A new report from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has raised concerns over the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program, citing instances of identity fraud and gang affiliations among applicants approved for lawful permanent residency.
“The scale of criminality, gang involvement, and fraud described in this report is more extensive than in earlier public discussions of the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program,” Morgan Bailey, a partner at Mayer Brown and a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, told Newsweek.
https://www.newsweek.com/special-immigrant-juvenile-visa-gang-exploitation-uscis-report-2104231
A Michigan Democratic effort would open up ICE agents to state prosecution if they conduct immigration enforcement operations while wearing masks that conceal their identity.
…
The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Betsy Coffia, D-Traverse City, said Friday ICE’s masking-up “mirror the tactics of secret police in authoritarian regimes and strays from the norms that define legitimate local law enforcement.”
“It confuses and frightens communities,” she said. “Those who protect and serve our community should not do so behind a concealed identity.”
A banner on the dais from which Coffia announced the bill read, “Justice needs no masks.”
State Rep. Noah Arbit, D-West Bloomfield, added his name as a co-sponsor and said in a statement when a person is unable to discern whether someone apprehending them is a government authority or not, it “shreds the rule of law.”
“That is why the Trump administration and the Republican Party are the most pro-crime administration and political party that we have ever seen,” Arbit said.
Attorney General Dana Nessel, who was one of several state prosecutors to demand Congress pass similar legislation at the federal level, also threw her support behind the bill.
“Imagine a set of circumstances where somebody might be a witness to a serious crime and that defendant has some friends go out and literally just mask up and go apprehend somebody at a courthouse,” Nessel told the Traverse City NBC affiliate.
…
Nessel also lent her name to an amicus brief this month supporting a case brought against ICE over tactics used during its raids in Los Angeles.
“When masked, heavily armed federal agents operate with no identification, they threaten public safety and erode public trust,” Nessel said in the brief.
…
On 14 March, [Ramos Bastidas] shared with his family that maybe he would be able to come back to Venezuela after all …. The next day, he was flown to Cecot.
“They could have deported him to Venezuela,” Alvarez-Jones. “Instead, the US government made a determination to send him to be tortured in Cecot.”
Venezuelans that the Trump administration expelled to El Salvador’s most notorious megaprison endured “state-sanctioned torture”, lawyers for some of the men have said, as more stories emerge about the horrors they faced during capacity.
When José Manuel Ramos Bastidas – one of 252 Venezuelan men that the US sent to El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison – finally made it back home to El Tocuyo on Tuesday, the first thing he did was stretch his arms around his family.
His wife, son and mother were wearing the bright blue shirts they had printed with a photo of him, posed in a yellow and black moto jacket and camo-print jeans. It was the first time they had hugged him since he left Venezuela last year. And it was the first time they could be sure – truly sure – that he was alive and well since he disappeared into the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot) in March.
“We have been waiting for this moment for months, and I feel like I can finally breathe,” said Roynerliz Rodríguez, Ramos Bastidas’s partner. “These last months have been a living nightmare, not knowing anything about José Manuel and only imagining what he must be suffering. I am happy he is free from Cecot, but I also know that we will never be free of the shadow of this experience. There must be justice for all those who suffered this torture.”
The Venezuelan deportees were repatriated last week following a deal between the US and Venezuelan governments. Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, negotiated a prisoner swap that released 10 American citizens in his custody and dozens of Venezuelan political prisoners in exchange for the release of his citizens from Cecot.
This week, after undergoing medical and background checks, they are finally reuniting with their families. Their testimonies of what they experienced inside Cecot are providing the first, most detailed pictures of the conditions inside Cecot, a mega-prison that human rights groups say is designed to disappear people.
Ramos Bastidas and other US deportees were told that they were condemned to spend 30 to 90 years in Cecot unless the US president ordered otherwise, he told his lawyers. They were shot with rubber bullets on repeated occasions – including on Friday, during their last day of detention.
In interviews with the media and in testimony provided to their lawyers, other detainees described lengthy beatings and humiliation by guards. After some detainees tried to break the locks on their cell, prisoners were beaten for six consecutive days, the Atlantic reports. Male guards reportedly brought in female colleagues, who beat the naked prisoners and recorded videos.
Edicson David Quintero Chacón, a US deportee, said that he was placed in isolation for stretches of time, during which he thought he would die, his lawyer told the Guardian. Quintero Chacón, who has scars from daily beatings, also said that he and other inmates were only provided soap and an opportunity to bathe on days when visitors were touring the prison – forcing them to choose between hygiene and public humiliation.
Food was limited, and the drinking water was dirty, Quintero Chacón and other detainees have said. Lights were on all night, so detainees could never fully rest. “And the guards would also come in at night and beat them at night,” said his lawyer Stephanie M Alvarez-Jones, the south-east regional attorney at the National Immigration Project.
In a filing asking for a dismissal of her months-long petition on behalf of her clients’ release, Alvarez-Jones wrote: “He will likely carry the psychological impact of this torture his whole life. The courts must never look away when those who wield the power of the US government, at the highest levels, engage in such state-sanctioned violence.”
Ramos Bastidas has never been convicted of any crimes in the US (or in any country). In fact, he had never really set foot in the US as a free man.
In El Tocuyo, in the Venezuelan state of Lara, and had been working since he was a teenager to support his family. Last year, he decided to leave his country – which has yet to recover from an economic collapse – to seek better income, so he could pay for medical care for his infant with severe asthma.
In March 2024, he arrived at the US-Mexico border and presented himself at a port of entry. He made an appointment using the now-defunct CBP One phone application to apply for asylum – but immigration officials and a judge determined that he did not qualify.
But Customs and Border Protection agents had flagged Ramos Bastidas as a possible member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, based on an unsubstantiated report from Panamanian officials and his tattoos. So they transferred him to a detention facility, where he was to remain until he could be deported.
Despite agreeing to return to Venezuela, he remained for months in detention. “I think what is particularly enraging for José is that he had accepted his deportation,” said Alvarez-Jones. “He was asking for his deportation for a long time, and he just wanted to go back home.”
In December, Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees – so Ramos Bastidas asked if he could be released and make his own way home. A month later, Donald Trump was sworn in as president. Everything changed.
Ramos Bastidas began to see other Venezuelans were being sent to the military base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba – and he feared the same would happen to him. On 14 March, he shared with his family that maybe he would be able to come back to Venezuela after all, after officials began prepping him for deportation.
The next day, he was flown to Cecot.
“They could have deported him to Venezuela,” Alvarez-Jones. “Instead, the US government made a determination to send him to be tortured in Cecot.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/26/venezuela-el-salvador-prison
When Jerce Reyes Barrios and other Venezuelan deportees entered a maximum security prison in El Salvador this spring, he said guards greeted them with taunts.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of bitches,” Reyes Barrios said the guards told them. “You’ve arrived at the Terrorist Confinement Center. Hell on earth.”
What followed, Reyes Barrios said, were the darkest months of his life. Reyes Barrios said he was regularly beaten on his neck, ribs and head. He and other prisoners were given little food and forced to drink contaminated water. They slept on metal beds with no mattresses in overcrowded cells, listening to the screams of other inmates.
“There was blood, vomit and people passed out on the floor, he said.
Reyes Barrios, 36, was one of more than 250 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador from the United States in March after President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang without normal immigration procedures. Many of the men, including Reyes Barrios, insist that they have no ties to the gang and were denied due process.
After enduring months in detention in El Salvador, they were sent home last week as part of a prisoner exchange deal that included Venezuela’s release of several detained Americans.
Venezuela’s attorney general said interviews with the men revealed “systemic torture” inside the Salvadoran prison, including daily beatings, rancid food and sexual abuse.
One of the former detainees, Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, filed a claim Thursday with the Homeland Security Department, accusing the U.S. of removing him without due process and asking for $1.3 million in damages.
Reyes Barrios spoke to The Times over video Thursday after returning to his hometown of Machiques, a city of 140,000 not far from the Colombian border. He was overjoyed to be reunited with his mother, his wife and his children. But he said he was haunted by his experience in prison.
A onetime professional soccer player, Reyes Barrios left Venezuela last year amid political unrest and in search of economic opportunity. He entered the U.S. on Sept. 1 at the Otay Mesa border crossing in California under the asylum program known as CBP One. He was immediately detained, accused of being a gangster and placed in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A court statement earlier this year from his attorney, Linette Tobin, said authorities tied Reyes Barrios to Tren de Aragua based solely on an arm tattoo and a social media post in which he made a hand gesture that U.S. authorities interpreted as a gang sign.
The tattoo — a crown sitting atop a soccer ball, with a rosary and the word “Díos” or “God” — is actually an homage to his favorite team, Real Madrid, Tobin wrote. She said the hand gesture is sign language for “I Love You.”
While in custody in California, Reyes Barrios applied for political asylum and other relief. A hearing had been set for April 17, but on March 15, he was deported to El Salvador “with no notice to counsel or family,” Tobin wrote. Reyes Barrios “has never been arrested or charged with a crime,” Tobin added. “He has a steady employment record as a soccer player as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.”
The surprise deportation of Reyes Barrios and other Venezuelans to El Salvador drew outcry from human rights advocates and spurred a legal battle with the Trump administration.
Reyes Barrios was not aware of the controversy over deportations as he was ushered in handcuffs from the airport in San Salvador to the country’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT.
There, Reyes Barrios said he and other inmates were forced to walk on their knees as their heads were shaved and they were repeatedly beaten. He said he was put in a cell with 21 other men — all Venezuelans. Guards meted out measly portions of beans and tortillas and told the inmates they “would never eat chicken or meat again.”
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has detained tens of thousands of his compatriots in CECOT and other prisons in recent years, part of a gang crackdown that human rights advocates say has ensnared thousands of innocent people.
Bukele garnered worldwide attention and praise from U.S. Republicans after he published dramatic photos and videos showing hundreds of prisoners crammed together in humiliating positions, wearing nothing but underwear and shackles. During a meeting with Bukele at the Oval Office this year, Trump said he was interested in sending “homegrowns” — i.e. American prisoners — to El Salvador’s jails.
A spokeswoman for Bukele did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Reyes Barrios said guards told him and the other detained Venezuelans that they would spend the rest of their lives in the prison.
Reyes Barrios said he started praying at night: “God, protect my mother and my children. I entrust my soul to you because I think I’m going to die.”
Then, several days ago, he and the other prisoners were awakened by yelling in the early morning hours. Guards told them they had 20 minutes to take showers and prepare to leave.
“At that moment, we all shouted with joy,” Reyes Barrios said. “I think that was my only happy day at CECOT.”
After arriving in Venezuela, Reyes Barrios and the other returnees spent days in government custody, undergoing medical checks and interviews with officials.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has seized on the treatment of prisoners, airing videos on state television in which some deportees describe suffering abuses including rape, beatings and being shot at with pellet guns. Venezuelan authorities say they are investigating Bukele over the alleged abuse.
Maduro, a leftist authoritarian who has ruled Venezuela since 2013, has maintained his grip on power by jailing — and sometimes torturing — opponents. Many of the 7.7 million Venezuelans who have fled the country in recent years have cited political repression as one reason for leaving.
In Tobin’s court statement, she said Reyes Barrios participated in two demonstrations against Maduro in early 2024. After the second, Reyes Barrios was detained by authorities along with other protesters and tortured, she wrote.
Reyes Barrios said he did not wish to discuss Venezuelan politics. He said he was just grateful to be back with his family.
“My mother is very happy, ” he said.
He was greeted in his hometown by some of the young soccer players he once coached. They wore their uniforms and held balloons. Reyes Barrios juggled a ball a bit, gave the kids hugs and high fives, and smiled.
Police gang databases are known to be faulty. The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians’ personal information into massive, barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria — like their personal contacts, clothing, and tattoos — even if they haven’t committed a crime. The databases aren’t subject to judicial review, and they don’t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members.
They’re an ideal tool for officials seeking to imply criminality without due process. And many are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE — which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called “third countries.” Some of the country’s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.
Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research, reporting, and audits have revealed that many contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling.
The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s promised “mass deportation” campaign. The administration has cited common tattoos and other spurious evidence to create its own lists of supposed gang members, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison, also known as CECOT. Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries, including some targeted at Central American communities that have landed in the administration’s crosshairs. That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable.
“They’re going after the asylum system on every front they can,” said Andrew Case, supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice. “Using gang affiliation as a potential weapon in that fight is very scary.”
Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one case that became a national flashpoint: To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March, federal officials used a disputed report that a disgraced Maryland cop submitted to a defunct registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang. The report cited the word of an unnamed informant, Abrego’s hoodie, and a Chicago Bulls cap — items “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” it said.
The case echoed patterns from Trump’s first term, when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops — evidence as flimsy as doodles in a student’s notebook — to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation. As Trump’s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive, ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego’s that it’s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence.
Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE’s ability to target people without due process.
“This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse,” she said. “This is our worst fear.”
In February, ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique, a barber from Venezuela living in Texas. The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang at the center of the latest anti-immigrant panic, and sent him to CECOT.
Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors: A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang, USA Today reported. Garcia Casique’s family insists he was never in a gang.
It’s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique’s rendition, which federal officials insist wasn’t a mistake. But ICE agents had direct access to it — plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database — The Intercept has found.
Under a Texas statute Trump ally Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in 2017, any county with a population over 100,000 or municipality over 50,000 must maintain or contribute to a local or regional gang database. More than 40 Texas counties and dozens more cities and towns meet that bar. State authorities compile the disparate gang intelligence in a central registry known as TxGANG, which contained more than 71,000 alleged gang members as of 2022.
Texas then uploads the entries to the “Gang File” in an FBI-run clearinghouse known as the National Crime Information Center, state authorities confirmed to The Intercept. Created in the 1960s, the NCIC is one of the most commonly used law enforcement datasets in the country, with local, state, and federal police querying its dozens of files millions of times a day. (The FBI did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)
ICE can access the NCIC, including the Gang File, in several ways — most directly through its Investigative Case Management system, Department of Homeland Security documents show. The Obama administration hired Palantir, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel, to build the proprietary portal, which makes countless records and databases immediately available to ICE agents. Palantir is currently expanding the tool, having signed a $96 million contract during the Biden administration to upgrade it.
TxGANG isn’t the only gang database ICE can access through its Palantir-built system. The Intercept trawled the open web for law enforcement directives, police training materials, and state and local statutes that mention adding gang database entries to the NCIC. Those The Intercept identified likely represent a small subset of the jurisdictions that upload to the ICE-accessible clearinghouse.
New York Focus first reported the NCIC pipeline-to-immigration agents when it uncovered a 20-year-old gang database operated by the New York State Police. Any law enforcement entity in the Empire State can submit names to the statewide gang database, which state troopers then consider for submission to the NCIC. The New York state gang database contains more than 5,100 entries and has never been audited.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment, has instructed its intelligence bureau on how to add names to the NCIC Gang File as recently as 2023, The Intercept found. Virginia has enshrined its gang database-sharing in commonwealth law, which explicitly requires NCIC uploading. In April, Virginia authorities helped ICE arrest 132 people who law enforcement officials claimed were part of transnational gangs.
The Illinois State Police, too, have shared their gang database to the FBI-run dataset. They also share it directly with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s umbrella agency, through an in-house information-sharing system, a local PBS affiliate uncovered last month.
The Illinois State Police’s gang database contained over 90,000 entries as of 2018. The data-sharing with Homeland Security flew under the radar for 17 years and likely violates Illinois’s 2017 sanctuary state law.
“Even in the jurisdictions that are not inclined to work with federal immigration authorities, the information they’re collecting could end up in these federal databases,” said Gupta.
Aside from the National Crime Information Center, there are other conduits for local police to enable the Trump administration’s gang crusade.
Some departments have proactively shared their gang information directly with ICE. As with the case of the Illinois State Police’s gang database, federal agents had access to the Chicago Police Department’s gang registry through a special data-sharing system. From 2009 to 2018, immigration authorities searched the database at least 32,000 times, a city audit later found. In one instance, the city admitted it mistakenly added a man to the database after ICE used it to arrest him.
The Chicago gang database was full of other errors, like entries whose listed dates of birth made them over 100 years old. The inaccuracies and immigration-related revelations, among other issues, prompted the city to shut down the database in 2023.
Other departments allow partner agencies to share their gang databases with immigration authorities. In 2016, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used the statewide CalGang database — itself shown to contain widespread errors — to help ICE deport undocumented people. The following year, California enacted laws that prohibited using CalGang for immigration enforcement. Yet the California Department of Justice told The Intercept that it still allows the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office to share the database, which contained nearly 14,000 entries as of last year, with the Department of Homeland Security.
“Each user must document their need to know/right to know prior to logging into CalGang,” and that documentation is “subject to regular audit,” a California Department of Justice spokesperson said.
Local police also share gang information with the feds through a series of regional hubs known as fusion centers. Created during the post-9/11 domestic surveillance boom, fusion centers were meant to facilitate intelligence-sharing — particularly about purported terrorism — between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Their scope quickly expanded, and they’ve played a key role in the growth of both immigration- and gang-related policing and surveillance.
The Boston Police Department told The Intercept that agencies within the Department of Homeland Security seek access to its gang database by filing a “request for information” through the fusion center known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. In 2016, ICE detained a teenager after receiving records from the Boston gang database, which used a report about a tussle at his high school to label him as a gang member. Boston later passed a law barring law enforcement officials from sharing personal information with immigration enforcement agents, but it contains loopholes for criminal investigations.
In the two decades since their creation, fusion center staff have proactively sought to increase the upward flow of local gang intelligence — including by leveraging federal funds, as in the case between the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which works directly with the Department of Homeland Security. An email from 2013, uncovered as part of a trove of hacked documents, shows that an employee at the Maryland fusion center threatened to withhold some federal funding if the D.C. police didn’t regularly share its gang database.
“I wanted to prepare you that [sic] your agency’s decision … to NOT connect … may indeed effect [sic] next years [sic] funding for your contractual analysts,” a fusion center official wrote. “So keep that in mind…………..”
Four years later, ICE detained a high schooler after receiving a D.C. police gang database entry. The entry said that he “self-admitted” to being in a gang, an Intercept investigation later reported — a charge his lawyer denied.
For jurisdictions that don’t automatically comply, the Trump administration is pushing to entice them into cooperating with ICE. The budget bill Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July earmarks some $14 billion for state and local ICE collaboration, as well as billions more for local police. Official police partnerships with ICE had already skyrocketed this year; more are sure to follow.
Revelations about gang database-sharing show how decades of expanding police surveillance and speculative gang policing have teed up the Trump administration’s crackdowns, said Gupta of the American Immigration Council.
“The core problem is one that extends far beyond the Trump administration,” she said. “You let the due process bar drop that far for so long, it makes it very easy for Trump.”
“They’re putting attorneys who have dedicated themselves to public service in the impossible position of fealty to the President or fealty to the Constitution – candor to the courts or keeping your head low and lying if asked to do so,” Reuveni told The New Yorker. “That is not what the Department of Justice that I worked in was about. That’s not why I went to the Department of Justice and stayed there for fifteen years.”
Shortly after three planes filled with alleged Tren de Aragua gang members took off for an El Salvador supermax prison in March, a judge issued a verbal order with a simple instruction to government lawyers: turn the planes around. The planes, however, continued to El Salvador.
Now, a whistleblower says a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official authorized disregarding the judge’s order, telling his staff they might have to tell the courts “f- you” in immigration cases.
The official was Principal Associate Attorney General Emil Bove, whom President Donald Trump nominated to be a federal judge. Leaked emails and texts from whistleblower and former DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni, released during the week of July 7, came days before a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Bove’s nomination to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If the committee approves, Bove’s nomination will advance to the full Senate.
At Bove’s direction, “the Department of Justice is thumbing its nose at the courts, and putting Justice Department attorneys in an impossible position where they have to choose between loyalty to the agenda of the president and their duty to the court,” Reuveni told The New York Times.
Bove is perceived by some as a controversial choice for the lifetime position. He served on Trump’s defense team in the state and federal indictments filed after Trump’s first term in the White House.
In 2024, after Trump appointed him acting deputy attorney general, Bove ignited controversy over his firing of federal prosecutors involved in cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and over his role in dismissing corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Early this year, the federal government was using an arcane 18th-century wartime law – the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – to remove the alleged gang members from the United States without court hearings. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia ruled the removals violated the men’s right to due process, setting up the conflict with the DOJ.
The leaker’s emails and texts suggest Bove advised DOJ attorneys that it was okay to deplane the prisoners in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
The messages also cite Bove’s instruction for lawyers to consider saying “f- you” to the courts.
When Reuveni asked DOJ and Department of Homeland Security officials if they would honor the judge’s order to stop the planes to El Salvador, he received vague responses or none at all.
While the email and text correspondence allude to Bove’s instruction, none of the messages appear to have come directly from Bove himself. The official whistleblower complaint was filed on June 24.
Bove denies giving that instruction. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Bove said he “never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.”
The leak prompted outrage from both sides of the political spectrum. Some say deporting people without trial to a supermax prison in El Salvador violates due process rights and a DOJ lawyer telling other lawyers to ignore a court order should put him in contempt of court.
However, Attorney General Pam Bondi – who served as one of Trump’s defense attorneys during his first Senate impeachment trial in 2020 – responded on X, saying there was no court order to defy.
“As Mr. Bove testified and as the Department has made clear, there was no court order to defy, as we successfully argued to the DC Circuit when seeking a stay, when they stayed Judge Boasberg’s lawless order. And no one was ever asked to defy a court order,” the attorney general wrote Thursday, July 10, when the emails and texts were released.
Bondi was referring to the DOJ’s immediate emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit of Appeals requesting a stay of Boasberg’s temporary restraining order. The DOJ did not turn the planes around, arguing that a verbal order by the lower court is not binding and that the planes had already left U.S. airspace.
On March 26, the DOJ lost its appeal, with the D.C. Circuit voting 2-1 to uphold Boasberg’s ruling. The DOJ appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower courts had interfered with national security and overreached on executive immigration power. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the DOJ, 6-3, and lifted the lower court’s injunction on April 9.
Bondi accused the whistleblower Reuveni of spreading lies. She said on X that this is “another instance of misinformation being spread to serve a narrative that does not align with the facts.”
“This ‘whistleblower’ signed 3 briefs defending DOJ’s position in this matter and his subsequent revisionist account arose only after he was fired because he violated his ethical duties to the department,” Bondi wrote.
Reuveni worked at the DOJ for 15 years, mostly in the Office of Immigration and Litigation. Bondi fired Reuveni in April for failing to “zealously advocate” for the United States in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was accidentally deported to the El Salvador prison and whose return the Supreme Court eventually ordered.
Bondi and other Trump administration officials have fired many DOJ and FBI employees, saying the administration has broad constitutional power to do so.
“They’re putting attorneys who have dedicated themselves to public service in the impossible position of fealty to the President or fealty to the Constitution – candor to the courts or keeping your head low and lying if asked to do so,” Reuveni told The New Yorker. “That is not what the Department of Justice that I worked in was about. That’s not why I went to the Department of Justice and stayed there for fifteen years.”
https://san.com/cc/doj-whistleblower-says-trump-appointee-ordered-defiance-of-courts
An expert with the libertarian Cato Institute sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to slash taxes on the wealthy and cut over $1 trillion from Medicaid, food stamps, and green energy subsidies, highlighting a lesser-known provision that could codify one of the president’s most controversial deportation policies — and turbocharge it into overdrive.
Specifically, posting on X, David J. Bier pointed to a subsection on page 529 of the bill that deals with the increase in funding for immigration enforcement.
“In the case of an unaccompanied alien child who has attained 12 years of age and is encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the funds made available under subsection (a) shall only be used to conduct an examination of such unaccompanied alien child for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings,” said the section.
In other words, wrote Bier, “You’ve heard about how ICE deported a bunch of adults to a Salvadoran torture prison based on their tattoos. Did you know that the Big Beautiful Police State Act includes $40 million to identify ‘gang kids’ the same way?”
A court on Tuesday ordered Costa Rican authorities to release foreign migrants locked up in a shelter after being deported by the United States, according to a resolution issued on the eve of a visit by the US secretary of homeland security.
Some 200 migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Russia as well as from Africa and some other Asian countries, including 80 children, were brought to the Central American nation in February under an agreement with the US administration of President Donald Trump, a move criticized by human rights organizations.
By partially accepting an appeal filed in March on behalf of the migrants, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice gave immigration 15 days to process the “determination of the immigration status of the deportees” and their release, according to the resolution seen by AFP.
The migrants were detained in February at the Temporary Migrant Care Center (CATEM), 360 kilometers (220 miles) south of San Jose, on the border with Panama.
However, in the face of criticism, the government allowed them to move freely outside the center in April.
Some accepted voluntary repatriation but about 28 of them remain at CATEM, 13 of them minors, according to official data.
The habeas corpus petition continued until it was resolved Tuesday, and would serve as a precedent to prevent a similar agreement.
The court also ordered Costa Rican authorities to “determine what type of health, education, housing, and general social assistance they require from the State.”
To hear President Trump tell it, the nation is facing a rebellion in Los Angeles, an invasion by a Venezuelan gang and extraordinary foreign threats to its economy.
Citing this series of crises, he has sought to draw on emergency powers that Congress has scattered throughout the United States Code over the centuries, summoning the National Guard to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s governor, sending scores of migrants to El Salvador without the barest hint of due process and upending the global economy with steep tariffs.
Legal scholars say the president’s actions are not authorized by the statutes he has cited and are, instead, animated by a different goal.
“He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties,” said Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School who represents a wine importer and other businesses challenging some of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
…
