‘Watch Him With The Hands’: Trump Tests The Limits Of His Hypocrisy, Takes Jab At Gavin Newsom’s Body Language In Tone-Deaf Rant
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USA Today: Federal judge hands press groups wins in lawsuits against LAPD, DHS
- U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera issued preliminary injunctions in lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security over officers’ treatment of journalists.
- Vera wrote that federal officers “indiscriminate use of force … will undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts” to cover protests and that the police department violated both state and federal law.
- Press groups filed lawsuits against both agencies in June following protests over President Donald Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles.
A federal judge handed press and civil liberties groups wins in two separate cases against the Los Angeles Police Department and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over the treatment of journalists covering immigration raid protests.
U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera’s preliminary injunctions bar, among other actions, the police department from arresting journalists for failing to disperse or otherwise interfering with journalists’ ability to cover Los Angeles protests. The DHS officers are also barred from “dispersing, threatening, or assaulting” journalists who haven’t “committed a crime unrelated to failing to obey a dispersal order.”
In his Sept. 10 order in the LAPD case, Vera wrote that the department’s “heavy-handed efforts to police this summer’s protests” violated both state and federal law.
In granting the motion in the DHS case, Vera said federal officers “unleashed crowd control weapons indiscriminately and with surprising savagery” during the protests.
“Specifically, the Court concludes that federal agents’ indiscriminate use of force … will undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts to cover these public events and protestors seeking to express peacefully their views on national policies,” Vera wrote.
He went on to condemn individuals who engaged in violent action during such protests, but said “the actions of a relative few does not give DHS carte blanche to unleash near-lethal force on crowds of third parties in the vicinity.”
In taking such actions, Vera wrote, federal officers have “endangered” peaceful protesters, journalists and the broader public.
“The First Amendment demands better,” he wrote.
USA TODAY reached out to the police department and the DHS for comment.
“There’s an old line in policing: We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,” Adam Rose, press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, said in a news release following the rulings. “Press organizations have been trying to help LAPD for years take the easy way, just asking them to train officers and discipline offenders. They wouldn’t stop resisting. LAPD failed to police themselves. Now a judge is doing it for them.”
The First Amendment Coalition filed the federal lawsuit against the police department in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of the press club and the independent media outlet Status Coup in mid-June.
Days later, a similar lawsuit was filed against Noem over what the plaintiffs, which include the Los Angeles Press Club and the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, described as federal officers’ unconstitutional actions against journalists.
Vera issued a temporary restraining order in the LAPD case on July 10 that barred officers from using less-lethal munitions against journalists not posing a threat to law enforcement. The plaintiffs later accused the department of violating the order by hitting journalists with batons and arresting them during an August protest.
Federal judge hands press groups wins in lawsuits against LAPD, DHS
In granting the motion in the DHS case, the judge said federal officers’ actions will “undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts” to cover protests.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/15/lapd-dhs-la-press-club-court-wins/86112156007
Alternet: Revealed: Trump letter to UCLA littered with grammatical and factual errors
The Los Angeles Times has reviewed a previously unreleased 28-page letter from the Trump administration to UCLA demanding an overhaul to adhere to a more conservative agenda and it’s littered with grammatical and factual errors.
These demands, which include $1.2 billion fine over allegations of antisemitism and civil rights violations, also calls on the California university “to make public declarations that it has agreed to significant elements of President Trump’s vision of higher education.”
The president, who has previously said he “loves the poorly educated,” doubled down on that sentiment Sunday, saying, “smart people don’t like me.”
Adding fuel to that fire is the UCLA document, which, the LAT reports, “shows signs of being hastily put together.”
Some of the more egregious errors besides the grammatical ones in which “nouns and verbs occasionally do not match in tense,” are more factual, or, rather, lack thereof.
“There are references to the “president” of UCLA, but the top campus administrator, Julio Frenk, is a “chancellor,” the LAT notes.
“A sentence about medical facilities references the “Feinberg School of Medicine,” which is at Northwestern University“, not UCLA.
This isn’t the first time the administration has shown why grammar and fact-checking matter.
In letters posted to his Truth Social account in July demanding world leaders sign on to his tariffs, Trump made an embarrassing error, according to the Daily Beast.
” Despite correctly referring to Željka Cvijanović, the Chairwoman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina as “Her Excellency,” the letter to her begins with “Dear Mr President.”
In another Truth Social post in which he thanked the B-2 pilots who took part in the attack on Iran, Trump, in all caps, misspelled his own name as, ” “DONAKD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!”
More concerning that garden variety typos, however, is what The Guardian calls “governing by mistake.”
“Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error,” says The Guardian’s Moustafa Bayoumi.
Slingshot News: ‘Obviously It’s Not Working’: Trump Scrambles To Justify His Plan To Dismantle The Department Of Education During Cabinet Meeting
During his remarks in a cabinet meeting this month, President Trump scrambled to justify his plan to dismantle the Department of Education. Trump stated, “Obviously, it’s not working.”
Slingshot News: ‘You Should Never Run For Another Office’: Trump Goes On Tangent, Belittles Member Of His Own Cabinet During Remarks At The White House
During his remarks in a cabinet meeting this month, President Trump belittled Marco Rubio, stating, “You should never run for another office.”
Knewz: MAGA fumes as Newsom mocks Trump with Bibles
Gavin Newsom has once again gotten under the skin of conservatives, this time by selling signed copies of Bibles on his merchandise site, Knewz.com can reveal. The California governor’s team has been mimicking Donald Trump for weeks, leaving his supporters raging and failing to see the irony of it all.
This time, Newsom and his handlers took it up a notch by listing Bibles for sale on his website. (The Bibles were marked as sold out.) The site also includes several other items mocking Trump slogans like a “Newsom Was Right About Everything” cap, a “Trump Is Not Hot” tank top and a T-shirt labeled “The Chosen One” featuring an image of Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson and the late Hulk Hogan with a halo looking over Newsom. There’s at least one person who will not be purchasing any of these items: Fox News personality Will Cain. On an episode of The Will Cain Show, the host went off on Newsom for purportedly selling Bibles. “He seems to have found ground, legs with the left by mocking President Trump,” Cain cried on TV. “Like the ChatGPT personality, he’s just borrowing now from President Trump, copying his style with X posts, now he’s even going for his own MAGA style merch.”
…
Newsom’s antics have already reached the White House, as earlier this month, Trump took to Truth Social to call out his fellow politician. He raged, “Gavin Newscum is way down in the polls. He is viewed as the man who is destroying the once Great State of California. I will save California!!! President DJT.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/maga-fumes-as-newsom-mocks-trump-with-bibles/ss-AA1MxApp
Raw Story: Stephen Miller’s ex-classmate spills details: ‘He craved triggering the good-looking kids’
In high school, Stephen Miller was trying to “triggering the good-looking kids,” according to a new report Sunday.
Rolling Stone reported over the weekend that Miller was being “gossiped” about behind his back even in Trump’s White House.
As part of the broader report diving into Miller’s background and role at the White House, the outlet interviewed an individual who went to school with the man who is now the deputy chief of staff for policy for Trump’s second term in the Oval Office.
“As a teenager in Santa Monica, California, Miller craved nothing more than triggering the good-looking kids in school who wanted nothing to do with him,” the report states before introducing Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, and “says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan).”
The report continues:
“That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. ‘One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,’ Islas recalls.”
https://www.rawstory.com/stephen-miller-trigger-good-looking
Associated Press: Judge pauses California’s request to bar Trump administration’s ongoing use of National Guard troops
A federal judge who ruled last week that the Trump administration broke federal law by sending National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area said Tuesday he will not immediately consider a request to bar the ongoing use of 300 Guard troops.
In a court order, Senior District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco said he was not sure he had the authority to consider California’s motion for a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s further deployment of state National Guard troops. That’s because the case is on appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the judge said.
Breyer indefinitely paused all proceedings related to the state’s motion, though he suggested California officials could file the request with the 9th Circuit.
An email to the California attorney general’s office late Tuesday was not immediately returned.
Breyer’s Sept. 2 ruling took on heightened importance amid President Donald Trump’s talk of National Guard deployments to other Democratic-led cities like Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Trump has already deployed the Guard as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover targeting crime, immigration and homelessness in Washington, where he has direct legal control over the District of Columbia National Guard.
The Trump administration sent troops to the Los Angeles area in early June after days of protests over immigration raids.
Breyer ruled the administration “willfully” broke federal law, saying the government knew “they were ordering troops to execute domestic law beyond their usual authority” while using “armed soldiers ( whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”
He did not require the 300 remaining soldiers to leave but pointed out that they received improper training and ordered the administration to stop using them “to execute the laws.” The order that applies only to California was supposed to take effect Sept. 12, but the 9th Circuit has put it on hold for now.
California later sought a preliminary injunction blocking an Aug. 5 order from the administration extending the deployment of the 300 troops for another 90 days.
The further deployment “would ensure that California’s residents will remain under a form of military occupation until early November,” including while voting on Nov. 4 on whether to adopt new congressional maps — “an election with national attention and significance,” state officials said in a court filing.
Judge pauses California’s request to bar Trump administration’s ongoing use of National Guard troops
A federal judge who ruled last week that the Trump administration broke federal law by sending National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area says he will not immediately consider a request to bar the ongoing use of 300 Guard troops.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-california-national-guard-troops-08f8a71ca5834b8f32ce4c3ee944abca
Extra.ie: Trump’s ICE agents threaten to deport Irish grandmother living in the US for 47 years
An Irish woman who has been living in the US since she was a child faces deportation over a ‘bad’ $25 cheque she wrote a decade ago.
Donna Brown, 58, who emigrated nearly 50 years ago, is being held by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known as ICE – and faces being sent back to Ireland.
Her husband, Jim Brown, said his wife, an Irish citizen born in England, moved to America when she was 11 and is a legal resident alien, but not a U.S. citizen. The couple married eight years ago, which he believes should also protect her from being deported.
Mr Brown told his local TV station in Missouri: ‘It’s just not fair that you’re telling me I have to be a bachelor the rest of my life because of some stupid policy.’
In July, Donna was arrested at customs in Chicago on her return from Ireland after a family funeral. Her husband said: ‘You don’t arrest 58-year-old grandmothers. It’s just wrong. She hasn’t committed crimes.’
She has now spent more than 30 days in jail in Kentucky as the US government moves to deport her, which Mr Brown fears will happen.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
Legal documents for her arrest say that ten years ago, Donna wrote a bad cheque for $25. However, she paid the money back and was given probation. But Mr Brown said the US government is now arguing that was a ‘crime of moral turpitude’.
US courts say a ‘crime of moral turpitude… refers generally to conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality’. It has been used in the past against former IRA members who did not declare their crimes to immigration.
Mr Brown believes his wife’s arrest is a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies.
‘I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s a blanket thing to catch everybody, to fill [jail] beds. They signed a stupid bill that is torturing innocent people, and that’s the problem,’ he said. He is now protesting at what he calls his wife’s ‘deplorable’ conditions in jail and is campaigning for her release.
‘She’s been in this country 47 years, is married, with five kids and five grandkids, and you’re telling me she’s a flight risk? I want somebody to have the guts and the fortitude to stand up and say, “You know what? This is wrong”,’ he said.
‘It’s crazy that this is happening. It’s just crazy that this is even allowed in this country. That’s the problem. It shouldn’t even be thought that this should be okay,’ he said.
Mr Brown, a veteran who served 20 years in the military, said he won’t stop fighting for his wife. ‘My wife is not a criminal,’ he said. He is now caring for their horses on their nine-acre farm near Troy, Missouri.
A GoFundMe for Donna states it was created to help prepare and support her husband’s ‘fight for justice and freedom of his wife, Donna Hughes-Brown, who was wrongly detained and incarcerated this past July.
‘The goal is to raise the resources necessary to cover the lawyers and court fees, and help Jim and Donna navigate these difficult, stressful and expensive times,’ the appeal reads.
‘Jim and Donna are both very strong supporters and helpers of our community. They are often involved with multiple volunteer organisations and projects. They both are hard-working, honest, and caring individuals. They are good servers of God; humble people who are always willing to help, and kind friends that share knowledge and wisdom with anyone in need.’
In May of this year, Cliona Ward was released from custody in the US where she had been arrested after she returned from visiting her dying father in Ireland.
The 54-year-old Dubliner lives in Santa Cruz, California, and was detained by ICE over minor convictions from almost 20 years ago, which were supposed to have been expunged from her record.
Washington Post: Senators ramp up pressure on Trump to abandon threats to send troops into U.S. cities
A group of Democratic senators is filing a friend of the court brief Tuesday in California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump, stepping up pressure to keep Trump from overriding Democratic leaders and sending National Guard troops into Democrat-led cities like Chicago.
The 19 senators are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to overturn a temporary order issued by a three-judge panel in June that found that Trump had the authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles this summer over Newsom’s objections. The Democratic senators argue that the issue has gained greater salience since then, as Trump began threatening to go into other states and cities against the wishes of their governors and mayors.
The senators are amplifying Newsom’s argument that the president’s use of the federal troops — at a moment when local law enforcement officials said they did not need federal support — violated the separation of powers doctrine by usurping Congress.
A federal district court judge initially sided with Newsom on June 12. Then, on June 19, the three-judge panel issued their temporary ruling siding with Trump. California is waiting on a final ruling from the appeals court.
Led by California Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, the group includes senators who represent Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and Portland — all cities that Trump has threatened to send in National Guard troops to “straighten it out” as he ramps up enforcement on crime and immigration. Schiff said in a statement that he hoped the Newsom case would become “the line drawn in the sand to prevent further misuse of our service members on the streets of American cities.”
The senators argue in their brief that by federalizing 4,000 California National Guard troops for domestic law enforcement over Newsom’s objections “without showing a genuine inability to enforce federal laws with the regular forces,” Trump violated the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering mandate and contravened the provisions of the Constitution assigning power over militias to Congress.
“Our concern that President Trump will continue to act in bad faith and abuse his power is borne out by his recent deployment of state militias to Washington, D.C. and his stated intent to deploy state militias elsewhere (like Chicago and Baltimore),” the senators wrote in the brief obtained by The Washington Post that will be filed in court Tuesday. They warned that courts are the last resort to “prevent the President from exceeding his constitutional powers” and that failing to do so could “usher in an era of unprecedented, dangerous executive power.”
In court filings this summer, the administration argued that Trump was compelled to send the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property because numerous “incidents of violence and disorder” posed unacceptable safety risks to personnel who were “supporting the faithful execution of federal immigration laws.” Department of Justice lawyers argued that Trump was within his rights to mobilize the National Guard and Marines “to protect federal agents and property from violent mobs that state and local authorities cannot or choose not to control.”
Before Trump sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles this summer in the midst of protests against his administration’s immigration raids, prior presidents had deployed Guard troops on American soil primarily to assist after natural disasters or to quell unrest.
The senators write that the last instance in which a president federalized the National Guard without consent from the state’s governor is when Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D) ordered the Alabama Highway Patrol to prevent the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rep. John Lewis and others from marching from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to protect the marchers.
Our arguments to the court make clear that Trump’s unprecedented militarization of Los Angeles should not be used as a playbook for terrorizing other cities across America,” Padilla said in a statement.
Last month, the president deployed National Guard troops and federal agents to D.C., arguing that they needed to tackle a “crime emergency” that local officials say does not exist. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, last week sued the Trump administration, seeking to force it to withdraw troops from the city.
In recent days, Trump has escalated his warnings to intervene in Chicago, posting on his social media site that the city is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” a reference to the Defense Department.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said on social media Monday that Trump’s threats were not “about fighting crime,” which would require “support and coordination” from the administration that he had not yet seen.
The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it had launched an operation to target immigrants in Chicago as the president vowed a broader crackdown on violent crime. A spokesperson for Pritzker said Monday that the governor’s office has not received any formal communication from the Trump administration or information about its plans.
