Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern criticize the big law firms that immediately caved to Trump’s demands to quash their diversity programs and pledge millions of dollars in pro bono work for Trump’s causes. They were singled out for punishment by Trump in executive orders because they dared to represent his political enemies.
In the present crisis of American law, judges have been overwhelmingly strong in upholding the rule of law over the demands of an egotistical, lawless president. Over 200 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, which has so far not gone well for Trump. Judges have been targets of abuse, intimidation, even death threats directed at them and their families.
The authors single out Judge Beryl Howell for her fearless defense of the right of lawyers to represent their clients regardless of their political views.
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell deftly knit together the professional obligations of the bench to the bar when she handed down a 102-page opinion in favor of one of these fighting firms, Perkins Coie, handing it a massive victory that carried a deeper lesson for the entire legal profession. Howell’s decision is noteworthy for all manner of things, but perhaps the most important aspect is that it serves as a clarion call for lawyers—meaning every lawyer in the country—to find their way to doing the work of democracy. The judge highlighted the “importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice,” a role “recognized in this country since its founding era.” She condemned the administration’s “unprecedented attack on these foundational principles.” And she praised Perkins Coie for defending its lawyers’ right “to represent their clients vigorously and zealously, without fear of retribution from the government simply for doing the job of a lawyer.” Howell also gave credit to the hundreds of lawyers who filed amicus briefs on behalf of the firm, including a cross-ideological array of lawyers, former government officials, and retired judges, reflecting the profession’s near-unanimous revulsion at the prospect of singling out firms based on the clients they choose to represent.
But Howell went out of her way to cast doubt upon the capitulating firms that took Trump’s deal, for possibly compromising their own legal ethics. Describing Trump’s threat that “lawyers must stick to the party line, or else,” she wrote, archly: “This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees.” Some clients, she noted, “may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel”—an extraordinary warning to these clients that their lawyers may no longer be defending their best interests. And to make her position perfectly clear, the judge added: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.”
Howell’s opinion serves as the most important reminder to date that in this constitutional moment, those trained to operate within the law and those who swear oaths to defend it have a singular and critical role to play. The days of “I just do mergers and acquisitions” are behind us, sports fans. If America were experiencing a national tooth-decay crisis, the dentists would be on the front lines; and were it experiencing a sweeping leaky-pipe epidemic, the plumbers would be on the front lines. Given that we are in the throes of the greatest legal disaster the country has faced in many Americans’ lifetimes, it might be a good idea for the nation’s attorneys to begin to understand that they have a role to play too. Howell, meanwhile, holds no quarter for those who would seek to be neutral. If you have the tools to fight lawlessness and you opt not to use them at this moment in history, you are emphatically still taking a side.
It is hard to read Howell’s opinion without worrying that some judge somewhere will find it too sweeping, too polemical, and too teeming with overinflated claims about the centrality of attorneys in American life. (She quoted Alexis de Tocqueville’s observationthat in the early United States, “the authority … intrusted to members of the legal profession … is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.”) What Howell seems to understand, with as much force as de Tocqueville, is that those entrusted to protect against the “excesses of democracy” are not going to have the luxury of appearing “neutral” much longer, or even just tamping down criticism by avoiding flowery prose in favor of more anodyne wrist slaps. Effective immediately, the defenders of the rule of law are those who went to school to understand it, who get paid to fight for it, and who swear an oath to uphold it.
During Biden’s term in office, Republicans continually complained that Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department because it prosecuted Trump for inciting the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and for taking classified documents to his Mar-A-Lago estate.
Days ago, the Trump administration announced that it had reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a police officer as she attempted to be first to break into the House of Representatives’ chamber, where members of Congress were fleeing. The family is suing for $30 million. The police officer who shot her was defending the lives of our elected representatives, both Democrats and Republicans. It’s hard to imagine any other administration, whatever the party in power, paying off the family of a woman leading a mob into the House chambers to stop the electoral vote count.
Now that Trump is president again, he has turned the Departnent of Justice into his personal law office and assigned it the mission of prosecuting anyone whoever dared to cross Trump.
Trump is gleefully using his powers to weaponize the Department of Justice and to punish his political enemies. Not a peep from the Republicans, who unjustly accused Biden of doing what Trump is literally doing.
Trump has issued executive orders targeting law firms who had the nerve to represent Democrats or other Trump critics. His orders barred lawyers from those firms from federal buildings and directed the heads of all federal agencies to terminate contracts with the firms he designated. Several major law firms, fearful of being blocked from any federal cases, immediately capitulated. Trump exacted a price for releasing them from his attack: they had to agree to perform pro bono work on behalf of causes chosen by Trump. He currently has close a billion dollars of legal time pledged to him by those law firms that feared his wrath.
Individuals targeted by Trump must either find a lawyer who will represent them pro bono or face personal bankruptcy, that is, if they can find a lawyer willing to take on the Trump administration.
A few law firms have resisted Trump’s tyranny, and one of them–Perkins Coie–won a permanent injunction to block the enforcement of Trump’s ban. Perkins Coie represented Hillary Clinton in 2016, as well as George Soros. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said that Trump’s attacks on specific law firms, based on the clients they represented, were unprecedented and unconstitutional.
Judge Howell cited the example of John Adams, who represented the British soldiers accused of killing five colonists in the Boston Massacre of 1770. In two separate trials, Adams prevailed. He believed that everyone deserved a good lawyer and that they had been provoked into firing. Adams was a patriot and a man who defended the law. He was not stigmatized for defending the British soldiers.
An issue that Judge Howell raised but set aside for another time was whether Trump’s orders, which single out specific groups or individuals for punishment without trial are bills of attainder, which the Constitution forbids. They surely look like it, and this issue will come up again in the future.
A presidential bill of attainder places the powers of all three governmental branches in the hands of one man. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
When Thomas Paine asked what made America different from England, he had a ready answer: “In America, the law is king.” America has not alwaysupheld that ideal, but, taking the long view, it has made great progress toward that principle. In recent decades, the Department of Justice has become an institutional embodiment of these aspirations—the locus in the federal government for professional, apolitical enforcement of the law, which is in itself a rejection of the kingly prerogative. That is why Donald Trump’s debasement of the DOJ is far more than the mere degradation of a governmental agency; it is an assault on the rule of law.
His attack on the institution is threefold: He is using the mechanisms of justice to go after political opponents; he is using those same mechanisms to reward allies; and he is eliminating internal opposition within the department. Each incident making up this pattern is appalling; together, they amount to the decimation of a crucial institution.
This development should frighten all citizens, no matter what their political persuasion. As Attorney General Robert Jackson warned in 1940, the ability of a prosecutor to pick “some person whom he dislikes and desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, [is where] the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.” Choosing targets in this way flies in the face of the DOJ’s rules and traditions—to say nothing of the actual, grave harm it can inflict on people.
Far from eschewing the possibility of abuse, Trump and his allies at the Department of Justice positively revel in it. The most egregious example was Trump’s recent issuance of an executive order directing the government to investigate the activities of two of his own employees in the first administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who later came to be political opponents of his. (Both men are friends and colleagues of mine.)
Their offense of perceived disloyalty is perhaps the gravest sin in Trump world, and as a result, they will now be individually targeted for investigation. The personal impact on each of them is no doubt immediate and severe. Krebs, who is a well-respected cybersecurity leader, has quit his job at SentinelOne and plans to focus on his defense. If Trump’s DOJ pursues this investigation to the limit, the two men could face imprisonment.
The cases of Krebs and Taylor do not stand in isolation. Recently, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey (Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba) launched an investigation into the state of New Jersey for its alleged “obstruction” of Trump’s deportation agenda. In other words, because New Jersey won’t let its own employees be drafted as servants of Trump’s policy, the state becomes a pariah in Trump’s mind, one that must be coerced into obedience.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced that the U.S. government is suing Maine because of the state’s refusal to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ high-school sports teams. Not content with threatening Maine, Bondi has also announced an investigation of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office because of its alleged opposition to the Second Amendment and its “lengthy” process for approval of gun permits. And she recently announced that she would target leakers of classified information by going after journalists, rescinding a policy that protected journalists from being subpoenaed to assist government-leak investigations.
A less-well-known example of Martin’s excess is his use of threats of criminal prosecution to empower DOGE. When DOGE was first denied entry into the U.S. Institute of Peace, one of the lawyers for USIP got a call from the head of the U.S. attorney’s criminal division, threatening criminal investigation if they didn’t allow DOGE into the building. Magnifying that power of criminal law, Martin sent D.C. police officers to the agency, telling the police that there was “an ongoing incident at the United States Institute of Peace” and that there was “at least one person who was refusing to leave the property at the direction of the acting USIP president, who was lawfully in charge of the facility,” according to the journalist Steve Chapman.
A final example of DOJ overreach is, perhaps, the most chilling of all. In a recently issued presidential memorandum, Trump directed the attorney general to “investigate and take appropriate action concerning allegations regarding the use of online fundraising platforms to make ‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions and to make foreign contributions to U.S. political candidates and committees, all of which break the law.” Were the investigation neutral in nature, this might be understandable. But it isn’t.
In fact, there are two major fundraising platforms in use—WinRed (the Republican platform) and ActBlue (the Democratic one). Even though WinRed has been the subject of seven times as many FTC complaints as ActBlue, the Trump memorandum involves only the latter. By targeting his opponents’ fundraising, Trump is overtly marshaling the powers of federal law enforcement in his effort to shut down political opposition.
In essence, Trump is using the department to try to ensure future Republican electoral victories. One can hardly imagine a more horrifying variation on Lavrentiy Beria’s infamous boast: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
There is more to the article. I encourage you to read it in full.
This is a website that will keep you informed about the ongoing struggle to preserve our democracy.
It’s called Democracy Docket, and it is led by lawyer Marc Elias. Marc is a fearless defender of the rights of all citizens. He reports on threats to democracy and victories for democracy.
Trump administration proposes more drastic election security cuts
The Trump administration introduced a new budget proposal calling for a near $500 million cut to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the nation’s top federal entity responsible for protecting elections from hacking.
Trump ‘looking at’ suspending Habeas Corpus, Stephen Miller says
The Trump administration is looking into suspending people’s right to challenge their incarceration in court, to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts, White House aide Stephen Miller said today.
Though Miller described it as a “privilege,” the writ of habeas corpus is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitutionand can only be suspended “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
New challenge to Wisconsin congressional map
A second lawsuit was filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court challenging the state’s congressional map. Voters, represented by the Campaign Legal Center, argue the map unevenly distributes the population, violating the state constitution.
Iowa voting materials won’t be translated
The Iowa Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision that allowed voting materials to be translated into other languages, despite a state law requiring documents to be distributed in English only. The case was dismissed due to lack of standing.
Wyoming’s citizenship requirement challenged
A pro-voting group is challenging Wyoming’s House Bill 156, which mandates documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The lawsuit alleges the measure violates the First, Fifth, and 14th Amendments by creating barriers for eligible voters.
The group argues the law disproportionately affects women, Hispanic, young, and low-income residents. This comes amid already low civic participation in Wyoming, where only 65% of eligible voters registered and 60% voted in 2024.
We have more power than Trump wants us to believe
Trump wants us to believe he is all-powerful. He wants us to believe that opposing him is futile or worse. He wants you to accept that there’s nothing you can do to limit his ability to harm our country and our democracy. But that simply isn’t true.
Marc shares 10 things you can do to stand up to Trump and protect our democracy.
BURLINGTON, Vermont — A federal judge Friday ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University Ph.D. student whose video-recorded detention by masked federal agents drew national scrutiny amid a crackdown by the Trump administration.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions III ruled that Ozturk had been unlawfully detained in March for little more than authoring an op-edcritical of Israel in her school newspaper.
“That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” the Clinton-appointed judge said, describing it as an apparent violation of her free speech rights. He also said Ozturk had made significant claims of due process violations. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
Sessions said the Trump administration’s targeting of Ozturk could chill the speech of “millions and millions” of noncitizens.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked Ozturk’s visa, saying her continued presence in the United States was contrary to American foreign policy interests, part of a wave of similar visa terminations targeting students who had criticized Israel or joined pro-Palestinian protests.
Trump pulled the nomination of the noxious Ed Martin, whom he had nominated to be U.S. Attorney for DC, a crucial post.
After Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced that he would not vote for Martin, his nomination was dead. The vote in the Senate Juduciary Committee would be 11-11, and Martin’s name would not go to the Senate floor.
In the world of horrible nominations for important posts, this was one of the worst. Ed Martin has been a vocal defender of the January 6 insurrectionists, even those who violently assaulted police officers. Think MAGA, then think extreme MAGA, and that’s Ed Martin. It was recently revealed that Martin appeared on Russian state media more than 150 times since 2016.
Thankful there is at least one Republican in the Senate who is not kissing Trump’s feet.
A colleague said recently to me that the abandonment of vocational education was one of the great errors in American education in the past generation. I recall when New York City had successful high schools that prepared students for vocations and careers that paid well. The concept of “college for all” undermined support for such schools, and most of them closed.
A few days ago, Randi Weingarten wrote an article in the New York Times endorsing CTE–career and technical education--a cause she has been supporting for years. CTE is an updated term for vocational education. One of the r big complaints about vocational education was that students were being trained to service obsolete machinery. CTE incorporates the latest technology into its curricula.
Isn’t it time to recognize that electricians, plumbers, nurses, computer technicians, auto mechanics, and other skilled occupations are needed as much and often paid more than those with a Ph.D.? To be clear, I admire those who spend years to acquire a doctorate in the liberal arts, but the reality today is that most college professors are underpaid adjuncts.
We should recognize that education is a lifelong endeavor. Everyone needs a strong foundation from K-12 in the skills of reading, writing, thinking, and using technology, as well as a solid grounding in mathematics, civics, history, the sciences, and the arts. Students should graduate high school ready for college or careers. They should be ready to make choices and able to change course, which many adults do.
Randi writes:
For years, America’s approach to education has been guided by an overly simplistic formula: 4+4 — the idea that students need four years of high school and four years of college to succeed in life.
Even with this prevailing emphasis on college, around 40 percent of high schoolers do not enroll in college upon graduating, and only 60 percent of students who enroll in college earn a degree or credential within eight years of high school graduation.
While college completion has positive effects — on health, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and even happiness — it’s increasingly clear that college for all should no longer be our North Star. It’s time to scale up successful programs that create multiple pathways for students so high school is a gateway to both college and career.
More than 80 percent of America’s young people attend public schools, and the challenges many students and their families face are well known. Chronic absenteeismworsened during the pandemic. For many reasons, the country’s lowest-performing students are being left behind. Cellphones and social media have helped fuel an epidemic of bullying, loneliness and mental health struggles among youth. Educators, who have less and less authority in their classrooms, are valiantly fighting those headwinds, too often with insufficient resources.
So far, President Trump’s response has been to order the dismantling of the Department of Education and to propose billions of dollars of cuts to K-12 education that will push our system of public schools closer to the breaking point.
Republican-led states are increasingly embracing school vouchers, which let parents spend public funds on private schools, despite evidence of the negative effect of vouchers on student achievement: Evaluations of vouchers in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that these programs can cause drops in test scores. And vouchers divert vital funding that could and should go to public schools. Arizona is spending millions of dollars on vouchers for kids already attending private schools. Students in Cleveland’s public schools may lose up to $927 per pupil in education spending to vouchers each year.
I propose a different strategy: aligning high school to both college prep and in-demand vocational career pathways. Just as students who plan to go to college can get a head start through Advanced Placement programs, high schools, colleges and employers should work together to provide the relevant coursework to engage students in promising career opportunities.
I’m not suggesting reviving the old shop class, although there is value in aspects of that approach, including hands-on learning. We’ve got to shed the misperception some may still have of technical education as a dumping ground for students headed for low-skill, low-paying jobs.
I taught social studies and A.P. government in a career and technical education, or C.T.E., school. My students not only prepared for careers in health care such as nursing; they also had robust discussions about the Constitution and won national debate competitions. I have seen innovative programs throughout the country, which show that high schools — with work force partners — can prepare all students for a variety of careers and fulfilling lives whether they go on to four-year or two-year college or training for a variety of skilled trades and technical careers.
In April, I attended the opening of a C.T.E. high school, RioTECH, in Rio Rancho, N.M. RioTECH is a partnership between the public schools and a local community college, with support from industry partners and the local teachers union — an affiliate of the organization I lead, the American Federation of Teachers — giving students the opportunity to earn stackable credentials in high-demand skilled trades as well as tuition-free, dual-credit classes that count for both high school and college credit.
The Brooklyn STEAM Center is a public school at the Navy Yard that partners with businesses, public high schools and the local union, the United Federation of Teachers. Students there have access to internships and apprenticeships and the potential of full-time jobs with more than 500 businesses on site. Career pathways include cybersecurity, construction technology and computer-aided design and engineering.
In Newark, students at the Red Hawks Rising Teacher Academy can enter a no-cost, dual-enrollment program in partnership with Montclair State University, Newark Public Schools and the A.F.T. This high school experience with a high-quality teacher preparation program helps create a pipeline to educate, train and retain future teachers, and to diversify the teacher work force.
Last year, the A.F.T. and two affiliates began an advanced technology framework with Micron and the state of New York in 10 school districts, now expanding to districts in Michigan and Minnesota, with federal funding. In this program, high school students acquire technical and foundational skills, creating pathways to middle-class jobs in the microchip sector that often won’t require a four-year college degree.
More than 90 percent of students who concentrate in career and technical education graduate from high school, and about three-quarters of them continue their education after high school. Research shows that career and technical education has positive effects on students’ academic achievement, high school completion and college readiness…
Ensuring all students get a great public education takes resources, which is why Mr. Trump’s planned cuts are just plain wrong. The Senate passed a resolution this year “supporting the goals and ideals of ‘Career and Technical Education Month’”; a similar resolution is pending in the House. Now it’s time for Congress and the administration to offer tangible support for those goals in the federal budget.
Rather than undercutting the Education Department, or using the challenges that public schools face as a rationale to cut vital federal funding under the pretext of sending more authority to the states (which already have most of the authority for schools), why not support and scale practices, policies and programs that will make our schools more engaging and relevant to more students?
Neri Alvarado Borges was working for Latin Market Venezuelan Treats, which has locations in Far North Dallas and Lewisville, before he was deported to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento Contra del Terrorismo last month.(Alvarado family / Courtesy)
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The Trump administration has couched its aggressive ramp-up of deportations as an action to root out criminals. But signs are quickly emerging that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is scooping up hardworking North Texas migrants with little or no criminal past in its “crackdown.”
Last week, editorial columnist Robert Wilonsky chronicled the case of Neri Alvarado Borges, a young Lewisville resident with a jigsaw-ribbon tattoo associated with autism awareness he wore in honor of his autistic little brother. Did Alvarado look like a hardened criminal to you?
In February, the Venezuelan citizen was seized by ICE officers outside his apartment, and eventually taken to an El Salvadoran prison with suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang. If he ever gets out, Alvarado’s trauma will be lifelong.
Paul Hunker is a Dallas immigration attorney and former chief counsel of the Dallas office of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Since the Trump administration took power, Hunker has been shocked by the profile of clients who come to him for help fighting deportation proceedings, he told me. These clients typically do not have criminal histories, Hunker said. They are hardworking members of the community, longtime residents. There’s a brief police encounter, a routine traffic stop, and they land in ICE custody.
“The model is detain-and-deport,” Hunker said. “The focus [in my time] was people who were a threat to their community, national-security threats and recent entrants. … Now they’re just going after everybody, even if they’ve been here for 20 years, with family ties. It doesn’t matter.”
ICE’s remit has changed drastically, and that change threatens to drag us all into something akin to a police state. ICE, and before it the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s enforcement arm, traditionally worked with the border patrol, focused on preventing undocumented migrants crossing the border. Apprehending a migrant in the act of an irregular border crossing is a vital part of rule-keeping, and something that has happened throughout U.S. history. Dragging family men out of their cars, throwing them into detention centers and kicking them out of the country is something ICE has never done. Until now.
That’s what appears to be happening to Jesus Ramos, of Lewisville. He, like me, is a green-card holder. Now, he’s facing deportation, allegedly because of nonviolent offenses in his past which have already been adjudicated. Ramos is on probation for simple assault and intent to possess drugs, according to reporting from NBC5.
He may have some substance-abuse problems, but Ramos is not a hardened criminal. Most families have members who go through similar struggles.
There are other stories. In Cedar Park in January, a young Venezuelan man with no criminal record was apprehended by ICE, according to an NPR story which withheld his name. Immigration officers told his family that the 18-year-old had appeared in an online video with guns and drugs, but they couldn’t produce the video for the family or for NPR.
ICE is still targeting serious offenders as the agency has always done since it launched in 2003, according to Hunker. But, as these cases and many of Hunker’s cases illustrate, ICE has new targets, too. And they are targets that we all know well.
ICE is targeting the people who climb on our roofs after hailstorms to fix the shingles. ICE is targeting the people who clean our houses and mind our children. What happens the next time your house-cleaner or your handyman drives home after a few too many?
That’s when the thorny moral question arises, the one your grandchildren may ask you: What did you do when dear, dear Nanny Gloria was swept up by burly officers and thrown in a cell?
What could you do? You will say. You were just one person.
“Tell your congressmen, ‘We don’t want this police state,’” said Hunker, who worked for ICE and its predecessor for more than 20 years. “‘Let ICE focus on people that are dangerous, and don’t try to deport those people who have their lives here.’”
I was reared in Ireland where memories of 1930s Central Europe were fresh. We are not there, yet or hopefully ever, but 20th-century history is no longer an abstract lesson.
My grandmother met some of the young people brought to London in the Kindertransport operation that evacuated Jewish children from Central Europe before World War II. She inspired my mother with a compassion for displaced families, and an animus for state authorities who displaced those families because of their outsider status.
It is all too easy, my mother taught me, to turn a blind eye to the state’s mistreatment of vulnerable outsiders.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Houston. I saw an ICE officer cruising around a strip mall in her patrol SUV, and felt a familiar chill. As a reporter with interest in the subject, I wanted to ask the officer why she was there, who she was looking for. But I turned my back, and moved on.
In Ireland, looking on from across the ocean, we contrasted Europe’s 20th-century dystopia with Reagan’s America, a land where hard work and enterprise counted for more than paperwork. Kids a few years ahead of us in school escaped to New York and Chicago from recession-wracked Ireland. A few won green-card lotteries. Most fudged the paperwork for a few years. Nobody shook them down. They were allowed to build skyscrapers, restaurant chains and plumbing empires, and sort the paperwork out later.
Now their children run emergency rooms, law offices and trading floors all over this nation.
That’s the story of immigration in modern America. The authorities have always sought to facilitate the inclusion of hardworking immigrants, rather than seeking to exclude and detain people for paperwork reasons.
The Trump administration continues to insist it is only targeting migrants with a criminal past. ICE’s broad interpretation of those criteria is what troubles me. Who’s to say that today’s deportation for DUI won’t be tomorrow’s deportation for a traffic violation, or for having the wrong surname?
Or writing a newspaper column critical of the regime. My green card is soon up for renewal. I sometimes fear it will be revoked by the thin-skinned Trump government.
But I must be able to look my children in the eye, and so I must speak up for Neri Alvarado and for Jesus Ramos and an unnamed Venezuelan 18-year-old.
Veteran prosecutor Joyce Vance shared some good news: the nomination of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney in DC is hanging by a thread and may be dead. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina interviewed Martin and said he would vote no in the Senate Judiciary Committee because Martin supported the January 6 insurrectionists, even those who assaulted police officers. Since the split on the committee is 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats, Martin’s nomination would not get to the Senate floor. If you live in North Carolina, please call Senator Tillis and thank him.
Vance writes:
Last night, I wrote to you about Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee to be the United States Attorney in Washington, D.C.. Martin, until quite recently, used the handle “Eagle Ed Martin” on Twitter, a reference to his days working for Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Apparently, someone mentioned to him during the last month that the handle wasn’t appropriate for a U.S. Attorney hopeful.
But no whisper in the ear could fix Martin’s other flaws, from utter lack of qualifications and knowledge about how to do the job to flagrant ties to people known for their open antisemitism. Last night, I suggested we all needed to be in touch with our senators on the Martin nomination. Although we still need to do that, the message is different now. That’s because North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, made it known that he won’t support Martin.
Before Martin goes to the floor of the Senate for a confirmation vote, he has to make it out of committee. And that’s unlikely to happen now. The Senate Judiciary Committee is made up of 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. All of the Democrats oppose Martin. With Tillis abandoning him, the best Martin could do is 11-11, and a nominee who receives a tie vote doesn’t advance. For all practical purposes, the outcome of that vote will be a death knell for his nomination.
Martin may end up rewarded for his loyal service to Trump and Musk with another plum job, one that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the moment and the fact that it looks like he won’t be the top law enforcement officer in the District of Columbia. Defeating Martin’s nomination wasn’t a foregone conclusion—far from it. It took lots of research, lots of conversation, and lots of hard work by a lot of people. You never know which issue, or even which call or letter, is going to be the last straw. What matters is that Trump and his plans are not inevitable, and it makes a difference when all of us push back against the horrible as hard as we can.
Tillis told reporters this morning that he is unable to support Martin because of Martin’s support for defendants convicted of committing crimes in connection with January 6. He is certain to face a sustained backlash from MAGA’s inner circle, so if he’s your senator, make sure you thank him, and if your senator is on the Judiciary Committee (that’s Grassley, Graham, Cornyn, Lee, Cruz, Hawley, Tillis, Kennedy, Blackburn, Schmitt, Britt, and Moody on the Republican side and Durbin, Whitehouse, Klobuchar, Coons, Blumenthal, Hirono, Booker, Padilla, Welch, and Schiff for the Democrats) this is a good time to reach out and either thank them for opposing or encourage them to show a little backbone and follow Tillis’ lead. Martin, after all, supports the people who overran the Capitol, threatening these folks and their staff. He is the least qualified selection I can recall seeing to lead a U.S. Attorney’s office, even edging out Trump’s former attorney Alina Habba, the New Jersey nominee, who should be rejected as well. This is a very big win for pro-democracy forces.
There was also a win on a very different front, one that didn’t get a lot of national attention. Trump’s efforts to cut staff and funding at national parks have garnered a lot of attention in the protests that have cropped up across the country. Many protests have taken place at the parks themselves, notably at Yosemite, where staff unfurled an upside-down American flag atop El Capitan to signal distress. On March 1, people protested at all 433 sites in the national park system—the 63 national parks and additional sites like monuments and historic places. Americans, it turns out, love their national parks.
Despite that, the Trump administration continues to keep them on the chopping block. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had suspended all air-quality monitoring at national parks, stating that “The Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service, issued stop-work orders last week to the two contractors running the program, the email shows.”
The reporting provided detail that makes it clear this is a serious matter:
Data was being collected on ozone and particulate matter and being used in connection with requests to grant permits to industrial facilities like power plants and oil refineries in close proximity to the parks.
The pollutants data was being collected on are “linked to a range of adverse health effects,” including “heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and premature death.”
One goal of the program is “to curb regional haze,” which has “reduced visibility at scenic viewpoints in parks nationwide” over the past few decades.
Park Service employees pushed back and demanded that monitoring continue. They pointed out that states lack the equipment and resources to monitor and that without federal monitoring, they would be flying blind. It’s part and parcel of discontinuing environmental justice work at the Justice Department. Data makes it possible to protect the environment and the people who live in it. Trump is creating a permissive environment for business—when you can’t document the consequences of a new plant permit, for instance, it’s hard to oppose it.
But today, Washington Post reporter Teddy Amenabar posted on social media that “After The Post’s article was published, a Park Service spokesperson said the stop-work orders would be reversed and that ‘contractors will be notified immediately.’” Whether it’s traditional media, new media, protests, or our communications with our elected officials, it’s clear that none of what Trump wants to do is inevitable. Sunlight continues to act as a disinfectant. Government employees need public support right now, especially as many of them continue to bravely do the right thing, whether it’s federal prosecutors or park rangers. They richly deserve our support.
So if you’ve been questioning whether what you’re doing matters, it does. The signs you make, the protests you go to, the letters and calls you make to elected officials, your efforts to share information (like this newsletter) with people—all of these efforts matter. It all adds up, small victories and large ones.
Speaking of big ones, Donald Trump appears to have knowingly lied when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) in order to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. In his proclamation, he said, “TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”
Not so fast. An intelligence community memo was partially declassified yesterday, two weeks after a FOIA request was made for it—that’s lightning speed in the world of FOIA, where requests can drag on for years. The memo contradicts Trump’s claimed basis for invoking the AEA. Hat tip to my friend Ryan Goodman, whose new Substack is great if you haven’t seen it already, for highlighting the parts of the memo that contradict Trump’s claim that TdA is mounting an invasion of the U.S. on behalf of Venezuela’s government.
It’s not clear how or whether this will impact ongoing litigation. Judges largely defer to presidential assessments of this nature under the political questions doctrine. We don’t know if this revelation will have any impact in court, although there should be some ambit, even if it’s small, for courts to reject presidential assessments that run entirely contrary to the facts. But in the court of public opinion, where facts still matter, here are some facts, from the people who know the subject best.
Finally for tonight, the North Carolina Supreme Court race that we’ve been following so carefully since last November seems to finally be over, and Allison Riggs, the Democrat who won the race, will now be declared the winner per an order issued by a federal judge who is a Trump appointee. Two recounts confirmed Riggs’ victory, but the disgruntled loser challenged it nonetheless. He tried to convince courts to disallow ballots cast by North Carolina voters who complied with all of the rules for voting by changing the rules about what ballots could be counted after the fact. He could still appeal this ruling, but it is a solid decision and unlikely to be reversed on appeal. The bottom line democratic principle is that you don’t get to move the goal posts to secure a victory. Didn’t work for Trump, and it didn’t work in North Carolina. Chalk another one up for the rule of law.
Whether it’s lawsuits or your letters, engaged citizens get results. We have a long way to go, but take heart; we are making progress. We can get there. Every little step forward adds to the tally in favor of democracy.
Thom Hartmann sums up what Trump is: a malignant narcissist intent on destroying every shred of our democracy and our ideals. we knew from his first term that he was a liar and a fraud. Yet here he is, acting with even more rage, vengeance, and destruction than before.
Let us not forget that Trump is enabled by the Republican Party. By their slim majorities in Congress. They have meekly watched as he terminated departments and agencies authorized by Congress. They have quietly given the power of the purse to Trump and Musk. They have watched as he turned himself into an emperor and made them useless. They could stop him. But they haven and they won’t.
He writes:
The Trump administration just gutted Meals on Wheels.
Seriously. Meals on Wheels!
Donald Trump didn’t just “disrupt” America; he detonated it. Like a political Chernobyl, he poisoned the very soil of our democratic republic, leaving behind a toxic cloud of cruelty, corruption, and chaos that will radiate through generations if we don’t contain it now.
He didn’t merely bring darkness; he cultivated it. He made it fashionable. He turned cruelty into currency and made ignorance a political virtue.
This man, a grotesque cocktail of malignant narcissism and petty vengeance, ripped the mask off American decency and showed the world our ugliest face. He caged children. Caged. Children. He laughed off their cries while his ghoulish acolytes used “Where are the children?” as a punchline for their next QAnon rally.
He welcomed white supremacists with winks and dog whistles, calling them “very fine people,” while spitting venom at Black athletes who dared kneel in peaceful protest.
He invited fascism to dinner and served it on gold-plated Trump steaks. He made lying the lingua franca of the right, burning truth to the ground like a carnival barker selling snake oil from a flaming soapbox.
And let’s not forget the blood on his hands: 1,193,165 dead from COVID by the time he left office, 400,000 of them unnecessarily, dismissed as nothing more than “a flu,” while he admitted — on tape — that he knew it was airborne and knew it was lethal. His apathy was homicidal, his incompetence catastrophic.
He tried to overthrow a fair election. He summoned a violent mob. He watched them beat cops with American flags and screamed “Fight like hell!” while cowering in the White House, delighting in the destruction like Nero fiddling as Rome burned.
And now, like some grotesque twist on historical fascism, Trump’s regime is quietly disappearing even legal U.S. residents — snatched off the streets by ICE and dumped into El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, a dystopian nightmare of concrete and cruelty.
One such man, Kilmar Ábrego García, had legal status and a home in Maryland. But Trump’s agents defied a federal court order and deported him anyway, vanishing him into a foreign hellhole so brutal it defies comprehension.
This isn’t policy: it’s a purge. A test run for authoritarian exile. And if Trump’s not stopped by Congress, the courts, or We The People in the streets, it won’t end there.
But somehow, he’s still here, waddling across the political stage like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of authoritarianism, bloated with power, empty of soul, and reeking of spray tan and sulfur.
Donald Trump didn’t just bring darkness: he’s a goddamn black hole, a gravity-well of cruelty sucking the light out of everything he touches. This is a man who desecrates everything good. Empathy? He mocks it. Truth? He slanders it. Democracy? He’d bulldoze it for a golf course. And if we let him continue, he won’t just end democracy — he’ll make damn sure it never rises again.
So the question is: are we awake yet?
Or will we let this orange-faced death-cult leader finish the job he started, grinning over the corpse of the America we once believed in?
Now is not the time to kneel: it’s the time to rise. Stay loud, stay vigilant, and show up. Every protest, every march, every call to DC, every raised voice chips away at the darkness.
Democracy isn’t a spectator sport: it’s a fight, and we damn well better show up for it.
The Trump administration has declared war on Harvard University, for what is now–in the Trump era–the usual reasons: allegedly, that Harvard is not doing enough to stop anti-Semitism (a claim that is opposed by many Jews, who don’t want to be the favorite cause of a hateful, bigoted President); that Harvard engages in the policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which have been banned by the Trump administration; and that Harvard engages in “racism” by admitting and hiring nonwhite students and professors. The Trump administration has demanded the power to monitor Harvard’s curriculum, admissions, and hiring. Such a federal takeover is obviously unacceptable to Harvard, as it should be unacceptable to any private institution.
To Harvard and other universities, such a government intrusion would compromise academic freedom and their independence. Frankly, the best characterization of this government takeover of independent private institutions is fascist.
The Trump administration is currently withholding $2.2 billion that is dedicated to medical and scientific research. Does it make sense to punish Harvard’s alleged DEI transgressions by stopping funding for projects seeking cures for tuberculosis and ALS?
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a condescending, insulting letter to Harvard, warning that it would no longer receive any funding until it accepted Trump’s demands. She posted it on Twitter.
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She accused Harvard of “disastrous mismanagement,” snd she warned, “This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided.” Her biggest grievance appears to be that Harvard continues to practice affirmative action despite the Supreme Court banning it. The Trump administration considers any effort to admit or hire people of color to be racism. So the very presence of Black students and professors is evidence that Harvard engages in “ugly racism.”
In her letter, Secretary McMahon rants about Harvard’s abandonment of “merit” and of the excellence for which it was once known.
This stance is ironic, coming from a member of the most unqualified, incompetent Cabinet in modern American history. Was McMahon the best qualified person to be Secretary of Education? Did her experience in the world of wrestling entertainment qualify her to lecture Harvard about academic excellence? Was there no Republican State Commissioner of Education or university president available?
Was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best person to run the department of Health and Human Services? Did Pete Hegseth become Secretary of Defense because of his merit?
Various Twitter accounts have posted a copy of her letter with her grammatical errors marked in red pencil. They claim this was Harvard’s response, but it was not.
Harvard responded with a dignified letter to McMahon that restated their intention not to be cowed by her threats, rudeness, and bluster.
In a statement on Monday night, a Harvard spokesperson said the letter showed the administration “doubling down on demands that would impose unprecedented and improper control over Harvard University and would have chilling implications for higher education.”
The statement suggested it would be illegal to withhold funds in the manner Ms. McMahon described.
“Harvard will continue to comply with the law, promote and encourage respect for viewpoint diversity, and combat antisemitism in our community,” the statement said. “Harvard will also continue to defend against illegal government overreach aimed at stifling research and innovation that make Americans safer and more secure.”
I’m betting on Harvard. They are fighting for academic freedom and for freedom from government control of a private institution. They will have the best legal talent. They will be represented by lawyers with sterling conservative credentials.
Harvard will be here long after the Trump administration is a memory, a very bad memory, like the McCarthy era.
Diane Ravitch's blog 