https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/639327932069846
Long read but a good wrap-up for the week:
Today I’m feeling nauseously optimistic. (Nauseous optimism is when your heart aches and you’re sick to your stomach but believe you’ll live to see the dawn.)
Although every other constraint on Trump is gone — congressional Republicans are in the MAGA cult, Democrats are zombies, big business doesn’t dare oppose Trump, and high-tech has gone over to the dark side — one constraint remains: the federal courts.
And the federal courts seem to be holding firm, at least so far.
Consider what the courts did this week:
The White House, through an outside event production company called Harbinger, is soliciting corporate sponsors for this year’s annual Easter Egg Roll, which is prompting major concerns from ethics experts and shock from former White House officials from both parties.
The sponsorship offers range from $75,000 to $200,000, with the promise of logo and branding opportunities, according to a nine-page document sent to potential sponsors and obtained by CNN.
The Egg Roll, which began during the Rutherford B. Hayes administration in 1878, has long been privately funded without taxpayer dollars, largely through the American Egg Board, which also provides tens of thousands of eggs for the occasion.
…
Looks like they are dispensing with the court approval normally required to share IRS data, which leaves the legality of the arrangement highly questionable.
This also means that any illegal alien with half a brain will no longer file tax returns nor pay any more than his required withholdings.
The Internal Revenue Service is nearing an agreement to allow immigration officials to use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to four people familiar with the matter, culminating weeks of negotiations over using the tax system to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Under the agreement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement could submit names and addresses of suspected undocumented immigrants to the IRS to cross-reference with confidential taxpayer databases, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals.
Normally, personal tax information — even an individual’s name and address — is considered confidential and closely guarded within the IRS. Unlawfully disclosing tax data carries civil and criminal penalties.
However, tax information may be shared with other federal law enforcement under certain, limited conditions — and typically with approval from a court. It would be unusual, if not unprecedented, for taxpayer privacy law exceptions to be used to justify cooperation with immigration enforcement …
IRS nears deal with ICE to share addresses of suspected undocumented immigrants
Homeland Security is eliminating those employees whose job is to keep them operating honestly and legally:
In a move aimed at reducing “roadblocks” to its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has fired most employees within the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two separate DHS ombudsman offices, a senior DHS official confirmed late Friday.
The actions come amid other changes at DHS that critics say will curtail oversight of immigration efforts by President Donald Trump even as legal challenges intensify over their constitutionality.
A senior DHS official told USA TODAY that the RIF or “reduction in force” efforts were done “to eliminate redundant and counterproductive roles while reallocating resources to frontline enforcement, where they are most effective.”
…
Michelle Brané, who served in the Biden administration as the immigration detention ombudsman within DHS, called the cuts a “recipe for disaster.”
Brané said she believes roughly 200 people lost their jobs in what she called “Black Friday” cuts.
“They’re eliminating all the oversight bodies within the Department of Homeland Security at a time when they are being more aggressive than ever and making more mistakes than ever,” Brané said. “I think we’ll see people die in custody as a result.”
Trump slashes homeland security civil rights jobs in ‘Black Friday’ cuts
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/639846732017966
https://www.facebook.com/VietVetsforDems/posts/1714510345934210
https://www.facebook.com/VietVetsforDems/posts/1714394152612496
Anything to get the numbers up, so that Trump & cronies can claim to be doing something!
Federal authorities in South Florida have recently detained at least 18 Cubans during scheduled immigration appointments, local attorneys say, highlighting that a group that has historically enjoyed special immigration benefits is not immune to the Trump administration’s intensified mass deportation efforts.
Among the Cubans recently detained is Beatriz Monteagudo, 25, her friend Johan Ariel told the Miami Herald. The pair texted each other daily. But the last message he received from Monteagudo was March 10. The Cuban woman, who got an I-220A after entering the U.S. in January 2024, was heading to her required check-in appointment in Miramar.
Ariel quickly grew worried that he hadn’t heard from her following the appointment. When he searched the ICE detainee locator service online, her name showed up. Then came Monteagudo’s call.
When she called Ariel from the detention facility, she told him she was with about 18 others who had also been taken into custody after showing up for their routine appointments. Monteagudo told him she wasn’t told why they were there, aside from officers mentioning the laws had changed.
That’s a blatant lie. No laws changed. Trump and ICE are now retaliating again people who have properly complied with the process up to this point. Most of these Cubans crossed the border after they had arranged appointments to do so with immigration officials.
To date, neither Monteagudo nor Ariel have gotten answers, he says. And this week, Monteagudo, who was living in Miami, was transferred to a detention facility in San Diego.
Transferring detainees to remote prisons is a favorite ICE tactic to make it difficult / impossible for family members and attorneys to assist the detainees.
‘Deport every person under the sun’: ICE detains Cubans during immigration appointments
Justice Department lawyers once again faced an angry federal judge on Friday as they sought to defend President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and usher migrants out of the country without a court hearing.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg vowed to determine whether or not the Trump administration knowingly violated his Saturday order to return hundreds of Venezuelan migrants that were, at the time, being flown to an El Salvadoran prison, where they presently remain.
Earlier this week, Trump prompted a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts when he called for Boasberg to be impeached.
At the hearing, Boasberg slammed the government’s language in some of its recent court filings as “intemperate and disrespectful,” adding that he could not recall ever encountering such a tone from U.S. government lawyers. One such filing accused the judge of “continuing to beat a dead horse” with his requests for more information from the Justice Department, which only responded in part, alleging that the judge’s orders were “immaterial.”
“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said during an approximately 90-minute hearing.
Angry Federal Judge Calls Trump’s Action On Migrant Flights ‘Frightening’
Former Republican lawmaker Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posited in a new Substack piece that the nearly decade-long fever pervading the GOP thanks to a “virus called Donald Trump” is finally showing signs of breaking.
Kinzinger described this insidious “political pathogen” as causing “a fever so disorienting that many cannot see his malevolence.”
But Kinzinger wrote that the president’s failure to shift the economy into high gear as he promised on the campaign trail has many voters wiping the scales from their eyes.
‘Political pathogen’ of Trump ‘fever’ may finally be breaking: Ex-GOP lawmaker
