America Uncovered: What Trump’s Proposal Could Mean for the 14th Amendment
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Rolling Stone: Trump Cuts Off Medical Visas from Gaza After Laura Loomer Meltdown
The move comes after Loomer, the right-wing provocateur, freaked out over a video of children from Gaza coming to the U.S. for medical care
Donald Trump’s administration stopped all visitor visas from Gaza — including those for humanitarian and medical aid — on Saturday after far-right provocateur and Trump friend Laura Loomer posted about several Palestinian children being allowed into the U.S. for medical care amid Israel’s relentless siege and blockade.
The State Department said it will “conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” in a post on X.
“It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” Loomer wrote on X, adding an applause emoji.”
Loomer posted a video Friday showing children from Gaza arriving in San Francisco for treatment, greeted by a cheering crowd. Loomer called the video an “exclusive,” posting it to X with her watermark on it, despite it being posted on Aug. 6 by the nonprofit HEAL Palestine, which provides medical care to Palestinians.
“How did Palestinians get Visas under the Trump administration to get into the United States? Did @StateDept approve this? How did they get out of Gaza? Is @SecRubio aware of this?” she asked Friday.
The caption of the Aug. 6 video reads, “Leyan, Ghazal, and their siblings will [begin] medical treatment and school as soon as possible under the care of HEAL.”
Loomer messages Rolling Stone on Saturday afternoon: “The MAGA base didn’t vote for more Islamic immigration into the United States. I applaud Secretary of State Marco Rubio for halting the Visas of Gazans from a HAMAS hot zone and look forward to seeing the State Department’s review of the rogue State Department employees who signed off on visas for Gazans who have shown a disrespect for American life as Hamas continues to hold hostages.”
According to NBC Bay Area, Leyan is a 14-year-old who was burned and injured by shrapnel in an explosion at her school. Ghazal, 6, was also hurt in an explosion. Another child who arrived, 8-year-old Anas, was hurt in an explosion that killed his entire family. There were 11 children in total evacuated, the largest medical evacuation of injured children from Gaza to the U.S.
“The logistics of getting them out is also a nightmare,” Talha Baquar of HEAL Palestine told NBC Bay Area. “The Israeli government has to approve of their release. One of the children who’s coming today, he’s been on a waitlist to get out. He’s had his medical visa since November of last year.”
“These children could not wait,” Dr. Zeena Salman, pediatric oncologist and co-founder of HEAL Palestine, said in a statement. “Their lives are at stake, and this mission is about giving them a future.”
After the children receive medical care, they will go to Egypt, where HEAL will continue to support them, the organization said. HEAL has evacuated 63 injured children and 148 people total as of August 4, according to its website.
Andrew Miller, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs, posted on X that the State Department’s move reflected “prejudice.”
“I dealt with such cases during the Biden admin. No one leaves Gaza w/o Israel’s approval & everyone’s vetted through U.S. databases. Any security risk is negligible. This is rank ethnic/religious prejudice. Denying sick people critical medical care is cowardly & depraved.”
Loomer declared victory after the State Department announced it would stop visas from Gaza.
“This is fantastic news,” she posted on X. “Hopefully all GAZANS will be added to President Trump’s travel ban. There are doctors in other countries. The U.S. is not the world’s hospital!”
“Thank you for bringing attention to this matter, @LauraLoomer,” Jan. 6 rally organizer Caroline Wren wrote on X.
Islamophobic Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) applauded Loomer for posting the video. “Massive credit needs to be given to @LauraLoomer for uncovering this and making me and other officials aware. Well done, Laura,” he posted on X.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement that the State Department’s move seemed “intentionally cruel.”
“Blocking Palestinian children injured by American weapons from coming to America for medical treatment is the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.
Israel has led a brutal onslaught and near-total blockade in Gaza since October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, Gaza’s Health Ministry said at the end of July. More than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured during this period, according to UNICEF, and more than one child has been killed per hour, according to The Washington Post. In April, an Israeli airstrike destroyed part of the last fully functional hospital in Gaza. Israel has tightly restricted food and humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza, creating widespread famine throughout the strip.
Trump previously called Loomer a “free spirit” when the two traveled together last September, and she continues to privately advise him and others in the administration.
After Trump won in November, various Gazan families and immigration attorneys — who were already largely sickened by the Biden administration’s actions during this conflict — were in panic mode, fearing the worst for how any slivers of relief and options they were offered under the Democratic presidency would evaporate under a second Trump government.
Those fears are being realized, and then some.
“I’ve visited with some of the children in Houston, [Texas], who have been brought here from Gaza for medical treatment,” human rights lawyer Maria Kari told Rolling Stone in January. “I’m a mother and I don’t know how many diapers you’ve changed. But until this war, I had never seen someone have to change a diaper on a baby — who was just under two years old — who had third-degree burns on the diaper-change area. The sound the baby makes is horrifying. It’s seared into your brain. It haunts you forever. I’ve sat and ate with a girl who had to hold her jaw while we ate because there’s a hole in her jaw and food was falling out while she ate. I’ve sat and painted ceramic dinosaurs with these children — the same things I do with my children — and they’re so beautiful, they’re so cute and resilient. One of them had just buried her baby sister just before she got on a plane to come here.”
This is whom Republicans and their allies are working hard to shun, banish, and deny relief.
Newsweek: Trump supporter detained by ICE Agents regrets vote: “Were all brainwashed”
A California man who voted for President Donald Trump has spoken out after being detained by immigration agents.
Brian Gavidia, a 29-year-old American citizen from Montebello, joined a lawsuit challenging immigration enforcement tactics after federal agents detained him on June 12, NBC 4 Los Angeles reported.
“I truly believe I was targeted because of my race,” Gavidia told the outlet, adding elsewhere in the interview, “We were all brainwashed.”
“While conducting a lawful immigration enforcement operation in Montebello, CA, Brian Gavidia was arrested for assaulting a law enforcement officer and interfering with agents during their duties,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek.
“Javier Ramirez was detained on the street for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants,” she added.
Why It Matters
Millions of Americans voted for Trump in support of his promise to carry out widespread deportations of migrants living in the U.S. illegally, particularly those with criminal records. As immigration enforcement efforts ramp up across the country, concerns are mounting that the Trump administration is not, as it pledged, targeting the “worst first.”
Newsweek has documented several cases of Trump supporters being affected by the immigration raids.
What To Know
Gavidia voted for Trump, believing that his administration’s immigration agenda would target criminals, not everyday citizens, NBC 4 Los Angeles reported.
He told the outlet that during an immigration enforcement operation in the San Gabriel Valley, a federal agent pushed him against a wall and demanded proof of citizenship, asking him the name of the hospital where he was born.
Footage circulating on social media shows Gavidia shouting, “I was born here in the states, East LA bro!”
The video shows agents, who are wearing vests with “Border Patrol Federal Agent” on them, holding Gavidia’s hands behind his back.
Agents allegedly confiscated his Real ID and phone. Gavidia was later released and recovered his phone, but he said he never received his ID.
Convinced he was targeted because of his Latino heritage, Gavidia now rejects his prior support for the president.
“I believe it was a mistake because he ran on lies,” Gavidia said. “He said criminals.”
“If this was going to happen, do you think we would have voted? We’re humans. We’re not going to destroy our community. We’re not going to destroy our people,” he continued.
“We were all manipulated. We were all brainwashed,” Gavidia told NBC 4 Los Angeles. “And now look at us. We are all suffering because of it, and I feel guilty 100 percent.”
Gavidia is among seven plaintiffs in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that resulted in a court order limiting when federal agents can initiate immigration enforcement.
The filing requested that the court prohibit raids conducted without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. It also said agents concentrated operations in places where Latino workers were often found, such as local car washes and outside Home Depot locations.
California has been a key battleground state for immigration enforcement operations after Trump ordered federal agents to ramp up arrests in Democratic cities.
On August 1, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary restraining order, originally issued by a federal judge, that placed limits on how the federal government could carry out immigration enforcement operations in Southern California.
An attorney for the Trump administration argued before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, seeking a stay of the temporary restraining order while the case was appealed. The panel denied the request.
The decision upholds a July 11 ruling granting a restraining order sought by immigrant rights advocates to limit federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and other areas of Southern California. Under Judge Maame E. Frimpong’s directive, officers and agents may not detain individuals unless they have reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States in violation of immigration law.
What People Are Saying
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek: “Any allegations that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are FALSE. What makes someone a target is if they are in the United States illegally. These types of disgusting smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave ICE law enforcement. This kind of garbage has led to a more than 1,000 percent increase in the assaults on ICE officers. Politicians and activists must turn the temperature down and tone down their rhetoric.
“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.
“We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets.”
Brian Gavidia told NBC 4 Los Angeles: “I believe I was racially profiled. I believe I was attacked because I was walking while brown. Where is the freedom? Where is the justice? We live in America. This is why I’m fighting today. This is why I’m protecting the Constitution.”
What Happens Next
Despite the legal restrictions, immigration raids continue. The Trump administration has appealed the Ninth Circuit’s decision that upheld the temporary restraining order. The case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will decide whether to lift or uphold the restrictions limiting broad-based immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
Trump supporter detained by ICE Agents regrets vote: “Were all brainwashed”
“I truly believe I was targeted because of my race,” Brian Gavidia of Montebello, California, told NBC 4 Los Angeles.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-supporter-detained-ice-agents-immigration-2112676
KTLA: Teen with disabilities reportedly detained by ICE outside L.A. school
Los Angeles Unified School District leaders are calling for limits on immigration enforcement near campuses after a 15-year-old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed, and briefly detained outside Arleta High School on Monday in what officials describe as a case of mistaken identity.
The incident happened around 9:30 a.m. on Monday, just days before more than half a million LAUSD students return to classrooms. According to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the student — who attends San Fernando High School — had gone to Arleta High with his grandmother to accompany a relative registering for classes.
While the family member was inside, several officers approached their vehicle, telling them they were not with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, Carvalho said district-reviewed video appeared to show both police and Border Patrol personnel.
The boy was removed from the car and placed in handcuffs.
“As our students return to school, we are calling on every community partner to help ensure that classrooms remain places of learning and belonging,” Carvalho said. “Children have been through enough — from the pandemic to natural disasters. They should not have to carry the added weight of fear when walking through their school gates.”
The teen was eventually released after school staff and Los Angeles police Intervened.
“The release will not release him from what he experienced,” Carvalho said during a news conference. “The trauma will linger. It will not cease. It is unacceptable, not only in our community, but anywhere in America.”
Parents like Yvonne, whose child attends school in the district, said the incident has left them shaken. “I was upset because our kids shouldn’t have to be going through this and being scared of coming to school, parents dropping them off. We shouldn’t be going through this,” she told KTLA.
Soon after the incident, parents received a recorded voice message from the principal, saying: “We are aware of reports of immigration enforcement activity in the area, near our campus. Our school has not been contacted by any federal agency.”
Many parents KTLA spoke with called the presence of federal agents near public school campuses shameful. “Our government, the administration had stated they were going to go after criminals. At a school, what criminals are you going to find? Kids trying to enroll — today’s orientation day,” parent Dorian Martinez said.
Board of Education President Kelly Gonez condemned the actions on social media, calling them “absolutely reprehensible” and part of the “continued unconstitutional targeting of our Latino community.”
The district says the detention underscores the need for strong protections as students return to school. In a statement Monday, LAUSD reaffirmed that “schools are safe spaces” and said immigration enforcement near campuses “disrupts learning and creates anxiety that can last far beyond the school day.”
Some parents fear that their children will be targeted simply because of the color of their skin, regardless of immigration status. “He fits that category,” Yvonne said of her child. “Where he’s on the darker side, and I feel like that’s who they’re attacking… that’s the main reason I tell him you better be careful and you don’t go with anybody.”
Ahead of the start of the school year, the district said it has contacted 10,000 families potentially impacted by immigration enforcement efforts, rerouted bus stops, deployed 1,000 central office staff to assist in school zones, and expanded virtual options for those too afraid to leave their homes.
Teen with disabilities reportedly detained by ICE outside L.A. school
Los Angeles Unified School District leaders are calling for limits on immigration enforcement near campuses after a 15-year-old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed, and briefly …
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/disabled-teen-detained-ice-outside-school
San Francisco Chronicle: ICE is holding people in its S.F. office for days. Advocates say there are no beds, private toilets
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials handcuffed Jorge Willy Valera Chuquillanqui as he walked out of his court hearing in San Francisco recently and placed him in an eighth-floor cell at a downtown field office with no bed. He spent the next four days there with six other detainees before being sent to Fresno and eventually to a larger facility in Arizona.
“It was hell,” the 47-year-old Peruvian man said. His meals were granola bars and bean-and-cheese burritos, and at one point had to be transferred to a hospital after he started feeling pain related to a stroke he suffered a year ago.
“I’ve never experienced something like this, not even in my own country,” Valera said.
As President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts ramp up and immigration authorities strive to meet an arrest quota of 3,000 people per day, detention centers continue to fill up, leading to overcrowding in some cases. As of July 27, just under 57,000 people were being held at detention centers compared to just under 40,000 people in January, according to TRAC Immigration, a data gathering nonprofit organization.
Immigration attorneys say that as a result, they’ve seen an increase in ICE holding people at its 25 field offices across the country for extended periods of time – raising concerns that the facilities are ill-equipped for people to sleep in, and lack medical care for those who need it and privacy to use the bathroom.
The situation has prompted legal action from immigration advocates across the country. In the Bay Area, lawyers have raised concerns about the conditions of the offices as holding centers and are looking into taking legal action.
Until recently, ICE limited detentions in field offices such as that at 630 Sansome St. to 12 hours “absent exceptional circumstances,” but increased that to 72 hours earlier this year after Trump ordered mass deportations.
ICE said in a statement to the Chronicle that there are occasions where detainees might need to stay at the San Francisco field office “longer than anticipated,” but that these instances are rare.
“All detainees in ICE custody are provided ample food, regular access to phones, legal representation, as well as medical care,” the agency said. “The ICE field office in San Francisco is intended to hold aliens while they are going through the intake process. Afterwards, they are moved to a longer-term detention facility.”
ICE did not respond to questions about what kind of medical staff the agency has at its San Francisco facility, its only field office in the Bay Area. The second nearest field office is in Sacramento. Other field offices in the state are located in Los Angeles, San Diego and other parts of Southern California.
In a memorandum filed in court in June, ICE said that the agency increased its detention limit at field offices to 72 hours to meet the demands of increased enforcement. ICE stated that increased enforcement efforts have strained the agency’s efforts to find and coordinate transfers to available beds, and that it is no longer permitted to release people.
“To accommodate appropriately housing the increased number of detainees while ensuring their safety and security and avoid violation of holding facility standards and requirements, this waiver allows for aliens to be housed in a holding facility for up to, but not exceeding, 72 hours, absent exceptional circumstances,” the memorandum states.
After the passage of Trump’s policy legislation, ICE’s annual budget increased from $8 billion to about $28 billion – allowing the agency to hire more enforcement officers and double its detention space. While there are no detention centers in the Bay Area, ICE is poised to convert a 2,560-bed facility in California City (Kern County) into a holding facility. Immigrant advocates are worried that FCI Dublin, a former women’s prison that closed after a sexual abuse scandal, could be used as a detention center, but a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told the Chronicle there are no plans to reopen the prison.
Meanwhile, some immigrant advocacy groups are starting to take action against ICE for using its field offices as holding facilities.
In Baltimore, an immigrant advocacy group filed a federal class action lawsuit in May on behalf of two women who were held at ICE’s field offices in “cage-like” holding cells for multiple days. A judge denied the group’s request for a temporary restraining order, but attorneys said they intend to try again.
“They have no beds, a lot of them have no showers, they are not equipped to provide medical care or really provide food because it’s not designed to be a long-term facility,” said Amelia Dagen, a senior attorney at Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that filed the lawsuit.
“We have heard this is not exclusive to Baltimore and is happening quite a bit in other field offices. This is an ongoing issue unfortunately because with arrest quotas being what they are… everyone is a priority,” Dagen added.
Jordan Wells, a senior staff attorney at Lawyer’s Committee For Civil Rights in San Francisco, said he and other attorneys are examining the Maryland case. Wells has filed habeas petitions on behalf of two people who were initially held at Sansome Street. A judge ordered the temporary release of one of his clients and a court hearing is scheduled for later this month for the second person, who has since been transported to a detention center in Bakersfield.
A separate class action lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security to stop raids in Los Angeles said that ICE is holding people in a short-term processing center in the city and a basement for days – describing the conditions of the “dungeon-like facilities” as “deplorable and unconstitutional.” A judge granted the temporary restraining order last week.
Immigrant advocates have criticized ICE for detaining more people than they have room for, saying that their strategy is devastating communities.
“If there is bed space ICE will fill it, and that means more terror for local communities,” said Jessica Yamane Moraga, an immigration attorney at Pangea Legal Services, which provides services to immigrants.
It remains unclear exactly how many people have been held at ICE’s San Francisco field office.
Moraga said she saw six people held at the San Francisco ICE field office for at least three days. She represented a 27-year-old Colombian woman from San Jose who was detained at the office for nearly four days.
When ICE arrests people in the Bay Area, they typically are taken to the San Francisco field office for processing and then transferred to a detention center, usually in Southern California. However, as beds fill up, many people are starting to be transferred to centers out of state.
Earlier this year, ICE started detaining people leaving their court hearings. Moraga said that when people are detained on Thursday or Friday by ICE at 630 Sansome St., which has three courtrooms and a processing center, authorities are sometimes unable to find a long-term detention facility to transport people to until after the weekend.
“ICE is deciding to use the blunt instrument of detention to turn away people who have lawful claims,” Moraga said.
Lawyers, legal advocates and migrants reported substandard conditions at ICE’s field offices.
Three days after Valera, the Peruvian migrant, was detained, Ujwala Murthy, a law student and summer intern at nonprofit Pangea Legal Services, visited him at the ICE field office.
As she was preparing to leave, she heard a loud pounding. She said she saw multiple women, apparently in detention, banging on the glass window of a door behind the front desk. A security guard came. One of the women reported that somebody was overheating. That day, it was hotter inside the field office than outdoors, she said.
Security personnel unlocked the door and Murthy said she saw a woman in a white track suit step out flushed and sweating, looking distressed. The woman was given a bottle of water and led out of Murthy’s sight.
“It made me upset,” she said. “It was very dehumanizing.”
At Valera’s asylum hearing before he was unexpectedly detained on July 25, an ICE attorney had tried to dismiss his case, part of a new Trump tactic to speed up deportations. The judge declined and continued the case to October to give Valera time to respond. But minutes after exiting the courtroom, ICE officers seized him.
In his cell at the ICE field office, he started feeling pain in the left half of his body that was paralyzed from a stroke a year ago, according to a habeas petition his attorney filed. He said he urged ICE to get him medical care and was eventually transported to San Francisco General Hospital, but returned to custody at the field office a day later.
Valera, who crossed the border in December 2022 after fleeing his home in Peru where he received death threats from an organized criminal group, was eventually transported to Fresno and then Arizona to be held in detention. He was released last month after a judge granted him a temporary restraining order.
“I’m going to ask my lawyer to help me go to therapy,” he said, “because I am traumatized.”
Fox News: Trump admin cutting $20M in DC security funding after federal law enforcement ordered to increase presence
‘If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take federal control of the city,’ Trump said
The Trump administration plans to cut millions in security funding for Washington, D.C., despite the president also directing federal law enforcement to increase its presence in the city because of its “totally out of control” crime.
In a grant notice posted last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said that D.C.’s urban security fund would receive $25.2 million, a 44% year-over-year reduction.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, said on Friday it slashed funds to multiple cities to be consistent with the “current threat landscape.” Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Jersey City also had their security funds cut, but the decrease in D.C. was the largest for any urban area that received funding from the program last fiscal year.
DHS has “observed a shift from large-scale, coordinated attacks like 9/11 to simpler, small-scale assaults, heightening the vulnerability of soft targets and crowded spaces in urban areas.”
Violent crime in D.C. dropped by 35% between 2023 and 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. said in December, stating that there were 3,388 incidents last year compared to 5,215 incidents the year before.
Crimes that saw significant drops last year included homicide, which was down 30%, sexual abuse down 22% and assault with a dangerous weapon down 27%. Robberries and burglaries slightly dropped to 8% for both.
The federal funding covers security needs in the National Capital Region, which includes D.C. and surrounding cities in Maryland and Virginia.
FEMA has $553.5 million to spend to support cities across the U.S. to boost security. It is unclear how much of the National Capital Region’s total security budget comes from that program.
In the past, local officials have used federal funds for hazmat training, hiring officers and replacing fiber in their emergency communications network, according to a 2016 report from D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.
On Thursday, Trump directed federal law enforcement to increase their presence in the nation’s capital, following a string of violent crimes, including an incident in which former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls”, was beaten in the city’s streets earlier this week.
“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released. They are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now!”
The president said that the nation’s capital “must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see.”
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he continued. “Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime.”
So King Donald and his suck-ups are whining about crime in D.C. (which has actually been decreasing significantly!) while they cut security funding for D.C.? Go figure!
Wall Street Journal: Judges Continue to Block Trump Policies Following Supreme Court Ruling
Even with new curbs on their powers, district judges have found ways to broadly halt some administration actions
When the Supreme Court issued a blockbuster decision in June limiting the authority of federal judges to halt Trump administration policies nationwide, the president was quick to pronounce the universal injunction all but dead.
One month later, states, organizations and individuals challenging government actions are finding a number of ways to notch wins against the White House, with judges in a growing list of cases making clear that sweeping relief remains available when they find the government has overstepped its authority.
In at least nine cases, judges have explicitly grappled with the Supreme Court’s opinion and granted nationwide relief anyway. That includes rulings that continue to halt the policy at the center of the high court case: President Trump’s effort to pare back birthright citizenship. Judges have also kept in place protections against deportations for up to 500,000 Haitians, halted mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services, and prevented the government from terminating a legal-aid program for mentally ill people in immigration proceedings.
To accomplish this, litigants challenging the administration have used a range of tools, defending the necessity of existing injunctions, filing class-action lawsuits and invoking a law that requires government agencies to act reasonably: the Administrative Procedure Act.
It is a rare point of consensus among conservative and liberal lawyers alike: The path to winning rulings with nationwide application is still wide open.
“There are a number of highly significant court orders that are protecting people as we speak,” said Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group that has brought many cases against the Trump administration. “We’re continuing to get that relief.”
Conservative legal advocates also continue to see nationwide injunctions as viable in some circumstances. “We’re still going to ask for nationwide injunctions when that’s the only option to protect our clients,” said Dan Lennington, a lawyer at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has challenged race and sex-based preferences in federal policies.
The Supreme Court’s decision was long in the making, with Democratic and Republican administrations in turn chafing against their signature policies being held up by a single district court judge. The 6-3 ruling said that when judges find that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, their injunctions against the government can’t be broader than what is needed to provide complete relief to the parties who sued.
“Many judges with policy disagreements continue to abuse their positions to prevent the President from acting by relying on other laws to provide universal relief,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Regardless of these obstacles, the Trump Administration will continue to aggressively fight for the policies the American people elected him to implement.”
Trump’s birthright policy would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless one of their parents was a citizen or permanent legal resident. Judges in the weeks since the high court decision have ruled that blocking the policy everywhere remains the proper solution.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston again said a ruling with nationwide application was the only way to spare the plaintiffs—a coalition of 20 Democratic-run states and local governments—from harm caused by an executive order he said was unconstitutional. The judge noted that families frequently move across state lines and that children are born in states where their parents don’t reside.
“A patchwork or bifurcated approach to citizenship would generate understandable confusion among state and federal officials administering the various programs,” wrote Sorokin, “as well as similar confusion and fear among the parents of children” who would be denied citizenship by Trump’s order.
In a separate decision last week involving a different group of states that sued Trump, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reached a similar conclusion. Both rulings showed that state attorneys general remain well positioned to win broad injunctions against the federal government when they can demonstrate executive overreach.
“You’ve got these elite litigation shops in the states,” Tennessee’s Republican attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, said of offices such as his. “You’re gonna figure out a way to continue to be one of the most active participants in the judicial system.”
A New Hampshire judge has also blocked Trump’s birthright order after litigants in that case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, used another pathway the Supreme Court left open: filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of a nationwide group of plaintiffs.
Recent cases also underscore that the Administrative Procedure Act, long a basis for lawsuits against administrations of both parties, remains a potent tool. The law allows judges to set aside agency actions they deem arbitrary, capricious or an abuse of discretion.
Judges have blocked Trump policies in a half-dozen cases in the past month under the APA, and in almost every instance have specifically said they aren’t precluded in doing so by the Supreme Court.
Zach Shelley, a lawyer at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, filed a case using the APA in which a judge this month ordered the restoration of gender-related healthcare data to government websites, which officials had taken down after an anti-transgender executive order from Trump.
The act was the obvious choice to address a nationwide policy “from the get-go,” Shelley said.
District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., said administration officials ignored common sense by taking down entire webpages of information instead of removing specific words or statements that ran afoul of Trump’s gender order. “This case involves government officials acting first and thinking later,” Bates wrote. Nothing in the high court’s ruling prevented him from ordering the pages be put back up, the judge said.
The Justice Department argued that Trump administration officials had acted lawfully and reasonably in implementing the president’s order to remove material promoting gender ideology.
The department is still in the early stages of attempting to use the Supreme Court’s ruling to its advantage, and legal observers continue to expect the decision will help the administration in some cases.
In one, a New York judge recently narrowed the scope of a ruling blocking the administration’s attempts to end contracts with Job Corps centers that run career-training programs for low-income young adults.
If the lawsuit had instead been filed as a class action or litigated in a different way, though, “the result may very well be different,” Judge Andrew Carter wrote.
Washington Post: Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says
Tae Heung Kim, a Korean citizen studying in the United States, is being held in San Francisco after returning from his brother’s wedding overseas.
A Korean-born researcher and longtime U.S. legal permanent resident has spent the past week detained by immigration officials at San Francisco International Airport without explanation and has been denied access to an attorney, according to his lawyer.
Tae Heung “Will” Kim, 40, has lived in the United States since he was 5 and is a green-card holder pursuing his PhD at Texas A&M University, where he is researching a vaccine for Lyme disease, said his attorney, Eric Lee. Immigration officials detained Kim at a secondary screening point July 21 after he returned from a two-week visit to South Korea for his younger brother’s wedding.
Lee said the government has not told him or Kim’s family why it detained Kim, and immigration officials have refused to let Kim speak to an attorney or communicate with his family members directly except for a brief call to his mother Friday. In 2011, Kim faced a minor marijuana possession charge in Texas, Lee said, but he fulfilled a community service requirement and successfully petitioned for nondisclosure to seal the offense from the public record.
“If a green card holder is convicted of a drug offense, violating their status, that person is issued a Notice to Appear and CBP coordinates detention space with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said Tuesday in a statement to The Washington Post. “This alien is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”
Aside from a brief phone call, the only other contact Kim’s family has had with him is through what they believe to be secondhand text messages — probably an immigration official texting them from Kim’s phone in his presence. When relatives asked via text if Kim is sleeping on the floor or if the lights remain on all day, Lee said, the reply from Kim’s phone read: “Don’t worry about it.”
When Lee asked a CBP supervisor in a phone call if the Fifth and Sixth amendments — which establish rights to due process and the right to counsel — applied to Kim, the supervisor replied “no,” according to Lee.
“If the Constitution doesn’t apply to somebody who’s lived in this country for 35 years and is a green-card holder — and only left the country for a two-week vacation — that means [the government] is basically arguing that the Constitution doesn’t apply to anybody who’s been in this country for less time than him,” Lee said Monday.
Representatives for CBP and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about the supervisor’s alleged comment about Kim’s constitutional rights.
President Donald Trump has made aggressive immigration enforcement a signature of his second term, promising to root out violent criminals who are in the country without authorization. But the crackdowns have in practice swept up undocumented immigrants with little or no criminal history, as well as documented immigrants, like Kim, who hold valid visas or green cards.
Lee, the attorney, said that with no details from immigration officials or direct access to Kim, he and Kim’s family could only speculate on the reason he was detained, though Lee had believed it is probably tied to the 2011 drug charge. But immigration law has a long-established waiver process that allows officials to overlook certain minor crimes that would otherwise threaten a legal permanent resident’s status. Lee said Kim easily meets the criteria for a waiver.
“Why detain him when he’s got this waiver that is available to him?” Lee said.
Other foreign-born researchers detained by the Trump administration have included scholars accused of being “national security threats” because they expressed views opposing U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. In another case, a Russian-born researcher studying at Harvard University was charged for allegedly smuggling frog embryos into the country.
At Texas A&M, Kim’s primary research has focused on finding a vaccine for Lyme disease, which is caused by bacteria spread through tick bites. He began his doctoral studies there in summer 2021 after earning a bachelor’s degree in ocean engineering from the university in 2007, Texas A&M said in a statement to The Post.
As Kim’s family waits for answers, his mother, Yehoon “Sharon” Lee, said she worries about his health and if he’s eating well — “mother’s concerns,” she said through an interpreter.
“I’m most concerned about his medical condition. He’s had asthma ever since he was younger,” Sharon Lee added. “I don’t know if he has enough medication. He carries an inhaler, but I don’t know if it’s enough, because he’s been there a week.”
Sharon Lee, 65, and her husband came to the U.S. on business visas in the 1980s, and she eventually became a naturalized citizen. But by then, Kim and his younger brother had aged out of the automatic citizenship benefit for minor children whose parents are naturalized. The brothers are legal permanent residents and have spent most of their lives in the United States.
“He’s a good son, very gentle,” Sharon Lee said of Tae Heung Kim, noting that he is a hard worker and known for checking on his neighbors. After his father died of cancer, Kim stepped up to help take care of his mother and the family’s doll-manufacturing business.
After more than three decades in the U.S., Sharon Lee said her son’s predicament has saddened and surprised her.
“I immigrated here to the States — I thought I understood it was a country of equal rights where the Constitution applies equally,” she said.
She still believes the U.S. is a country of opportunity and second chances. But she said vulnerable immigrants must learn about immigration law to protect themselves. In her son’s case, that was the hotline at the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, an advocacy group for Koreans and Asian Americans.
Eric Lee, Kim’s attorney, said there’s a dark irony to the Trump administration’s detention of someone like him.
“This is somebody whose research is going to save countless lives if allowed to continue — farmers who are at risk of getting Lyme disease,” Lee said. “Trump always talks about how much he loves the great farmers of America. Well, Tae is somebody who can save farmers’ lives.”
Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says
A Korean citizen studying in Texas on a green card was detained in San Francisco after a trip overseas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/29/korean-scientist-green-card-detained
AOL: Chokeholds, bikers and ‘roving patrols’: Are Trump’s ICE tactics legal?
An appellate court appears poised to side with the federal judge who blocked immigration agents from conducting “roving patrols” and snatching people off the streets of Southern California, likely setting up another Supreme Court showdown.
Arguments in the case were held Monday before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, with the judges at times fiercely questioning the lawyer for the Trump administration about the constitutionality of seemingly indiscriminate sweeps by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“I’m just trying to understand what would motivate the officers … to grab such a large number of people so quickly and without marshaling reasonable suspicion to detain,” said Judge Ronald M. Gould of Seattle.
Earlier this month, a lower court judge issued a temporary restraining order that has all but halted the aggressive operations by masked federal agents, saying they violate the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Justice Department called the block that was ordered by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong “the first step” in a “wholesale judicial usurpation” of federal authority.
“It’s a very serious thing to say that multiple federal government agencies have a policy of violating the Constitution,” Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Yaakov M. Roth argued Monday. “We don’t think that happened, and we don’t think it’s fair we were hit with this sweeping injunction on an unfair and incomplete record.”
That argument appeared to falter in front of the 9th Circuit panel. Judges Jennifer Sung of Portland, Ore., and Marsha S. Berzon of San Francisco heard the case alongside Gould — all drawn from the liberal wing of an increasingly split appellate division.
“If you’re not actually doing what the District Court found you to be doing and enjoined you from doing, then there should be no harm,” Sung said.
Frimpong’s order stops agents from using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement across Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. The judge found that without other evidence, those criteria alone or in combination do not meet the 4th Amendment bar for reasonable suspicion.
“It appears that they are randomly selecting Home Depots where people are standing looking for jobs and car washes because they’re car washes,” Berzon said. “Is your argument that it’s OK that it’s happening, or is your argument that it’s not happening?”
Roth largely sidestepped that question, reiterating throughout the 90-minute hearing that the government had not had enough time to gather evidence it was following the Constitution and that the court did not have authority to constrain it in the meantime.
Read more:Trump administration asks appeals court to lift restrictions on SoCal immigration raids
Arguments in the case hinge on a pair of dueling Golden State cases that together define the scope of relief courts can offer under the 4th Amendment.
“It’s the bulwark of privacy protection against policing,” said professor Orin S. Kerr of Stanford Law School, whose work on 4th Amendment injunctions was cited in the Justice Department’s briefing. “What the government can do depends on really specific details. That makes it hard for a court to say here’s the thing you can’t do.”
In policing cases, every exception to the rule has its own exceptions, the expert said.
The Department of Justice has staked its claim largely on City of Los Angeles vs. Lyons, a landmark 1983 Supreme Court decision about illegal chokeholds by the Los Angeles Police Department. In that case, the court ruled against a blanket ban on the practice, finding the Black motorist who had sued was unlikely to ever be choked by the police again.
“That dooms plaintiffs’ standing here,” the Justice Department wrote.
But the American Civil Liberties Union and its partners point to other precedents, including the San Diego biker case Easyriders Freedom F.I.G.H.T. vs. Hannigan. Decided in the 9th Circuit in 1996, the ruling offers residents of the American West more 4th Amendment protection than they might have in Texas, New York or Illinois.
In the Easyriders case, 14 members of a Southland motorcycle club successfully blocked the California Highway Patrol from citing almost any bikers they suspected of wearing the wrong kind of helmet, after the court ruled a more narrow decision would leave the same bikers vulnerable to future illegal citations.
“The court said these motorcyclists are traveling around the state, so we can’t afford the plaintiff’s complete relief unless we allow this injunction to be statewide,” said professor Geoffrey Kehlmann, who directs the 9th Circuit Appellate Clinic at Loyola Law School.
“In situations like this, where you have roving law enforcement throughout a large area and you have the plaintiffs themselves moving throughout this large area, you necessarily need to have that broader injunction,” Kehlmann said.
Frimpong cited Easyriders among other precedent cases in her ruling, saying it offered a clear logic for the districtwide injunction. The alternative — agents sweeping through car washes and Home Depot parking lots stopping to ask each person they grab if they are a plaintiff in the suit — “would be a fantasy,” she wrote.
Another expert, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the Los Angeles Police Department chokehold case set a standard that litigants “need to show it’s likely it could happen to you again in the future.”
But, he added: “The 9th Circuit has said, here’s ways you can show that.”
The tests can include asking whether the contested enforcement is limited to a small geographic area or applied to a small group of people, and whether it is part of a policy.
“After the injunction here, the secretary of Homeland Security said, ‘We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing,’” Berzon said. “Is that not a policy?”
Roth denied that there was any official policy driving the sweeps.
“Plaintiffs [argue] the existence of an official policy of violating the 4th Amendment with these stops,” Roth said. “The only evidence of our policy was a declaration that said, ‘Yes, reasonable suspicion is what we require when we go beyond a consensual encounter.'”
But Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU of Southern California, part of a coalition of civil rights groups and individual attorneys challenging cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests, argued that the federal policy is clear.
“They have said, ‘If it ends in handcuffs, go out and do it,'” he told the panel. “There’s been a wink and a nod to agents on the ground that says, ‘Dispatch with the rigors of the law and go out and snatch anybody out there.'”
He said that put his organization’s clients in a similar situation to the bikers.
“The government did not present any alternatives as to what an injunction could look like that would provide adequate relief to our plaintiffs,” Tajsar said. “That’s fatal to any attempt by them to try to get out from underneath this injunction.”
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, he said, are “likely to ensnare just as many people with status as without status.”
The Justice Department said ICE already complies with the 4th Amendment, and that the injunction risks a “chilling effect” on lawful arrests.
“If it’s chilling ICE from violating the Constitution, that’s where they’re supposed to be chilled,” Chemerinsky said.
A ruling is expected as soon as this week. Roth signaled the administration is likely to appeal if the appellate panel does not grant its stay.
Chokeholds, bikers and ‘roving patrols’: Are Trump’s ICE tactics legal?
The appellate court battle over whether ICE can resume ‘roving patrols’ across the Los Angeles area hangs on dueling legal precedents that involve the LAPD and the CHP.
https://www.aol.com/chokeholds-bikers-roving-patrols-trumps-232936992.html
Law & Crime: ‘This discrepancy is not insignificant’: Judge alleges Trump admin misled SCOTUS about injunction over federal layoffs
The Trump administration provided incorrect information to the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent high-profile case about firing federal employees, according to a federal judge sitting in San Francisco.
On Monday, in a terse, two-page filing, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the U.S. Department of Justice substantially mischaracterized the reach of a preliminary injunction the lower court issued in response to one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
That injunction, issued in late May, came on the heels of a temporary restraining order issued in early May. Later that same month, a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit upheld the lower court order, rejecting the government’s request to stay the injunction.
Then, in early June, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a 147-page application for an emergency stay with the nation’s high court.
In that application, Sauer described Illston’s injunction in the following terms: “In fact, this Office has been informed by OPM that about 40 [reductions in force] in 17 agencies were in progress and are currently enjoined.”
Now, Illston says Sauer protested a bit too much.
The district court judge, in her Monday statement, alleges the fourth-highest ranking DOJ official got both sets of numbers wrong.
“Petitioners provided this information to argue that the preliminary injunction was causing them irreparable harm,” Illston writes. “Now that petitioners have filed their RIF list, it is apparent that the figure presented to the Supreme Court included numerous agencies that are not defendants in this case and therefore were not enjoined by the District Court.”
The document goes on to list seven “non-defendant” agencies and nine RIFs which were incorrectly included in the government’s representations before the justices in its June stay application.
Illston then crunches the numbers – using bold to highlight the math.
Based on this list, petitioners’ application to the Supreme Court should have stated that the injunction paused 31 RIFs in 10 agencies, not 40 RIFs in 17 agencies. This discrepancy is not insignificant. In this Court’s view, this further underscores the Court’s previous finding that any deliberative process privilege, if it exists at all, is overridden by ‘the need for accurate fact-finding in this litigation[.]'”
While the Supreme Court stayed the injunction itself, other business in the litigation has been moving forward at the district court level.
The underlying lawsuit, filed by a coalition of labor unions, nonprofit groups, and municipalities, challenges the 45th and 47th president’s Feb. 11 executive order, “Implementing The President’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order, on its own terms, purports to “commence” a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” by “eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity.” In real terms, Trump’s plans ask agency heads to quickly “initiate large-scale reductions in force,” or massive layoffs, in service of a goal to restructure the government.
The plaintiffs, for their part, have continued to push for discovery regarding the extent of the government’s RIFs and reorganization plans. The defendants, in turn, have sought various reprieves from both the district court and the court of appeals.
On July 18, Illston issued a discovery order which directed the government to provide the requested information. The order provided a win for the plaintiffs on the basic request as well as a win for the government – which requested to file some information under seal.
That discovery order is the first instance in which the “40 RIFs in 17 agencies” assertion was called into question by the court.
“Defendants made this assertion to the Supreme Court to highlight the urgency of their stay request and the extent of irreparable injury facing the government,” Illston observed. “Yet defendants now back-track, telling this Court that, actually, ‘those RIFs have not been finalized, many were in an early stage, and some are not now going forward.'”
The court ordered the DOJ to clear things up as follows:
Defendants must file with the Court, not under seal, a list of the RIFs referenced in the Supreme Court stay application. Defendants may note which RIFs, if any, agencies have decided not to move forward, or provide any other details they wish.
On July 21, the DOJ filed a petition for a writ of mandamus – a request for a court to force another government entity to do what it says – with the 9th Circuit. That petition complains Illston’s discovery order “directs the government to produce voluminous privileged documents to plaintiffs’ counsel and the district court.” The petition goes on to ask the appellate court to both pause and kibosh completely the elements of the discovery order which require the filing of the documents under seal.
On July 22, the panel issued a stay on the sealed production order.
On July 28, the 9th Circuit directed the parties to respond and reply to the mandamus request by Aug. 1 and Aug. 8, respectively. The panel also said the district court “may address the petition if it so desires.”
In her filing, Illston said she “appreciates the invitation to address” the government’s mandamus petition.
As it turns out, even after the government filed its requests to stay Illston’s more invasive discovery orders, the Trump administration provided the information the lower court directed them to file “not under seal.”
“Since the Discovery Order issued, petitioners produced the list of the reductions in force (RIFs) that petitioners represented to the Supreme Court were in progress and were halted by the District Court’s May 22, 2025 preliminary injunction,” Illston explains.
Now, that information is being used against the Trump administration to allege the DOJ overstated its case before the nation’s highest court.
Judge alleges Trump admin misled SCOTUS about injunction over federal layoffs
“Petitioners provided this information to argue that the preliminary injunction was causing them irreparable harm.”