Two whistleblowers recently revealed a secret Department of Homeland Security memorandum, dated May 12, 2025, giving a Trump “legal gloss” to the president’s right to instruct his personal agencies to ignore the US Constitution if ordered to by President Project 2025 under an imagined emergency pulled from Trump’s well-tongued ass. In addition to the new claim, echoed by the soul dead JD Vance, that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP — Bovino) agents are immune from prosecution for unprovoked cold-blooded murder (another 37 year-old, Alex Pretti, was pepper sprayed, beaten and murdered today, ten shots into his prone body, at least three in the back, by several ICE/CBP agents — firing again in “self-defense” — in besieged Minneapolis) the deliberately concealed memo instructs ICE that it is not bound by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. It advised that ICE and CBP may, contrary to the Bill of Rights, break down anyone’s door and seize them for any, or no, reason. The New York Times reports on this legal obscenity in their time honored, squeamishly restrained fashion [1].
“Shot while escaping” George Grosz circa 1936.
Nazis know that it is best to hide illegal actions to the fullest extent possible, particularly while committing atrocities. When writing up the minutes of the Wannsee conference of January, 20, 1942 — a meeting among top Nazi officials to set up the Final Solution, the administrative mass killings in the countries conquered by Hitler’s army — special neutral words were used to mask goals like “liquidation”, “annihilation” and “mass murder”. Anodyne substitutions were employed according to strict Nazi sprachregelung, “speech code”, now a staple of authoritarian and corporate communication strategies. The notes of that meeting were kept top secret and all but one copy was destroyed by the time Hitler shot himself in the mouth after condemning the weakneyss of the German nation that had betrayed him. That surviving copy of the carefully worded minutes of the Wannsee conference was produced as evidence of deliberate mass murder in the Nuremberg trials
When the aptly named Dick Cheney, as evil an elected official as ever lived, announced that America needed to go to the “dark side” after the 9/11 terrorist attack, to render suspects to secret “black sites” to torture them, in violation of American and international law, and treaties signed by the United States, he kept the details as quiet as possible. A secret torture memo was written to offer a fig leaf of legal rationale for these illegal, barbaric practices. Written by two far-right wing “neo-con” lawyers, now tenured constitutional law professor John Yoo and now federal judge for life Jay Bybee, the secret memo narrowly defined torture by torturing the definition of torture until it succumbed to the policy needs of the fascists then intent on torturing whoever they felt like torturing. President Obama later cleared things up by candidly, almost nonchalantly, admitting that, in terrible times, some well-meaning Americans “tortured some folks.”
Then Obama ordered the killing by drone, of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, not charged with any crime, but condemned publicly for months as the leading English language Al Q’aeda propagandist and recruiter. Shortly thereafter al-Awlaki’s teenaged American son was turned into chopped meat by another drone, in what the US classified as a “mistake”. In 2017 Trump had al-Alwaki’s eight year-old daughter killed, for reasons still unclear. Shit happens in war and very few people made a peep about any of this. Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, details the radicalizaton of al-Awlaki, a once moderate Muslim imam who apparently was being blackmailed by the FBI when they uncovered his regular visits to prostitutes. The authors of the Wikipedia piece on al-Awlaki don’t seem to be aware of Scahill’s research (though FN 246 cites the book), but this is from Wikipedia [2]. The New York Times wrote that the government report on the extrajudicial killing of al-Awlaki (released under FOIA) “provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care”, describing it as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result.”[220]
Now we have the whistleblower release of the secret May 12, 2025 memo from Kristi Noem’s/Stephen Miller’s/Corey Lewandowski’s Department of Homeland Security, instructing supervisors to tell ICE agents that they may break down doors to conduct warrantless searches and detentions illegal under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I don’t know why this is hard for the media to state unambiguously, since the Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about the right of persons to be safe from arbitrary searches and seizures in their own homes without a judicial warrant based on probable cause to support forced entry to a residence. Here again is the NY Times report on the secret memo illegally instructing ICE agents that they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down someone’s door and hustle them out into an unmarked van to be flown to random sites 1,000 miles away.
Like other, similar illegal orders, the memo outlining the legal rationale for ignoring the US Constitution was not distributed widely among ICE agents, most of whom appear to be uneducated, poorly trained, violent, cowardly idiots, Ku Klux Klansmen, misogynists and criminals, a legally sanctioned J6 lynch mob intended to violently provoke a violent public reaction. The memo asserting that the Fourth Amendment may be ignored during ICE aktions was a secret document that supervisors were read in on. They could read it once under supervision, to see the rationale that appeared to give their goon squads permission to ignore the Fourth Amendment in this “national emergency” (we are under attack by “narco-terrorist” gangs of illegal immigrants, the worst of the worst, including five year-olds, coming in caravans to eat the dogs and cats of Iceland!) but not have a copy of it. Nothing to see here. This is how fucking Nazis always do it.. Speaking of pieces of shit:
[1] why use “appear”, twice, in both the headline and the lede, Grey Lady? The executed man had no gun in hand at any point in the video, only a camera; the Trump admin says he was killed in self defense. The three “suggestive” bullets in his back “appear to contradict” the official story that he was a crazed gunman intent on inflicting mass casualties on ICE and CBP agents who shot him ten times while he was on the ground, in self defense? You appear to squeamishly suck ass, Grey Lady.
[2] In June 2014, a previously classified memorandum from the U.S. Department of Justice was released; the memorandum described al-Awlaki’s killing as a lawful act of war.[23] Civil liberties advocates have called the killing of al-Awlaki an extrajudicial execution that breached al-Awlaki’s constitutional rights.[24] The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki’s public statements and videos had been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than they were before his death.[25] . . .
. . . In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship.[177] U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an “imminent threat“.[17] Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council.[17] Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare.[17] As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons.[178] The authorization was nevertheless controversial.[179]
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