Kyle Cheney crunched the numbers, in a recent article in Politico, and found that federal judges ruled against ICE in 10,000 cases brought contesting the illegal tactics frequently employed by Trump’s federal goon squad. ICE has won about a thousand times, a 10-1 skew in favor of the law. The use of force, detentions, and conditions of detention, and denial of constitutionally guaranteed rights were deemed illegal in 90% of the cases.
The federal circuits are unaccountably deadlocked, in regard to ICE policies. There is a divide between The Rule of Law and MAGA/Project 2025 over the ICE question. That question is whether Trump’s masked goon squads need to follow the Fourth Amendment, be truthful to judges, present actual evidence or if their executive branch agency really has to honor the 9-0 Supreme Court affirmation of the writ of habeas corpus (the right to go in front of a judge to contest the reason you’re being held in prison). The Federalist Society Six will eventually have the final say about the criminally insane president’s right to unilaterally suspend Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus rights, and trial court judges in several districts have their hands tied in the meantime by Appellate decisions.
Criminal charges brought by Trump’s DOJ are routinely dismissed, by judges and juries, for lack of evidence of a crime. A number of his attempted vindictive indictments were rejected by grand juries. His DOJ has repeatedly committed frauds on the court and prosecutorial misconduct, including jury tampering. Top DOJ officials routinely go on the air to declare Trump’s enemies guilty before they are even indicted.
In a court of law, evidence is required to prove a claim, particularly when the State intends to deprive a person of their liberty or their life. Evidence that there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed is required to get a judge to sign a search warrant. Evidence is the factual basis for any legal claim. Vexatious litigants like the petulant, pampered, professional victim in the White House hate this requirement of “evidence.” Evidence is as abhorrent to a compulsive liar as the truth itself. Judges require evidence (outside of the Federalist Six, of course), as does our justice system.
If you are Trump, you send lawyers to shop for a cooperative judge to give you a search warrant to seize 2020 ballots in a county that voted for the Democratic candidate, without evidence of any kind of crime — and well beyond the statute of limitations. You illegally appoint unqualified acting state’s attorneys to commit hanky panky to get indictments from grand juries, claiming to have slam dunk evidence they don’t have. Some are even forced to admit prosecutorial misconduct in court.
When it comes to Trump’s crimes, the same principle applies in reverse. A search warrant, legally obtained and based on evidence of criminal possession of documents and obstruction of the investigation (both of which turned out to be true) — a witch hunt by a weaponized DOJ engaging in “lawfare”! Trump is entitled to billions in compensation for being the target of a weaponized DOJ, IRS, the electorate, etc. So are all his wealthy “friends” and those violent loyalists willing to risk death for his lies, they are all entitled to millions.
Trump’s DOJ was recently found to have maliciously prosecuted Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man they illegally rendered to the torture prison in El Salvador. To save face, after defying a federal judge’s order to turn the airplanes around, and claiming for months that they had no jurisdiction over El Salvador (the dictator of El Salvador acknowledged these US prisoners were living in cells rented by Trump), they prosecuted Abrego for a non-crime they had no evidence he committed. They did this after publicly vowing that IF he ever got back into the US because some traitor judge ruled he had to come back, they’d put him on criminal trial for felonies they falsely assured the public he was 100% guilty of. That case was dismissed with a rare finding of “malicious prosecution”. Trump’s psychotic lackies are now determined to deport Abrego Garcia to one of several African war zones the State Department classifies as highly dangerous. Abrego has agreed to be deported to Costa Rica, who has indicated they’d take him, but the DOJ is determined to send him to South Sudan, ASAP.
Trump’s Department of Justice has lost the “presumption of regularity” judges always gave government lawyers when they appeared before them. There is nothing regular about a DOJ routinely hiding evidence, lying to judges, making public statements about the guilt of the parties they haul into court. Never have we had an acting Deputy Attorney General tell his lawyers that they have to be ready to tell judges “fuck you” if they ask inconvenient questions that could impede the president’s illegal agenda. Erez Reuveni, a former DOJ lawyer, quoted criminal weasel Emil Bove, now federal appellate Judge Bove for life, to that effect. Reuveni was fired for admitting to the court that he had not been given any evidence to present to the court. In fact, he’d been instructed to defy the judge by one of the president’s most aggressive mongooses (no offense to mongooses, but look at this motherfucker:)
I keep thinking of one of the hundred or so cases Trump and the RNC brought (and lost) before the 2020 election to restrict voting by mail and the use of drop boxes (recall this was in the middle of the hpandemic, voters who believed Covid was highly contagious and deadly skewed overwhelmingly anti-Trump). This federal case, Trump 2020 v. Boockvar, against numerous election officials in Pennsylvania, caught my eye. The media was not reporting on it (it was one of many such frivolous lawsuits) so I followed it on PACER, the online database of federal cases. I was frustrated that the judge, a 43 year-old Trump appointee named J. Nicholas Ranjan, was not dismissing such an amateurishly filed case presented with zero evidence of its mostly incoherent claims. Week after week I followed this case. Judge Ranjan granted a motion to compel Trump and the RNC to submit evidence supporting its many bogus claims. Plaintiffs delivered a box full of screenshots and printouts from FOX, NewsMax, Breitbart, der Sturmer and other reliable legal authorities. I waited for Ranjan to dismiss the case. He didn’t, not for some time. But it was well worth the wait. The judge made a record that ensured he could not be reversed on appeal when he finally dismissed the case.
These two quotes are from the Kyle Cheney article linked above:
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
“Despite hundreds of similar rulings in this and other courts resoundingly in favor of the ICE-detainee petitioners, ICE continues to act contrary to law, to spend taxpayer money needlessly, and to waste the scarce resources of the judiciary,” said U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, a George H.W. Bush appointee from Pennsylvania.
Senator Andy Kim was pepper sprayed today by masked agents outside of infamous ICE detention center, GEO Group’s private Delaney Hall, in Newark, New Jersey. The detainees are on a hunger strike over conditions there that have been found to constitute torture — insufficient, expired food, unclean water, lack of medical care, abusive treatment. The other day the governor of New Jersey was prevented from entering to inspect the facility. This is the same hellhole that refused admission to the mayor of Newark, and then let him in before he was briefly and illegally arrested when he left, on orders, presumably, of the highly qualified Alina Habba. The melee that followed led to assault charges (still pending) against US Congress member LaMonica McIver. Apparently she assaulted an ICE agent’s elbow with her eye and her stomach during a chaotic shoving match between elected officials and masked goons licensed to kill and gas with impunity. Evidence, I suppose, will eventually be presented in the case against her. I suspect it will be similar to the suspect evidence judges have rejected in many other fraudulent Trump DOJ vindictive prosecutions.
As for Trump’s Stephen Miller-led deportation Gestapo, in 2018, under Trump, there were six detainee deaths in ICE custody. In the year and a half the malevolent creature has been back in power: 61 acknowledged deaths in ICE custody (dying detainees are often rushed to hospitals to take their deaths off the books of ICE, but 61 deaths in detention in 2025 and the first half of 2026 are confirmed on ICE’s own website..
Fuck these fuckin putos.
gratuitousblahg 