In Trump’s America, no one is safe from government harassment and abuse. As we have seen, anyone can be picked up while walking along the street by masked people, bundled into unmarked vehicles, and ‘disappeared’, just like what happens in the worst kinds of despotic regimes. The abducted person may end up in a distant detention center and kept in awful conditions or even deported to countries like El Salvador that are notorious for their terrible prisons. You can see a list of recent such cases here.

So it is a good idea for everyone to know what rights they have and what they should do if ever they ever find themselves being taken in and questioned by the police or agents of the government for anything at all, however minor it may seem, like a traffic stop. This one-minute long video by longtime civil rights attorneys Bill Goodman and Denise Heberle, who look like a pair of genteel grandparents, succinctly tells you exactly what you should do in such situations.

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In the previous post, I wrote about the Trump gang’s efforts to quickly deport large numbers of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that has only been used three times in its history: the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, claiming that these people were members of the gang Tren de Aragua and formed the invading force of the Venezuelan government.

Today, in a 7-2 opinion (predictably with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees must be given time to challenge their deportations

The court emphasized that the men — whom the Trump administration has labeled “alien enemies” — are entitled to more due process than the administration has so far provided. That means advance notice of their deportations and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the deportations in court, the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In particular, the justices faulted the administration for its attempt last month to carry out swift deportations just one day after providing a bare-bones deportation notice to the detainees. The Supreme Court intervened at the time to stop those deportations, and in Friday’s decision, the court elaborated on its decision and extended its order blocking them.

“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court’s opinion said, without deciding exactly how much notice is required.

A small victory for due process against a government that has no regard for the law or human rights.

Finally, after being kidnapped during daylight hours in a public street near Tufts University where she was a graduate student by masked unidentified people in unmarked cars who were later revealed to be ICE agents, and then quickly transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Rümeysa Öztürk was released today after 45 days in captivity. Her release had been ordered by a federal judge.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
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It has become clear that the Trump gang’s plan is to summarily detain and deport people before they have had a chance to challenge their detention in the courts via a habeas corpus petition. Once the people have been deported, they then claim that there is nothing they can do to bring them back, even if the plane carrying them was still in the air. This practice so enraged a district court judge James Boasberg that he began criminal contempt proceedings against the government because of their earlier defiance of his order to turn around planes that had been transporting people to El Salvador prions and then stonewalling his attempts to get them to give him a clear timeline of their actions.

A federal judge found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order gives the administration a final opportunity to come into compliance but says he otherwise will take steps to identify the specific people who flouted his March 15 ruling, which was later lifted by the Supreme Court, and refer them for prosecution.
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In dispute is whether the government violated an oral order from Boasberg given around 6:45 p.m. that day to halt or turn around any flights carrying migrants. 

The White House has sought to sidestep that question, saying it complied with a 7:27 p.m. written order. In court, however, they have declined to provide Boasberg with flight details and have asserted the ability to do so under the state secrets privilege.

Boasberg on Thursday raised the specter that the administration’s delay in publicizing the proclamation could have been “trying to put measures in place to get people subject to the proclamation removed from the country before it’s possible to challenge” their deportation and before it could be blocked by a court.

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After the US Supreme Court said that the Trump administration needed to facilitate Kilmar Ábrego García’s release from a prison in El Salvador, they started, as predicted, playing word games to not do anything, arguing that ‘facilitate’ only meant that if he should turn up at the US border, they would let him in but that they need do nothing more. They had earlier admitted that sending him had been a mistake but said that since he was now in the custody of El Salvador there was nothing that they could do.

The president of El Salvador came to the White House and he and Trump gave a joint press conference where they yucked it up and seemed to find it highly amusing that an innocent man is now in a foreign prison separated from his family here, and has been reportedly traumatized by the experience. It was disgusting to see how little regard they had for the fate of an innocent man.

The case went before a three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and they blasted this line of reasoning in a unanimous opinion, saying that the word ‘facilitate’ did not allow the government to do nothing
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I posted three days ago about how Trump faced his first major test before the US Supreme Court about the extent of his powers in a case involving a man who was sent illegally to a prison in El Salvador.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that Trump’s action has to be reversed.

The US supreme court upheld on Thursday a judge’s order requiring Donald Trump’s administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis last week issued an order that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.

The supreme court, in an unsigned decision, said that the judge’s order “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.
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