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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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      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

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      Judge rules ex-Trump lawyer unlawfully serving as US attorney in New Jersey

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      A federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote: “The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves.“Along the way, it has disagreed with the Judges of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey and criminal defendants in that District about who should or may lead the office. Faced with the question of whether Ms Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not.”The judge found that Habba’s term as the interim US attorney ended in July, and the Trump administration’s maneuvers to keep her in the role without getting confirmation from the US Senate did not follow procedures required by federal law.Brann said he is putting his order on hold pending an appeal.Habba, who unsuccessfully defended Trump in his New York fraud trial, also served as a frequent campaign surrogate for him in 2024.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter being appointed to the interim role in March, she said the state could “turn red”, a rare overt political expression from a prosecutor, and said she planned to investigate the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general.She then brought a trespassing charge, which was eventually dropped, against Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, stemming from a confrontation with federal agents during his visit to an immigration detention center. Habba later charged a Democratic representative, LaMonica McIver, with assault for resisting the detention of the mayor in the same incident, a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress other than for corruption. McIver denies the charges and has pleaded not guilty.In late July, when Habba’s four-month temporary appointment was coming to a close, it became clear that she would not get support from home state senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, meaning her chances of Senate approval were nil.Trump then withdrew her nomination, and federal judges in New Jersey exercised their power under the law to replace Habba with a career prosecutor when Habba’s temporary appointment lapsed. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, retaliated by firing that prosecutor and moved to re-install Habba as acting US attorney.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      US imposes sanctions on international court officials in ‘flagrant attack’

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      The Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to hobble the international criminal court in what the ICC has denounced as a “flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution”.The US state department on Wednesday announced new sanctions on four ICC officials, including two judges and two prosecutors, saying they had been instrumental in efforts to prosecute Americans and Israelis. As a result of the sanctions, any assets that the targets hold in US jurisdictions are frozen.The sanctions were immediately denounced by both the ICC and the United Nations, while Israel welcomed the move announced by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.It is just the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken against the Hague-based court, the world’s first international war crimes tribunal. The US, which is not a member of the court, has already imposed penalties on the ICC’s former chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who stepped aside in May pending an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, and four other tribunal judges.The new penalties target the ICC judges Kimberly Prost of Canada and Nicolas Guillou of France and prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal.“These individuals are foreign persons who directly engaged in efforts by the international criminal court to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of either nation,” Rubio said.He added that the administration would continue “to take whatever actions we deem necessary to protect our troops, our sovereignty and our allies from the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions”.In a separate statement, the state department said Prost was sanctioned for a ruling to authorize an ICC investigation into personnel in Afghanistan, which was later dropped. Guillou was sanctioned for ruling to authorize the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former minister of defense Yoav Gallant related to Israel’s war in Gaza.France – whose president, Emmanuel Macron, was in Washington two days earlier – expressed “dismay” over the action.The sanctions are “in contradiction to the principle of an independent judiciary”, a foreign ministry spokesperson said in Paris.Khan and Niang were penalized for continuing Karim Khan’s investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza, including upholding the ICC’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, according to the statement.In response, the ICC issued a statement calling the sanctions “a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution” and “an affront against the Court’s states parties, the rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world”.A UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said the ICC had the full support of the world body to carry out its work. The UN was “very concerned” about the US continuing to target the international court, he said.“We firmly believe that the ICC is a key pillar of international criminal justice, and we respect their work,” Dujarric said. “The decision imposes severe impediments on the functioning of the office of the prosecutor in respect for all the situations that are currently before the court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNetanyahu welcomed the US move.“This is a firm measure against the mendacious smear campaign against the State of Israel and the IDF, and for truth and justice,” he said in a statement, using an acronym for the Israeli military.Wednesday’s move carries on a history of Trump administration actions against the ICC dating back to his first term in office. During Trump’s first term, the US hit the ICC with sanctions, but those were rescinded by Joe Biden’s administration in early 2021.Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said the escalation in US sanctions amounted to “a continued attack on the rule of law and a blatant attempt to intimidate those pursuing accountability for atrocity crimes”.She said the new sanctions were a “defining test” for the ICC’s 125 member states. “Will they defend the court’s independence and the rights of victims of international crimes, or allow intimidation by powerful states to dictate who deserves justice?” she added. More

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      Consent decrees force schools to desegregate. The Trump administration is striking them down

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      In late April, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending a decades-long consent decree in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, in a school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.The Plaquemines parish desegregation order, one of more than 130 such orders nationwide, was in place to ensure that the school district, which initially refused to integrate, followed the law. Many consent decrees of the era are still in existence because school districts are not in compliance with the law.Some experts, including former justice department employees, say the change in direction for the department could be worrying.These orders “provide students with really important protections against discrimination”, said Shaheena Simons, who was the chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the justice department for nearly a decade. “They require school districts to continue to actively work to eliminate all the remaining vestiges of the state-mandated segregation system. That means that students have protections in terms of what schools they’re assigned to, in terms of the facilities and equipment in the schools that they attend. They have protection from discrimination in terms of barriers to accessing advanced programs, gifted programs. And it means that a court is there to protect them and to enforce their rights when they’re violated and to ensure that school districts are continuing to actively desegregate.”The justice department ended the Plaquemines parish desegregation order in an unusual process, one that some fear will be replicated elsewhere. The case was dismissed through a “joint stipulated dismissal”. Previously, courts have followed a specific process for ending similar cases, one in which school districts prove that they are complying with the court orders. That did not happen this time. Instead, the Louisiana state attorney general’s office worked with the justice department in reaching the dismissal.“I’m not aware of anyone, any case, that has [ended] that way before,” said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF); the LDF was not specifically involved with the Plaquemines parish case. “The government as a plaintiff who represents the American people, the people of that parish, has an obligation to make sure that the district has done everything that it’s supposed to have done to comply with the federal court order in the case before it gets released, and the court itself has its own independent obligation to confirm that there’s no vestiges of discrimination left in the school district that are traceable to either present or past discrimination.”Despite the district not proving that it is compliant with the order, the justice department has celebrated the end of the consent decree.“No longer will the Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago,” Harmeet K Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the decision. “This is a prime example of neglect by past administrations, and we’re now getting America refocused on our bright future.”But focusing on the age of the case implies that it was obsolete, according to Simons, who is now the senior adviser of programs and strategist at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The administration is trying to paint these cases as ancient history and no longer relevant.”In 1966, the Johnson administration sued school districts across the country, particularly in the south, that refused to comply with desegregation demands. At the time, Plaquemines parish was led by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist and white supremacist.Perez had played a large role in trying to keep nearby New Orleans from desegregating, and once that effort failed, he invited 1,000 white students from the Ninth Ward to enroll in Plaquemines parish schools. By 1960, nearly 600 had accepted the offer. Perez was excommunicated by Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for ignoring his warning to stop trying to prevent schools run by the archdiocese of New Orleans from integrating.Perez attempted to close the public schools in Plaquemines parish, and instead open all-white private academies, or, segregation academies, which became a feature of the post-integration south. An estimated 300 segregation academies, which, as private schools, are not governed by the same rules and regulations as public schools, are still in operation and majority white.Students and teachers working in school districts today might be decades removed from the people who led the push for desegregation in their districts, but they still benefit from the protections that were long ago put in place. Without court oversight, school districts that were already begrudgingly complying might have no incentive to continue to do so.According to the Century Foundation, as of 2020, 185 districts and charters consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies, while 722 districts and charters are subject to a legal desegregation order or voluntary agreement. The justice department currently has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, the majority of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Separate but equal doesn’t work,” said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division at the justice department. “The reality is that students of color do better when they are in integrated classrooms … We know that the amount of resources that are devoted to schools are greater when there are a higher number of white students. So to have students attend majority-minority school districts means that they’re going to be shut out, whether that’s from AP classes, whether that’s from extracurricular activities. All the activities that make it possible for students to fully achieve occur when you have more integrated classrooms.”“Public education isn’t just about education for the sake of education,” he added. “It’s about preparing people to be citizens of our democracy and to be fully engaged in our democratic institutions. When you have students that are being shut out from quality public education, the impact is not just on those communities. It’s on our democracy writ large.”Smith, the current chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said that the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration, and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools”.“Even though we are 71 years after the Brown v Board [of Education] decision, schools of this country remain more segregated today than they were back in 1954,” he said. “The fact that the administration is kind of wholeheartedly ending these types of consent decrees is troubling, particularly when they’re not doing the research and investigation to determine whether or not these decrees really should be ended at this point.”Smith said that the decision in the Plaquemines parish case may be a “slippery slope” in which other school districts begin reaching out to the Trump administration.“The impact they can have across the country and particularly across the south is pretty huge,” he said. “I worry that we’re going to see more and more of these decrees falling and more and more of these districts remaining segregated without any real opportunity to address that.” More

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      US court blocks Trump administration from revoking Afghans’ protected status

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      A US appeals court has for now blocked the Trump administration from removing the temporary protective status of thousands of Afghans in the United States, court documents showed on Monday.An administrative stay on the termination of temporary protected status for Afghans will remain until 21 July, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit said in an order granting a request from immigration advocacy organization Casa.The group had filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security to challenge the terminations of the temporary protected status for Afghans and Cameroonians announced by the Trump administration in April.Casa had filed for an emergency motion for a stay on Monday, when the protected status for Afghans was scheduled to be terminated. The protected status for Cameroonians is set to end on 4 August, according to the court document.The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In April when the Trump administration terminated temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians, the department had said conditions in Afghanistan and Cameroon no longer merited the protected status.The Trump administration has until 1159pm ET on Wednesday to respond.The US evacuated more than 82,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after Taliban’s takeover in 2021, including more than 70,000 who entered the US with temporary “parole”, which allowed legal entry for a period of two years. More

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      Kilmar Ábrego García was tortured in Salvadorian prison, court filing alleges

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      Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador and detained in one of that country’s most notorious prisons, was physically and psychologically tortured during the three months he spent in Salvadorian custody, according to new court documents filed Wednesday.While being held at the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) in El Salvador, Ábrego García and 20 other men “were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM”, according to the court papers filed by his lawyers in the federal district court in Maryland.Guards struck anyone who fell from exhaustion while kneeling, and during that time, “Ábrego García was denied bathroom access and soiled himself”, according to the filing.Detainees were held in an overcrowded cell with no windows, and bright lights on 24 hours a day. They were confined to metal bunk beds with no mattresses.Ábrego García’s testimony is one of the first detailed insights the world has into the conditions inside Cecot, a megaprison that human rights groups say is designed to disappear people.His lawyers say he lost 31 pounds during his first two weeks of confinement. Later, they write, he and four others were transferred to a different part of the prison “where they were photographed with mattresses and better food–photos that appeared to be staged to document improved conditions”.The filings also note that officials within the prison acknowledged that Ábrego García was not a gang member, and that his tattoos did not indicate a gang affiliation. “Prison officials explicitly acknowledged that plaintiff Ábrego García’s tattoos were not gang-related, telling him ‘your tattoos are fine,’” per the filing, and they kept him in a cell separate from those accused of gang membership.The prison officials, however, threatened to move Ábrego García into a cell with gang members whom officials said “would ‘tear’ him apart”.Ábrego García is currently in federal custody in Nashville. The Trump administration brought him back from El Salvador after initially claiming it was powerless to do so. The US justice department wants him to stand trial on human-smuggling charges. The administration has also accused him of being a member of the street gang MS-13, and Donald Trump has claimed that Ábrego García’s tattoos indicate that he belonged to the gang.Ábrego García has pleaded not guilty to the smuggling charges, which his attorneys have characterized as an attempt to justify the administration’s mistake in deporting him after the fact.On Sunday , a Tennessee judge ordered his release while his criminal case plays out, but prosecutors said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) would take Ábrego García into custody if that were to happen and he would be deported before he was given the chance to stand trial.A justice department lawyer, Jonathan Guynn, also told a federal judge in Maryland that the administration would deport Ábrego García not to El Salvador but to another, third country – contradicting statements from attorney general Pam Bondi that he would be sent to El Salvador.Amid the confusion, Ábrego García’s lawyers requested that their client remain in criminal custody, fearing that if he were released, he would be deported. Upcoming hearings in both Maryland and Tennessee will help decide whether Ábrego García will be able to remain in the US and be released from jail. More

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      Throwing their bodies on the gears: the Democratic lawmakers showing up to resist Trump

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      A flock of Ice agents, some masked, some sporting military-operator fashion for show, smooshed the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, up against a wall and handcuffed him in the hallway of a federal courthouse in early June, shuffling the mild-mannered politician into an elevator like the Sandman hustling an act off the stage 10 miles north at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.Like at the Apollo, Lander’s arrest was a show. News reporters and cellphone camera-wielding bystanders crowded the hall to watch the burly federal officers rumple a 55-year-old auditor asking for a warrant.“I’m not obstructing. I’m standing here in this hallway asking for a judicial warrant,” Lander said. “You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens.”“This is an urgent moment for the rule of law in the United States of America and it is important to step up,” Lander told the Guardian after the arrest. “And I think the dividing line for Democrats right now is not between progressives and moderates. It’s between fighters and folders. We have to find nonviolent but insistent ways of standing up for democracy and the rule of law.”The act of showing up is resonating with voters who have seen the limits of social media activism. Be it Senator Cory Booker’s speech in April or the arrest of lawmakers trying to inspect an Ice detention facility, the images of administration opponents physically interposing themselves as a disruption hearken back to an earlier era in American politics, of sit-ins and full jails, where opponents meant to grind the apparatus of government to a halt as a means of resistance.“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part,” Mario Savio, a student leader in the free speech movement, a campaign of civil disobedience against restrictive policies on student political activity, said 60 years ago during a campus protest. “You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”That can look like Booker’s 25-hour record-breaking stand at the dais from 31 March through 1 April this year, presenting a litany of protest against the actions of the first 71 days of the Trump administration in the longest speech in Senate history. Technically, it was not a filibuster, unlike the previous record-holder, the South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond’s speech delaying passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1957.As an act of political protest, it required presence. The rules of a Senate floor speech are exacting. No sitting. No breaks. Continuous, corporeal effort. As the spectacle grew, Booker acknowledged that Democratic voters had been demanding more of their leaders.“I confess that I have been imperfect,” Booker said. “I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I confess that the Democratic party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say: ‘We will do better.’”Activists had been in the street from the day of Trump’s inauguration. But Booker’s speech was a demarcation point after which Democratic leaders started confronting the right more directly. It also marked them being confronted in return.Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, allowed a man to leave through the back doors of her courtroom, allegedly in response to the presence of immigration officers waiting to arrest him. FBI agents subsequently arrested Dugan in her Milwaukee courtroom on 25 April, charging her with obstruction.The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted comments about her arrest on X almost immediately, and eventually posted a photograph of her arrest, handcuffed and walking toward a police cruiser, with the comment: “No one is above the law.” Digitally altered photographs of Dugan appearing to be in tears in a mugshot proliferated on social media. Trump himself reposted an image from the Libs of TikTok website of Dugan wearing a Covid-19 mask on the day of her arrest.Three days later, Trump issued an executive order to create “a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification”, including “private-sector pro bono assistance”, for cops it describes as “unjustly incur[ring] expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law”.The order also seeks “enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers”, and calls for federal prosecution of state or local officials who the administration says obstruct law enforcement.View image in fullscreenTaken together, the order sent a clear signal to federal police agencies to take the gloves off – that accusations of misconduct would be defended against and that placing the bodies of public officials into handcuffs and squad cars was fair game.Three days after that, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, suggested more arrests were on the way. “Wait till you see what’s coming,” he said in response to a question about future arrests of officials.But the warnings have not stopped Democrats from showing up at Ice detention centers and other demonstrations.Four more elected or appointed Democratic officials and one Democratic senator’s staffer have been detained, arrested or charged by federal agents since Trump’s executive order. Each of the arrests has become a media spectacle.Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, visited Delaney Hall, a privately owned Ice detention facility he accuses of violating safety protocols, on 9 May. He was with three members of Congress at the time, who have the explicit right by law to inspect Ice facilities. Video captured by body-worn cameras shows a tangle of bodies as Ice agents arrest him, with beefy federal officers bending him over in handcuffs as they walk him through an outraged crowd.Amid the scrum is the freshman representative LaMonica McIver in her red coat, who stands out in videos as she walks through the gate. She appears to bump a masked law enforcement officer as she’s caught in the chaotic scene. Her intentions are far from clear, and witness video from other angles contradicts the government’s claim that members of Congress stormed the facility.Ten days later, the acting US attorney, Alina Habba, charged McIver with forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers, even after dropping similar charges against Baraka. For the administration and its supporters, the high-visibility arrests play out as payback for what they see as the politically motivated prosecution of Trump and of January 6 rioters. The Republican representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina filed a House resolution to expel McIver. Baraka’s arrest and McIver’s charge became fodder for conservative media.But it also galvanized Newark. Protesters filled the streets awaiting Baraka’s release.“History will judge us in this moral moment,” he told the crowd. “These people are wrong. And it’s moments like this that will judge us all – as cowards or, you know, as heroes.”Three weeks later, a staffer for the representative Jerry Nadler – whose name has not been released – allegedly impeded homeland security agents searching for “rioters” at a protest about immigration enforcement abuses. The agents handcuffed and detained her. Video circulated widely on social media and cable television.View image in fullscreenOn 8 June, as protesters flooded downtown Los Angeles intent on gumming up the streets around the Metropolitan detention center, the Democratic representative Jimmy Gomez of California posted a video on Instagram describing how chemical irritants had been deployed around the detention building. “They’re spraying something to try to get us to leave,” he said. “This is just to prevent us from doing our jobs.”Homeland security briefly released guidance last week asking members of Congress to give Ice facilities 72 hours of prior notice before visiting a facility. The demand conflicts with federal law allowing members of Congress immediate access for inspections. The guidance is no longer posted on the DHS website.The Democratic senator Alex Padilla of California attempted to confront the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, about protests in Los Angeles on 12 June. Before he could get a word in, when he approached to ask a question, Secret Service and FBI agents dragged Padilla out of the room and handcuffed him. The DHS falsely claimed that Padilla had failed to identify himself, releasing a statement describing Padilla’s inquiry as “disrespectful political theatre”.“The only political theater happening in Los Angeles is Trump using thousands of troops in Los Angeles as political props in response to overwhelmingly peaceful protests,” Padilla said in response.It has only been half a year that Trump has been president, but Democrats and other critics are finding that it’s the balance of civil rights tactics with 2025 TikTok-era virality that is cutting through the noise. Paired with some of the biggest protests in American history, it seems they are only getting started.“Authoritarians are looking to stoke fear and conflict and send a signal [that] if they are going to do this to elected officials – if they’re going to do it to white male US citizens with passports or elected officials, I think their goal is to make everyone afraid,” Lander said.“There is a pattern here, you know, from Senator Padilla to Ras Baraka to me, and an on-the-record statement from the attorney general about … trying to quote-unquote ‘liberate’ cities from their elected officials,” he added. “So, I take them at their word.” More