Tag Archives: Crimea

The Hill: Opinion: What ICE agents are doing is outrageous — and legal

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The Trump administration’s draconian immigration enforcement actions are raising the specter of American autocracy, prompting many to ask — perhaps for the first time — how the U.S. could possibly have gotten here. Videos of masked ICE agents in street clothes accosting unsuspecting people in public places, or smashing car windows and dragging people into unmarked vehicles, are all over the internet and social media.

The behavior of ICE agents is also revealing glaring blind spots in the law, which has long been premised on the assumption that government officials mostly act in good faith, prompting the widespread question: Can they legally do that?

Rather astonishingly, the answer is — for the most part — yes, they can.

ICE’s heavy-handed tactics are even being used against people once presumed to be immune from raw police brutality: elected officials.

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Opinion: What ICE agents are doing is outrageous — and legal

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/5364547-what-ice-agents-are-doing-is-outrageous-and-legal

CNN World: Why Trump’s Crimea proposal would tear down a decades-old pillar of the global order

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US President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine should recognize Russia’s control over Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow annexed more than a decade ago, is threatening to upend international law and order.

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Is this legal?

No. If the Trump administration was to somehow recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, it would be breaching international law as well as multiple declarations and agreements made by the United States, including by the first Trump White House.

“In terms of international law, such a pronouncement would be null and void,” said Sergey Vasiliev, an international law expert and professor at the Open University in the Netherlands.

“That territorial acquisitions that result from the use of force shall not be recognized as legal is basically one of the bedrock principles of international law,” Vasiliev told CNN.

Recognizing Crimea as part of Russia would put the Trump administration in breach of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the US made a commitment to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders, in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.

In 2018, during the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement reaffirming the US’ refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over Crimea.

Why Trump’s Crimea proposal would tear down a decades-old pillar of the global order | CNN
President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine should recognize Russia’s control over Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula Moscow siezed by force more than a decade ago, is threatening to upend international law and order.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/world/trump-ukraine-crimea-explainer-intl