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Joyce Vance: Judge Aileen Cannon “Lives in Trump’s Hip Pocket”

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2026 //
2

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor who explains legal issues to the lay public. Her writing is clear, concise, and free of legalese..

She writes here about Judge Aileen Cannon, who has almost single-handedly protected Trump from facing criminal prosecution by her tactics and rulings.

Her post is titled, “If DOJ Is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon Is His Judge.” I have heard speculation that if Alito or Thomas should retire, Trump may well replace him with Cannon because she saved him from trial and ignominy.

In her latest ruling, a few days ago, she barred the public release of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s report about Trump and his retention of classified documents after leaving office. As Vance says, the public release of such reports is routine. But Judge Cannon saw something in the report that might be embarrassing for Trump, so she blocked their release.

Hopefully, a higher court will overrule her or some anonymous person who has the report will post it on the Internet.

I am not pasting Vance’s commentary in full. I urge you to open the link and finish reading.

Vance writes:

South District of Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon has history with Donald Trump. He appointed her to the bench in May 2020. She was confirmed that November. Then came the June 2023 indictment of Trump by federal prosecutors. It landed on her desk.

Some judges would have recused. There is no precedent, because no former president had been indicted previously. But a reasonable jurist might have thought that the public wouldn’t have confidence in the objectivity of a judge sitting on a criminal case against the president who appointed her. It would have been the safe bet for someone concerned about the integrity of the judicial branch of government. Judge Cannon did not recuse.

To be fair, the government didn’t ask her to. That turned out to be a miscalculation.

From the earliest moments of the case, even before it was indicted, Cannon’s decisions were questionable. Mar-a-Lago was searched on August 8, 2022, well before Trump’s indictment and Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. Cannon was asked to consider the unusual motion Trump’s lawyers filed to restrict the Justice Department’s ability to use evidence seized during the search. It was an attempt to impose an unprecedented (back when that word still had meaning) constraint on the government’s ability to investigate a criminal case. 

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

But Cannon agreed with Trump’s position, assigning a special master to review seized documents. Her decision dramatically slowed the progress prosecutors were able to make. On December 1, shortly after Jack Smith’s appointment in November, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cannon. The per curiam order did not mince words: “This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.”

The manifestly unmeritorious decision she made in Trump’s favor pre-indictment was a harbinger of everything that was to come. The case was indicted on June 8, 2023. There is no way to know how much the loss of four months in giving prosecutors full access to the evidence against Trump contributed to the ultimate demise of the case, which was dismissed without going to trial on Smith’s own motion, once Trump was reelected. 

Once Trump and his co-defendants were charged, Judge Cannon ruled in their favor at virtually every opportunity. She ruled for them on pretrial motions, like this one, after delaying. She rejected a request by prosecutors, a fairly routine one, to protect witness identities pre-trial. A timeline of her rulings and the delays they engendered is set out at length in this ABC report. Ultimately, Smith’s request to dismiss the case went to the Eleventh Circuit because Cannon had dismissed the prosecution in July 2024, accepting the highly questionable defense theory that Jack Smith’s appointment was unlawful. That decision was on appeal when Trump was elected. 

We discussed Cannon’s decision in this post, where I noted that “Until today, every federal judge that considered the issue—all eight of them—unanimously found that attorneys general have the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel. But Judge Aileen Cannon disagrees. In a 93-page opinion, nicely timed for the first day of the Republican convention … she dismissed the entire indictment.”

But pursuant to DOJ rules that prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, Smith had little choice but to ask the Eleventh Circuit to dismiss the case as to Trump. When he did so, he wrote: “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”

That catches us up, more or less, to what happened today, when Judge Cannon ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants, both designed to prevent release of Volume II of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, the one covering the Mar-a-Lago case. If it weren’t such a serious matter, “unopposed” would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.

Please open the link to finish this valuable analysis.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Justice, Trump

Andy Borowitz: Will Pam Bondi Go to Prison?

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2026 //
8

Andy Borowitz is America’s humorist. More than that, he is incisive and brilliant. He used to write for The New Yorker, but now has his own Substack blog called The Borowitz Report. I subscribe, and I recommend that you do so as well.

In this post, he gives insight into our notorious Attirney General, Pam Bondi, who has turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s personal law firm.

It’s important to remember that she was Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019. She claimed that human trafficking was her #1 issue but somehow overlooked Jeffrey Epstein. As Attorney General, she is still shielding his crimes. Could it be that she is doing this to protect Trump?

Her obnoxious, aggressive, pugnacious appearance before the House Judiciary Committee showed the real Pam Bondi.

Borowitz writes:

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Can the attorney general of the United States go to prison? 

The answer, of course, is yes: John Mitchell, who served under Richard M. Nixon, later served 19 months behind bars for crimes related to the Watergate cover-up. 

Will the toxin known as Pam Bondi follow in his footsteps? 

It’s worth considering in light of her appearance before Congress on Wednesday, a performance that Kimberly Guilfoyle might call “too shouty.” 

Her testimony was unquestionably obnoxious. But was it criminal? 

When you examine the evidence, it doesn’t look good for Pam. 

This was the pivotal moment: responding to a question from California Rep. Ted Lieu about the Epstein scandal, Bondi snapped, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that.”

Lieu, who must have been tickled that Bondi was dumb enough to step into the weasel trap he set for her, responded that the attorney general might have just committed perjury. Which, as every Watergate superfan knows, is exactly what earned her Republican predecessor, John Mitchell, a trip to the pokey. 

When the Trump shitshow is finally over, two things must happen. First, there must be a solid month of dancing in the streets. Second, there must be a reckoning: ideally, Nuremberg-style trials of the corrupt quislings who enabled this unprecedented crime spree. With those enjoyable tribunals in mind, let us now consider the case of Pam Bondi.

Remember when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general? We were so much younger then—although, it should be added, not young enough for Matt Gaetz.

At the time, I observed that Gaetz’s nomination was not what QAnon had in mind when they said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice. In the end, Matt turned out to be as reckless with Venmo as he was about the age of consent, and Trump quickly withdrew his name.

Pundits claimed that Trump never expected Gaetz to pass muster with the Senate. By their reckoning, he was a “sacrificial lamb”—an odd way to describe a man who, in his personal life, had consistently behaved like a wolf. But by shitcanning Gaetz, the theory went, Trump was sending a signal to his Senate toadies that they’d better confirm all his other nominees, no matter how idiotic, incompetent, or drunk. When it came to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and myriad other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck, the gambit seemed to pay off.

Matt Gaetz, peering into the gates of Hell. (Erin Scott-Pool via Getty Images)

As for the job of attorney general, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed relieved that it would not be filled by a summer-stock version of Jeffrey Epstein. Surely, whoever Trump named as Gaetz’s replacement would be an improvement.

Instead, Trump picked Pam Bondi.

In 2016, when she was Florida attorney general, Bondi secured her place in Trump’s heart with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Her bloodcurdling attack on Hillary Clinton inspired the GOP mob to break into a familiar chant, which prompted Bondi to comment, “Lock her up? I love that.” And so, by approving the incarceration of a woman who had never been charged with a crime, Bondi displayed an attitude towards due process that would someday serve her splendidly as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

She would, of course, have another opportunity to assert her preference for imprisoning innocent people with the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. On April 14, 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s accomplice in the world’s most notorious administrative error, joined him in the Oval Office, receiving a much warmer welcome there than was offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After chummily congratulating each other on the abduction and deportation of a non-criminal, the two men started workshopping how their brilliant strategy might be applied to innocent American citizens.

“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—a stroke of branding so cringe, it’s amazing it didn’t come from Elon Musk. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump advised him.

Where did America’s attorney general stand on this flagrant nullification of a basic right enshrined in the Constitution? Trump added, “Pam is studying. If we can do that, it’s good.”

Pam, apparently, is a quick study. On Fox that evening, she was all in on Trump’s blatantly illegal idea, asserting, “These are Americans who he [Trump] is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically.”

It’s not that Bondi is bad at her job—it’s that she’s outstanding at the exact opposite of her job, that is, using the DOJ to subvert justice whenever possible. Bondi’s Department of Injustice, a mutant creation worthy of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, has proven inhospitable to career DOJ lawyers, who have struggled in court to defend the indefensible.

One such staffer, senior immigration attorney Erez Reuveni, committed what Bondi apparently considers a cardinal sin: uttering a truthful statement within earshot of a judge. After acknowledging what was obvious to any thinking person (but seemingly elusive to Messrs. Trump and Bukele)—that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—Reuveni was put on indefinite leave and then fired.

Meanwhile, Liz Oyer, a longtime DOJ pardon attorney, was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost them after pleading no contest to domestic battery charges in 2011. Apparently, Trump believes Mel Gibson needs lethal weapons more urgently than Ukraine.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump standing up for the rights of domestic abusers, since a sizable number of the January 6 rioters he pardoned fit that description. He doubled down on his support for this cohort by appointing a crony accused of domestic violence, Herschel Walker, ambassador to the Bahamas.

But what makes the Mel Gibson case particularly rich is that Trump has repeatedly claimed he is punishing universities for their “failure to combat antisemitism.” If Trump is serious about spanking antisemites, he need look no further than his pal Mel. 

After the actor’s 2006 drunk driving arrest in Malibu, the police report indicated, “Gibson blurted out a barrage of anti-semitic remarks about ‘fucking Jews’. Gibson yelled out: ‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’ Gibson then asked: ‘Are you a Jew?'”

Mel Gibson after his 2006 drunk driving arrest (L) and his 2011 domestic violence arrest (R).

In the upside-down world of Pam Bondi, highly regarded DOJ lawyers are fired and Mel Gibson is rearmed. But do such perversions of justice make Bondi a candidate for worst attorney general ever? They most certainly do, when one considers how decisively and repeatedly she has violated her oath of office:

“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Rather than defend the Constitution, Bondi has used her time in office to tirelessly protect pedophiles—which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her tenure as Florida’s AG. The following campaign ad from that era, in which she vowed to “put human trafficking monsters where they belong—behind bars,” hasn’t aged well:

As Bloomberg’s Mary Ellen Klas wrote, “Bondi kept her distance from the state’s most prominent sex-trafficking case, even as Epstein’s victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate provisions of his non-prosecution agreement and filed lawsuits alleging that he abused them when he was on work release from jail.”

I am confident that Bondi’s misdeeds—including but not limited to her role in the Epstein cover-up—have more than earned her a Nuremberg-style tribunal. I am not, however, suggesting we chant, “Lock her up.” Unlike our current attorney general, I believe in due process.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Injustice, Justice

Jamie Raskin Visits an ICE Facility

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2026 //
29

Last night Rep. Jamie Raskin posted a comment on Twitter about his visit to a nearby ICE facility:

I just exercised my right as a Member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight visit of the ICE field facility in Baltimore. The staff I met with respected my right to visit, but what I saw was disgraceful. Kristi Noem has a budget of $75 billion she could use to ensure humane conditions, but we saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets. Whether it’s for three days or seven days, nobody would want a member of their family warehoused there. The room set aside for dangerous criminals and violent offenders was empty. We’re demanding immediate answers and action.

What kind of a person treats other human beings this way?

Is cruelty its own reward?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Funding, Justice, Maryland

Minnesota: A Hero Judge

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2026 //
1

The Trump fascists have many problems in Minnesota. One of them is the Chief U.S. District Judge of Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, appointed by President George W. Bush.

Judge Schiltz believes in his oath of office. He believes in upholding the Constitution. That spells trouble for Trump’s military occupation of Minneapolis.

Judge Patrick G. Schiltz

Politico wrote about Judge Schiltz:

“My hope is to be the Benjamin Harrison of chief judges: one that no one remembers,” he told his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in 2022.

Four years later, the mild-mannered George W. Bush appointee — known for his conservative jurisprudence, his clerkship with late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his mentorship of future Justice Amy Coney Barrett — has been thrust into an increasingly pitched legal confrontation with President Donald Trump’s immigration forces.

It’s a role that will be remembered.

Schiltz, 65, has publicly aired his fury over the Trump administration’s mistreatment of noncitizens arrested in Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities. He blasted the Justice Department for its criticism of his courthouse colleagues and labeled as “frivolous” the administration’s effort to compel him to issue an arrest warrant for former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others involved in last week’s church protest in St. Paul.

The clash is slated to reach a climax Friday, when Schiltz plans to haul into his Minneapolis courtroom Todd Lyons, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to grill him about the rampant violation of court orders that Schiltz and his colleagues say has poisoned the trust between the administration and the court.

CNN wrote that Judge Schiltz is ready to hold Lyons’ feet to the fire.

The hearing raises the prospect that a top federal official could be sanctioned for his agency’s failures to obey the courts. And at the very least, he’ll be forced to begin accounting for an extraordinary number of cases — more than 2,000, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney — in which judges have ruled that ICE has illegally detained people…

In a court order, Schiltz cited “dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks….”

Schiltz acknowledged his move was extraordinary, but he added that “the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”

“The Court’s patience is at an end,” he added….

The order follows a pair of letters Schiltz sent last week that featured similarly exasperated language, this time about people who were arrested for protesting at a St. Paul church where they claimed a pastor was a top local ICE official..

In that case, Schiltz derided what he cast as an effort by the Justice Department to ignore the usual process in order to bring charges in a politically charged case.

A magistrate judge found there was no probable cause to charge five of the eight people DOJ wanted to charge, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has said he was acting in his capacity as a journalist. The DOJ quickly asked for the district court to intervene. Schiltz said he surveyed a wide variety of colleagues, and everyone who responded could think of no precedent for such a request. Then when Schiltz didn’t rule fast enough, the DOJ sought the intervention of an appeals court, which ultimately declined.

In his letters, Schiltz cited “the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old).”

He wrote at one point: “The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”

The judge also criticized the government for characterizing the situation as a national security-related emergency, noting it had declined to bring the cases to a grand jury that could have decided on charges quickly.

(The administration has failed to get grand juries to indict in a number of such politically charged cases in which the evidence appeared thin.)

Schiltz’s first letter, in particular, is remarkable.

CNN legal contributor Steve Vladeck wrote Sunday, before the judge summoned Lyons, that his letters were must-reads when it comes to understanding the Trump DOJ’s manipulation of the legal process.

“Were it not for Chief Judge Schiltz’s actions here, we might not know about any of this backstory — or, even worse, the Eighth Circuit might have simply acceded to the government’s entirely one-sided account of what happened and granted unprecedented relief,” Vladeck wrote.

He argued that other judges should lay these things bare just like Schiltz did. And now Schiltz’s summoning of Lyons puts these issues even more squarely in the spotlight.

On Friday, a judge with impeccable conservative credentials is set to hold an extraordinary hearing putting the top ICE official in a Republican administration on the spot about its disregard for court orders.

And it could be a big moment in an already bad week for the administration’s Minneapolis crackdown.

However, Judge Schiltz cancelled the hearing after ICE met one of his stipulations, releasing an immigrant named Juan T.R., as per his order. The Court had previously demanded the release of Juan by January 15. ICE ignored the court’s order. Judge Schiltz wanted to know why. When Juan was finally released, Judge Schlitz canceled the hearing.

In his statement canceling the hearing, Judge Schiltz made clear his impatience. He wrote:

Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.

This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Court warns ICE that future noncompliance with court orders may result in future show‐cause orders requiring the personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials. ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.

FOX News thought they did a gotcha on Judge Schlitz when they discovered that he had donated to immigrant legal groups. AHA! A closet liberal!

But he stopped them in their tracks with his response. FOX said:

A Minnesota-based federal judge who threatened to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons in contempt of court has donated to a nonprofit that gives legal support to illegal immigrants.

Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, and his wife were listed in a 2019 annual report for the organization, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which routinely condemns the Trump administration and advertises free legal advice for immigrants, refugees and people detained by ICE.

Schiltz told Fox News Digital in a statement he has “donated for many years to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

“I have also donated for many years to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. I believe that poor people should be able to get legal representation,” Schiltz said.

Categories Honor Roll, Justice

No, ICE May Not Enter Your Home Without a Judicial Warrant

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2026 //
2

The deployment of ICE to detain and arrest undocumented immigrants threatens to become a war against U.S. citizens who object to ICE’s brutal tactics. We have all seen the videos of ICE agents smashing car windows, knocking men and women to the ground, grabbing women by their hair, pummeling people on the ground, operating in teams of 5 or 6 as they beat up those they choose.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution forbids ICE from entering homes. This article appeared on the blog CAFE, where seasoned prosecutors and law professors comment on matters of law and hold the federal government accountable.

No ICE Cannot Enter Your Home Without a Warrant — and Why Doing So Is Very Dangerous For All of Us
By Perry A. Carbone and Mimi Rocah

Dear Insider,

A leaked internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo claims that ICE agents may enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant. That claim is wrong as a legal matter— and it threatens one of the most basic freedoms Americans have: the right to be safe in their own homes.

The memo—dated May 12, 2025 and signed by Acting Director Todd Lyons—was leaked by two whistleblowers and shared with Senator Richard Blumenthal. According to the whistleblowers, the memo was directed to all personnel but was distributed in a secretive manner to selected personnel.
We spent many years as federal prosecutors enforcing federal law – about 50 years between the two of us. We know firsthand the power of law enforcement authority and how important it is that it be exercised within constitutional limits, especially within the sacrosanct safety of a person’s home.

Our homes have special protection under the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizures and explicitly names “houses” as protected spaces: “The right of the people to be secure in their … houses … against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause….”
 
The Supreme Court has repeatedly made this protection crystal clear.

In Payton v. New York (1980), the Court held that police may not enter a home to make an arrest without a judicial warrant, unless there is an emergency or the resident consents, calling  physical entry of the home “the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

In Kyllo v. United States (2001), the Court reaffirmed that the home is a place where privacy protection is at its highest. Even using technology to detect heat patterns inside a home — without ever physically entering — violated the Fourth Amendment if it was done without a warrant.

In Florida v. Jardines (2013), the Court held that bringing a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to investigate constituted an unlawful “search” under the Fourth Amendment, if done without a search warrant.
If the Constitution forbids the government from using technology and animals to sense what happens inside a home, it certainly forbids crossing the threshold without judicial approval.

The whistleblower disclosure shows ICE claiming its agents may enter homes without judicial warrants because immigration enforcement is “civil.” But the Fourth Amendment does not contain a “civil enforcement” carveout. And the relevant Supreme Court’s cases do not turn on whether a matter is labeled “civil” or “criminal.”  There is no “immigration exception” to the Constitution.

The ICE memo reportedly relies on Form I-205, a “warrant of removal/deportation” created within the executive branch and not signed by a judge. It authorizes officers to use “necessary and reasonable force” to enter certain residences to arrest people with final removal orders.

That is incompatible with the Fourth Amendment’s demand for judicial oversight. A judicial warrant is one that is issued by an individual who is ”neutral and detached” and can determine probable cause. An administrative warrant, by contrast, is issued by the government agency itself and so does not meet the Constitution and Court’s repeated requirement of being issued by someone “neutral” and “detached.”  Federal agencies do not get to rewrite the Constitution through internal memos. Put simply, an administrative warrant is the government agency authorizing itself to enter a home — the constitutional equivalent of letting the fox write its own warrant to enter the henhouse.

This is not an immigration issue. It is a constitutional issue with consequences for all Americans. Yes, it will have huge implications for immigrants, who have long been advisednot to open their door to federal agents unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. But it will not end there. If ICE is permitted to enter homes without judicial warrants, the consequences will not stop with immigration enforcement. Other agencies will follow the same path — and they will do so using the same logic: that civil enforcement, public safety, or administrative necessity justifies bypassing judicial oversight.

One can easily imagine a parade of horribles:

  • Tax enforcement: IRS agents entering homes to seize records or property based solely on internal agency warrants, without a judge ever reviewing probable cause.
  • Health and safety enforcement:Public health officials entering private residences to conduct inspections or remove occupants during disease outbreaks without judicial authorization.
  • Child welfare investigations: Social services entering homes to investigate allegations based only on agency paperwork, without court approval.
  • Firearms regulation: Regulatory agents entering homes to inspect compliance with gun laws without judicial warrants.
  • Local law enforcement: Police departments reclassifying certain arrests as “civil” or “administrative” to avoid the warrant requirement altogether.

Once the government can enter a home based on its own approval, the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement becomes optional — a procedural inconvenience rather than a constitutional command.

And that erosion won’t stop at homes. If agency-issued warrants suffice for entry, then agency-issued authorizations will soon suffice for searches of phones, computers, bank accounts, and digital records — all areas the Supreme Court has increasingly treated as deserving heightened constitutional protection.

The Fourth Amendment was written precisely to prevent this outcome: a system in which government officials authorize their own intrusions. Judicial warrants are not a technicality — they are the firewall between liberty and unchecked power. And when that firewall falls, it does not fall selectively. It falls for everyone.

The home is the heart of American liberty. The Fourth Amendment draws a bright line at the front door — and for good reason. This leaked ICE memo crosses that line. It is legally wrong. It is constitutionally dangerous. And it should concern everyone who values privacy, liberty, and the rule of law — regardless of their views on immigration.

Stay Informed, 
Mimi & Perry 

CAFE Contributor Mimi Rocah is the former District Attorney for Westchester County, and previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and Division Chief for the Southern District of New York. She is currently an adjunct professor at Fordham School of Law.

Perry A. Carbone served as Chief of the White Plains Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York; he previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of New Jersey.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Justice, Freedom, Extremism

ICE Ignores Constitution

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
7

The Department of Homeland Security decided that ICE agents were exempt from the Fourth Amendment, which prevents police from entering homes without a warrant signed by a judge.

U.S. District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan ruled last Saturday in Minneapolis that ICE had to abide by the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This means that law officers can’t burst into your home without a judge’s warrant.

The Fourth Amendment underpins the phrase that “a man’s home is his castle.”

Recently, ICE decided that its agents did not need a judge’s warrant and that an “administrative warrant” would suffice. The administrative warrant would be signed by an ICE employee.

ICE decided that with an “administrative warrant,” it could batter down doors and enter homes to seize suspects.

Federal Judge Bryan said they could not.

Wired magazine summarized the situation:

A FEDERAL JUDGE in Minnesota ruled last Saturday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated the Fourth Amendment after they forcibly entered a Minnesota man’s home without a judicial warrant. The conduct of the agents closely mirrors a previously undisclosed ICE directive that claims agents are permitted to enter people’s homes using an administrative warrant, rather than a warrant signed by a judge.

The ruling, issued by US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan in response to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on January 17, did not assess the legality of ICE’s internal guidance itself. But it squarely holds that federal agents violated the United States Constitution when they entered a residence without consent and without a judge-signed warrant—the same conditions ICE leadership has privately told officers is sufficient for home arrests, according to a complaint filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group representing whistleblowers from the public and private sector.

In a sworn declaration, Garrison Gibson, a Liberian national who has lived in Minnesota for years under an ICE order of supervision, says agents arrived at his home in the early morning on January 11 while his family slept inside. He says he refused to open the door and repeatedly demanded to see a judicial warrant. According to the declaration, the agents initially left, then returned with a larger group, deployed pepper spray toward neighbors who had gathered outside, and used a battering ram to force the door open.

The declaration was filed as part of a January 12 Minnesota lawsuit against Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem challenging federal immigration enforcement operations in the Twin Cities, which state officials characterize as an unconstitutional “invasion” by ICE and other agents that has roiled Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Federal officials did not contest Gibson’s habeas petition.

Gibson, who reportedly fled the Liberian civil war as a child, says agents entered his home without showing a warrant. His wife, who was filming at the time, warned that children were inside, he says, and that agents holding rifles stood in their doorway. “One agent repeatedly claimed ‘We’re getting the papers’ in response to her demand to see the warrant,” he says. “But without showing a warrant, and apparently without having one, five to six agents moved in as if they were entering a war zone.”

Only after he was handcuffed, Gibson says, did the agents show his wife an administrative warrant.

One day after the judge ordered Gibson’s immediate release, ICE agents took him back into custody when he appeared for a routine immigration check-in at a Minnesota immigration office, according to his attorney, Marc Prokosch, who said Gibson arrived believing the court order had resolved the matter.

“We were there for a check-in, and the original officer said, ‘This looks good, I’ll be right back,’” Prokosch told the Associated Press. “And then there was a lot of chaos, and about five officers came out and then they said, ‘We’re going to be taking him back into custody.’ I was like, ‘Really, you want to do this again?’”

The re-arrest did not reverse the court’s finding that ICE violated the Fourth Amendment during the warrantless home entry, but underscores how the agency retains civil detention authority even if a judge rules that a specific arrest was unconstitutional.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Justice, Minneapolis, Ethics, Extremism

Obamas Issue Statement About Murder of Alex Pretti

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
11

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama released a statement about the murder of Alex Pretti.

Will we hear from former President George W. Bush?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Justice, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Obama

Why Is the Justice Department Refusing to Investigate Killing of Renee Good?

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2026 //
12

This short video was made by Liz Oyer, who used to be the attorney in charge of Presidential pardons at the Justice Department.

Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Justice, Trump

U.S. Justice Department Will Investigate Renee Good and Her Widow, Not ICE Officer Who Killed Her

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2026 //
6

The Trump administration is determined to prove that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist who was trying to kill an ICE officer by running him down with her car. He had to kill her to save his own life. The many videos that have been released demonstrate that these assertions were lies. Renee Good was attempting to flee the scene and did not strike or injure ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who fired three shots point blank at her and killed her.

The New York Times reported that key federal prosecutors in Minnesota quit rather than defend the administration’s lies. The government wanted them to investigate the victim’s widow for links to terrorism.

Three Minnesota federal prosecutors resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and its reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.

Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent last Wednesday.

Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.

Two other senior career prosecutors, Harry Jacobs and Melinda Williams, also resigned on Tuesday. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Thompson, Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Williams declined to discuss the reasons they resigned

The Guardian reported that several attorneys in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division resigned in protest when they learned that the Government would investigate the victim but not the killer.

The Guardian reported.

Several attorneys in the US justice department’s civil rights division have reportedly resigned in protest at a decision not to investigate the fatal shooting of an unarmed US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis – while the FBI presses ahead with an inquiry into the victim.

At least four leaders of the division’s criminal investigations section have stepped down, according to MS NOW, citing three people it said were briefed about the departures.

It follows a decision by Harmeet Dhillon, the Donald Trump administration-aligned assistant attorney general for civil rights, not to investigate the 7 January killing of Renee Nicole Good by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, as would be usual in the case of a shooting by law enforcement.

Separately, the FBI – which seized total control of the investigation after freezing out local officials – is looking into Good’s “possible connections to activist groups”, according to the New York Times. A succession of Trump administration officials, including the president himself, have portrayed Good, without presenting evidence, as a “domestic terrorist” or “paid agitator” – while video of her confrontation with Ross appears to show her trying to steer her vehicle away from him when she was shot three times in the face…

The resignations are the latest in a flow of departures from the civil rights division since Donald Trump began his second term a year earlier. In May, the Guardian reported that more than 250 attorneys had left, been reassigned or accepted a deferred resignation offer since January, a roughly 70% reduction.

Dhillon, a former Republican official in California, and an election denier who promoted the “big lie” that Trump’s 2020 election defeat was fraudulent, was confirmed by the Senate in April. She worked quickly to realign the division’s priorities away from its longstanding work tackling discrimination and protecting the rights of marginalized groups and towards Trump’s political goals, including exposing voter fraud, which is rare, and focusing on anti-transgender issues.

“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to see this as the end of the division as we’ve known it,” a civil rights division attorney told the Guardian at the time.

Subsequently, in September, the online news outlet Notus reported that only two lawyers remained out of 36 at the justice department’s public integrity unit assigned to investigations of corrupt politicians and law enforcement.

What you need to know about Harmeet Dhillon, the lawyer appointed by Trump to lead the Civil Rights Division, is that she spent years litigating against civil rights law. Thus, she is just what you would expect: a prosecutor ready and willing to investigate the murder victim, but not the murderer.

Categories Civil Rights, Justice, Shame

Parker Molloy Read Jack Smith’s Testimony So You Wouldn’t Have To

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2026 //
4

Thank you, Parker Molloy! She reviews Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s testimony behind closed doors. The House Republicans were determined to pin Smith as a political partisan, but Smith made crystal clear that he would prosecute anyone without regard to party labels.

Molloy writes on her Substack blog, “The Present Age”:

House Republicans released the 255-page transcript of Jack Smith’s closed-door deposition on New Year’s Eve. You know, the day when absolutely nobody is paying attention to the news. The day when political operatives dump things they don’t want people to see.

Funny how that works.

Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17th, spending an entire day answering questions about his investigations into Donald Trump. Republicans had been demanding this testimony for months, framing it as part of their “weaponization” investigation.

They got what they asked for. And then they released it when America was busy watching the ball drop.

I spent the holiday reading through the whole thing. Here’s what they didn’t want you to see.

Smith says Trump is guilty

In Smith’s opening statement, he declared that his office had developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump committed crimes in both the January 6th case and the classified documents case.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.” (p. 17)

When asked if he would prosecute a former president on the same facts today, Smith said he absolutely would:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.” (p. 17)

When asked if he would prosecute a former president on the same facts today, Smith said he absolutely would:

“If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.” (p. 18)

And when asked point-blank if he’d ever prosecuted someone he didn’t believe was guilty, Smith’s answer was simple:

“Never.” (p. 83)

Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former U.S. President Donald Trump on August 1, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Trump’s tweet “endangered the life of his own vice president”

Smith described what happened on January 6th in stark terms. When asked whether Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol, Smith testified:

Categories Accountability, Justice, Lies, Trump
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