Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
Fam, is it good when a judge compares ICE to the Ku Klux Klan?
Because that’s exactly what Judge William Young, a radical woke leftist—oh wait, he’s actually an 85-year-old Reagan appointee—had to say about President Donald Trump’s weaponization of immigration laws.
The Trump administration has suppressed the free speech of international students, particularly those who have made pro-Palestinian statements or participated in protests, by threatening, imprisoning, and deporting them, even if they are here legally. It turns out that even conservative judges do not love it when the government uses the might of the state to punish people for their protected First Amendment speech. Who knew?
Well, now the administration knows, thanks to Young’s 161-page decision absolutely excoriating it for its ceaseless attacks on free speech.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came in for special scorn, and rightly so. Turns out even conservative judges do not like the idea of masked vigilantes terrorizing people.
“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” the ruling read. “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”
Not one single lie detected.
Guess we’ll find out exactly how special the Fed Board of Governors is
The Supreme Court is going to take up the case of whether Trump can legally fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. This is a frequent occurrence these days, what with Trump firing pretty much everyone, but this case has a twist.
For most other commissioners and board members illegally removed by Trump, the Supreme Court has let the firings stand while litigation proceeds. This is what the court said about Trump removing Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, Cathy Harris at the Merit Systems Protection Board, National Labor Relations Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox, and every Democrat on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
All of those people are currently out of a job, so why does Cook, ostensibly removed from the Fed because of her alleged mortgage fraud criming, get to keep her job while the Supreme Court has a think?
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Because while the Supreme Court’s conservatives are seemingly all in on overruling their own 90-year-old precedent so that Trump can completely take over formerly independent agencies, they don’t love that idea so much when it comes to the Federal Reserve Board.
In the case where they allowed Trump to fire Wilcox and Harris, they feebly tried to explain that the Federal Reserve is special and different, a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
This, of course, is nonsense. It’s clear the court understands that if Trump gets a hold of the Federal Board, his nascent attempts at wrecking the economy will really kick into high gear, so they’re trying to figure out a way to let him fire everybody else but somehow protect the Fed. It’s absolute Calvinball, like everything else at SCOTUS these days.
Look who suddenly likes the FACE Act
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is not exactly a favorite of conservatives, seeing as it is used to protect patients trying to access reproductive health care clinics in the face of a howling mob of anti-choice right-wingers.
One of Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon 23 people convicted of violating the Act, including people who broke into clinics and stole fetal tissue. The administration also issued a memo essentially saying that the real violence is against anti-choicers and that the Department of Justice would not pursue any abortion-related FACE Act prosecutions unless they involve death, serious bodily harm, or significant property damage. So cool that we will basically have to wait and see what the government does after an anti-choice terrorist blows up an abortion clinic. Is that enough property damage?
Now, however, the administration loves the FACE Act because they figured out how to use it in their faux crusade against antisemitism. So, they’ve filed a civil complaint against demonstrators who ostensibly disrupted a Jewish religious event by … wait for it—blowing vuvuzelas. Yes, the annoying horn that tens of thousands of people wailed away on during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
According to the administration, blowing a vuvuzela is not protected speech and instead was a method of physical harm intended to cause permanent noise-induced hearing loss. To be fair, the things are ridiculously loud, but the notion that blowing a loud horn at people going to synagogue is something that requires the government to step in is even more ridiculous.
So in Trump’s America, reproductive health clinics will just have to wait and see if someone gets murdered enough for the DOJ to use the FACE Act, but when it comes to pro-Palestine protesters, blowing a horn is essentially terrorism.
Gather ‘round for a benchslap of Jeanine Pirro’s office
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro keeps getting no-billed at a comically alarming rate, unable to get a federal grand jury to indict D.C. residents on the ludicrously inflated felony charges she keeps bringing.
But Pirro is nothing if not persistent—so she came up with a genius plan to avoid federal grand juries altogether. After she failed to get a felony indictment from a federal grand jury, she instead secured an indictment from a local D.C. Superior Court grand jury. Then she had some unlucky prosecutor bring that indictment to the federal magistrate judge.
You do not need to be a U.S attorney—or any kind of attorney, really—to understand that you cannot really get an indictment in one court and then trundle it on over to a different one.
Related | Jeanine Pirro can’t indict a ham sandwich, and Harvard gets a win
The government’s feeble attempt to justify this was that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government used Superior Court grand juries to charge federal cases when federal grand juries were not available.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, with a weariness you can feel bleeding off the page, pointed out that “federal grand juries—plural—were available, unlike during COVID-19 when there were none at times. And in none of those cases had a federal grand jury already refused to return an indictment.”
Faruqui didn’t stop there, saying that “At a minimum, this is very unseemly; more than likely, it is unlawful.”
For her part, Pirro is running around calling Faruqui an “activist judge,” which is a fairly hilarious thing to accuse Faruqui of, given he spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor, including in the very office Pirro is now wrecking.
Fare thee well, Sigal Chattah
Acting U.S. Attorney for Nevada Sigal Chattah is a real gem: an election conspiracy theorist with a very loose sense of ethics and no real experience for her job. And now, she doesn’t have that job.
As was the case with another of Trump’s unqualified U.S. attorney picks, Alina Habba, the administration tried to string together a series of temporary appointments so hot messes like Chattah and Habba would not have to go through the Senate confirmation process.
That didn’t work out so well for Habba, and now it’s not working out so well for Chattah. In late August, a federal judge ruled that Habba wasn’t legally in her job as acting U.S. attorney and hadn’t been since July 1.
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Now, it’s Chattah’s turn to be told that she is, in a word, illegal. Four criminal defendants had filed suit, arguing that if Chattah wasn’t legally the acting U.S. attorney, she couldn’t bring charges or supervise their criminal cases. U.S. District Judge David Campbell, a George W. Bush appointee who once clerked for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, agreed, saying that the mashup of temporary appointments violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
“The Court cannot conclude that Ms. Chattah’s role is anything less than Acting U.S. Attorney, a position she cannot hold,” the judge said.
Ouch.