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      Denied, detained, deported: the most high-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March.View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally-protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials wearing masks and hoodies encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student in a suburb of Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, according to his lawyers and a video of the incident, first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen, his lawyer said.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother student at Columbia, Chung, 21, sued the Trump administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting against the university’s punishments of student activists, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they want to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”Less is known about the federal government’s claims against Doroudi but it is understood he was taken to the same Ice processing center in Jena, Louisiana, where Khalil is behind bars, NBC reported.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the citizen of India’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.Kseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana.Student visas revokedMore than 1,300 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US have had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, between mid-March and mid-April, Inside Higher Education has reported. The specialist publication called it “an explosion of visa terminations”.The schools and students have been given little information, but secretary of state Marco Rubio has lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some have been cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some can find no specific reason why their visa would be revoked. Many are from India and China, the Associated Press reported, and panic is setting in on campuses.High-profile cases include:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he is “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Momodou TaalTaal, a dual citizen of Britain and Gambia, was pursuing a PhD at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, and was an outspoken activist on the Ivy League campus. He was suspended last year for his role in anti-Zionist protests. He sued the Trump administration over labeling foreign student protesters anti-Semitic and was told to surrender to immigration officials. He has since left the country.Deported by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadoran man was deported to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But then it essentially defied a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland from a brutal mega-prison in the central American country. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis. He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans also deported there. Sheet metalworkers union chief Michael Coleman described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadoran prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández Romeroskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes BarriosThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the Department of Homeland Security, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country because their nations of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      Finally, the Trump regime has met its match | Robert Reich

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      It was bound to happen.Encouraged by the ease with which many big US institutions caved in to their demands, the Trump regime – that is, the small cadre of bottom-feeding fanatics around Donald Trump (JD Vance, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and RFK Jr) along with the child king himself – have overreached.They’ve dared China, Harvard and the supreme court to blink.But guess what? They’ve met their matches. None of them has blinked – and they won’t.China not only refused to back down when the Trump regime threatened it with huge tariffs, but also retaliated with huge tariffs of its own, plus a freeze on the export of rare-earth elements that the US’s high-tech and defense industries depend on.Harvard also pointedly defied the regime, issuing a clear rebuke to its attempt to interfere with academic freedom.The supreme court – in a rare unanimous decision – ordered Trump to facilitate the return of a legal US resident wrongly deported to a dangerous prison in El Salvador, without any criminal charges.But the White House was defiant. On Monday, both Trump officials and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said they could not return Kilmar Ábrego García.“Of course, I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked. Trump sat by his side with a smile on his face. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, joined in the cruel imitation of justice: “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him.”What’s next?I suspect the testosterone-poisoned lackeys around King Trump are urging him to hit back even harder, escalating their confrontations with China, Harvard and the supreme court. They view these showdowns as ultimate tests of the regime’s strength.Think of it – they must be telling themselves and their boss – what prizes! If they defeat China, they have brought the world’s other economic powerhouse to its knees!If they defeat Harvard University, they have been victorious over the world’s intellectual powerhouse!skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf they defeat the supreme court, they have conquered the entire US government!Win these battles and no one will ever again doubt the power and resolve of the Trump regime!Hopefully, Trump is smarter than this. He knows these three institutions will not back down. They are rich and powerful enough to defy Trump’s escalating threats and demands. They cannot and will not cower.If Trump escalates his wars against them, they’ll become even stronger in the eyes of their supporters and constituents, and much of the world.The American people will see that Trump is actually a blowhard with no real power at all.So if he’s smart, Trump will try to de-escalate these three conflicts.He’s already hinted at an off-ramp with China. He will probably find some way to claim that Harvard has capitulated to his demands. He will avoid a showdown with the supreme court.But keep a watch on these three. They are Trump’s most formidable foes. If he doesn’t understand this and instead succumbs to the urges of his power-crazed lackeys, the Trump regime’s days will in effect be over before it even completes the first hundred of them.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Judge rebukes Trump officials for not securing return of wrongly deported man

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      A federal judge sharply rebuked the Trump administration and scolded officials on Tuesday for taking no steps to secure the return of a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, as the US supreme court had ordered in a contentious ruling last week.The US district judge Paula Xinis said that Donald Trump’s news conference with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where the leaders joked that Kilmar Ábrego García would not be released, did not count as compliance.“To date nothing has been done,” Xinis said, a day after senior Trump officials also mounted an effort to sidestep the supreme court decision by offering increasingly strained readings of the order to claim they were powerless to bring back Ábrego García.The judge ultimately said she would require the administration to produce details under oath about its attempts to return Ábrego García to US soil in two weeks, an unusually expeditious timeline for discovery that indicated how she intends to move with the case.At issue at the hearing in federal district court in Maryland was the administration’s narrow reading of the supreme court order that compelled it to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García, who was supposed to have been shielded from being sent to El Salvador.The administration had earlier conceded Ábrego García’s deportation was an administrative error. But it has since taken the position that it is powerless to bring him back beyond removing domestic obstacles, and that courts lack the constitutional power to dictate the president to do more.The lead lawyer for the administration, Drew Ensign, also said in legal filings before the hearing that even if Ábrego García were returned to the US, the justice department would deport him to a different country or move to terminate the order blocking his removal to El Salvador.But the judge rejected the administration’s narrow reading of “facilitate”, noting the plain meaning of the word meant officials needed to secure Ábrego García’s release – and that US immigration and customs enforcement had previously taken a number of positions on its meaning.“Your characterization is not bound in fact,” Xinis said. “I need facts.”The administration argued it had sought to comply with the supreme court’s order when Trump addressed the case and Bukele questioned whether he was supposed to smuggle Ábrego García across the border – which Ensign argued showed the matter had been raised at the “highest levels”.The judge appeared unimpressed by the argument. “It’s not a direct response,” Xinis said. “Nor is the quip about smuggling someone into the US. If you were removing domestic barriers, there would be no smuggling, right? Two misguided ships passing in the night.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judge told Ábrego García’s lawyers to prepare by Wednesday their questions for the administration about what steps it had taken. She said they could depose up to six officials, including Robert Cerna, a top official at Ice, and Joseph Mazarra, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.“Cancel vacation,” Xinis told Ensign. “Cancel appointments. I’m usually pretty good about this in my courtroom, but not this time.”After the hearing, Ábrego García’s lawyer Rina Gandhi called the hearing a win but added they were not yet done. “We have not brought Kilmar home,” she told reporters, “but we will be able to question those involved and get information and evidence as required.”She also accused the administration of acting in bad faith. “This case is about the government unlawfully – and admitting to unlawfully – removing a gentleman from this country, from his home, his family, his children, and taking no actions to fix them as ordered by the supreme court,” Gandhi said. More

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      US supreme court blocks ruling that 16,000 fired federal workers must be rehired

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      The US supreme court has handed Donald Trump a reprieve from a judge’s ruling that his administration must rehire 16,000 probationary workers fired in its purge of the federal bureaucracy.A day after ruling in the White House’s favor to allow the continued deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, the court gave the White House a less clear-cut victory in halting the order by a California court that dismissed workers from six government agencies must be rehired.The court struck down by a 7-2 majority last month’s ruling by US district court judge William Alsup because non-profit groups who had sued on behalf of the fired workers had no legal standing.It did not rule on the firings themselves, which affected probationary workers in the Pentagon, the treasury, and the departments of energy, agriculture, interior and veterans affairs.“The district court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case,” the unsigned ruling read. “But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing. This order does not address the claims of the other plaintiffs, which did not form the basis of the district court’s preliminary injunction.”Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.The victory, though limited, is likely to embolden the Trump administration in the belief that the spate of legal reverses it has faced since taking office can be eventually overturned in the supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, due largely to three rightwing judges Trump nominated to the bench during his first presidency.The extent of Tuesday’s victory was qualified by the fact that it does not affect a separate order by a judge in Maryland applying to the same agencies plus several others. Judge James Bredar of the Maryland federal district court ordered the administration to reinstate workers in response to a case brought by 19 states and the government of Washington DC.In the California ruling, the court heard how staff were informed by a templated email from the office of personnel management that they were losing their jobs for performance-related reasons. “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the email said.While accepting that workforce reductions were acceptable if carried out “correctly under the law”, Alsup said workers had been fired for bogus reasons.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee, and say it was based on performance, when they know good and well, that’s a lie,” he said.In filings to the supreme court, the acting solicitor general, Sarah Harris, argued that Alsup had exceeded his powers.“The court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” she wrote. “That is no way to run a government. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.” More

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      US supreme court allows Trump administration to freeze teacher-training grants

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      The US supreme court is letting the Trump administration temporarily freeze $65m in teacher-training grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in a 5-4 decision.The decision came down on Friday afternoon, with five of the court’s conservatives – Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh – in the majority. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented.In the unsigned opinion, the court said that the states made it clear “that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running”, but the Trump administration had a strong case that it would not be able to reclaim any of the funds spent while the lower court’s order remained in place.The cuts to more than 100 programs had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge in Boston, who found that they were already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage. The federal appeals court in Boston turned away an appeal from the administration to allow them to resume.The emergency appeal is among several the high court is considering in which the justice department argues that lower-court judges have improperly obstructed Donald Trump’s agenda.Friday’s order was the first time in three attempts that the nation’s highest court gave the administration what it wanted on an emergency basis.US district judge Myong Joun issued a temporary restraining order sought by eight Democratic-led states that argued the cuts were probably driven by efforts from Trump’s administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.The Republican president also has signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the education department, and his administration has already started overhauling much of its work, including cutting dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful.The two programs at issue – the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development – provide more than $600m in grants for teacher preparation programs, often in subject areas such as math, science and special education, the states have argued. They said data has shown the programs had led to increased teacher retention rates and ensured that educators remain in the profession beyond five years.Despite Joun’s finding that the programs already were being affected, the high court’s conservative majority wrote that the states can keep the programs running with their own money for now. By contrast, the majority said in an unsigned opinion, the federal government probably wouldn’t be able to recover the cash if it ultimately wins the lawsuit.
      Kagan wrote in dissent that there was no reason for the court’s emergency intervention.“Nowhere in its papers does the Government defend the legality of canceling the education grants at issue here,” Kagan wrote.In a separate opinion, Brown Jackson wrote: “It is beyond puzzling that a majority of Justices conceive of the government’s application as an emergency.”
      The administration halted the programs without notice in February. Joun, an appointee of Democratic president Joe Biden, found that the cancellations probably violated a federal law that requires a clear explanation.The appellate panel that rejected the administration’s request for a stay also was made up of judges appointed by Democrats.California is leading the ongoing lawsuit, joined by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.Boston public schools have already had to fire several full-time employees due to the loss of grant funding, and the College of New Jersey has also canceled the rest of its teacher-residency program. California State University has ended support for two dozen students in a similar program, and eliminated financial assistance for 50 incoming students. More

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      White House asks supreme court to allow deportations under wartime law

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      The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to intervene to allow the government to continue to deport immigrants using the obscure Alien Enemies Act.The request came one day after a federal appeals court upheld a Washington DC federal judge’s temporary block on immigrant expulsions via a wartime act that allows the administration to bypass normal due process, for example by allowing people a court hearing before shipping them out of the US.Friday’s emergency request claims that the federal court’s order temporarily blocking the removal of Venezuelans forces the US to “harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans”.Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has spurred a legal battle between the executive and judiciary branches of the US federal government.“We will urge the supreme court to preserve the status quo to give the courts time to hear this case, so that more individuals are not sent off to a notorious foreign prison without any process, based on an unprecedented and unlawful use of a wartime authority,” said Lee Gelernt in a statement on Friday afternoon. Gelernt is the deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project and lead counsel in the case.As the executive branch continues to battle the constitutionally coequal judiciary branch for primacy, the US justice department said in its filing on Friday that the case presents the question of who decides how to conduct sensitive national security-related operations, the president or the judiciary.“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President,” the department wrote. “The republic cannot afford a different choice.“On 15 March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute allowing the government to expel foreign nationals considered to be enemies to the US. When invoking the act, Trump, without proof, claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government.A US intelligence document accessed by the New York Times contradicts Trump’s claim about the Venezuelan government’s ties to the gang.That day, attorneys filed an emergency motion to block the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel migrants to El Salvador. Then planes took off from the US, transporting the nearly 300 immigrants accused of being gang members. As the planes were in mid-air, a federal judge in Washington blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel the immigrants, but the Venezuelans were not returned to the US.Despite the Trump administration in its supreme court filing claiming that it engaged in a “rigorous process” to identify members of the Venezuelan gang, news stories are increasingly placing those claims into question. Family members of many of the deported Venezuelan migrants deny the alleged gang ties. This month, the US district judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to engage in “individualized hearings” for immigrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. More

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      Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it | Laurence H Tribe

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      Less than seven weeks into Donald Trump’s second term as president, his administration has set off a new wave of handwringing over what has by now become a familiar question: has the US entered a constitutional crisis?Triggering the latest iteration of that worry, the government hastily deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, without hearings or evidence and thus without anything even resembling due process of law, pursuant to the US president’s proclamation “signed in the dark on Friday evening” that they constituted an invasion by a foreign state.Trump invoked a 1798 statute last used to intern Japanese Americans during the second world war, buttressed by powers he claimed were inherent in the presidency. Chief judge James E Boasberg of the US district court for the District of Columbia rushed to convene a hearing on the legality of the challenged action as two deportation flights departed from Texas, followed quickly by a third. Moments after the judge ordered them to return so he could rule on a motion barring the deportation, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, tweeted: “Oopsie … Too late”, with a laughing emoji, even as the court considered whether its order had been defied.The branch of government best able to uncover and safeguard both our noblest traditions and the simple truth in moments such as these – the judiciary – has been hobbled and vilified by Trump and his allies, making wildly irresponsible calls for impeachment that put dangerous targets on the backs of judges who rule in ways they dislike. Even mild-mannered chief justice John Roberts had to cry “foul”. The administration’s cavalier attitude toward courts that fail to do its bidding, exemplified by calls for Boasberg’s removal, seemed to confirm concerns about a looming crisis.But searching for evidence of a “constitutional crisis” in the rapidly escalating clashes of the executive branch with the judicial branch misses the larger cataclysm taking place across the US. This president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.What we are currently living through is nothing less than a reorganized forgetting of the building blocks of our republic and the history of our struggles, distorting what it means to be American. The body politic is being hollowed out by a rapidly metastasizing virus attacking the underpinnings of our entire constitutional system. Make no mistake. This is how dictatorship grows.Symptomatic of that reshaping is the peculiar emergence, in a duet staged by the president together with the world’s richest man and Trump’s main benefactor, of a co-presidency without precedent in our republic and without even a hint of the irony in such shared power being propagated by ideologues whose mantra has long been the need for a “unitary presidency”.As staffers of the newly minted so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) raided congressionally created independent federal agencies and foundations without warning and slashed entire programs without thought, the Trump administration stuttered when asked by the courts to explain who was in charge of the “department” that no Congress had created – and how the leader of that enterprise had somehow acquired the power of the purse that the constitution clearly delegated only to Congress.More than just stonewalling courts and refusing to provide basic information on government activities, the Trump administration has waged war on history itself. Having first debilitated our capacity to act, it is now coming after our capacity to think. The same day Boasberg directed the administration to explain why it had seemingly failed to comply with his order, Doge staffers marched into the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency responsible for funding many needy public museums, libraries and historic repositories across the country.Like Julius Caesar besieging and burning the Library of Alexandria, the Doge officials descended upon the IMLS to begin the process of gutting the public institutions dedicated to preserving and making widely available the shared memory of our past. It was none other than Benjamin Franklin whose conception of public libraries democratized knowledge and made it accessible to ordinary people. What used to be the private province of the few became the public province of the many.The attack on the IMLS is only the latest episode of the Trump presidency’s attempt to privatize information while replacing authentic history with a version more to its liking. As internet archivists race to back up the nation’s files and records, Trump administration officials have been systematically purging government websites in real time of the tools, concepts and language we need to act as informed citizens. In response to secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s order to remove “diversity” content from the department’s platforms, the Pentagon took down pages about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness and suicide prevention. So too, the Department of Agriculture deleted entire datasets and resources that farmers relied on to identify ways of coping with heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires. Websites belonging to the Small Business Administration and Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed their platforms of photographs and references to women, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color, including facts about American heroes such as Jackie Robinson or Gen Colin Powell.Taken together, these events of the past few weeks reveal an alarmingly rapid collapse of what gives the United States constitution life and meaning. Its words may remain unchanged, but its role in our lives is crumbling before our eyes. Looking for a decisive explosion or a moment of crisis – what physicists call a singularity – in the chaotic onrush of presidential provocations is a fool’s errand, one calculated to disarm the resistance without which we will surely be doomed.The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump’s rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country’s capital, followed first by the Senate’s abdication of its duty in Trump’s second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court’s gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power.Rarely noted is how this frightening power to ignore federal criminal law has been conferred not only on the president but on his legions of loyal lieutenants, from public officials to private militias. Because the constitution itself gives presidents an unbridled power to pardon others – a power Trump reveled in employing to free from prison the violent insurrectionists that he had himself helped unleash – we now live under a system in which any president can license his trusted followers to commit crimes to consolidate his power and wealth, making clear that a pardon awaits them should they face federal prosecution. The upshot is that privateers in league with the president can safely ignore federal laws criminalizing corrupt evasion of rules designed to protect public health and safety while they casually usurp powers the constitution gave to Congress, moving so fast and breaking so much that not even genuinely independent federal courts can keep pace with the mayhem.In his iconic poem The Hollow Men, TS Eliot a century ago famously wrote: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / … /Not with a bang but a whimper.” Rooted in our past, the anti-democracy virus has reached a fever pitch as it ravages the body politic and revises all traces of our history. It’s a virus we must fight with all the energy we can muster if we don’t want our system of self-government under law to die – not in a sudden explosion but with a quiet whimper.The tragedy is that too many politicians and organizations are caving in without a fight, leading others to follow suit. With each surrender, Trump and his minions not only grow more emboldened but cement their hold on power by cracking down on all who dare oppose them in court, including lawyers who come to the aid of the administration’s enemies.Without more courageous leaders – including Republican officeholders who fear being primaried by candidates backed by limitless wealth – and without more bravery on the part of corporate CEOs whose fortunes can be threatened by Trump, elite lawyers whose business can shrivel if Trump targets them, and ordinary citizens understandably fearing online threats and worse, this darkness will be our destiny as we are reduced to mere memories and then relegated to the vast wasteland of the forgotten.

      Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School. Meriting special thanks and acknowledgment is his research assistant, Radhika M Kattula, a third-year law student at Harvard Law School. More

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      in US Politics

      Chief justice rebukes Trump for call to impeach judge hearing deportation case

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      John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, delivered a rare rebuke on Tuesday of Donald Trump after the US president demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who had issued an adverse ruling against the administration blocking the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members.“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement. “The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”The statement came hours after Trump assailed the chief US district judge in Washington DC, James Boasberg, for issuing a temporary restraining order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that gives the president the power to conduct removals without due process.“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote about Boasberg, labelling him a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” and a “troublemaker”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s personal attack against Boasberg reflected his broader resentment at being increasingly constrained in recent weeks by court orders he believes are wrong, and his frustration at having his signature deportation policy be halted while subject to legal scrutiny.It also followed the administration’s attempt to have Boasberg thrown off the case, complaining in a letter to the clerk of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit – a bizarre way to force a recusal – on grounds that he had overreached by improperly turning the matter into a class-action lawsuit.According to the statute, the Alien Enemies Act can be invoked in the event of war, which only Congress can declare under the US constitution, or in the event of “predatory incursions” by state actors that amount to an invasion.The Trump administration’s use of the law rests on the second clause concerning incursions. In court filings, the administration has said Trump determined that the US was being invaded by members of the Tren de Aragua gang in Venezuela, which acted as a proxy for the Venezuelan government.Trump has the power as president to declare an incursion under the Alien Enemies Act, the filing said, and his decision was unreviewable by the courts following the US supreme court’s 1948 decision in Ludecke v Watkins, which said that whether someone was an enemy alien was up to the president.But Trump and his political allies appeared to have conflated two issues; federal courts can still review whether Trump satisfied the conditions to declare an incursion under the Alien Enemies Act in the first instance.The problem for the Trump administration is that in deciding Boasberg’s injunction blocking the deportation flights was unlawful, they ignored a verbal order from the judge at an emergency hearing on Saturday to turn around any deportation flights that had already departed.That opened a second legal battle for the administration where the justice department was left to argue at a hearing on Monday that the orders had been unclear and that, in any event, Boasberg’s authority to compel the planes to return vanished the moment they left US airspace.The extraordinary defenses by the administration suggested the White House took advantage of its own perceived uncertainty to do as it pleased, testing the limits of the judicial system to hold to account government officials set on circumventing adverse rulings.At the hearing, the administration claimed it did not follow Boasberg’s verbal instruction to turn around planes that had already departed, because it had not been repeated in the written injunction he issued at 7.25pm ET on Saturday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Oral statements are not injunctions and the written orders always supersede whatever may have been stated in the record,” Abhishek Kambli, the deputy assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil division, argued for the administration.The judge appeared unimpressed by that contention. “You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded – that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said.Kambli also suggested that even if Boasberg had included the directive in his written injunction, by the time he issued the temporary restraining order the deportation flights had been outside the judge’s jurisdiction.Boasberg expressed incredulity at that argument, too, explaining that federal judges still have authority over US government officials who make the decisions about the planes and that he had had the authority to order their return, even if the planes had been outside US airspace.The Trump administration opened a third legal front in the Alien Enemies Act case, after it asked Boasberg in a late-night 35-page filing on Monday to dissolve the injunctions and dismiss the case.The administration is currently subject to two injunctions: one order preventing the deportation of five Venezuelans who filed the initial suit challenging the use of the Alien Enemies Act, and a second order from Boasberg that expanded the initial order to cover anyone being removed under the Alien Enemies Act.Administration lawyers affirmed in a separate filing on Tuesday that no deportation flights had departed the US after Boasberg’s written injunction had been issued on Saturday evening. Two flights took off before his 7.25pm ET order. One flight took off after, but that plane carried immigrants who were being deported under a different authority from the Alien Enemies Act. More