Politics

The Trump administration just lies and lies and lies. Those in charge assume they can just bluster their way past the system of checks and balances. For everything else, there’s AI generated memes depicting Trump taking a shit on the people he serves. Win-win, I guess.

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

An immigration enforcement officer who shot a US citizen in Chicago last month bragged about the incident in texts afterwards, according to court documents filed in federal court on Wednesday. It’s just one of the latest examples of how, contrary to the Trump administration’s own narrative, the agents helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are posing a danger to residents themselves.

The Department of Homeland Security has sent unaccompanied immigrant teenagers $5,000 fines for illegally entering the United States, according to youth advocates and fine notices reviewed by New York Focus and The Intercept.

After being sued for violating state-level human trafficking laws, the nation’s largest private prison company is pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to grant private government contractors like itself blanket immunity from such lawsuits and many others. This case — and another involving a military contractor — could deliver sweeping immunity to federal contractors, if they get the ruling they…

Last week we covered how Trump’s immigration theater was pulling federal agents off child sex crimes, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations to chase landscapers and line cooks instead. Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re learning the administration is also pulling hundreds of cybersecurity professionals away from defending America’s critical infrastructure so they can help process deportation paperwork.

A lot has happened since last week when my post about Des Moines (IA) school superintendent Ian Roberts being arrested by ICE first hit the front page here at Techdirt. A lot of new information has come to light, almost all of it obtained by Des Moines Register journalists, which indicates the arrested man may not have been the man he pretended to be (a legal migrant with only the slightest amount of previous legal troubles).

It seems like years ago, but the Trump administration got itself sued earlier this very year by the state of California for commandeering California’s National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Trump justified this by declaring the city to be under siege, even though (1) most violence was being committed by law enforcement, (2) most of the protest activity was limited to a few blocks in the downtown LA area, and (3) even Los Angeles law enforcement officials stated no help was needed because whatever imagined problem there was, they already had under control.

Did Trump just blink? It sure seems like he did. If he did, he quickly unblinked. All of which suggests that the administration is in disarray. I know, I know. The administration is always in disarray. But, as discussed below, the administration is losing or is in retreat on multiple fronts—driven by his historic unfavorability ratings, his incoherent ramblings in public appearances, his frequent unexplained absences from public view, his consistent losses in every court except the Supreme Court, the weakening economy, his stubborn use of illegal tariffs to punish American consumers, and his assault on US cities through ICE and CBP.

Today, federal lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) demanding information on any plans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has to use Graphite, a spyware program that can access — without the owner’s knowledge or consent — a phone’s location data, photos, and encrypted applications, including WhatsApp and Signal. Last year, the Biden administration paused…

Mario Guevara, the Atlanta-based Spanish-language journalist who was arrested while covering an anti-Trump protest, has been transported to a Louisiana immigration facility, from where his family said he will be…

By Gabe Miller and Richard Berg