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    Judge bars Trump administration from cutting funding to University of California

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    The Trump administration cannot fine the University of California or summarily cut the school system’s federal funding over claims it allows antisemitism or other forms of discrimination, a federal judge ruled late on Friday in a sharply worded decision.US district judge Rita Lin in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction barring the administration from cancelling funding to the university based on alleged discrimination without giving notice to affected faculty and conducting a hearing, among other requirements.The administration over the summer demanded the University of California, Los Angeles, pay $1.2bn to restore frozen research funding and ensure eligibility for future funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus. UCLA was the first public university to be targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations.It has also frozen or paused federal funding over similar claims against private colleges, including Columbia University.In her ruling, Lin said labor unions and other groups representing UC faculty, students and employees had provided “overwhelming evidence” that the Trump administration was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke’, ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities”.“Agency officials, as well as the president and vice-president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of pre-eminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” Lin wrote.She added: “It is undisputed that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California.”At UC, which is facing a series of civil rights investigations, she found the administration had engaged in “coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the first amendment and 10th amendment”.Messages sent to the White House and the US Department of Justice after hours on Friday were not immediately returned. Lin’s order will remain in effect indefinitely.The president of the University of California, James B Milliken, has said the size of the UCLA fine would devastate the UC system, whose campuses are viewed as some of the top public colleges in the nation.UC is in settlement talks with the administration and is not a party to the lawsuit before Lin, who was nominated to the bench by Joe Biden, a Democrat. In a statement, the university system said it “remains committed to protecting the mission, governance and academic freedom of the university”.The administration has demanded UCLA comply with its views on gender identity and establish a process to make sure foreign students are not admitted if they are likely to engage in anti-American, anti-western or antisemitic “disruptions or harassment”, among other requirements outlined in a settlement proposal made public in October.The administration has previously struck deals with Brown University for $50m and Columbia University for $221m.Lin cited declarations by UC faculty and staff that the administration’s moves were prompting them to stop teaching or researching topics they were “afraid were too ‘left’ or ‘woke’”.Her injunction also blocks the administration from “conditioning the grant or continuance of federal funding on the UC’s agreement to any measures that would violate the rights of plaintiffs’ members under the first amendment”.She cited efforts to force the UC schools to screen international students based on “’anti-western” or “‘anti-American’” views, restrict research and teaching, or adopt specific definitions of “male” and “female” as examples of such measures.Donald Trump has decried elite colleges as overrun by liberalism and antisemitism.His administration has launched investigations of dozens of universities, claiming they have failed to end the use of racial preferences in violation of civil rights law. The Republican administration says diversity, equity and inclusion efforts discriminate against white and Asian American students. More

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      ‘Godfather of the Trump presidency’: the direct through-line from Dick Cheney to Donald Trump

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      He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.The former vice-president died on Monday aged 84. The White House lowered flags to half-mast in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.Cheney, who served under George W Bush for eight years, was one of the most influential and polarising vice-presidents in US history. Some critics said they would never forgive him for pushing the US to invade Iraq on a false pretext but suggested that his opposition to Trump offered a measure of redemption.Perhaps Cheney’s defining legacy, however, was the expansion of powers for a position that he never held himself: the presidency. Cheney used the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext to assert a muscular executive authority that Trump now amplifies and exploits to challenge the system of checks and balances.Some commentators perceive a direct through-line from the Bush-Cheney administration’s policies – such as pre-emptive war, warrantless spying and the creation of novel legal categories like “enemy combatant” – to the Trump administration’s actions against immigrants, narco-traffickers and domestic political opponents.“Dick Cheney is the godfather of the Trump presidency,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “Trump is unchained because Dick Cheney had been at war for half a century against the restraints put in place after Vietnam and Watergate. He believed that action was more important than following constitutional rules.”The debate over the balance of power between the White House, Congress and courts did not start with Cheney. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr published The Imperial Presidency, arguing that the executive branch had begun to resemble a monarch that often acted without the consent of Congress.However, by the time of the Ronald Reagan administration, young conservatives felt the presidency had become hamstrung. This sentiment culminated in a 1989 American Enterprise Institute volume titled The Fettered Presidency, articulating a doctrine to regain what they saw as constitutionally appropriate powers.As a young chief of staff in the Gerald Ford administration, Cheney experienced the fallout of the Watergate scandal. He concluded that a sceptical Congress, reacting to the abuses of Richard Nixon, had gone too far, leaving the presidency dangerously weakened.Jacobs said: “Dick Cheney took it as his mission to tear all that down. He saw the efforts to return accountability in the 70s after Watergate and Vietnam as profoundly and dangerously limiting presidential power. He talked openly about Congress self-aggrandising and warned that the country would face ruin.”Cheney believed that new constraints such as the War Powers Act, a 1973 law that limited the president’s power to commit US forces to conflict without congressional approval, had hobbled the executive, making it nearly impossible for a president to govern effectively, particularly in national security.In a 2005 interview, he said: “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority, that it’s reflected in a number of developments – the War Powers Act … I am one of those who believe that was an infringement upon the authority of the president.“A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the 70s served to erode the authority, I think, the president needs to be effective especially in a national security area.”Cheney’s ideas were formalised as the “unitary executive theory”, which asserts that the president should possess total and personal control over the entire executive branch. This effectively eliminates the independence of a vast array of government institutions and places millions of federal employees under the president’s authority to hire and fire at will.As Bush’s No 2, Cheney was dubbed “Darth Vader”. When America was attacked on 9/11 with nearly 3,000 people killed, the trauma created a political climate in which extraordinary measures were deemed necessary. Cheney turned a crisis into an opportunity to broaden executive power in the name of national security.He was the most prominent booster of the Patriot Act, the law enacted nearly unanimously after 9/11 that granted the government sweeping surveillance powers. He championed a National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping programme aimed at intercepting international communications of suspected terrorists in the US, despite concerns over its legality.The Bush administration also authorised the US military to attack enemy combatants acting on behalf of terrorist organisations, prompting questions about the legality of killing or detaining people without prosecution at sites such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.This doctrine is now being used by the Trump administration to justify deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats in Latin America. It claims the US is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and has declared them unlawful combatants.Last month the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, wrote on social media: “These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaida, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”In 2002 a set of legal memorandums known as the “torture memos” were drafted by John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, advising that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the “war on terror”.Jeremy Varon, author of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, said: “That championed the unitary executive theory and then said as an explicit argument anything ordered by the commander in chief is by definition legal because the president is the sovereign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In its own day it was considered a dubious if not a highly contestable legal theory, but the Trump administration is almost pretending that it’s settled law and then using expansive ‘war on terror’ powers to create a war on immigrants, a war on narco traffickers and even potentially a war on dissenting Americans as they protest in the streets.”Varon, a history professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, added: “The great irony is that Trump represents, on the one hand, the repudiation of the neoliberal neocon globalists like Cheney and Bush that entangled America in forever wars. But now America First is being weaponised, making use of ‘war on terror’ powers to capture, brutalise, dehumanise and kill people without any sense of legal constraint.”As an architect of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney pushed spy agencies to find evidence to justify military action. He asserted that then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. Officials used that to sell the war to members of Congress and the media, though that claim was later debunked.The government’s arguments for war fuelled a distrust among many Americans that resonates today with some in the current Republican party. But it did not lead to a significant pushback from Congress aimed at preventing future presidents making a similar mistake.The trend for executive power has been fuelled by an increasingly polarised and paralysed Congress, creating a vacuum that successive administrations, including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have filled with executive action, unwilling to cede powers once gained.The ultimate battle for the unitary executive theory is now being waged within the chambers of the supreme court. Recent rulings from the court’s conservative majority signal a shift away from longstanding precedents that have, for nearly a century, placed limits on presidential authority.Since taking office in January, Trump has unleashed a barrage of unilateral presidential actions. He has waged a campaign to remove thousands of career government workers from their posts and shut down entire federal agencies. His deployment of national guard troops to major US cities and attacks on law firms, media organisations and universities have earned comparison with autocrats around the world.Cheney himself did not approve. He became a severe and outspoken critic of Trump, arguing that the president’s actions went “well beyond their due bounds”, particularly regarding the integrity of the US electoral system. His daughter, Liz Cheney, became one of the most prominent opponents of Trump within the Republican party but eventually lost her seat in the House.Ken Adelman, a former US diplomat who knew Cheney since working with him the 1970s, was not surprised that he took a stand. He said: “Trump stood for everything Dick did not stand for and that was foreign policy, you support your friends and you oppose the totalitarians, strong alliances, strong defence and free trade.“He was very uncomfortable and then finally turned and absolutely opposed Donald Trump with every fibre of his bone, which shows that conservatives can oppose Trump and should oppose Trump because he’s not conservative and he’s not decent and he’s not honourable.”Some commentators contend that while Cheney operated to enhance the power of the institution of the presidency for policy and national security reasons, Trump has leveraged that power for self-aggrandisement, pushing beyond boundaries that Cheney himself recognised.Robert Schmuhl, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said: “Clearly in his time as vice-president, he pushed that envelope almost as far as anyone could. But the distinction is that Cheney was trying to enhance the power of the presidency for policy and security reasons, while Donald Trump seems to be pushing for greater power in the presidency that also has a personal dimension for him.”Others agree that, along with the rhymes between Cheney and Trump, there are significant differences. Jake Bernstein, co-author of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, said: “You can draw a line between Cheney and Trump. Trump has taken that to the max; as they say in Spın̈al Tap, he’s turned it to 11. It’s a qualitative difference.“Yes, Cheney believed that power had tilted too much towards Congress and had to go back to the executive and certainly believed that, particularly in issues of war-making, the executive should be completely unfettered. He also understood a lot of this balance between Congress and the executive was based on norms that were elastic and could be stretched in one direction or another.“But he was absolutely at heart an institutionalist and he didn’t want to break those norms. He didn’t want to destroy those institutions. He would have been appalled by the neutering of Congress that’s going on under this current Trump administration. Basically Trump is president and speaker of the House at the moment, and that would have offended Cheney.” More

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      Too bad I can’t run, but we’ll see what happens, says Trump on unconstitutional third term

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      Donald Trump said “it’s too bad” he is not allowed to run for a third term, conceding the constitutional reality even as he expressed interest in continuing to serve.“If you read it, it’s pretty clear,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One from Japan to South Korea on Wednesday. “I’m not allowed to run. It’s too bad.”The president’s comments, which continue his on-again, off-again musings about a third term, came a day after the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said it would be impossible for Trump to stay in the White House. “I don’t see a path for that,” the Republican told reporters at the US Capitol on Tuesday.Johnson, who has built his career by drawing closer to Trump, said he discussed the issue with the president and thought he understood. “He and I have talked about the constrictions of the constitution,” he said.The speaker described how the constitution’s 22nd amendment does not allow for a third presidential term, and changing that with a new amendment would be a cumbersome, years-long process of winning over both states and members of Congress.Johnson dismissed worries about a potential third term as “hair on fire” by the president’s critics. “He has a good time with that, trolling the Democrats,” Johnson said.Trump stopped short of characterizing his conversation with Johnson, and his description of the prohibition on third terms was somewhat less definitive.“Based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run,” he said on Wednesday. “So we’ll see what happens.”Trump has repeatedly raised the idea of trying to stay in power. Hats saying “Trump 2028” are passed out as keepsakes to lawmakers and others visiting the White House, and Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, the podcaster Steve Bannon, has revived the idea of a third Trump term.Trump told reporters on Monday on Air Force One that “I would love to do it”.He went on to say the Republican party had “a great group of people” for the next presidential election in Marco Rubio, the secretary of state who was travelling with him, and JD Vance, the vice-president who visited with senators at the Capitol on Tuesday.Asked about a strategy where he could run as vice-president, which would be allowed, and then work himself into the presidency, he dismissed the idea as “too cute”.“You’d be allowed to do that, but I wouldn’t do that,” he said. More

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      Would a written constitution save Britain from the far right? | Letters

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      George Monbiot is right that having a written constitution would be better than not having one if the far right takes power (We must act now: without a written constitution, Reform UK will have carte blanche to toxify our nation, 23 October). But, as he points out, it’s not a guarantee of sane government. At least 75% of what Donald Trump is doing is unconstitutional, but it’s permitted by a compliant Congress and a rubber-stamp supreme court that is suddenly discovering presidential powers in the constitution that its framers never intended. The true problem is that a large proportion of the US electorate is content to let this happen.Marina Hyde noted the same trend here – too many people are so dischuffed (some with good cause, some not) that they are willing to press the “F you” button and smash the system. In 1795, as the first US government was getting under way, the writer Samuel Miller commented that “political prosperity resides, not in the words and letters of the constitution; but in the temper, the habits, and the practices of the people”. With or without a constitution, there needs to be peaceful civic resistance to a future extremist regime until more people are persuaded that a humane and tolerant government is worth having.Peter Loschi Oldham, Greater Manchester George Monbiot advocates a written constitution to defend against the threat of Reform UK. Do we really believe that it will win 40%-plus of votes and a majority of seats in a general election? I know it may be dangerous to dismiss it as a protest vote, but I can’t believe that.I was reading an entry from Alan Bennett’s Writing Home recently, where he opined that if Labour fought an election on the state of the NHS alone it would surely win hands down. Still true. Yet it is desperate to engage Reform on its home ground. I can’t believe people think that migration and cutting public services are the country’s biggest priorities.Ray FloodDundee George Monbiot calls for a written British constitution to be created through “a citizens’ constitutional convention”, with “participatory events all over the country”. But such events are likely to be dominated by people like him – educated, activist-minded liberals – whose values would then shape the constitution. Views that clash with theirs would be excluded by a process controlled by similar voices. In wanting to make his own values permanent, Monbiot shows an instinct not unlike Nigel Farage’s – both seek to enshrine their worldviews as the national default.Nathon RaineBradford George Monbiot says we urgently need constitutional change – there is an immediate opportunity for citizens to contribute to this agenda. The public bill committee reviewing the English devolution and community empowerment bill is welcoming submissions right now. In the evidence I submitted, published on the parliamentary website, I point out how the rise of far-right extremist groups gives renewed urgency to the importance of providing constitutional protection for all elected local authorities in England.It is a simple step for such a clause to be added to the bill. I explain how countries that outperform the UK on economic, social and environmental indicators, for example, Sweden, already enjoy such protections.Robin HambletonEmeritus professor, University of the West of England More

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      Alabama executes man on death row by controversial nitrogen gas method

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      An Alabama man convicted of helping to burn a man alive was executed by nitrogen gas – a form of suffocation which defense lawyers have described as cruel and unusual punishment – on Thursday shortly after the US supreme court signed off on the seventh execution using the contested method.Anthony Boyd, 54, was sent to the death chamber at the William C Holman correctional facility on Thursday evening.“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” said Boyd in his final words, per the Associated Press. “There can be no justice until we change this system … Let’s get it.”He was strapped to a gurney and forced to breathe nitrogen through an industrial mask, fatally depriving his body of oxygen. He was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.On Thursday, the six conservative justices on the supreme court denied Boyd’s petition for a stay of execution over the fierce opposition of their three liberal peers. Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote an excoriating dissenting opinion in which she invited readers to use a stopwatch to time four minutes.“Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating … That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight,” Sotomayor said.Boyd’s execution was the eighth time the gas has been used to kill a man after its initial experimentation by Alabama on Kenny Smith in January 2024. In March, Louisiana became the second state to deploy nitrogen as a killing method, with the execution of Jessie Hoffman Jr.Advocates of the death penalty have embraced the nitrogen method, which they insist is an acceptable alternative to the prevalent execution method in the US, lethal injection. A boycott of medical drugs sold to corrections departments has made it increasingly difficult for states to procure the chemicals used in lethal injections, and as a result they have turned to other methods including nitrogen.But the track record for this new killing procedure has been deeply troubling. The first prisoner to die by the gas, Smith, was seen by witnesses writhing and convulsing on the gurney.At a recent hearing in federal court in which Boyd appealed against his execution by nitrogen, Smith’s widow, Deanna Smith, likened the process of watching her husband die to “watching somebody drown without water”.The second person killed by Alabama using nitrogen, Alan Miller, also visibly shook and trembled for about two minutes in September last year. In the Louisiana execution, Hoffman was recorded still breathing 16 minutes into the procedure.Boyd’s lawyers argued in federal district court that the method was a violation of the eighth amendment of the US constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. They said that previous nitrogen executions had caused prisoners “extreme pain and terror of suffocation while still conscious, inflicting gratuitous suffering beyond what is constitutionally permitted”.Earlier this month the federal judge in the case, Emily Marks, declined to stop Boyd’s execution from going ahead. She said she had no doubt that a person deprived of oxygen “experiences discomfort, panic and emotional distress”, but ruled that the constitution does not guarantee a painless death.Boyd was sentenced to death for the murder of Gregory Huguley in 1995. Prosecutors said he was one of four men who kidnapped Huguley after he failed to pay $200 for cocaine, then doused him in petrol and set fire to him.Boyd has always protested his innocence. The prosecution case depended on the testimony of an eyewitness with no forensic evidence connecting Boyd to the crime.“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in any killing,” Boyd said when he phoned in to a recent press conference held by his supporters.His death sentence was handed down by a jury vote of 10 to two. Alabama and Florida are the only states that allow people to be sent to death row on the basis of a non-unanimous jury verdict. More

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      ‘Rogue president’: growing number of US judges push back against Trump

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      US district and appeals courts are increasingly rebuking Donald Trump’s radical moves on tackling crime, illegal immigration and other actions where administration lawyers or Trump have made sweeping claims of emergencies that judges have bluntly rejected as erroneous and undermining the rule of law in America.Legal scholars and ex-judges note that strong court pushback has come from judges appointed by Republicans, including Trump himself, and Democrats, and signify that the administration’s factual claims and expanding executive powers face stiff challenges that have slowed some extreme policies.Among the toughest rulings were ones this month by Judge Karin Immergut in Oregon and Judge April Perry in Chicago. Both district judges sharply challenged Trump’s plans to deploy national guard troops to deal with minimal violence that Trump had portrayed as akin to “war” zones, spurring the judges to impose temporary restraining orders.Immergut, whom Trump nominated for the court in his first term, rejected Trump’s depiction of Portland as “war-ravaged”, and in need of saving from “Antifa and other domestic terrorists” concluding that the “president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts”. But a court of appeals ruled on 20 October that Trump could send national guard troops to the city.Elsewhere, district judge William Young in Boston issued a scathing 161-page ruling last month calling some of Trump’s deportation policies illegal efforts to deport non-citizen activists at colleges in violation of their first amendment rights “under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of antisemitism”. Young was nominated by Ronald Reagan.Some former appeals court judges say that the district courts and courts of appeals are responding appropriately to a pattern of unlawful conduct by Trump and his top deputies.“The president and attorney general are openly contemptuous of the constitution and laws of the United States and of the federal courts, and the arguments they make to the courts mirror that personal contempt,” said retired court of appeals judge J Michael Luttig. “The federal district courts and the courts of appeals well understand that and they are going to have none of it.”View image in fullscreenRecent court rulings reveal a pattern of strong judicial rebukes to the Trump administration from district and appeals courts on multiple issues since Trump took office again, which the legal news and analysis site Just Security has documented.A Just Security study, which was spearheaded by New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, revealed that courts’ distrust of government information and representations hit over 40 cases as of 15 October versus 35 cases in mid-September. Similarly, it noted that courts’ findings of “arbitrary and capricious” administrative action totaled 58 cases on 15 October versus 52 in mid-September. The study showed courts’ concerns over noncompliance with judicial orders totaled over 20 cases as of 15 October up from 15 cases a month before.But despite the growing number of strong lower court rulings against the administration, some may well get reversed by the supreme court given its 6-3 conservative majority, and its rulings that have markedly expanded presidential powers.Nonetheless, legal scholars and ex-federal judges stress that recent district court rulings against Trump’s radical policies are grounded in fact and reveal profound scepticism about a number of the administration’s sweeping legal claims.“US district judges have the responsibility to determine the relevant facts before applying the law. Accordingly, the credibility of a party and its counsel are immensely important,” said former federal judge John Jones, who is now president of Dickinson College.“Simply put, the president’s reputation for hyperbole that lapses into outright lies precedes him in these cases, and judges are increasingly refusing to take the administration’s rationale for its actions at face value.”For example, Perry called the Department of Homeland Security’s depiction of events in Chicago “simply unreliable” with a “lack of credibility”. She noted that state and local law enforcement contradicted the case for deploying the national guard and Trump’s assertion that it was a “war zone”, and warned that using the guard could fuel “civil unrest”.Days later, the seventh circuit court of appeals upheld Perry’s ruling that denied a White House request to deploy national guard troops on Chicago streets in response to a lawsuit brought by the city of Chicago and Illinois.But on Friday the Trump administration asked the supreme court to pause those rulings and permit Trump to deploy troops in Illinois, boosting efforts to send the national guard into the Chicago area.Elsewhere, on Monday a three-judge appeals court panel ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration can send the national guard to Portland, lifting Immergut’s ruling and allowing some 200 federalized guard troops to be sent to the city to protect federal buildings.Responding to the ruling, Oregon’s attorney general said if the decision is allowed to stand Trump would have “unilateral power to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification”.More broadly, scholars and other experts voice strong criticism of the administration’s legal claims.“Trump is abusing the laws that authorize domestic military deployment in a crisis, and the courts are starting to push back,” said Liza Goitein, the Brennan Center’s senior director of liberty and national security.“In the United States, federal armed forces cannot be used to execute the law except when civilian authorities have been completely overwhelmed. As judges in Oregon and Illinois have recognized, the facts on the ground simply don’t justify deployment of the military.“A court could reach the opposite conclusion only by extending a dangerous level of deference to the president, effectively giving him free rein to use the military as a domestic police force. That would be contrary to American principles and traditions, and it would pose a grave threat to democracy and individual liberty.”Not surprisingly, some recent rulings by district judges have outraged Maga world and top Trump officials, who have decried them in incendiary terms. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called Immergut’s ruling “legal insurrection”, which some analysts worry could incite violence.Trump, too, fired back at Immergut’s ruling. “I wasn’t served well by the people who pick judges,” Trump told reporters soon after the ruling, seemingly forgetting he had nominated her, and then misidentifying her sex. “Portland is burning to the ground … That judge ought to be ashamed of himself.”Trump’s attacks on Immergut and earlier dust-ups with judges who ruled against the administration were advanced this month by El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele, who urged the Trump administration to emulate his policies and impeach “corrupt judges”.“If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country,” Bukele tweeted, sparking multi-billionaire and Maga ally Elon Musk to retweet it as “essential”.But legal experts say the ruling by Immergut and other district judges who have pushed back hard against administration policies are fully warranted and reasonable, given extreme moves by Trump on immigration, crime and other fronts they deem unjustified or illegal.“I think the strong district court response in these contexts is striking,” said Columbia law professor Gillian Metzger. “It’s occurring in other Trump contexts as well – for example, the administration’s efforts to deny appropriated funding or target law firms – but immigration enforcement and calling out the national guard are traditional executive areas where you’d expect the president to get deference.”Metzger said: “Judges are perceiving an administration that is asserting power in novel ways and at odds with basic norms and longstanding practices – eg, employing the national guard in a partisan fashion over the objections of state and local leaders, deploying Ice officers in aggressive ways, etc – and at times violating governing statutes.”Other legal scholars go further.“The problem is not rogue judges, but a rogue president. The problem is not what judges are doing but what the president is doing,” said former Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches law at Harvard.Gertner pointed in particular to Young’s ruling in a deportation case involving efforts by the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to deport pro-Palestinian non-citizen students and professors who protested against Israel’s actions in Gaza.In his ruling, Young wrote that Trump’s conduct violated his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States” and the actions of his administration represented a “full-throated assault on the first amendment”.Gertner noted that the “case involved sending people to countries without due process. We gave due process to people involved with the September 11 attacks. Sending people to countries where they had no relatives, NO TIES, was a flagrant violation of law.“What the Trump administration has been doing is so unprecedented and so far from normal and so illegal it makes sense that judges have issued injunctions stopping them.”Luttig stressed: “The judges of the United States will not be threatened and intimidated by this president and this attorney general. They will continue to honor their oaths to the constitution, which means the president and attorney general can expect loss after loss after loss, at least before the nation’s lower federal courts.” More

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      Judge says prosecution against Kilmar Ábrego García for human smuggling may be illegal retaliation

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      A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human-smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.The case of Ábrego, a Salvadorian national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego’s effort to show that the federal human-smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.Crenshaw said Ábrego had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to inquiries about the case on Saturday.In his 16-page ruling, Crenshaw said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern”, but one stood out.That statement, by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on a Fox News program after Ábrego was charged in June, seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged him because he won his wrongful deportation case, Crenshaw wrote.Blanche’s ”remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Ábrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights” to sue over his deportation “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct”, Crenshaw wrote.Likewise, Crenshaw noted that the Department of Homeland Security reopened an investigation into Ábrego days after the US supreme court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring him back.Ábrego was indicted on 21 May and charged on 6 June, the day the US returned him from a prison in El Salvador. He pleaded not guilty and is now being held in Pennsylvania.If convicted in the Tennessee case, Ábrego will be deported, federal officials have said. A US immigration judge has denied Ábrego’s bid for asylum, although he can appeal.The Salvadorian national has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager.In 2019, he was arrested by immigration agents. He requested asylum but was not eligible because he had been in the US for more than a year. But the judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he faced danger from a gang that targeted his family.The human-smuggling charges in Tennessee stem from a 2022 traffic stop. He was not charged at the time.Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Ábrego, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang, among other things, despite the fact he has not been convicted of any crimes.Ábrego’s attorneys have denounced the criminal charges and the deportation efforts, saying they are an attempt to punish him for standing up to the administration.Ábrego contends that, while imprisoned in El Salvador, he suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has denied those allegations. More

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      ‘Like the Gestapo’: trailblazing immigration judge on Ice brutality and Trump’s damage to the courts

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      Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of.At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts from political meddling and blazed a trail for a generation of female judges.Now retired at 71, she’s seen her share of political ups and downs over her 10 years as an immigration lawyer and 35 years on the bench. But nothing could have prepared her for what she’s seen the Trump administration do to the court systems she once served.“I have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months,” said Marks, reflecting on the state of her profession while sipping coffee near her home in Marin county, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where she spent much of her career. “I’m flat out terrified on all fronts.”Whip-smart, with a shock of white curls, Marks can speak more freely than a sitting immigration judge. And the picture she paints is alarming.Trump’s immigration crackdown has thrown the already backlogged courts into chaos. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump was sworn in, including roughly a third of the judges in San Francisco, home to one of the largest immigration courts in the country. People across the US are routinely arrested outside their court hearings by Ice agents “acting like the Gestapo”, Marks said.She described her former colleagues as under siege. “If I were an immigration practitioner now, I’d tell my clients that they have to act like they’re in a war zone,” she said. “Be prepared for any eventuality, because it is so random and so chaotic.”Despite the grim subject matter, Marks is full of wisecracks and seems to have her spirits permanently set on high – gushing at every passing dog and baby.“Immigration judges do death penalty cases in a traffic court setting” is among her oft-quoted zingers.She describes the frenetic work of an immigration judge as like “the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz”: managing dockets, juggling courtroom tech and interpreters, typing verbatim notes while monitoring audio recording levels, then issuing immediate oral rulings with few clerks and barely any time to think. It’s an already frenzied job, and one she believes the Trump administration is intentionally trying to make harder.Humor aside, her message for the public is a serious one: that the Trump administration is “attacking” immigration courts “on all fronts” in order to eliminate them entirely by proving they’re “dysfunctional”. There’s a backlog of 3.6m cases waiting to be adjudicated, and Marks believes the courts have been purposefully starved of resources.“I feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine,” she said, “and what’s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don’t stop it.”A critical eye and an open mindMarks’ interest in refugees and the immigrant experience comes from her own family’s lucky escape to America.“I was raised with an awareness of immigration to begin with,” said Marks. Her Jewish grandmother fled pogroms in Lithuania and was on one of the last boats to the US before the first world war severely restricted transatlantic migration. By the 1920s, the US enacted laws imposing strict quotas on refugees from eastern and southern Europe that almost completely shut down legal pathways for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.View image in fullscreenMarks grew up in a diverse part of west Los Angeles, and spent a year in Chile after Salvador Allende’s election, where she learned Spanish and saw first-hand the dissonance between US media coverage of his presidency and how Chileans talked about politics around dinner tables. She learned to read and listen to many perspectives with a critical eye and an open mind.She wanted to be a social worker, but went to law school and nearly dropped out before falling in love with immigration law. “You met the world coming into your office,” she said, describing her years in private practice.In 1987, at the age of 32, she won the supreme court case known as INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, which expanded asylum eligibility by granting relief to those with a “well-founded fear” of persecution. The morning after that victory, she started her training to become a judge.Alongside her work in court, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges for nearly two decades and recruited half a dozen female judges to the bench. She prided herself on using compassion and humor to lower the tension in her courtroom: when people feel heard and judged fairly, they’re more likely to accept your decisions, she said, even when you rule against their claim.View image in fullscreenMarks retired in 2021 to become “Nana Dana” and care for her grandchild, but she remains deeply engaged in the field, speaking at conferences, advising the National Association of Immigration Judges, educating law students, officiating weddings and serving on the advisory board of the non-profit Justice Connection.What’s been playing out now in courtrooms, in policy memos and on the streets has chilling echoes of the authoritarian eras her Jewish ancestors fled.Among her more recent concerns is the push to recruit hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges. In late August, the Trump administration scrapped the rule requiring temporary immigration judges to have spent a decade practicing immigration law before qualifying for the bench. Days later, 600 military lawyers were cleared to fill vacant judge seats. All of this is “absolutely unprecedented”, said Marks. “I don’t want to slam military lawyers, but there is the concern that they’re being picked because there’s a perception that they will just follow orders.”Political interference in the courtFor Marks, political encroachment on immigration courts has been “a slow creep that now has gone to light speed”.A hallmark of American democracy is the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. But this has never been so for immigration courts, which are overseen by the Department of Justice, a part of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch.“Deep in my bones, I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong,” she said. “The boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge.”The court’s placement has led to political interference and underfunding by both parties in power, and Marks wanted to fight back. She spent decades advocating for the nation’s immigration court system to be moved out from under the political whims and meddling of the justice department and into an independent judiciary. In 2022, the congresswoman Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that would have created an independent immigration court system – but the bill ultimately died. Marks thinks reviving that bill should be a top priority for Democrats.She believes everyone across the political spectrum should be incensed by the current level of meddling with due process: from firing immigration judges, to pressuring them to toss out asylum cases so they can be reassigned as emergency deportations, to turning courthouses into traps where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoop up immigrants to meet deportation quotas, and more.“Americans were raised with the golden principle that everybody deserves due process, and I really think the majority of Americans believe that, and that that’s what makes us exceptional in the world,” she said.“What kills me, as a lawyer, is that Trump turns everything on its head and blows through clearly established legal precedent as if it doesn’t exist. Fealty to precedent is the core of our legal system.”If there’s a silver lining for her, it’s that she predicts the administration’s embrace of chaos will ultimately backfire. For example, she thinks that dropping military reservists on to the bench for six-month stints is a recipe for failure. Rather than expediting the backlog of asylum cases, it will unleash chaos, “screw up the records” and “make appeals go wild”.“If you build by chaos, even if you’re right in what you construct,” she quipped, “it’s going to crumble.” More

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      in US Politics

      Most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal, federal court rules

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      Donald Trump overstepped his presidential powers with most of his globe-rattling tariff policies, a federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday.US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”, the court said in the 7-4 ruling.Many of Trump’s steep tariffs are “are unbounded in scope, amount and duration”, the ruling added, and “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration has leant on.The court’s decision is the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies and will likely mean the supreme court will have to rule on whether he has the legal right as president to upend US trade policy. The court said the ruling would not take effect until 14 October.“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT!” Trump wrote on social media, moments after the ruling came down, after the stock markets closed ahead of a three-day weekend in the US. In a lengthy post, he accused the appeals court of political bias.“If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” he continued. “At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products.”The ruling voided Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that set a 10% baseline on virtually all of the US’s trading partners and his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on countries he has argued have unfairly treated the US.Trump has claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.The Trump administration has cited various national emergencies – including US trade deficits with trading partners, fentanyl trafficking, and immigration – as the reasons for the actions.But a group of small businesses has challenged the administration’s arguments, arguing they are “devastating small businesses across the country”.And on Friday, the appellate court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”The ruling also said the US law “neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the president’s power to impose tariffs”.Earlier on Friday, Bloomberg reported that the administration, worried the court might invalidate the tariffs immediately, filed statements by Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warning that such a decision would be a “dangerous diplomatic embarrassment” for the US.In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that Trump “lawfully exercised the tariff powers granted to him by Congress to defend our national and economic security from foreign threats”.He said: “The president’s tariffs remain in effect, and we look forward to ultimate victory on this matter.”William Reinsch, a former senior commerce department official now with the Center on Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters that the Trump administration had been bracing for this ruling. He said: “It’s common knowledge the administration has been anticipating this outcome and is preparing a Plan B, presumably to keep the tariffs in place via other statutes.”The US trade court heard the case – VOS Selections Inc v Trump – in May, and ruled that the tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the president”. But the court agreed to a temporary pause in the decision pending an appeal hearing.The US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC heard oral arguments about the case on 31 July. Judges expressed skepticism about the administration’s arguments at the hearing. The IEEPA “doesn’t even say ‘tariffs’”, one of the judges noted. “Doesn’t even mention them.”In its ruling, the appeals court noted there were “numerous statutes” that do delegate the power to impose tariffs, in which “clear and precise terms” are used to this make clear.When Congress wants to delegate such authority, it typically “does so explicitly, either by using unequivocal terms like tariff and duty, or via an overall structure which makes clear that Congress is referring to tariffs”, the court added.It said: “The absence of any such tariff language in IEEPA contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such power and included clear limits on that power.”Trump’s tariffs have triggered economic and political uncertainty across the world and stoked fears of rising inflation. More