among the most troubling example yet of the department’s Civil Rights Division bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section — who have taken extreme steps to undermine…

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Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

The Hill reports: The top lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing an ethics complaint with the Florida Bar after he launched a “Worst of the Worst” list for federal jurists, attacking their rulings. James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, has in recent weeks taken to social media to criticize judges who have made unfavorable rulings on the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The complaint, filed Wednesday by a group of nearly 130 former federal and state…

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Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Wired reports: Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often…

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American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

Greg Sargent writes: It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary…

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Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday. The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into…

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Israel’s security minister Ben-Gvir advocates killing ‘30 to 40’ people in Gaza nightly

Israel’s security minister Ben-Gvir advocates killing ‘30 to 40’ people in Gaza nightly

The Associated Press reports: An extremist Israeli lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition publicly advocated for killing “30 to 40” people in Gaza each night, comments that surfaced Sunday and were quickly shared by Palestinian media. Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made the statement while speaking to a former Gaza-held hostage, Rom Braslavski, on Braslavski’s podcast. The two were discussing Israel’s recovery from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when Ben-Gvir criticized Israel’s recent drawdown of strikes…

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Liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling the Supreme Court

Liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling the Supreme Court

The Washington Post reports: One bill proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 13. Another would cut their lifetime terms to 18 years. Others would create an enforceable ethics code and place standards on how the court rules from its relatively opaque “shadow docket.” The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn….

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Trump-appointed regulator OKs banking license for Trump-linked crypto firm

Trump-appointed regulator OKs banking license for Trump-linked crypto firm

Politico reports: The Trump administration has granted preliminary approval for a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump’s family to operate a federally chartered trust bank, over the protests of Democrats who decried the decision as riddled with conflicts of interest. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank regulatory arm of the Treasury Department, said in a letter on Friday that it was conditionally approving World Liberty Trust Co.’s application for a trust bank charter. The company…

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How Trump’s unprecedented effort to prosecute noncitizen voters fell apart

How Trump’s unprecedented effort to prosecute noncitizen voters fell apart

By Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales and Andy Mannix This story was originally published by ProPublica It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency,…

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DHS extensively spied on anti-ICE protesters and leftwing groups, records reveal

DHS extensively spied on anti-ICE protesters and leftwing groups, records reveal

The Guardian reports: Newly disclosed records reveal the US government extensively spied on prominent leftwing organizations and on protesters as part of a vast operation into groups opposing the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year. Internal investigative reports show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent undercover agents to community meetings in the Twin Cities and New York, infiltrated Signal chats and obtained financial records of mainstream unions and left-leaning nonprofit groups. Nearly 30 internal law enforcement reports were…

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U.S. Ambassador Huckabee calls settler siege of Palestinian homes a ‘horrific act of terror’

U.S. Ambassador Huckabee calls settler siege of Palestinian homes a ‘horrific act of terror’

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. Ambassador to Israel condemned the actions of Jewish settlers who are besieging the home of an American Palestinian family in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the siege a “horrific act of terror.” Since Sunday, according to local officials and family members, settlers have gathered near the home in the village of Qusra and harassed those inside, defying efforts by the Israeli military to defuse the situation. A group that has…

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Deported to a country he’d never heard of. He may never go free

Deported to a country he’d never heard of. He may never go free

Nicholas Casey reports: As he stepped out of the American military cargo plane, Roberto Mosquera still couldn’t tell where he was or why he had been taken there. When federal immigration agents forced him onto a secret flight 30 hours earlier, it was a hot July afternoon in Texas. Now, after traveling thousands of miles, he felt a cold winter’s morning in the air. He was in the kingdom of Eswatini, a tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa that until…

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Money laundering gets easier: Treasury scales back scrutiny of U.S. shell companies

Money laundering gets easier: Treasury scales back scrutiny of U.S. shell companies

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is moving forward with a plan to scale back scrutiny of the shadowy shell companies that criminals use to launder money and traffic drugs. The initiative follows a yearslong campaign by lobbying groups, which contended that new financial reporting requirements were too onerous for businesses. The Treasury Department said late on Tuesday that it was permanently halting the collection of data about the ownership of private American companies that was required as…

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Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from oil and gas assets since joining Supreme Court, analysis shows

Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from oil and gas assets since joining Supreme Court, analysis shows

The Guardian reports: The supreme court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows. The analysis from the non-profit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W Bush in 2005. The findings…

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ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks

ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks

The Associated Press reports: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals. ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security. The devices are known as the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are…

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