The case is Ramirez Ovando v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03183-RBJ, in the District of Colorado. Three filings across nine months form a sequence, and the sequence is the story.

The statute nobody argues about

The legal question here is narrower than most immigration litigation, which is part of what makes the case worth following.

Federal law lets an immigration officer make an arrest without a warrant only under a specific condition. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2), the officer must have reason to believe the person “is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.” The escape assessment has to come first. It is the thing that authorizes the arrest, and it has to happen before the arrest, individually, about the particular person being arrested.

That requirement is not in dispute between the parties. What has been in dispute is whether ICE was actually doing it, and what should happen if it was not.

November 25, 2025: the injunction

Judge Jackson, a senior judge on the District of Colorado bench, granted a preliminary injunction at ECF 49 and provisionally certified a class. The class definition is worth reading closely, because its breadth is doing work:

“All persons since January 20, 2025, who have been arrested or will be arrested in this District by immigration officers without a warrant and without a pre-arrest, individualized assessment of probable cause that the person poses a flight risk.”

Note the two-part structure. Membership does not turn on whether a warrant eventually appeared. It turns on whether an individualized flight-risk assessment happened before the arrest. A person arrested without that assessment is in the class even if paperwork materialized an hour later.

That definition anticipated the government’s principal workaround, and Jackson addressed it directly:

“Issuing post hoc warrants once plaintiffs had already been unlawfully arrested does nothing to cure the initial statutory violation.”

In plain terms: the legality of an arrest is fixed at the moment it happens. A warrant signed afterward does not travel backward in time. If the officer lacked authority when the handcuffs went on, a later signature does not supply it.

On the named plaintiffs, Jackson was equally direct: “No reasonable officer could have reasonably concluded that these plaintiffs were likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained.” He was not describing a close call resolved against the government. He was saying the assessment could not have been made in good faith on these facts.

May 12, 2026: the enforcement order

Nearly six months later, Jackson issued an enforcement order at ECF 112. This is a signed judicial order with findings, and it is the pivot point of the whole case.

He found that officers “have continued to effect warrantless arrests without making individualized probable cause determinations of the likelihood of escape in defiance of § 1357(a)(2) and the PI.”

Two further findings matter as much as the first. Jackson found that ICE had, “seemingly without exception, failed to document those warrantless arrests.” And he found that “at least on some occasions, arrests that ICE claims are made pursuant to field warrants are, in fact, warrantless.”

Read those together and a documentation problem becomes an evidentiary one. If the agency does not record warrantless arrests, no one outside the agency can count them. If the agency’s own records sometimes describe an arrest as warrant-based when it was not, then the records cannot be taken at face value even where they exist. Jackson also found that defendants “failed to adequately train their deportation officers,” which locates the problem in agency practice rather than in individual misconduct.

The remedy he ordered followed from those findings. A training curriculum within 14 days. Every deportation officer trained within 45 days. Officers who had not completed the training barred from making warrantless arrests at all. Monthly production of I-213 arrest records to plaintiffs’ counsel on the tenth of each month. Attorneys’ fees.

The monthly production requirement is the mechanism worth watching. Jackson did not simply tell ICE to follow the law again. He built a reporting obligation that would let plaintiffs, and through them the court, see whether it was.

August 26, 2026: the notice of noncompliance

Three monthly productions later, plaintiffs filed ECF 132, styled a Status Report and Notice of Noncompliance. Timothy Macdonald of the ACLU of Colorado signed it. Fifteen exhibits accompany it; nine were filed under Level 1 restriction at ECF 133 and 134, with the clerk modifying both entries the following day to apply the restriction correctly.

The filing describes several categories of alleged failure drawn from the government’s own productions. Four warrantless arrests with no documentation of any flight-risk determination. Arrests where the field warrant was obtained after the arrest had already occurred. Warrants issued before the Notice to Appear that would support them. Nine individuals whose responsive documentation was never produced at all, eight whose records came in incomplete, and twelve more missing complete sets.

That last cluster is easy to skim past and should not be. Across those three categories, plaintiffs identify a substantial number of individuals whose records are absent or partial. Under Jackson’s May findings, incomplete documentation is not a neutral gap. He had already found that ICE fails to document warrantless arrests as a matter of practice, which means a missing record is at least consistent with the violation the order was meant to stop.

The declarations

Six exhibits are public. One is an email between counsel. Five are sworn declarations from people arrested after the enforcement order took effect. They are the part of the filing that will circulate.

G.B.R. signed his declaration on August 14. He describes an arrest in Colorado Springs on July 2, 2026. He has been in the country twenty years, has U.S. citizen children, and runs a licensed construction company. He describes leaving home to look for work and noticing SUVs following him on the highway, then more vehicles closing from the front. Four to six vehicles surrounded his truck. He asked to see the warrant and was shown one bearing a different person’s name. Officers broke his window and pulled him out. On his account, when he told them the cuffs were cutting him, “They said we don’t care, you are arrested.”

S.N. is eighteen. He entered on parole from Venezuela in April 2023, filed for asylum within the year, and holds work authorization. He captained the varsity soccer team at Alameda International High School and wrestled. On the day of his arrest he was delivering food for his mother to an apartment in Aurora. He says the door opened and he was pulled inside: “The officers had helmets, shields, vests, and long guns pointing directly at me. I saw that there were site lasers on my chest.” He says an ICE officer punched him in the face, and that during transport officers told him he belonged in Venezuela. He signed on August 18.

D.R.M. signed on August 18 and describes an arrest on June 29, 2026. He was riding to a construction site with four coworkers in a two-door truck, about two minutes after they stopped at a Home Depot to buy cement. Four cars surrounded them and roughly six masked officers got out. Two officers opened the truck’s doors without asking permission, yelling “papers, papers, show us your papers.” He was pulled out, handcuffed behind his back, and put in leg chains. He states that ICE never showed him an arrest warrant or any paper, either at the arrest or later at the office in Colorado Springs.

By his account, the arresting officer asked him two questions: his name, and whether he had a family member who had served in the U.S. military. Nothing was asked about whether he was likely to flee.

That makes his the least dramatic declaration of the five and, for the § 1357(a)(2) question, possibly the most useful. There is no warrant to characterize, no timeline to reconstruct, no dispute about force. There is a truck, a stop, two questions, and no individualized inquiry into whether anyone in it was going to run.

D.B.D.J. and J.D.B. describe the same arrest, at a 7-Eleven on August 4, 2026, from inside the same truck. Three men were in it. J.D.B. was driving his uncle Francisco’s truck, Francisco was in the front passenger seat, and D.B.D.J., J.D.B.’s cousin, was in the back seat behind the driver. They had stopped for water and breakfast on the way to work.

D.B.D.J. says an agent pulled him down by the front of his shirt and “slammed my face on the pavement three times after he pulled me down.” He describes a fractured right wrist, facial lacerations, and a right eye swollen shut for three days. ICE handcuffed him to the hospital bed. He says officers asked only his name and date of birth before transporting him.

J.D.B., signing four days later, was backing the truck out when officers surrounded Francisco. He describes an officer pointing a gun at him through the windshield, opening his door, pulling him out, and shoving him face-first to the ground. He says he heard the back window shatter, and that when he turned his head from the pavement he saw an officer “beating him, pounding his face against the pavement.” Of the officers who arrested him, he says: “They had not asked me any questions until that point.”

Two sworn accounts of one arrest, from different seats in the same vehicle, is a different evidentiary object than a single declaration. J.D.B.’s account of hearing the rear window break independently supports D.B.D.J.’s description of how he was removed from the truck. Corroboration is what turns an allegation a court has to weigh against an agency denial into a factual account with independent support.

What this filing is not

ECF 132 is a status report. It informs the court. It does not ask the court to do anything.

Plaintiffs have not moved for contempt. They have not moved for sanctions, for a modification of the injunction, or for an order to show cause. Judge Jackson has not set a briefing schedule, ordered defendants to respond, or scheduled a hearing. Defendants have filed nothing since. The only order Jackson has signed on this docket since May is ECF 131, entered August 19, granting an attorney’s motion to withdraw.

So nothing has been decided. No official has been found in contempt, no penalty has issued, and the government has not yet had its chance to contest a single fact in these declarations. Anyone reading the August filing as a ruling against ICE is reading a party’s allegations as a court’s findings.

What the filing does accomplish is a record. It places sworn, dated, individually attributed accounts of post-order arrests in front of a judge who has already made findings about the same practice. It cross-references those accounts against productions the government itself was ordered to make. If plaintiffs move for contempt later, this is the evidentiary foundation that motion would sit on. Filed first, separately, and without a request for relief, it also gives the court room to act on its own.

Where this sits

Courts have limited tools for making an agency change how it behaves in the field. An injunction states the rule. When the rule is disregarded, an enforcement order adds structure: training, deadlines, reporting. Each step moves further from declaring what the law is and closer to supervising whether it is being followed.

Jackson has now taken that second step and is looking at evidence that it did not accomplish what he intended. The May order’s monthly production requirement was designed to surface exactly this information, and it did. What remains open is what a district judge does when the reporting mechanism he built reports failure.

The five declarants were arrested during that interval: a delivery run, a supply stop for a construction crew, a breakfast stop on the way to a job. None was described as fleeing. Whatever the court concludes about the warrants and the paperwork, the arrests already happened.

The next monthly production is due September 10.

If you’d rather support the work with a one-time contribution, I’ve made that option available here as well. Either way, your support — whether it’s reading, sharing, or contributing — means more than you know.

Sources

All documents cited are from Ramirez Ovando v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03183-RBJ (D. Colo.), before Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson. Full docket on CourtListener.

Orders

• ECF 49 — Preliminary Injunction, Nov. 25, 2025. Provisional certification of the Warrantless Arrest Class; the post hoc warrant and flight-risk findings.

• ECF 112 — Enforcement Order, May 12, 2026. Findings of violation, documentation and training failures; the training deadlines, the monthly I-213 production requirement, and attorneys’ fees.

• ECF 131 — Aug. 19, 2026. Text-only order granting a motion to withdraw as attorney.

Plaintiffs’ filing

• ECF 132 — Status Report and Notice of Noncompliance, Aug. 26, 2026, filed by Timothy Macdonald, ACLU of Colorado. Fifteen exhibits, nine restricted.

• ECF 133 and 134 — Aug. 26, 2026. Notice of filing and the nine Level 1 restricted exhibits. Both modified by the clerk on Aug. 27.

Declarations quoted (public exhibits to ECF 132)

• Ex. G — Declaration of G.B.R., signed Aug. 14, 2026.

• Ex. I — Declaration of S.N., signed Aug. 18, 2026.

• Ex. J — Declaration of D.R.M., signed Aug. 18, 2026.

• Ex. L — Declaration of D.B.D.J., signed Aug. 14, 2026.

• Ex. M — Declaration of J.D.B., signed Aug. 18, 2026.

What the Court Issued

On August 13, 2026, the en banc Fifth Circuit dismissed W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534, for lack of jurisdiction. Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote for the court. Judges Jones, Smith, Stewart, Richman, Southwick, Graves, Higginson, Willett, Ho, Duncan, Engelhardt, Wilson, Douglas, and Ramirez joined. Judges Haynes and Oldham concurred in the judgment only.

The holding is one sentence: “We therefore DISMISS the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.”

Dismissal for lack of jurisdiction means the court decided it had no power to rule. It did not decide whether President Trump lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act against alleged members of Tren de Aragua. That question is still open in the Fifth Circuit.

The court issued a separate order the same day denying three motions from the petitioners: an unopposed motion to add five new class representatives, a motion to let those proposed representatives proceed under pseudonyms, and a motion to seal the unredacted version of the first motion.

How the Case Reached This Point

Trump signed the Alien Enemies Act proclamation on March 14, 2025, invoking a 1798 wartime statute to remove Venezuelan nationals the administration identified as Tren de Aragua members.

The ACLU filed a habeas class petition in the Northern District of Texas on April 16, 2025, docketed as No. 1:25-cv-00059 before Judge James Wesley Hendrix. Hendrix declined to issue a temporary restraining order on April 18. The Supreme Court issued an emergency order at roughly 1:00 a.m. on April 19 barring removal of putative class members. Hendrix denied class certification on May 9.

On May 16, 2025, the Supreme Court granted an injunction and remanded to the Fifth Circuit. The injunction, reported at A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 605 U.S. 91, 99 (2025), barred the government “from removing the named plaintiffs or putative class members in this action under the AEA pending order by” the Fifth Circuit and disposition of any timely petition for certiorari.

A Fifth Circuit panel heard argument on June 30, 2025. On September 2, Judge Leslie Southwick wrote for a 2-1 majority holding that the proclamation failed to establish an “invasion or predatory incursion” under the statute, and granted a preliminary injunction. Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez concurred in part and dissented in part, finding on the record that seven days was “not ‘sufficient time . . . to reasonably be able to contact counsel, file a petition, and pursue appropriate relief.’” Judge Andrew Oldham dissented at length.

The full court granted rehearing en banc on September 30, 2025, which vacated the panel opinion. That sequence is reported at W.M.M. v. Trump, 154 F.4th 207, reh’g en banc granted, opinion vacated, 154 F.4th 319 (5th Cir. 2025). A vacated opinion has no force. The September panel ruling stopped being law the moment rehearing was granted.

The en banc court heard argument on January 22, 2026. Seven months later it dismissed.

What Happened at Oral Argument

The case collapsed on a fact the court learned from the lawyers in front of it.

During en banc argument, petitioners’ counsel said two of the named petitioners had been removed “under the immigration laws.” The court asked for a fuller answer. Both sides then filed a joint notice.

From the opinion: “At the court’s request, counsel for petitioners and for the government jointly notified us, without further explanation, that ‘[t]he government has removed all three named [p]etitioners—W.M.M., []A.R.P., and F.G.M.—under the Immigration and Nationality Act.’”

W.M.M., A.R.P., and F.G.M. were gone. They were removed under the ordinary immigration statute, not under the Alien Enemies Act the lawsuit challenged. An injunction against AEA removals would have protected no one in the case, because no one in the case faced an AEA removal anymore.

The phrase “without further explanation” is doing work in that sentence. The court noted that neither side told it why or when the removals happened.

The Class That Never Existed

Class actions have a mootness exception. A certified class survives the departure of the individual who filed it, because the class itself is the party.

That exception was unavailable here. From the opinion: “While an exception to the mootness doctrine exists for properly certified class actions, no class exists or ever has existed in this case.”

Hendrix denied certification on May 9, 2025, and no court certified a class after that. Sixteen months of litigation, including a Supreme Court intervention and an en banc rehearing, proceeded on a petition that legally represented three people. When those three were removed, nothing was left.

The petitioners tried to fix this. They moved, without opposition from the government, to add five new class representatives who were still in custody. The court denied the motion and pointed to the district court instead.

From the opinion: “But, as the court’s separate order explains, the denial of the motion to add class representatives on appeal is without prejudice to any future determination by the district court respecting whether to certify a class, to permit the petitioners to add or substitute new class representatives, or to allow an amendment of the petition.”

“Without prejudice” means the denial creates no bar. The Fifth Circuit said it would not restructure the case at the appellate stage, and it told Hendrix he remains free to certify a class, allow substitution, or permit an amended petition. The invitation is explicit and it points to Abilene.

Ho and Oldham

Judge James Ho agreed the appeal was moot and wrote separately to say the court should have reached the merits and ruled for the administration.

“Determining the existence of a state of invasion is a quintessentially executive prerogative—not a judicial one.”

“So judges may not review the President’s determination of an invasion.”

“judges are supposed to defer to a President’s declaration of a state of invasion—including the ones issued on January 20, 2025.”

Ho’s argument is that the courts have no role in checking whether an invasion is occurring. If a President says one is, that ends the inquiry. Applied here, it would mean no court could examine whether Tren de Aragua constitutes an invasion within the meaning of a 1798 statute.

That is one judge’s separate writing. His colleagues joined an opinion that reached no such conclusion.

Judge Oldham concurred in the judgment in eight sentences, resting on the dissent he already wrote at the panel stage: “I will be brief because I have said all of this before. The plaintiffs are not entitled to injunctive relief.” He closed by noting the case may fail “because the ACLU no longer represents a party to this case.”

What This Ruling Does Not Do

It does not hold that the Alien Enemies Act proclamation is lawful. The court reached no merits question.

It does not hold that the proclamation is unlawful. The September 2025 panel decision that found no “invasion or predatory incursion” was vacated and has no precedential force.

Nothing in the dismissal creates Fifth Circuit precedent on the scope of the Alien Enemies Act in either direction.

Ho’s concurrence is not the holding. It will be quoted as though the Fifth Circuit adopted his position on judicial review of invasion declarations. The court adopted no such position.

The district court case is not closed. No. 1:25-cv-00059 remains open before Judge Hendrix, and the en banc court’s “without prejudice” language was written to keep it that way.

The Supreme Court Injunction

Lee Gelernt of the ACLU said in a statement the day of the ruling: “The Supreme Court’s injunction barring use of the Alien Enemies Act remains in place, which is essential because there are still people at risk of being wrongly removed under the act without due process.”

The injunction’s own terms are narrower than that sentence sounds. The Supreme Court barred AEA removals of named plaintiffs and putative class members “pending order by” the Fifth Circuit and disposition of any timely certiorari petition. The Fifth Circuit has now issued its order. Whether the injunction survives depends on whether a timely cert petition follows, and no cert petition has been reported. That question is unresolved as of this writing.

What to Watch

The mandate has not issued. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 41, it issues seven days after the window for a rehearing petition closes. With the United States as a party, that window runs 45 days, which puts the mandate in late September or early October 2026 absent further filings.

Three filings would change the posture: a petition for rehearing, a certiorari petition that would also bear on whether the Supreme Court injunction survives, or a motion in front of Hendrix to substitute petitioners or certify a class. The last of those is the one the en banc court expressly left available.

The other possibility is that nothing is filed at all. The administration removed the three men who could have produced a merits ruling, and it did so under a statute nobody was challenging.

The Shape of It

The Supreme Court intervened in this case twice, once after midnight. The full Fifth Circuit sat for argument. The question was whether a President can invoke a wartime statute against a criminal organization during peacetime.

That question is exactly as unanswered today as it was on March 14, 2025.

The case emptied out before it could be decided. Every petitioner who could have produced a ruling was removed under a different statute, and the class that would have outlived them was never certified. What remains is an open district court docket in Abilene, a vacated panel opinion, and a proclamation that no appellate court in this circuit has passed judgment on.

Sources

Primary documents

• W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir. Aug. 13, 2026) (en banc opinion dismissing appeal) — ca5.uscourts.gov

• W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir. Aug. 13, 2026) (order denying motions to add class representatives, to proceed under pseudonyms, and to seal) — ca5.uscourts.gov

• W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir. Sept. 2, 2025) (panel opinion, subsequently vacated) — ca5.uscourts.gov

• Order granting rehearing en banc, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir. Sept. 30, 2025) — ca5.uscourts.gov

• A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 605 U.S. 91 (2025) — supreme.justia.com

• W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-00059 (N.D. Tex.), Judge James Wesley Hendrix — CourtListener docket

• W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir.) — CourtListener docket

Statements and secondary sources

• ACLU, “Comment on Federal Appeals Court Ruling in Alien Enemies Act Challenge,” Aug. 13, 2026 — aclu.org

• Steve Vladeck, “The End of the Alien Enemies Act Litigation?” — stevevladeck.com

• Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, case file 46411 — clearinghouse.net

• Justia, W.M.M. v. Trump, No. 25-10534 (5th Cir. 2026) — law.justia.com

Last week the Pentagon issued notices proposing to fire the paper’s publisher, its editor-in-chief, and one of its reporters, and placed all three on administrative leave. On Thursday, all three sued to stop it, with termination possible as soon as tomorrow.

It’s the third lawsuit against the Defense Department over Stars and Stripes since June.

The setup

Stars and Stripes staff are Department of Defense employees. About $15 million of the paper’s $29 million budget comes from the Pentagon. And by law, under a framework Congress set up in 1994, the Pentagon isn’t allowed to control what the paper prints.

Congress didn’t just write that down and move on. It created an ombudsman job whose only function is watching for the Pentagon overstepping that line.

Here’s what happened to that job, and to the people who held the other lines, over the past eight months.

Timeline

January 15: Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced an overhaul. The paper would drop Associated Press wire content and refocus on, in his words, “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and all things military.” He said the paper had been running gossip columns and AP reprints instead of covering troops.

April: Ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, the person whose job was to flag Pentagon overreach into the newsroom, was fired. She’d just published a column criticizing the January overhaul.

June 3: Two members of the paper’s publisher advisory board, Pulitzer winners Susan Dardarian and William Church, sued the Defense Department. Democracy Forward filed the case, Dardarian v. U.S. Department of Defense, arguing the overhaul broke the 1994 statute.

August 18: Publisher Max Lederer, 19 years running the paper’s global operations, announced he was retiring. He cited “fundamental” disagreements with Pentagon leadership.

August 21: The Pentagon issued notices of proposed separation to all three the same day — Lederer, Slavin, and Korte — citing insubordination. All three were placed on administrative leave, with termination possible as early as five business days later.

August 27: Lederer, Slavin, and Korte sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Parnell, and Pentagon aide Andrew Brey in federal court in D.C.

What the complaint says

Slavin and Korte gave an interview to CBS Sunday Morning, filmed June 26 and aired July 5. On air, Korte said: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration.” Slavin, asked if he had any red lines he wouldn’t cross, said running a Pentagon-written story instead of an accurate one would be one.

More than a month after that interview aired, Stripes published a story on the USS Abraham Lincoln, nine months into deployment, detailing shortages of food and water and strain on sailors’ mental health. A day after that story ran, the complaint says, Pentagon officials ordered Lederer to deliver separation notices to Slavin and Korte — citing statements from the interview five and a half weeks earlier. He didn’t do it. He announced his retirement instead, then was issued the same kind of notice himself on August 21.

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on the allegations.

The gap in the Pentagon’s story

Parnell has consistently described the changes as modernization: a paper “custom tailored to our warfighters.” That’s a mission statement for a public affairs office.

Congress funded something else in 1994: a newsroom troops and their families could trust precisely because the Pentagon couldn’t touch its coverage. The statute is the reason the paper exists on the Pentagon’s budget at all.

The pattern

Three lawsuits since June, over an outlet with one job: cover the military without the military editing the coverage. Same period, same building: new press credentialing restrictions, a photographer ban.

The court will decide whether the three proposed terminations were retaliation. Everything around that question is why it’s worth reading the docket when the answer comes.

If you’d rather support the work with a one-time contribution, I’ve made that option available here as well. Either way, your support — whether it’s reading, sharing, or contributing — means more than you know.

Sources

Slavin et al. v. Parnell et al., No. 1:26-cv-03009 (D.D.C.), Complaint and Motion for TRO/Preliminary Injunction, filed Aug. 27, 2026 Washington Post, “Lawsuit says Pentagon breached 1st Amendment in Stars and Stripes firings,” Aug. 27, 2026

CBS News, “Fired Stars and Stripes journalists sue Hegseth and Pentagon spokesperson,” Aug. 27, 2026

NPR, “After high-profile firings by the Pentagon, is Stars & Stripes still independent?” Aug. 22, 2026

Al Jazeera, “Editor of US newspaper Stars and Stripes reportedly fired under Trump,” Aug. 21, 2026

The Hill, “Stars and Stripes publisher announces retirement, citing displeasure with Pentagon’s direction of outlet,” Aug. 2026

The Hill, “Pentagon sued over Stars and Stripes editorial control,” June 3, 2026 Stars and Stripes, “Plaintiffs sue Pentagon, allege illegal limits on Stars and Stripes,” June 3, 2026

The Hill, “Former Stars and Stripes ombudsman sues Pentagon over firing,” June 2026

CBS News, “Pentagon officials considering firing longtime Stars and Stripes publisher, sources say” Editor & Publisher, “Stars and Stripes defends its independence amid new Pentagon pressures,” March 2026

Fox News, “Pentagon vows to reform military newspaper Stars and Stripes, remove ‘woke distractions,’” Jan. 15, 2026

1. “Trump scores major Supreme Court win, clears way for mail-in voting order”

Monday’s ruling was real, and it was narrow. The Court split 6-3 and lifted one of two injunctions blocking the order. It clears DHS to build a federal citizenship list and share it with states, and clears USPS to finalize ballot-design rules. It left the most contested piece untouched: withholding ballots from anyone not on that federal list.

Then Tuesday happened. Judge Indira Talwani ruled that USPS had violated her separate injunction by finalizing its mail-ballot rule while her order was still in effect. USPS argued it hadn’t actually broken the rule because it promised not to enforce it until the injunctions lifted. Talwani rejected that.

“These arguments ignore the court’s explicit directive not to ‘initiat[e] or complet[e]’ rulemaking.” — Judge Indira Talwani

She imposed no penalty. The rule stands published. USPS still can’t enforce it for 2026 under her other order. A win, a violation, and no consequence for the violation, all in 48 hours.

A new case and emergency TRO was requested immediately. Preliminary hearing scheduled for September 3.

—

2. “US set for largest mass visa revocation in history”

Still hasn’t happened. The State Department is preparing to revoke up to 200,000 B1/B2 visas from people who sought asylum, per documents obtained by the AP. A spokesperson wouldn’t give a firm number, calling the count “dynamic” and the process “rolling.” It would be the largest mass revocation in U.S. history if the administration carries it out. Right now it’s a plan on State Department letterhead, soon to be in litigation.

—

3. “ICE arrests jumped to the highest monthly total”

Accurate. Not a flex. ICE made 49,571 arrests in July, the highest single month of Trump’s second term, a 15% jump from June, according to data obtained by AP through the UC Berkeley Deportation Data Project. Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 20,000 of those arrests between them. This is one of the few items on the list that needs no asterisk. What doesn’t hold up is their claims that these arrests are warranted.

—

4. “Business activity expands at fastest pace since 2022”

The topline number checks out. The S&P Global flash composite PMI hit 56.0 in August, the highest reading since April 2022. But the gain is uneven. Manufacturing fell to a 13-month low. Every point of the increase came from services, which hit a 20-month high on its own.

“U.S. business is booming.” — Chris Williamson, S&P Global Market Intelligence

Half the economy is booming. The other half is shrinking.

—

5. “Fentanyl deaths plunge 22%, crackdown on deadly drug crisis”

The 22% is real CDC data. Synthetic opioid deaths fell from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025. What the graphic doesn’t say: this decline started in mid-2023, a year and a half before Trump’s second term began. Total overdose deaths have fallen for more than two years, a trend that predates this administration. The White House is taking credit for a curve that was already bending down.

—

6. “Trump admin pauses immigrant visa applications”

This one needs the timeline. On Aug. 21, a federal judge struck down the administration’s earlier policy suspending immigrant visa processing for 75 countries. Days later, the State Department announced a worldwide pause on immigrant visa appointments for consular “training.” The American Immigration Lawyers Association says applicants who completed every step the government asked, including security vetting, are now getting appointments canceled with no rescheduled date.

“These roadblocks are just really playing with people’s lives.” — Shev Dalal-Dheini, AILA

A court closed one door on Friday. The government opened a different one on Monday.

—

7. “ICE quietly arrests jaw dropping number of illegal immigrants in massive DC area operation”

DHS confirmed this one directly: 1,328 arrests across Virginia and Maryland over two weeks in August, an operation it named “Operation Safe Community — Washington, D.C.” DHS says almost 400 of those arrested, close to 30%, had criminal convictions or pending charges. NBC4 Washington reported it could not independently verify that number without a full list of names, and noted that means the majority of the 1,328 people arrested did not have one.

—

8. “Trump admin lays out new $103K fee proposal for H-1B visas”

The $103,265 figure is accurate. It’s a proposed regulation with a 30-day comment window, not a final rule. It’s also the administration’s second attempt at this fee: a federal judge in Boston vacated the original $100,000 version in June, calling it an unlawful tax Congress never authorized. The Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of 20 states already suing over that first fee say they may amend those lawsuits to hit this one too. DHS projects the new fee would bring in $8.8 billion a year, and its own regulatory analysis found it would cause

“significant economic impact” to 76% of the small businesses it studied — DHS’s own estimate

The government wrote down the damage in its own paperwork and proposed the fee anyway.

—

9. “Trump admin axes refundable tax credits for illegal migrants, saving taxpayers $3B”

Also a proposal, not a rule. Treasury and the IRS want to limit the refundable portion of four tax credits — adoption, child, American Opportunity, and Earned Income — to citizens, nationals, and “qualified aliens” under a 1996 welfare law. The comment period runs 45 days, closing in early October, with a hearing scheduled for Oct. 14. The graphic’s own headline oversells who this hits: the Washington Times’ framing and other outlets note the rule reaches certain legally working immigrants who hold authorization but don’t meet the narrower “qualified alien” bar, not only people in the country illegally. The $3 billion figure and the estimate of “nearly 1 million” affected people both come from Treasury’s own projections.

“The days of illegal aliens collecting taxpayer-funded benefits are over.” — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

—

10. “Illegal Immigrants deported on first flight to Haiti after Trump ended TPS”

161 people were deported to Cap-Haïtien on Aug. 20, the first flight since the Supreme Court let the administration end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians in June. Guerline Jozef, an immigration advocate, said one of her own clients, a former TPS holder, was on that flight. The plane also carried people with no direct ties to Haiti, born in Chile and the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, according to reporting from HNGN. DHS has said twice-weekly flights are planned going forward. The plane landed in Cap-Haïtien instead of Port-au-Prince because the capital’s main airport is considered too dangerous to use, in a country the UN says cannot safely absorb returnees.

—

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Sources

Axios, NPR, SCOTUSblog, Twitchy, NTD, The Epoch Times — mail-in voting order and Talwani ruling

AP via NBC News, ABC News, PBS, Axios — mass visa revocation

The Washington Post, WUSF/AP, PBS — ICE monthly arrest data

Bloomberg, Benzinga, S&P Global — flash composite PMI

CDC, KFF, rehab.com — overdose and fentanyl death data

The Washington Post, The Hill, CSMonitor, Reuters via Erickson Immigration Group — immigrant visa pause

DHS, NBC4 Washington, Washington Times, Fox News — DC-area ICE operation

The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, Forbes — H-1B fee proposal

CNBC, TheStreet, Treasury Department, IRS, NILC, Washington Times — tax credit rule

ABC News, UPI, The Hill, HNGN, DHS — Haiti deportation flight

On August 25, the Third Circuit told him the case was over.

He didn’t lose on the merits. He never got that far. The court dismissed his petition as moot, meaning it no longer has the power to resolve the dispute.

Judges Thomas Hardiman, Emil Bove, and D. Brooks Smith Fisher heard the case in June. Hardiman wrote the opinion, joined by Fisher and Bove. But Bove didn’t stop there. He wrote separately, joined by Hardiman, to argue the court never had the authority to hear this kind of claim in the first place — a broader, more aggressive ruling than the majority opinion he’d just signed.

Who’s writing this

Bove was confirmed to the Third Circuit in July 2025 after one of the most contested judicial confirmations in recent memory. Before that, he was Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, then acting deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.

His confirmation drew opposition from more than 75 former federal and state judges, including two retired members of the Third Circuit itself. A former DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Bove, while running DOJ’s response to deportation litigation, told colleagues the department might need to tell courts to defy their orders outright. Asked about it at his confirmation hearing, Bove said he didn’t recall the conversation. The Senate confirmed him anyway, 50-49.

That history matters here because of what Bove is arguing now that he’s on the bench: that federal courts should have less power to review certain immigration claims than they currently do. In a case involving a man removed to a prison in El Salvador, the judge once accused of wanting to defy court orders is now the one narrowing what courts are allowed to decide.

What he was fighting for

Mejia-Henriquez crossed into the United States illegally in 2015. When agents caught him, he said he’d come to look for work. He also said he feared gang violence back home. He was released with a notice to appear and stayed. He settled near Baltimore, worked construction, had a son.

He also had two drunk-driving arrests. In 2023, something worse: he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit armed robbery, after an accomplice held a convenience store clerk at gunpoint while he took part. He served 179 days.

That conviction is what brought the government back. He was charged as removable for his illegal entry and for a crime involving moral turpitude. He conceded removability. What he fought for was narrower: protection under the Convention Against Torture, known as CAT. It doesn’t ask whether someone can stay in the country. It asks whether sending them to a specific place would expose them to torture.

His argument had three parts. He said El Salvador’s “state of exception” — a mass-detention crackdown on suspected gang members with minimal due process — would sweep him up because of his tattoos, a Salvadoran indictment alleging gang-related extortion, and his U.S. criminal record. He said MS-13 might target him for refusing, as a teenager, to join. He said rival gangs might mistake him for a member and act on the mistake.

The immigration judge didn’t believe him. He found the testimony inconsistent and much of it implausible, and denied both asylum and CAT relief. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed. Mejia-Henriquez appealed only the CAT denial. He didn’t challenge the asylum ruling. He didn’t challenge the removal order itself.

Then he was removed.

What the majority decided

Federal courts can only decide live disputes. Article III limits them to cases where a ruling can still change something. That limit is called mootness.

Translation: if there’s nothing left to fix, there’s nothing left for the court to do.

CAT relief, even when granted, does not disturb a final order of removal — that’s Supreme Court precedent, from Nasrallah v. Barr. A CAT claim pauses removal to a specific dangerous place. It doesn’t undo the order that authorized removal in the first place. Mejia-Henriquez never challenged that order. So there was nothing left for the court to undo.

His lawyers offered two ways to keep the case alive. First, the ten-year bar he now faces on reentering the United States. The court said that bar isn’t a result of the CAT ruling — it flows from the removal order he never challenged, so winning the CAT claim wouldn’t lift it. Second, an ICE policy that lets the agency facilitate some removed people’s return. The court found that policy doesn’t apply either: the government told the court Mejia-Henriquez is suspected of MS-13 membership, a group it has designated a foreign terrorist organization, and he’s in Salvadoran criminal custody. Extraordinary circumstances, the court said. And even if the policy did apply, no U.S. court can order a foreign government to release a prisoner from its own system.

The panel also addressed, directly, the comparison sitting in the background: Noem v. Abrego Garcia. That case also involved a Salvadoran man removed and detained. But the government there conceded the removal itself was illegal. Mejia-Henriquez never made that argument. The court called the resemblance surface-level.

What Bove wanted instead

That’s the majority opinion — the one all three judges joined. Bove’s concurrence goes somewhere the majority didn’t.

His argument: under the relevant statute, CAT claims can only be reviewed together with a challenge to a final removal order. Mejia-Henriquez brought a CAT claim alone. Bove’s position is that a standalone CAT claim, with no challenge to the removal order attached, doesn’t give a federal appeals court jurisdiction to hear it at all — not because the case became moot along the way, but because it was never properly in court to begin with.

That’s a bigger claim than the one the majority made. Mootness is fact-specific — it depends on what happened to this petitioner after his case was filed. Bove’s jurisdictional argument isn’t fact-specific. It would apply to anyone who brings a CAT-only claim, whether or not they’ve been removed, whether or not their case becomes moot.

He’s not writing on a blank slate. Bove cites a dissent from Judge Matey in a recent Third Circuit case, a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court case that left the same question open on remand, and a fight at the Fourth Circuit over whether a “placeholder” petition — filed without a real challenge to the removal order — can manufacture jurisdiction that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Bove calls that placeholder concept fake.

If that reasoning spreads beyond this one concurrence, it would close a door that’s currently open in several circuits: the ability to bring a CAT-only claim to a federal appeals court without also fighting the underlying removal order. Right now, it’s one judge’s opinion, joined by one colleague. It is not the law of the circuit. But it’s a preview of where Bove wants the law to go, and he’s now positioned on a court that gets to decide.

What the ruling leaves open

The Third Circuit never decided whether Mejia-Henriquez would have been tortured in El Salvador. It never decided whether the immigration judge was right to disbelieve him. Those questions are closed now, not because they were answered, but because the case ran out of the kind of harm a court can still fix.

He is still in San Luis Mariona. Whatever happens to him there is happening outside the reach of the case that was supposed to decide whether he’d be safe. And the judge once accused of wanting courts to have less power over the executive branch just wrote an opinion arguing courts should have less power over cases like this one.

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She’s been living as a woman for more than thirty years. She was born with sex chromosome mosaicism, an intersex condition, and assigned male at birth. As a teenager she learned about the mosaicism and began living as a woman. In the 1990s she had surgery, changed the sex marker on her birth certificate and Social Security records, and eventually got her passport changed to female too. That passport doesn’t expire until 2032.

On January 20, 2025, the day he returned to office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168. It declared that “sex” means an “immutable biological classification” fixed “at conception,” and it directed the State Department and CBP to make passports and Global Entry cards reflect that definition. In practice, that meant reverting sex markers to what a person’s documentation showed at birth.

Jansen, proceeding pro se at first and later with appointed counsel, sued. She asked the court to stop the government from applying the policy to her passport and her Global Entry card while the case proceeds.

On August 24, Judge Loren Alikhan of the D.D.C. said no.

What the Court Actually Decided

A preliminary injunction requires a plaintiff to show four things: a likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm without relief, that the balance of equities favors her, and that an injunction serves the public interest. Alikhan’s opinion stops at the second factor. In plain terms: she ruled that Jansen hadn’t shown she’d be seriously and imminently harmed before the case could be resolved on its own timeline, so the court didn’t need to reach the other three questions, including whether the policy itself is constitutional.

The court did not rule that EO 14168’s passport and Global Entry policies are lawful. It ruled that Jansen, specifically, right now, hasn’t shown the kind of harm that justifies emergency relief before trial.

Why the Passport Claim Failed

Jansen’s passport currently displays a female marker and remains valid until 2032. The State Department’s own policy says passports stay valid until they expire, are replaced, or are affirmatively invalidated. Alikhan found that Jansen isn’t facing the harm she’s worried about, being forced to travel with a passport that doesn’t match her lived sex, because the document she’s actually carrying right now doesn’t have that problem.

Jansen’s lawyers argued the government could revoke her passport at any time, or that she could lose it and need a replacement before 2032. The court called both scenarios too speculative to support an injunction. That fear is understandable. But the harm hasn’t happened, and isn’t close enough to happening, to justify the kind of emergency order Jansen asked for.

Why the Global Entry Claim Failed

Global Entry is a different story procedurally, because Jansen’s membership is actually up for renewal now, and she says she’s avoided renewing it because she doesn’t want a male marker on the new card. Here the court’s reasoning shifts. Global Entry, unlike a passport, is a voluntary program. Jansen isn’t required to have it to enter the country; it just gets her through a shorter line at the border. She told the court she has no international travel planned. So even accepting that she’d lose the benefit, the court found that losing expedited processing doesn’t rise to irreparable harm.

The court was more sympathetic on one point: Jansen’s stated reason for using the Global Entry card as her everyday ID instead of her driver’s license, to avoid the awkwardness of explaining her address confidentiality status, is a real inconvenience. But “inconvenience,” even a socially loaded one, isn’t the legal standard. Alikhan noted that Jansen still has her passport, which shows the correct marker and no home address, as an alternative. The court called relying on a passport for daily ID “cumbersome,” not impossible.

The Line That’s Going to Get Quoted Out of Context

In a footnote, Alikhan wrote that she’s “somewhat skeptical” Jansen’s intersex identity is enough to distinguish her case from Orr v. Trump, the case where the Supreme Court, on a limited record, stayed a class-wide injunction and found transgender plaintiffs unlikely to succeed on similar passport claims. The Court in Orr reasoned that a passport listing sex at birth “merely attests to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”

That footnote is going to travel. It shouldn’t travel as a ruling. Alikhan says explicitly, in the same footnote, that she doesn’t need to resolve the question at this stage of the case. It’s a preview of how the merits argument might go if this case gets there, not a decision on the merits themselves. Preliminary skepticism from a judge managing a docket is not the same thing as a holding, and the order itself doesn’t rule on whether Jansen’s intersex status changes the constitutional analysis.

What Happens Next

The government now has until September 8 to respond to Jansen’s amended complaint. The underlying claims, that the passport and Global Entry policies violate equal protection, privacy, free speech, and the APA, are all still live. This order closes the door on emergency relief. It doesn’t close the case.

What’s left open is the harder question the court didn’t reach: whether a policy built around sex “at conception” survives constitutional scrutiny when applied to someone whose own body doesn’t sort cleanly into that definition, someone who has spent thirty years being seen, identified, and documented as a woman. Alikhan’s opinion doesn’t answer that. It just says Jansen will have to keep making that case the ordinary way, on the merits, without the emergency posture she asked for.

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Not her name. Not how long she’d lived there. Not whether she had status. They arrested her anyway. She was released only after agents saw her green card.

Her case, and the cases of four other Kern County residents, plus the United Farm Workers of America, hit a milestone this week. Not the one they were hoping for. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sent their case back to the district court on a threshold question: who, exactly, is allowed to sue.

What the operation was

In January 2025, Border Patrol agents from the El Centro Sector traveled more than 300 miles from the border to Kern County, California, a region with no meaningful connection to a border crossing. Over three days, they ran what the government itself later described as a coordinated operation. Plaintiffs’ lawyers called it something else in their briefing to the Ninth Circuit: a trial run. The same tactics surfaced later in immigration operations across the country: stopping people based on apparent ethnicity or occupation, arresting them without individually assessing flight risk, pressuring them toward “voluntary” departure.

Border Patrol’s own numbers: 60 agents, 78 arrests, all of people the agency says were unlawfully present. UFW and the individual plaintiffs don’t dispute that some of the people swept up lacked status. Their claim is narrower and, legally, more specific: the agents who stopped them didn’t have reasonable suspicion to stop them in the first place, and didn’t assess flight risk before arresting them. Both are requirements, one under the Fourth Amendment, the other under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2), the statute governing warrantless immigration arrests.

Aguilera Martinez’s stop illustrates the theory. She wasn’t targeted because agents had information connecting her to unlawful presence. She was stopped, plaintiffs allege, because of how she looked and where she was. Agents asked her nothing about her background, her time in the country, her status. That absence of inquiry is itself the constitutional problem: you can’t establish reasonable suspicion you never tried to develop.

What the district court did

UFW and five Kern County residents sued in the Eastern District of California in February 2025, seeking to represent three proposed classes: people stopped without reasonable suspicion, people arrested without a flight-risk determination, and people pressured into voluntary departure without a knowing waiver of their right to see an immigration judge. The district court granted a preliminary injunction. It ordered Border Patrol to document arrests, hand that documentation to class counsel, publicize a policy governing stops and arrests, and train agents on both the policy and the injunction itself.

The government appealed to the Ninth Circuit. Not, at this stage, on the merits of whether the stops violated the Fourth Amendment. On a narrower and, procedurally, more fundamental question: did the plaintiffs have standing to seek an injunction in the first place.

The standing problem

Standing to sue for an injunction is not the same as standing to sue for damages. If you’re suing over money owed for a past wrong, you generally just have to show the wrong happened to you. If you’re suing to stop something from happening in the future, the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in Los Angeles v. Lyons requires more. You have to show a real likelihood it will happen to you again. Not just that it happened once. Not just that you’re afraid it might recur.

In plain terms: past harm alone doesn’t buy you a seat at the table for future relief. You need a credible reason to think you, specifically, are still in the line of fire.

The government’s argument to the Ninth Circuit was that the district court skipped this analysis. Rather than asking whether these plaintiffs faced a real, ongoing risk of being stopped again, the district court’s standing discussion looked backward. It assessed what happened to the plaintiffs during the three-day January operation, the way you’d evaluate a damages claim, not a request to stop future conduct.

This isn’t an abstract technicality. The Supreme Court applied exactly this framework three months ago in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a companion case out of Los Angeles also involving UFW as a plaintiff. There, the Court found the plaintiffs likely lacked standing for a broad injunction under the same Lyons rule. What matters, the Court said, is the “reality of the threat of repeated injury,” not fear alone. That decision changed how lower courts in the Ninth Circuit are expected to handle standing in these suspicionless-stop cases, and it’s the backdrop for what happens next in Fresno.

What the panel decided, and didn’t

The Ninth Circuit panel, Judges Schroeder, Christen, and Forrest, agreed with the government on the standing question. The order is short and its holding is precise: the district court “failed to engage in the correct standing analysis before granting preliminary prospective injunctive relief.” The panel remanded “for the limited purpose of addressing standing.”

That’s the entire ruling. It doesn’t touch whether Border Patrol had reasonable suspicion to stop Aguilera Martinez or anyone else, whether the § 1357(a)(2) flight-risk requirement was violated, or whether the injunction itself was right on the merits. It sends one question back to Fresno: do these plaintiffs have standing to seek relief for the future.

What happens now

The case returns to the Eastern District of California, where the district court has to redo the standing analysis under the Lyons framework. Not whether Border Patrol wronged these plaintiffs in January 2025, but whether there’s a real, ongoing likelihood they’ll be stopped again without reasonable suspicion. That’s a fact-intensive inquiry, and it’s the same one now playing out in the parallel Los Angeles litigation.

The preliminary injunction, the documentation requirements, the public policy, the agent training, stays in place for now. But its legal footing is unsettled until the district court answers the question the Ninth Circuit just sent back.

Aguilera Martinez’s stop hasn’t been ruled lawful. It hasn’t been ruled unlawful. It’s still what it was the day it happened: a woman with 35 years of lawful status, questioned about nothing, held until a green card spoke for her. Whether the courts will let people like her ask a judge to stop it from happening again is still, more than a year later, an open question.

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The first vote revived a plan to put Donald Trump’s name on the building. The second revived a plan to close it for two years. A different court, a different bench, might call this persistence. Judge Christopher Cooper has already ruled on both theories once. He ruled against the Board both times.

This is the story of what the Board did next — and what a routine correction filed today reveals about how far this new attempt actually goes.

The fight this board already lost

To understand why an Aug. 13 board vote is news, you have to know what happened the first time.

In February 2025, Trump removed the Kennedy Center’s existing board and installed himself as chairman — a role no president has held before. By December, the reconstituted board had voted to rename the Center after him during a meeting where Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio trustee by virtue of her congressional seat, was repeatedly muted when she tried to object. The board called that vote unanimous. It was not.

Beatty sued. Her core argument: the Kennedy Center’s governing statute is specific about who the building honors, and a board can’t vote its way around a federal law.

Judge Cooper agreed. In a merits ruling this spring, he held that the Center’s organic statute “takes pains to ensure that the Kennedy Center’s public spaces honor President Kennedy and President Kennedy alone.” In plain terms: Congress didn’t leave the naming question open for a board to decide. It answered it, in the statute that created the building’s legal identity, and reserved it for one person.

The May bylaw amendment that had stripped Beatty and other ex officio trustees of their voting rights was found void along with it. Both rulings became permanent injunctions. The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit — that appeal, No. 26-5224, is still pending. A separate closure vote from March, ordered without a construction plan, budget, or named contractor on record, was blocked by a preliminary injunction that the government also tried and failed to stay pending appeal.

Trump’s name came down from the building on June 13, under court order. Workers put up scaffolding and a privacy tarp the same night, and left it there for weeks after the sign was gone — long enough that Cooper ordered the parties to explain, in writing, what the tarp was actually for.

That’s the posture heading into August: a renaming scheme voided, a bylaw maneuver voided, a closure vote enjoined, and a government appeal still working its way through the circuit court.

The August 13 vote

None of that stopped the Board from trying again.

The recognition resolution passed Aug. 13 doesn’t call itself a renaming. That’s not incidental — it’s almost certainly the point. Where the December 2025 vote tried to rename the Center outright, this resolution frames the changes as “recognition” of Trump’s fundraising and restoration work, tied to a set of triggering conditions rather than a straight name change.

What it actually does, according to the resolution’s own text:

• Inscribes, below the Center’s name, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts / renovated and restored by / President Donald J. Trump.”

• Adds a second inscription crediting “The Trump Kennedy Center Fund” once that fund’s endowment reaches $100 million.

• Renames the physical grounds — unnamed in the governing statute — “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

• Directs the Center’s Executive Director and COO to pursue “all legal means” to carry this out, starting 14 days after adoption. That clock points to roughly Aug. 27.

The same day, the Board also voted again to close the main building for two years — a second attempt at the closure plan Cooper already enjoined in the spring. Trustees received the planning packet for that vote on Aug. 11, two days before they voted on it. That’s the same compressed timeline the court faulted the first time around, when it found the Board had moved to close a national memorial without producing plans, an architect, or a budget anyone could examine.

Plaintiff’s filings flag a specific number worth sitting with: one slide given to trustees put the National Symphony Orchestra’s projected earnings at $6.6 million if the Center stays open, and $28.3 million if it closes. Whether that discrepancy gets explained, and how, is now bound up in a live discovery dispute — Beatty’s team wants discovery before any ruling on the closure injunction; the government wants to skip straight to summary judgment briefing. Which one Judge Cooper picks will determine how much of the Board’s actual deliberation becomes public record.

What the court has and hasn’t done about it

Cooper hasn’t ruled on any of this yet. What he’s done is set a clock.

An Aug. 19 minute order established a compressed briefing schedule on Beatty’s anticipated motion for relief: her motion was due today, Aug. 20; the government’s opposition is due Aug. 24; her reply is due Aug. 26. No hearing date has been set, and no stay has been ordered by the court itself.

That last point matters, because it’s easy to misread this as more settled than it is. The Board has voluntarily agreed not to act on the recognition resolution before Sept. 8. That’s a commitment the defendants made in a joint status report — not a court order, and not a guarantee. If Cooper doesn’t rule before then, the Board is free, by its own account, to move forward on Sept. 8 regardless.

There’s also a filing in this docket the public can’t currently see. On Aug. 18, a motion for leave to file under seal was submitted in the names of a long list of officials tied to the Center’s board and the administration — Trump, Vance, Wiles, Bondi, Rubio among them, per the docket entry. What’s actually in that filing isn’t public. It would be a mistake to characterize its contents beyond the fact that it exists and is sealed.

The correction filed today

Today’s filing is smaller than any of that, but it clarifies something the earlier record got wrong.

When the Center’s counsel attached the Aug. 13 resolution to Monday’s joint status report, they sent the Department of Justice the wrong version — a draft, not the one the Board actually voted on and passed. That came out today in a notice of errata, backed by a sworn declaration from Joseph LaFauci, the Center’s Vice President for Board Relations and Government Affairs, signed and dated Aug. 20. LaFauci states plainly that the mix-up was unintentional, that the version attached today is the true and correct one, and that the resolution “was read into the record once presented.”

The correction matters because of what the accurate text actually says. The inscription language isn’t simply a credit line added beneath the Center’s existing name. As passed, the resolution’s own inscription block reads “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — inserting the word “Memorial” into the institution’s name itself, not appending Trump’s name below an otherwise unchanged title.

That’s a meaningfully different act than a plaque. Cooper’s spring ruling turned on the statute’s specificity about what the Center’s public spaces are permitted to honor. A resolution that alters the name inscribed on the building — even framed as “recognition” rather than renaming — sits closer to the theory he already rejected than the earlier reporting on this vote suggested. Whether the court reads it that way is now part of what’s briefed by Aug. 26.

What’s actually at stake

Strip away the procedural layers and the question in front of Judge Cooper is simple: does an injunction from a federal court survive a board’s decision to describe the same outcome in different words.

Beatty has already won this fight once, on the merits, with a written opinion that reads the statute plainly. What she’s litigating now isn’t a new legal theory. It’s whether the ruling she already has means anything the second time the Board tests it.

The wire coverage made this sound simple: DOJ says the judge got it wrong, DOJ says there was plenty of evidence to charge him, DOJ is unhappy with an Obama appointee. All true.

But underneath that framing, the brief is asking for something much bigger than a second chance at prosecuting one man. It’s asking the court to adopt a rule so broad that no defendant, in any future case, could ever again get the legal protection that got Abrego Garcia’s case thrown out. It wouldn’t matter how obviously political the charging decision looked.

To understand why, you need to know what actually happened here, and what the government now wants to make legally irrelevant.

The backstory

In November 2022, Tennessee state troopers pulled Abrego Garcia over on the highway. He had nine passengers in the car and no luggage for a supposed long-distance trip. The troopers let him go with a warning and alerted an FBI tip line. Homeland Security opened an investigation into a possible smuggling operation. It sat open for a few years without much happening. Then, in April 2025, shortly after Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, HSI closed it. The case file said the government had “accomplished all goals for this case.”

Sixteen days later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia back after it admitted it had mistakenly deported him. The Fourth Circuit denied the government’s request to pause that order on April 17. HSI reopened the smuggling investigation that same day.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued this was retaliation dressed up as law enforcement. Judge Waverly Crenshaw, the Tennessee federal judge overseeing the criminal case, agreed. In May, he dismissed the indictment, writing that “the objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit... the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” That’s the ruling DOJ is now appealing.

Explainer: what is “vindictive prosecution,” legally?

The Constitution doesn’t let the government punish someone for exercising a legal right, like filing a lawsuit or winning in court, by hitting them with criminal charges afterward. If a defendant can show enough evidence that this might be what happened, courts apply something called a “presumption of vindictiveness.” The burden flips, and the government has to prove it would have brought the same charges anyway, for legitimate reasons, regardless of the lawsuit. Crenshaw found Abrego Garcia had cleared that bar, gave the government a chance to rebut it at a hearing in February, and ruled that DOJ hadn’t done so.

DOJ’s argument: it wasn’t me

The centerpiece of DOJ’s appeal is what lawyers call a “no personal stake” argument, and it’s worth translating out of legalese because it’s doing almost all the work in this brief.

The argument goes like this. Robert McGuire, the prosecutor who actually signed off on the indictment, was never a party to Abrego Garcia’s immigration lawsuit in Maryland. He didn’t lose anything when Abrego Garcia won that case. So even if someone else in the government had a vindictive motive, like then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who publicly tied the reopened investigation to Abrego Garcia’s court win, DOJ argues it legally cannot be pinned on McGuire. Under the cases DOJ cites, a court can only presume vindictiveness in the specific decision-maker who personally had something to lose. Anyone else’s bad motive, in this reading, just doesn’t count. DOJ calls Crenshaw’s opposite theory, that vindictiveness can travel down a chain of command from an angry official to the prosecutor who eventually signs the papers, a “cat’s paw” theory that no court has ever adopted.

It’s a clever argument, because it doesn’t ask the appeals court to say Crenshaw was wrong about the facts. It asks the court to say the facts don’t matter, because they attach to the wrong person.

The admission buried in DOJ’s own brief

Here’s what makes that argument harder to sit with than it first appears. DOJ’s own brief, in the course of describing McGuire as an independent decision-maker, includes this line: McGuire “ultimately made his decision based on ‘the proof,’ even though it was against the recommendation of his Criminal Chief, Ben Schrader.”

That’s the government’s own filing, conceding that its lead prosecutor charged Abrego Garcia over the stated objection of his own top deputy. DOJ means this as a point in its favor. McGuire, the brief argues, weighed Schrader’s disagreement and made the call himself. At the hearing, McGuire testified he considered his colleague’s input and disagreed on the merits, and separately testified, “I also am not going to do something that I think is wrong to keep my job.”

But the same underlying record, the email chain entered into the case file this month as Exhibit 1 from February’s evidentiary hearing, shows what surrounded that decision. Aakash Singh, an attorney in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, checked in with McGuire’s office repeatedly through late April and May of 2025, at one point instructing the team to “keep close hold until we get clearance.” On May 20, McGuire relayed to his own colleagues that he’d heard, secondhand, that the Deputy Attorney General and his top deputy “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” Schrader’s memo recommending against charging went up the same chain around the same period.

DOJ’s brief addresses this too, in its own way. It argues Singh’s communications were “routine coordination” required by the Justice Manual for high-profile cases, calls them “a one-way street” of logistics, and points to McGuire’s testimony that no one at ODAG, DOJ leadership, or the White House ever told him what to charge. That’s a real defense, not a dodge, and it’s worth taking seriously.

Whether “keep close hold” and a note about what the DAG and PDAG wanted reads as routine logistics or as something closer to pressure is exactly the question this appeal turns on. DOJ says it’s the former. The paper trail it just filed into the public record is what the Sixth Circuit, and now anyone else, gets to read for themselves.

The bigger ask, and the one to actually worry about

DOJ doesn’t stop at saying Crenshaw misapplied the law to these facts. It goes further, arguing that the presumption of vindictiveness should never apply to a first-time charging decision at all. In its view, the protection should only kick in when someone was already charged, exercised some right, and then got hit with worse charges as punishment. Citing a concurring opinion from a Sixth Circuit judge in an unrelated case, DOJ notes that “nearly every other circuit refuses to apply a presumption of vindictiveness in the pretrial context,” and argues no court has ever extended it to an original indictment.

If the Sixth Circuit accepts that, it wouldn’t just undo this one case. No defendant, anywhere in the circuit, could ever again use this protection against an original indictment, regardless of the timing, regardless of the evidence, regardless of how the case looked. Crenshaw’s specific findings, like the investigation reopened the same day the Fourth Circuit denied a stay, the “keep close hold” instruction, Blanche’s own public statements tying the case to Abrego Garcia’s court win, wouldn’t be wrong under that rule. They’d just stop being the kind of thing a court is allowed to look at.

That’s the argument that outlives this case, win or lose.

The one narrower argument that might actually work

There’s a third piece of the brief worth flagging because it’s the most technical and, honestly, the most persuasive on its own terms. After the investigation reopened, McGuire’s team developed real new evidence: they reinterviewed a cooperating witness multiple times, found a second witness in Texas with no apparent motive to lie, pulled phone records showing Abrego Garcia had called that cooperator during the original 2022 traffic stop, and obtained license-plate reader data showing his car had actually been in Texas, not St. Louis, contradicting what he’d told the trooper.

Crenshaw ruled that none of this counted as genuinely new, because prosecutors could have found it earlier if they’d tried, and applied a “due diligence” standard borrowed from Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the rule that normally governs convicted defendants asking for a new trial based on evidence they didn’t have at the time. DOJ calls this “inexplicable,” and it’s a fair hit. Rule 33 was built for a defendant appealing a conviction, not for a court second-guessing how quickly a prosecutor’s office worked. DOJ says it isn’t aware of any court that has ever imported that standard into a vindictive-prosecution ruling, and based on what’s in this brief, that appears to be true. Whatever happens with the bigger arguments, this narrower one has a real chance.

The Blanche problem, tackled head-on

Unlike the other two arguments, DOJ doesn’t try to avoid the toughest piece of Crenshaw’s opinion. It spends several pages on it directly: then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s June 2025 Fox News interview, the one Crenshaw leaned on hardest, where Blanche said the government began “investigating” Abrego Garcia after a Maryland judge “questioned” the deportation decision.

DOJ quotes the interview at greater length than Crenshaw’s opinion did, and the fuller version does complicate the picture somewhat. Blanche also said the government had “a responsibility to protect the American people,” and that it had to check its own prior claims about Abrego Garcia once a judge cast doubt on them. DOJ’s argument is that responding to a court’s skepticism by reinvestigating a public-safety claim is a legitimate governmental function, and that Blanche’s comments addressed the investigation rather than the specific decision to indict.

That’s a real argument. It’s also one that has to explain away the plain sequence Blanche himself described on camera: a judge doubted the government’s case, and “so we said okay, we’ll look into it.” DOJ’s brief never really answers why an investigation that had already been closed, with the case file noting all goals had been accomplished, needed to reopen the same day a stay was denied rather than any point in the two and a half years it sat open before that. The brief calls that timing legally irrelevant. Whether it’s also unpersuasive is the question the Sixth Circuit now has to answer.

Judge Crenshaw’s dismissal opinion: courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/crenshaw-ruling-abreg-garcia-vindictive-prosecution-indictment-dismissed.pdf

DOJ’s opening brief: justice.gov/usao-mdtn/media/1458166/dl?inline=

United States v. Abrego Garcia, No. 26-5555 (6th Cir.)

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Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez crossed into the United States in 2009. He stayed sixteen years. This spring, immigration agents picked him up under a warrant and placed him in removal proceedings in Tacoma, Washington. An immigration judge denied him bond. The reason had nothing to do with danger or flight risk. It came down to a policy change the government had made only months earlier: someone in his position wasn’t entitled to a bond hearing at all.

He eventually got that hearing. He was denied bond anyway. He chose to leave the country rather than keep fighting from inside a detention cell.

He was gone before the Ninth Circuit ever ruled on his case.

That detail carries the whole case in miniature: the legal question outlasted the person who raised it. On Thursday, a divided three-judge panel decided that question anyway, and the answer cuts against the policy that put Rodriguez Vazquez in custody in the first place.

What the government changed, and when

For nearly thirty years, immigration law drew a clean line. Noncitizens caught trying to enter the country at the border were mandatorily detained, no exceptions. Noncitizens already living inside the country, even if they’d entered illegally years earlier, were held under a different, more forgiving statute. They could ask an immigration judge for bond. Plenty got it.

In July 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rewrote that understanding. New guidance declared that anyone present in the interior without having been formally admitted was now subject to the border statute’s mandatory detention rule instead of the discretionary one. People who’d lived here for years, built families, or held jobs lost access to bond hearings entirely. The Board of Immigration Appeals endorsed the shift two months later in a published decision, Matter of Yajure Hurtado.

The practical effect was immediate and large. Thousands of people already living inside the United States, some for a decade or more, went from bond-eligible to mandatorily detained overnight, without any change in the underlying statute. They responded the only way available to them: habeas petitions, filed by the thousands, in federal courts across the country.

Rodriguez Vazquez’s case was one of those petitions. It became the vehicle for deciding whether the government’s new reading of the law could survive appellate review in the Ninth Circuit.

The word doing all the work

The relevant statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), requires mandatory detention for an alien who is “seeking admission” and isn’t “clearly and beyond a doubt entitled” to enter. A separate provision, § 1225(a)(1), “deems” anyone present in the United States without prior admission to be an “applicant for admission.” That label describes a legal status. It doesn’t describe what the person is actually doing at any given moment.

The government’s argument: those two phrases mean the same thing. An “applicant for admission” is, by definition, “seeking admission.” So the moment someone qualifies as the former, they’re automatically doing the latter, even if they crossed the border a decade ago and have no plans to leave.

In plain terms: the government wanted the court to read “applicant for admission” and “seeking admission” as interchangeable labels, so that being classified one way automatically triggers the other.

Judge Daniel Bress, writing for the majority, said no. The court had already confronted this exact move in a 2020 case called Torres v. Barr. There, the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, held that being deemed an “applicant for admission” under § 1225(a)(1) doesn’t mean a person is perpetually “applying for admission” for purposes of other parts of the statute. The label is a legal fiction built for one purpose. It doesn’t automatically carry over into other parts of the statute.

Bress applied that same logic here. If Congress didn’t mean “applicant for admission” to put someone in a permanent state of applying, it’s hard to see why it would put that same person in a permanent state of “seeking” something. “Seeking,” unlike “applicant for admission,” isn’t a defined term of art in the statute. It carries its ordinary meaning. Ordinarily, we don’t think of someone who’s lived in a country for sixteen years as actively seeking to enter it.

Why the government’s reading has to answer for thirty years of practice

The opinion also leans hard on something simpler than wordplay: what the government has actually done since 1996, when this statutory language was written.

For three decades, across five presidential administrations, immigration authorities consistently treated people like Rodriguez Vazquez as bond-eligible. That held without controversy until last year. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion invokes a principle the Supreme Court used earlier this year in a case about IEEPA tariffs: when no administration has ever exercised a claimed power, in a law that’s been on the books that long, that’s “strong evidence” the power was never actually there.

The government’s response is that authority granted by Congress “cannot evaporate through lack of administrative exercise.” In other words, an agency’s failure to use a power doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it. True as a general matter. But the court’s point cuts the other way here: if Congress had truly handed the executive branch the authority to mandatorily detain potentially millions of people already living in the country, it’s a strange thing for every administration, Republican and Democratic alike, to have missed it for three decades, until a single guidance memo discovered it in July 2025.

The opinion adds a structural argument along the same lines. If Congress in 1996 meant to impose a sweeping new mandatory-detention regime covering people already inside the country, the panel reasoned, it’s odd that lawmakers would have done it through a cross-referenced deeming provision tucked into the statute’s opening lines, rather than saying so plainly. Courts generally expect that kind of major policy shift to come with clearer language than a single definitional cross-reference.

What this ruling does not do

It’s worth being precise about the boundaries here, because there’s a version of this story that overstates it.

This ruling leaves expedited removal alone. Anyone caught trying to cross the border falls under a separate mandatory-detention track, § 1225(b)(1), that this decision doesn’t touch. Anyone detained under § 1226(c), which mandates detention for people with qualifying criminal convictions or national security concerns, including provisions Congress just expanded last year in the Laken Riley Act, stays in mandatory detention too. Both categories remain no-bond, exactly as before.

What changes is narrower, but still consequential: people arrested in the interior of the country, without a disqualifying criminal record, who entered without authorization. Under this ruling, they’re back to what the law required for thirty years before last summer. They get a chance to ask an immigration judge for bond, with release possible but not guaranteed while their case proceeds.

The dissent, and where this leaves things

Judge Carlos Bea dissented, and his reasoning isn’t frivolous. His argument is built on ordinary usage: an applicant for admission is one who applies for admission, and applying for something and seeking it mean the same thing in plain English. He points to the Fifth Circuit’s phrasing on this exact question: when someone applies for something, he is necessarily seeking it. An applicant for a college, on that logic, is understood to be seeking admission to that college, whether or not they take any further action. Congress’s decision to deem certain people “applicants for admission,” Bea concluded, put them in the “seeking admission” category too, with no further showing required.

Bea also leaned on statutory purpose in the other direction from the majority. The 1996 law that created this framework was explicitly designed, he argued, to put people who entered illegally on equal footing with those who present themselves lawfully at the border, eliminating a pre-1996 anomaly where illegal entrants sometimes got better procedural treatment than people who did things by the book. Reading the statute to give illegal entrants continued access to bond, while people applying properly at the border get none, reproduces exactly the inequality Congress meant to fix.

The point has real force. The majority’s answer is that Congress can pursue a purpose only as far as the text it actually wrote, and the text here, on the panel’s reading, doesn’t get the government where it wants to go.

The same dispute has already reached six other circuit courts, and they’re split. The Second, Sixth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits sided with detainees, as the Ninth just did, though the Sixth and Eleventh did so over their own dissents. The Seventh Circuit reached the same practical outcome without a majority opinion behind it. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits went the other way, each over a dissent of its own.

Count it up, and six circuits now read the statute the way Rodriguez Vazquez did. Two read it the government’s way.

Somewhere, whether he’s tracking it or not, a man who spent sixteen years building a life in Washington state, and who left the country rather than keep fighting from a detention cell in Tacoma, is the reason a federal appeals court just told the government it read its own detention law wrong.

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Source list

• Rodriguez Vazquez v. Bostock, et al., No. 25-6842 (9th Cir. July 30, 2026), ECF 87.1 (Bress, J., joined by McKeown, J.; Bea, J., dissenting)

• On appeal from Rodriguez Vazquez v. Bostock, No. 3:25-cv-05240-TMC (W.D. Wash.)

• Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I. & N. Dec. 216 (BIA 2025)

• Torres v. Barr, 976 F.3d 918 (9th Cir. 2020) (en banc)

• Barbosa da Cunha v. Freden, 175 F.4th 61 (2d Cir. 2026)

• Lopez-Campos v. Raycraft, 175 F.4th 713 (6th Cir. 2026)

• Santillan Quiroz v. Mullin, 2026 WL 1876709 (10th Cir. June 30, 2026)

• Hernandez Alvarez v. Warden, 175 F.4th 1258 (11th Cir. 2026)

• Castañon-Nava v. DHS, 175 F.4th 828 (7th Cir. 2026)

• Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 166 F.4th 494 (5th Cir. 2026)

• Avila v. Bondi, 170 F.4th 1128 (8th Cir. 2026)

Fourteen months later, he’s still fighting over that post.

On July 28, Comey’s lawyers filed three documents in the Eastern District of North Carolina. A motion to dismiss the indictment for vindictive and selective prosecution. A 54-page memorandum supporting it. And a separate motion asking the court to unseal the grand jury record. None of the three settles for arguing the case is weak. They argue the process that produced it, twice, was built to reach one result.

What the motion asks for

The filing, docketed as No. 4:26-CR-00016-FL-RN, makes two constitutional claims. Vindictive prosecution: that the government charged Comey to punish him for exercising a right, here his First Amendment right to criticize President Trump. Selective prosecution: that Comey was singled out for conduct the government routinely lets slide when other people engage in it.

Proving either takes more than showing the case is weak. Comey’s lawyers have to show the decision to bring it was corrupted from the start, either by animus toward Comey specifically or by a double standard applied because of who he is.

The remedy they’re asking for is dismissal with prejudice, meaning the government couldn’t simply refile. Failing that, they want discovery into how the indictment came together and an evidentiary hearing where DOJ officials would have to justify the decision under oath.

The first indictment, and why it collapsed

This isn’t the first time the government has charged Comey over the seashells post. In September 2025, according to the filing, Trump posted directly to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi on Truth Social, demanding action against Comey by name: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Within 48 hours, Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no prosecutorial background, was sworn in as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Four days later, on her fourth day in office, she took the case to a grand jury.

That grand jury didn’t simply rubber-stamp the charges. It first returned a no true bill on a three-count indictment. The panel then stayed past normal court hours and came back with a different, two-count indictment, passed by a two-vote margin, at 6:47 p.m.

There’s a gap in the record from that same evening. The disclosure motion says the transcript shows a blank stretch from 4:28 p.m. to 6:47 p.m., the exact window between the rejected indictment and the one that replaced it. Halligan told the court, in an unsworn statement, that the gap was just the grand jury’s private deliberations. She never swore to that under oath.

A magistrate judge reviewed the sealed grand jury materials anyway, and didn’t like what he found. He identified a witness who’d been briefed on potentially privileged communications between Comey and his attorneys on the very day that witness testified as the grand jury’s only witness. He also found two outright misstatements of law delivered to the panel. He ordered the entire record disclosed.

That order never got tested on the merits. The presiding judge stayed it pending further briefing. Before the briefing finished, the case was dismissed on a separate ground entirely: a judge assigned to review Halligan’s appointment found it invalid under the Appointments Clause and threw out everything that flowed from it, indictment included. That same judge noted the transcript gap in her own opinion, in passing, without resolving what caused it.

Then the government kept driving.

What changed when Blanche became Acting AG

Bondi was fired not long after, the motion says. Todd Blanche, then serving as Deputy Attorney General, became Acting Attorney General and was reportedly told by the President he was “auditioning” for the permanent job.

Blanche’s aides went back to a stalled, eleven-month-old investigation into the same seashells post, according to the filing, and instructed the Eastern District of North Carolina’s U.S. Attorney, Ellis Boyle, to seek a new indictment. That indictment came down on April 28, 2026, signed by a single assistant U.S. attorney with a background in state Medicaid fraud, not federal criminal prosecution, who had become an AUSA only two days earlier. He has since withdrawn from the case and transferred to the Civil Division.

The vindictive-prosecution claim

Winning on vindictive prosecution requires Comey’s lawyers to show two things: that a government actor held genuine animus toward him, and that he wouldn’t have been charged without it. They lean on Trump’s own public statements for both, years of calling Comey “a dirty cop,” “a weak and untruthful slime ball,” someone who “should be prosecuted,” building to the direct September 2025 demand that the Justice Department act.

They also lean on a recent case out of Tennessee, where a court dismissed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia after finding the government had revived a stale, years-old investigation right after Abrego Garcia won a legal challenge. Comey’s team says the same pattern played out here. In the Tennessee case, the court found the government had failed to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness once it was raised.

The selective-prosecution claim

This argument doesn’t turn on what Trump wanted. It turns on what everyone else got away with. Blanche himself has acknowledged that “86 47” posts happen constantly and don’t lead to indictments, and Comey’s lawyers quote him saying so. Then they name names: a former Trump campaign official who posted “86 46” about President Biden, a Trump attorney who said a DHS official “should be drawn and quartered... shot,” a former Trump aide who talked about putting officials’ “heads on pikes,” a sitting congressman who posted a video of himself stabbing a colleague and reposted it after the House censured him for it.

None of them faced federal charges. Comey did.

What the second warrant applications allegedly leave out

The grand jury disclosure motion doesn’t stop at Patel’s press conference. Its central argument concerns two search warrants obtained in this case, one for Comey’s Apple account in March 2026, one for his and his wife’s Google accounts in May, a month after the indictment. Both, the motion says, were built on the same misleading claims, and those claims most likely made it into the grand jury room too, since nothing changed between the two filings.

One source, referred to in the filing only as Person-1, told investigators that Rudy Giuliani once said “we’ve got to 86 this guy” as mafia code for killing someone, drawing on Giuliani’s experience prosecuting organized crime. The agent’s affidavit repeated that claim. It didn’t mention that the agent’s own investigation had already found the claim untrue.

The affidavit also leaned on Person-1’s opinion that Comey “must have known” the numbers meant a call for violence, given his legal and FBI background. Left out: Person-1 wanted Comey to go to jail, hadn’t spoken to him in years, and had a documented history that included a stint in rehab. None of it made it into the sworn statement.

A third claim implied that Comey’s own attorney, David Kelley, tried to obstruct the investigation by sending a screenshot of the seashells photo instead of the original file. Comey’s team calls that false. The investigator who asked for the photo never requested the original, and the screenshot itself showed the correct time and place it was taken: Emerald Isle, 1:56 p.m., May 15, 2025. When the government sought its second warrant in May, it dropped that claim and swapped in a new one, this time about Google searches by Comey’s wife, Patrice Comey.

Separately, the motion says prosecutors searched and kept privileged communications between Comey and two of his attorneys after setting up a filter process that covered only one of them.

The “true threat” problem

Underneath all of it sits a legal mismatch. The indictment charges Comey under statutes requiring a “true threat,” a serious expression of intent to commit violence, not just speech that unsettles someone. When Patel announced the case, though, he said Comey had “encouraged a threat” on the President’s life. That’s a different and looser theory than the one actually charged. If the prosecutor blurred that same distinction for the grand jury, Comey’s lawyers argue, after eleven months on the investigation, jurors may never have understood that a “call for violence,” even if they believed one occurred, isn’t automatically a crime under the statutes at issue.

The grand jury filing

All of this feeds the request Comey filed the same day: unseal the grand jury transcript and audio, or let the judge review it privately first. The motion returns again to Patel’s press conference, where he told reporters the grand jury had been informed Comey “apologized” for the post and that “as you all now know” he’d deleted it after threatening the President. That framing is false, Comey’s lawyers say. He didn’t withdraw the post as an admission of guilt. By his own account, he took it down out of caution, after learning some people read the numbers differently than he’d intended.

What the court must now decide

None of this has been resolved. U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan hasn’t ruled on whether the indictment stands, whether discovery will be ordered, or whether either grand jury record, the one sealed in Virginia or the one sealed in North Carolina, will ever see daylight. The government has until August 18 to respond. Trial is currently set for October 21 in New Bern.

What’s on the table right now isn’t a verdict on Comey’s guilt or innocence. It’s a question about whether the machinery that produced two indictments over the same Instagram post was working the way it’s supposed to, or whether it was pointed at one man because of who was angry at him.

Sources

United States v. Comey, No. 4:26-CR-00016-FL-RN (E.D.N.C.) — docket via CourtListener
ECF 35–38 (Motions to Dismiss and for Grand Jury Disclosure, filed July 28, 2026)

United States v. Comey, No. 1:25-cr-272 (E.D. Va.) — docket via CourtListener

United States v. Abrego Garcia, No. 3:25-cr-115 (M.D. Tenn.) — docket via CourtListener

18 U.S.C. § 871 — Cornell LII
18 U.S.C. § 875 — Cornell LII
Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e) — Cornell LII

The motion asked for two things. Dismiss the indictment because the prosecution is vindictive, punishment for the SPLC’s political speech. Or, failing that, let the SPLC take discovery into why the Department of Justice decided to charge it. Judge Marks denied both.

What the SPLC argued

The SPLC is charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, over what prosecutors call its “informant program,” paid sources embedded in white nationalist and other extremist groups. The organization’s defense theory has nothing to do with those facts. It argues the case was born of politics.

The FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation division looked into the same informant program starting in 2019, during President Trump’s first term. That investigation was closed without charges under President Biden. It sat dormant for years. Then, the SPLC says, the file was revived after Trump returned to office, around the same time the SPLC was publicly criticizing the administration, and around the same time FBI Director Kash Patel announced the Bureau was cutting ties with the SPLC over its “Hate Map,” calling the organization a “partisan smear machine.”

In October 2025, an FBI incident report characterized the Hate Map itself as a “scheme to defraud.” That report was opened after a conservative coalition, including Liberty Counsel and Turning Point USA, wrote to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller asking that federal agencies stop using SPLC data. The report was closed “without submission” two weeks later. Six months after that, the SPLC was indicted.

Then came what the SPLC’s filings call a “post-indictment media blitz.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC “manufactured the extremism it purports to oppose.” President Trump called the organization “a total scam run by the democrats” during a 60 Minutes interview five days after the indictment. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the SPLC, said in an interview that criticizing one of her “friends” was the kind of thing that gets you criminal charges.

Add it up, the SPLC argued, and the prosecution looks built backward. A target first. A crime found later, dressed in the language of bank fraud to survive a First Amendment problem.

What the court actually decides in this posture

Vindictive prosecution law gives a defendant two paths. The first is a presumption. If the facts fit a pattern courts have already recognized as inherently suspicious, a prosecutor who tacks on new charges only after a defendant demands a trial, for instance, the burden shifts to the government to justify itself. The second is actual vindictiveness, which requires objective evidence that the prosecutor was personally motivated by a desire to punish the defendant for exercising a right, and that the defendant would not have been charged but for that motive. The Eleventh Circuit calls this “exceedingly difficult” to prove, and it is not a figure of speech. A defendant who can’t clear even the lower bar, some evidence of animus connected to the actual charging decision, doesn’t get discovery. Clear that bar, and only then does dismissal become possible.

Judge Marks first rejected the government’s attempt to narrow the doctrine out of existence. The DOJ had argued that vindictive prosecution claims only protect procedural rights exercised during litigation, the right to appeal, the right to demand a trial, not substantive rights like speech. The court called that argument “simply wrong,” citing the Supreme Court’s holding in Hartman v. Moore that the First Amendment bars retaliatory prosecution for speaking out. In plain terms: the SPLC’s theory was legally available to it. The problem is what came next.

No presumption applies here, the court held. Investigations get opened and closed and opened again across administrations for ordinary reasons; different administrations have different enforcement priorities, and the court pointed to Attorneys General Garland and Bondi issuing differently worded charging memoranda as an example of exactly that kind of shift. The closing of a probe under one administration and its revival under the next is, in the court’s words, “susceptible of an innocent explanation just as readily as an improper one.” And if criticizing the government before being indicted were enough to trigger a presumption of vindictiveness, any organization could immunize itself from prosecution simply by speaking out loudly and often.

That left the SPLC needing to show actual vindictiveness. Here the opinion is specific about whose motive counts. Not Congress or the FBI director or the Attorney General’s cable news appearances. The prosecutor. Judge Marks worked through each piece of the SPLC’s evidence and found the same gap running through all of it: statements and pressure from officials outside the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, with nothing connecting any of it to that office’s actual charging decision. Senators Grassley and Lankford wanted the FBI to stop using SPLC data as an intelligence source. They never mentioned fraud. Patel’s statements reflected the FBI’s institutional break with the SPLC, not the prosecutor’s reasoning. Dhillon and Trump’s public comments, however pointed, were never tied by hard evidence to the decision inside the Middle District of Alabama’s office.

The October 2025 FBI report came closest to a real link, since Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson personally concurred in opening that inquiry. But the report was closed “without submission” weeks later, and the SPLC could not explain, beyond speculation, how a closed report becomes an indictment six months on. Judge Marks was blunt about that gap. The SPLC’s own filings admitted its central theory was a guess, that the record “do[es] not reveal” whether Miller directed anyone to reopen the case, only that “the facts suggest that may be the case.” Suggestion is not proof. Timing alone, the court noted, has never been enough on its own, a point with real teeth in an indictment that followed a coalition letter, an FBI report, and a change in administration by mere months.

What this ruling does not do

It does not decide whether the SPLC committed wire fraud, made false statements to a bank, or laundered money, and it does not touch the merits of the underlying charges at all. It does not close the door permanently on a vindictive prosecution argument; that defense can still be raised at trial, on a fuller record. Nor is it, whatever either side’s press strategy suggests, a verdict on whether the administration’s public statements about the SPLC were fair or accurate. It is a ruling about evidentiary thresholds: what a defendant must show before a federal court will look behind a prosecutor’s charging decision at all.

What the ruling does establish, for anyone tracking how courts are handling this administration’s relationship with its critics, is a boundary. Speech is a protected right that can support a vindictive prosecution claim; the court said so squarely, rejecting the government’s attempt to narrow the doctrine. But invoking that right and proving it are different exercises. The second one requires a documented line from a specific prosecutor’s animus to a specific charging decision, and no party in this case had one. Public hostility toward an organization, even hostility voiced by the President and his Attorney General, is not that line.

The case moves forward in the Middle District of Alabama under Judge Marks. Discovery into the government’s motives is off the table, for now. The indictment stands, and so does the question the SPLC will have to answer some other way: whether “informant program” and “scheme to defraud” describe the same conduct, or whether the label is doing work the facts can’t.

Source: Memorandum Opinion and Order, United States v. Southern Poverty Law Center, No. 2:26-cr-139-ECM (M.D. Ala. Aug. 7, 2026), ECF No. 112.

There’s a procedural irony in the timing. Two weeks ago the government was telling the Fourth Circuit it couldn’t afford to wait for Judge Xinis to rule on its dissolution motions. Now the motion that will actually decide the removal question sits fully briefed on her desk, and the reply suggests the government’s real problem was never delay. It was what the record shows.

The testimony the government won’t touch

On June 2, Secretary Mullin testified before Congress that if Abrego Garcia is willing to go to Costa Rica, “we’ll be happy to send him.”

The government filed its opposition three weeks later. The brief defends the Lyons Memorandum, the March document claiming removal to Costa Rica would be “prejudicial to the United States,” and insists that memo is a “formal, final determination” that ends judicial inquiry. What the brief never does, anywhere in its pages, is acknowledge that the Secretary of Homeland Security said the opposite under oath. It doesn’t distinguish the testimony, doesn’t walk it back, doesn’t attempt to explain how removal to Costa Rica can prejudice the United States while making the Secretary happy.

The reply presses the point the silence leaves open. Congress vested the country-designation authority in the Secretary, not the ICE Director. The government is asking the court to treat as conclusive a memo from an official who, per the reply, lacked authority to issue it, while ignoring sworn congressional testimony from the official who actually holds the power. The reply also notes the government never responded at all to the argument that the Lyons Memorandum isn’t properly in evidence, since the Court closed the record months before the memo was executed. Under ordinary briefing rules, silence forfeits the point.

[SCREENSHOT 1: Reply at 1, the introduction paragraph quoting Mullin’s “we’ll be happy to send him” testimony and noting the government “never even acknowledges it.” Caption: “The reply’s opening move: the government’s own Secretary against the government’s own brief.” Placement logic: the receipt sits directly under the section making the argument.]

“He can make his way to Costa Rica”

The opposition contains a concession the reply refuses to let go. The government acknowledges that Costa Rica remains willing to accept Abrego Garcia, and argues that after removal to Liberia, he can “make his way” to Costa Rica.

That concession does real damage, because the entire legal basis for overriding his designation is that removal to Costa Rica would prejudice the United States. If the government has no objection to Abrego Garcia ending up in Costa Rica, the prejudice claim collapses, and what remains is the routing. There is no removal-related reason to send a man through West Africa to reach a country that will take him directly. The reply’s conclusion is that the routing is the point: the government isn’t trying to remove him so much as punish him, and it cites the record you already know — the vindictive prosecution dismissal in Tennessee, the serial notifications of removal to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia, and Judge Xinis’s finding that the government “affirmatively misled the tribunal” about Costa Rica’s willingness to take him.

The reply adds a circularity argument aimed at the memo’s stated rationale. The Lyons Memorandum says removal to Costa Rica would harm U.S. diplomatic credibility after the government expended resources securing Liberia’s agreement. But those costs were incurred after Abrego Garcia designated Costa Rica and after the government refused to honor it. The government created the expense by disregarding the statute, then invoked the expense as its reason for continuing to disregard it. Days after the memo issued, the United States signed a broader removal-cooperation agreement with Costa Rica, which makes the diplomatic-credibility rationale harder still to credit.

[SCREENSHOT 2: Reply at 14, the paragraph on the government’s concessions. Caption: “No objection to the destination. Only to how he gets there.” Placement logic: pairs the concession with the analysis it supports.]

Why he can’t just go

A footnote answers a question that follows this case everywhere: if Costa Rica will take him, why doesn’t he leave? Counsel disclosed they are in direct contact with the Costa Rican consulate to arrange updated assurances, asylum status, and lawful transit. But Abrego Garcia wears an ICE ankle monitor that only the government can remove, so no unilateral departure is available to him. The government controls the exit, and the government is the party insisting on Liberia.

What Judge Xinis has in front of her

The reply asks for a final order granting the three remaining claims, declaring the government’s conduct unlawful, and enjoining removal — and detention for the purpose of removal — to any country other than Costa Rica.

The government’s threshold defenses are familiar ground: the D.V.D. class bars review, the claims don’t sound in habeas, the INA’s channeling provisions strip jurisdiction. Judge Xinis has rejected versions of most of these before, and the reply walks through why the arrival of the December removal order changes none of it, since the claims don’t seek review of that order.

The record in front of her now includes a vindictive prosecution dismissal, a judicial finding that the government misled the court, a Secretary who testified he’d be happy to send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica, and a government brief that pretends he never said it.

Abrego Garcia v. Mullin, No. 8:25-cv-02780-PX (D. Md.), Petitioner’s Reply in Support of Motion to Resolve Outstanding Habeas Claims, filed July 22, 2026

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One man was flown from the United States to Guantánamo Bay to be deported. He was never deported. According to the chart the government produced in discovery, he was “[r]eturned to CONUS” — the continental United States — “since the alien was not a final order.” He was later released from custody entirely, because his immigration proceedings were terminated.

The government flew him to a military base in Cuba, flew him back, and let him go.

His line in that chart is one of hundreds now sitting in front of a federal judge in Washington. On July 21, the plaintiffs in Luna Gutierrez v. Mullin filed their final summary judgment brief, and the question of whether the executive branch can lawfully run an immigration detention facility outside the United States is now fully submitted to Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the D.C. District Court.

We first covered this case in December, when Judge Sooknanan denied the government’s motion to dismiss and let the case proceed to discovery — including her line that the statute governing removal is “like garlic to a vampire” for the government’s theory of the case. That ruling is the legal foundation for everything below.

Where the case stands

Luna Gutierrez is a class action brought by the ACLU, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of noncitizens transferred from the United States to Guantánamo for civil immigration detention. Not criminal custody. Not wartime detention. Detention under the Immigration and Nationality Act — the same authority that governs an ICE facility in Louisiana or Arizona.

The court already did much of the heavy lifting at the motion-to-dismiss stage. It held that § 1231(g), the provision governing where immigration detainees may be held, authorizes detention facilities only for people awaiting removal inside the United States. It held that § 1103(a)(3), the Secretary’s general housekeeping authority, does not authorize a detention facility abroad either — at most, it covers restraining someone during transit, what the court called “an overnight refueling stop.”

In plain terms: the government lost the legal argument months ago. What survived was a factual one. If Guantánamo functions as a brief logistical stop for people already in the middle of being removed — wheels-up, destination set, just passing through — the government might fit inside that narrow window.

Then came discovery.

What the numbers show

The government produced data on 227 noncitizens transferred to Guantánamo. Plaintiffs ran the calculations, and the government, notably, declined to dispute the math — responding instead that the underlying records “speak for themselves.”

Here is what plaintiffs say those records show. 150 of the 227 — 66% — were transferred to Guantánamo with no travel arrangements in place to their destination country. A third of the group spent more than 40 days there. Several spent more than 100. Some were sent without the travel documents their destination countries required to accept them — meaning they could not have been removed on arrival even if a plane had been waiting.

For comparison, plaintiffs point to the government’s own practice inside the United States: staging facilities typically hold people for about 72 hours before removal.

And the paperwork underneath the operation contemplates something much longer than a layover. The memorandum of understanding between DHS and the Defense Department requires transfer out of Guantánamo “no later than 180 days from the date of final order of removal.”

In plain terms: the government’s position is that Guantánamo is a pit stop, and the government’s own operating agreement budgets up to six months for the stop.

Nine people were flown from Guantánamo back to the United States to be removed on commercial flights. The government suggested military transports may have been diverted, leaving commercial travel as the fallback. Plaintiffs answer that none of the nine had any travel arrangements — military or commercial — when they were sent to Guantánamo in the first place.

At a March status conference, a government attorney told the court his understanding was that Guantánamo was meant as a “weigh station” en route to final destinations. The brief filed Tuesday is built to show that word does not survive contact with the record.

The man who came back

Return to the man from the opening. The government disputes plaintiffs’ account of his case, pointing to a sealed matter, Vasilevskii v. Noem, in which a court order reflects that an expedited removal order had been issued for him before his transfer. Plaintiffs cannot access the sealed filings, but they acknowledge the order — and note that whatever paperwork existed at the time, the government’s own discovery chart says he was returned because he did not have a final order, and his proceedings were later terminated. In plaintiffs’ words, “it appears that the expedited removal order was issued in error.”

The dispute over one man’s file is small. What it illustrates is not: the government transferred people to a base with no immigration courts, no commercial flights, and — per the Inspectors General of DHS and the State Department — serious logistical and medical limitations, before the basic conditions for removing them existed.

The word the government disputed

One exchange in the fact filings deserves attention. Plaintiffs stated that the government has publicly called the Guantánamo detainees “the worst of the worst.” The government’s response disputed that the phrase appears in the two exhibits plaintiffs cited.

It did not dispute that the government said it. And the phrase is in the record, in an official CBP post on X: “Flights to Guantanamo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland.”

That framing matters legally, not just rhetorically. Plaintiffs argue the record shows the policy exists to send “a message of terror and deterrence” — and they note that a detention policy built on deterring immigration has already been held likely unlawful in this district.

The other claims in the brief

The filing also renews plaintiffs’ argument that the policy is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act — the statute requiring agencies to explain their decisions. The government admits in its briefing that detaining final-order immigration detainees at Guantánamo is “a change in agency practice.” Plaintiffs’ point is that the administrative record contains no acknowledgment of that change and no explanation for it, even though agencies must give a reasoned explanation when they depart from longstanding practice.

Nor, plaintiffs argue, did the agencies consider the obvious alternative: detention in the United States, where ICE’s own FOIA disclosures showed nearly 15,000 unused contract beds in April 2025, and where a 2,560-bed facility was brought online in under five months. DHS instead spent, by plaintiffs’ account of the record, $21 million over four months just transporting people to and from Cuba.

There is also a procedural problem. The government filed its cross-motion without a statement of undisputed material facts, which the local rules require once a case involves discovery beyond the administrative record. Plaintiffs cite D.C. authority denying summary judgment for exactly that failure. And under Local Rule 7(h)(1), facts a party fails to controvert may be deemed admitted — which is where “the data speaks for itself” becomes a costly answer.

What the court must now decide

Judge Sooknanan has three live questions. Whether the jurisdictional bars in § 1252 block review at all — she has already said no once, and the government’s renewed arguments cite no new law. Whether the record shows Guantánamo operating as anything other than a detention facility. And if not, what the remedy is: plaintiffs seek classwide declaratory relief and vacatur — a court order setting the policy aside — relying on the D.C. Circuit’s recent holding in RAICES that the INA’s limits on injunctions do not reach vacatur.

No ruling exists yet. Nothing has been decided. The cross-motions are fully briefed as of July 21, and the timing of a decision is the judge’s alone.

But the stakes reach past this docket. A story cited in plaintiffs’ brief reports that ICE is already exploring 1,000-bed detention facilities in other foreign countries. If § 1103(a)(3) can support a detention camp in Cuba, it can support one anywhere. That is the theory Judge Sooknanan has been asked to accept or reject — and somewhere in the government’s chart is a man who was flown to Guantánamo, flown home, and released, while the courts decide whether any of it was legal.

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Sources: Pls.’ Opp. to Defs.’ Cross-Mot. for Partial Summ. J. & Reply, Luna Gutierrez v. Mullin, No. 1:25-cv-01766-SLS (D.D.C. July 21, 2026), ECF No. 113; Pls.’ Reply to Defs.’ Resp. to Statement of Material Facts, ECF No. 113-1; Mem. Op. on Mot. to Dismiss, ECF No. 53 (as quoted in ECF No. 113).

What AFL told the public

America First Legal was founded in April 2021 by Stephen Miller, who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff.

AFL’s July 15 release frames the settlement as resolved. According to AFL’s account, the organization sued on behalf of Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap in June 2025 over a 2024 Shared Services Agreement that stripped his office of authority over voter registration systems, IT infrastructure, and early voting operations. AFL further states that the Maricopa County Superior Court ruled in Heap’s favor in April 2026, that the Board continued resisting that ruling, and that the Arizona Supreme Court then reinstated the Recorder’s authority. None of that procedural history is drawn from a court order in front of me — it’s AFL’s characterization of prior proceedings, not something I can verify against the underlying rulings themselves.

What the release doesn’t mention: whether the Board has actually approved what AFL is calling a done deal.

What has to happen before this binds anyone

The Settlement Terms answer that question directly, and the answer is no — not yet.

Paragraph 4 states plainly that approval is a condition, not a formality: the agreement becomes binding “upon approval by the Board of Supervisors for these Settlement Terms and to create and fund all positions contemplated therein.”

Paragraph 3 anticipates exactly the situation now on the table — fewer than a quorum of Supervisors signing — and lays out what has to happen next: the signing Supervisors “shall make reasonable efforts to communicate the Terms to the remaining Supervisors, and to arrange for the scheduling of a Board of Supervisors Meeting upon which these Settlement Terms can be considered and voted upon.”

That meeting hasn’t happened yet.

Two more limits worth flagging. Paragraph 2 carves out claims by Rachel Mitchell, in her official capacity as Maricopa County Attorney — this settlement doesn’t touch whatever she’s separately asserted in the case. And Paragraph 11 specifies that no final judgment has been entered, that all prior orders in the case are vacated, and that nothing in the litigation “shall be deemed to be a final order or have any res judicata, preclusive effect.” Whatever the Superior Court and Arizona Supreme Court did earlier in this fight, none of it survives as binding precedent once this settlement takes effect.

Where the press release doesn’t match the document

AFL’s release states the agreement “requires the Board to spend $15 million for the Recorder to purchase new IT servers.” The settlement terms describe something narrower. Exhibit A, section O.7(c), caps Board-authorized IT funding at $15 million “not to exceed” — and only $11.5 million of that is new County money. The remaining $3.5 million comes from the Recorder’s own legislative appropriation or outside grant funds, not from the Board. AFL’s framing puts the full $15 million on the Board’s ledger; the document splits it.

AFL also states the settlement “obligates the Board to fund the hiring of 12 new early voting staff and 24 new IT staff.” The IT figure checks out — Exhibit A, section O.5, funds 24 total IT positions for the Recorder’s office. The early-voting figure doesn’t match what I can find in the document. Exhibit A, section B.18, commits the Board only to consider, in good faith, a mid-year budget request for 10 additional early-voting staff during the FY2027 budget cycle, and only if “reasonably necessary.” That’s a conditional commitment to weigh a request for 10 positions — not a guaranteed 12.

Two overstatements, one document. Both run in the same direction: toward a bigger, more certain win than what’s actually on paper.

What the terms would reallocate, if adopted

Exhibit A splits election administration by function. Voter registration goes to the Recorder outright. Early voting splits down the middle — the Recorder controls ballot distribution, scanning, and signature verification and curing; the Board controls ballot procurement, site budgeting, and — until January 2029 — a floor requiring at least 20% of Election Day’s polling locations to remain available for early voting. Ballot tabulation stays with the Board, though the Recorder gets real-time camera access to all counting areas. Provisional ballot printing during in-person voting shifts to the Recorder’s supervision, revocable under the same quorum mechanism in Paragraph 1.

IT control is the slowest-moving piece. For 2026, joint control stays unchanged. The Recorder is entitled to a full clone of the shared ERO/VRAS voter registration system — source code, databases, configurations — once a data-sharing protocol is executed, targeted for September 15, 2026. Full migration to the Recorder’s independent system carries a target date of December 31, 2026, with the settlement’s own language conceding the timeline is a best-efforts goal, not a deadline with teeth.

One more distinction the terms make explicit: Exhibit B applies only to the 2026 primary, and for that election alone, the parties are bound to “follow the Recorder’s plan as adopted by the Arizona Supreme Court” — a separate, narrower arrangement than the one Exhibit A sets up for every election after it.

None of this becomes real until Stewart and Gallardo see the terms and a majority of the Board votes yes. Until then, the Recorder has a signed agreement with three of his five counterparts — and a set of numbers, in a press release, that don’t quite match the document he signed.

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The word is “termination.” The word the court already blocked is “discontinuance.” The Department’s position is that these are legally distinct actions, so an injunction against one doesn’t reach the other. The states disagree, but they aren’t waiting to find out who’s right. On July 10, 2026, they filed a second lawsuit, State of Washington, et al. v. U.S. Department of Education, No. 2:26-cv-02409-TMC (W.D. Wash.), built entirely around the possibility that a judge sides with the Department on that distinction in ten days.

What the grants were for

Congress created these two programs after school shootings. The Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program (MHSP) came out of the 2018 Parkland shooting, funding scholarships and clinical training for graduate students who commit to working in low-income schools. The School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program (SBMH) followed in fiscal year 2020, paying the salaries of mental health professionals so districts could hire them directly.

After the 2022 Uvalde shooting, a bipartisan Congress expanded both programs through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, directing the Department to spend an additional $100 million a year on each program through 2026.

How the discontinuances happened

On February 5, 2025, the Department issued an internal directive on grant priorities, instructing staff to identify and end funding for grants that “fund discriminatory practices — including in the form of DEI.” In plain terms: any grant application that mentioned equity, diversity, or inclusion became a target for review, regardless of what the grant actually did in practice.

The Department applied that directive on April 29, 2025, discontinuing 233 of 339 eligible grants, including roughly 140 within the states that are now plaintiffs. The discontinuance notices tracked the directive’s language almost word for word. A June 5, 2025 follow-up directive, kept out of the administrative record in the original case for six months, then governed how the Department handled grantees’ requests for reconsideration, denying them based on the same equity language grantees had been required to include in their original applications under the General Education Provisions Act (GEPA).

Sixteen states sued. On December 19, 2025, the court granted summary judgment, vacating the discontinuance procedure, the discontinuances themselves, and the reconsideration denials, and ordering the Department to make new continuation decisions based only on grant performance. That case, Washington v. U.S. Department of Education, No. 2:25-cv-01228-KKE (W.D. Wash., Judge Kymberly Evanson), is still open. The Department appealed the summary judgment order to the Ninth Circuit in June 2026.

The pivot from discontinuance to termination

Complying with that injunction, the Department made new continuation awards, funding what the complaint calls the “Protected Grants” for the first six months of 2026 and promising a mid-year review before deciding the rest of the year. The review never happened the way it was described. Instead, on June 10, 2026, the Department told the court in the original case that it planned to terminate “some or all” of the Protected Grants starting July 31, 2026, provided the judge first rules that the existing injunction doesn’t cover terminations under 2 C.F.R. § 200.340, a separate regulation from the one used for the original discontinuances.

The complaint calls this plan the “Washington Plan.” On June 30, 2026, the Department sent Protected Grantees a formal notice that it was considering terminating their grants, citing the pending motion, and telling them any legal challenge belonged exclusively in the Court of Federal Claims. It gave most grantees one month of remaining funds and wind-down instructions. Judge Evanson has set the Department’s clarification motion for a hearing on July 24, 2026.

Why a second lawsuit exists at all

The new complaint is explicit that the states think they’ve already won this argument. Paragraph 4 states the existing injunction should already block the Department from carrying out the Washington Plan “through any means, including termination.” But the states are not willing to bet the outcome on that reading alone. If Judge Evanson rules the other way on July 24, the Department’s stated plan is to begin terminations the next week, on July 31. The new suit exists to have a preliminary injunction motion already teed up in that scenario, rather than starting from zero after a loss.

Fifteen states are plaintiffs: Washington, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The defendants are the Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon, sued in her official capacity. Washington’s Attorney General’s office leads the filing, with New York’s office also appearing as co-counsel, which explains why one of the publicly hosted copies of the complaint sits on a New York state domain despite Washington being the lead filer.

What the states are arguing

The complaint brings eight counts, most of them variations on the Administrative Procedure Act.

• Counts I and II argue the Directives and the Washington Plan are arbitrary and capricious. In plain terms: the Department is punishing grantees for language Congress required them to include in their applications in the first place, and it hasn’t explained why grants that met performance targets are suddenly being cut.

• Count III argues the plan is contrary to law under 2 C.F.R. § 200.340(a)(4), the specific regulation the Department is relying on. That regulation allows termination only when an award “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities” that existed when the grant was made, not priorities invented afterward. The states argue the Department is trying to apply brand-new priorities retroactively, which the regulation doesn’t permit.

• Count IV argues the Department skipped notice-and-comment rulemaking, which GEPA requires before changing grant conditions. Count V argues the Department is bypassing GEPA’s own hearing and appeal process for grant terminations. Count VI makes a parallel argument under Title VI and Title IX, which require an agency to first try to secure voluntary compliance and hold a hearing before pulling funding over an alleged civil rights violation. Neither the Directives nor the Washington Plan do that.

• Count VII is a Spending Clause claim: federal grant conditions have to be clear and can’t be imposed after states already accepted the money. The states argue the Department’s new criteria, “merit, fairness, and excellence in education,” are too vague to have given fair notice, and were announced after the grants were already awarded. Count VIII asks the court to declare the whole plan ultra vires, meaning outside the authority Congress gave the Department in the first place.

What isn’t decided yet

Nothing in either case has been resolved by this filing. No judge has ruled on the states’ request for a hearing or a stay in the new case, and no judge has yet been formally confirmed for docket 2:26-cv-02409-TMC. The July 24 hearing in the original case is the more immediate event: Judge Evanson will decide whether “discontinuance” and “termination” mean the same thing for purposes of an injunction she already wrote. Whatever she rules, this new complaint means the fight over these grants doesn’t end at that hearing.

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Sources: Complaint, State of Washington, et al. v. U.S. Department of Education, Linda McMahon, No. 2:26-cv-02409-TMC (W.D. Wash., filed July 10, 2026), ECF No. 1. Referencing Washington v. U.S. Department of Education, No. 2:25-cv-01228-KKE (W.D. Wash.), ECF Nos. 193, 208, 237-1, 269, 357, 367, 437, 447, 447-1.

The government’s theory is that her silence on the dissolution motions amounted to a constructive denial — inaction with the practical effect of continuing the removal injunction, which under A.A.R.P. v. Trump can sometimes be immediately appealable. The reply’s answer is that this wasn’t silence. The April 7 order called the dissolution motion “simply not ripe for resolution,” identified issues that needed more development, and set a hearing for April 28.

It also told the government directly: “Respondents cannot dictate the Court’s schedule or the outcome of the motion. Nor can they appeal a judicial order that does not exist.”

The government appealed anyway. Eleven days before its own requested hearing would have happened.

The urgency problem

A.A.R.P. and its predecessors require more than a practical effect resembling denial. The litigant has to show the delay risks “serious, perhaps irreparable” consequences that can only be addressed through immediate appeal. The reply notes the government never tries to make that showing here. It can’t point to any harm from letting Xinis rule in the ordinary course.

So instead the government reached for a Fifth Circuit standard — “a legitimate basis for the urgency” from Amazon.com Services v. NLRB — that the reply says isn’t even the controlling test in the Fifth Circuit. The Amazon.com majority held there was no effective denial at all and never reached the urgency question; only the dissent addressed urgency, and it applied the same “serious, perhaps irreparable” standard the government is trying to avoid here.

The timeline the government would rather not discuss

The reply’s strongest structural move is forcing the government to explain a gap in its own conduct. The removal injunction was entered in August 2025 and continued in September 2025. The government didn’t appeal either time. If the injunction was genuinely causing irreparable harm, the moment to say so was then, not eight months later when it became convenient to bundle the removal fight with the separate February re-detention appeal.

The government’s response, according to the reply, is to call the two questions “wholly unrelated.” That’s a hard position to hold onto a few pages later when the same brief argues pendent appellate jurisdiction should let the Fourth Circuit review both injunctions together because they’re “inextricably intertwined.” The reply catches the inconsistency and doesn’t let it go — the removal injunction and the re-detention injunction are either related enough to appeal together or they’re not, and the government wants it both ways depending on which argument it’s making that week.

There’s also an irony baked into the delay itself. The reply points out that the district court found the government “bear[s] the responsibility for substantial delay” in briefing the dissolution motions in the first place — meaning the eight months the government now points to as evidence of judicial foot-dragging is, per the court’s own record, largely the government’s doing. And the reason Xinis hasn’t ruled since April 7 is that the government’s own appeal stripped her of jurisdiction to do so. Had the government not appealed, the April 28 hearing would already have happened.

Where the Zadvydas argument actually lives

The pendent jurisdiction section is where the reply does its most substantive work, and it’s the part with the clearest connection to the removal fight you’ve been tracking. The government wants the Fourth Circuit to treat the re-detention injunction and the removal injunction as raising the same question, so that reviewing one lets the court reach the other.

The reply draws the line precisely. The re-detention injunction turns on whether the government can hold Abrego Garcia under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a) and Zadvydas — a detention-authority question. The dissolution motions turn on whether anything has changed to justify lifting the removal injunction itself, including “the lawfulness and feasibility of removal to Liberia rather than Costa Rica.” Different statute, different record, different question.

And the re-detention injunction doesn’t depend on the removal injunction being valid in the first place. It rests on findings the district court already made independently: the government’s “years of inaction in effectuating Abrego Garcia’s removal,” its unlawful “purchase[] of his detention in El Salvador,” and its choice to pursue “phantom removals to three (maybe four) African countries” instead of the Costa Rica removal it had available. The court found detention wasn’t being used for its “basic purpose” of timely third-country removal at all. That finding stands on its own; the Fourth Circuit doesn’t need to touch the dissolution motions to review it.

What’s actually at stake

If the Fourth Circuit agrees there’s no appealable order, the case goes back to Xinis to hold the hearing the government tried to skip. If it agrees with the government instead, the effect is to let a party manufacture appellate jurisdiction simply by setting its own deadline, declaring a pending motion denied when it isn’t, and appealing before the district court gets to rule. The reply frames that as the real stakes of the jurisdictional fight — not just about this case, but about whether litigants can jump district court proceedings whenever they’d rather not wait for a ruling.

Abrego Garcia v. Mullin, No. 26-6466 (4th Cir.)

A year later, the case has split into three separate fronts. Here’s where each one stands.

Outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan on July 14, Mahmoud Khalil stood in front of a bank of cameras and said the case was no longer only about him.

He wasn’t talking about deportation. He was announcing a new lawsuit — one that names Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Heritage Foundation, and two pro-Israel monitoring groups, Betar and Canary Mission, as co-conspirators in an effort to identify, doxx, and remove pro-Palestinian activists.

The suit invokes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era statute written to stop the government from coordinating with private vigilante groups.

“This case is about far more than what was done to me,” Khalil said.

It’s also, at this point, only one of five legal fronts carrying his name through federal court and the immigration system.

The habeas case: a jurisdictional loss, not a merits loss

When I last wrote about Khalil, Judge Michael Farbiarz in the District of New Jersey had just ordered his release on bail and found the government’s “foreign policy” removal ground — the Rubio Determination — likely unconstitutional. The government appealed both the injunction and the bail order to the Third Circuit.

The Third Circuit heard oral argument on October 21, 2025. On January 15, 2026, a three-judge panel reversed Farbiarz, 2-1. Judge Arianna Freeman dissented.

In plain terms: the panel didn’t rule that Khalil’s speech wasn’t protected, or that the Rubio Determination was constitutional. It ruled that federal district courts don’t have subject-matter jurisdiction to hear these claims at all — that Khalil has to exhaust his immigration court proceedings before a federal court can weigh in. That’s a jurisdictional holding, not a merits ruling, and it’s worth saying plainly because it’s the detail most likely to get flattened in a headline.

The panel’s decision didn’t take effect immediately. Khalil’s team asked the full Third Circuit to rehear the case en banc. On May 22, the full court declined, 6-5. Judges Krause, Restrepo, and Freeman dissented from that denial. Krause wrote that the judiciary “cannot fulfill that role if we write ourselves out of relevance,” referring to the courts’ function as a check on executive power.

Khalil’s lawyers then asked the Third Circuit to stay its own mandate while they prepare a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court. The court granted that stay on May 26. As of this writing, I have not been able to confirm that the cert petition has actually been filed — that’s a gap I’m flagging rather than guessing at, and I’ll update it once the docket shows it.

What matters for now: the stay means the panel’s jurisdictional ruling still isn’t in effect. Khalil cannot lawfully be detained or deported under it while the stay holds.

The immigration case: a final removal order that still can’t be enforced

Running alongside the habeas fight is a separate track entirely — Khalil’s actual removal proceeding before the immigration courts, which never stopped moving.

On April 9, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final administrative removal order — published as Matter of M-K-, 29 I. & N. Dec. 556 (BIA 2026) — denying Khalil’s motion to terminate the case. His attorney, Marc Van Der Hout, said he’d never seen “such a baseless and politically motivated decision.”

Here’s the distinction that matters: a “final” BIA order sounds like the end of the road. It isn’t, procedurally, because it can’t be enforced while the habeas litigation above is still live. The New Jersey district court’s injunction and bail order remain the only thing standing between that BIA order and an actual attempt to detain or deport Khalil.

His team appealed the BIA order to the Fifth Circuit, asking that court to reverse the removal finding outright. Separately, in mid-May, they went back to the BIA a second time, asking it to reopen the case based on new evidence — declarations from former immigration judges and former BIA members — alleging the agency’s decision-making had been improperly influenced by the administration.

The new suit: conspiracy, not deportation

The July 14 filing is different in kind from the other two. It doesn’t ask a court to block a removal order or rule on jurisdiction. It’s a 131-page civil complaint — Khalil v. The Heritage Foundation et al., Case No. 1:26-cv-05929, filed in the Southern District of New York. The complaint itself is here. It’s worth reading the caption in full, because the defendant list is longer than most coverage let on.

On the private side: the Heritage Foundation, along with Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway, both former Trump advisors credited as Project Esther’s lead authors; three named Betar entities (Betar Zionist Organization, Betar Zionist Movement, and Betar World) and Betar figure Ronn Torossian; and Megamot Shalom, doing business as Canary Mission, along with individuals Jonathan Bash and Victor Muslin, plus an unnamed “John Doe A.” On the government side: Stephen Miller, sued in both his individual capacity and his official capacity as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin; acting Attorney General Todd Blanche; former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem; and John Armstrong, a State Department official in the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

The complaint brings three counts. In plain terms:

• Count I is a conspiracy claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) — the KKK Act’s conspiracy provision, written after the Civil War to stop private vigilante groups from teaming up with the government to strip people of their constitutional rights. It’s brought against the private defendants and against Miller, Rubio, Noem, and Armstrong individually, seeking damages, and separately against the federal defendants in their official capacities, seeking a declaration and an injunction.

• Count II is brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1986, a companion statute that penalizes anyone who knew about a § 1985 conspiracy and had the power to stop it but didn’t. The complaint alleges every defendant had that knowledge and that power, and used neither.

• Count III is a Bill of Attainder claim — Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which bars the government from singling out a specific person or narrow group for punishment without a trial. This is the claim I hadn’t seen flagged anywhere in the wire coverage: Khalil’s lawyers argue that lodging “unprecedented and unconstitutional grounds of removability” against him, then running his case through immigration proceedings they controlled toward a “pre-ordained outcome,” functioned as exactly that kind of punishment-without-trial.

The complaint asks for compensatory and punitive damages, a declaratory judgment that the conduct violated §§ 1985 and 1986 and the Bill of Attainder Clause, and an injunction against continued reliance on what it calls pretextual removal grounds.

It’s a complaint. Nothing has been ruled on. What it does is put on the public record, in sworn allegations, a theory Khalil’s lawyers have been gesturing at since his arrest: that the government’s case against him didn’t originate with career immigration officials weighing a statute, but with outside advocacy groups feeding names to the State Department.

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The claim that came first: a $20 million demand under the FTCA

Before any of the above, there was a quieter filing that predates even my original piece on this case: a notice of claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act, submitted by CCR to the State Department and DHS on July 10, 2025 — nine days before I first wrote about Khalil.

An FTCA claim isn’t a lawsuit. It’s a mandatory administrative step: before you can sue the federal government for a tort, you have to present the claim to the relevant agencies first, in a “sum certain,” and either wait for a denial or let six months pass. Khalil’s claim, filed on the standard government form, sought $20 million and alleged six separate torts: false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, and both intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The claim traces those harms to the same Rubio Determination at the center of the habeas case, and to the specifics of the arrest itself — including an ICE agent’s remark, overheard during fingerprinting, that “the White House is requesting an update,” which Khalil’s lawyers cite as evidence the arrest was driven by political pressure rather than ordinary enforcement.

I don’t have confirmation that this has progressed to an actual FTCA lawsuit in the year since the claim was filed — that’s worth checking against the docket before treating it as litigation rather than an administrative claim still pending.

The FOIA fight: trying to get the paper trail

This front is older than the Heritage Foundation suit but has gotten less attention: a Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act lawsuit, Khalil v. DOJ et al., Case No. 25-cv-9674, filed in the Southern District of New York on November 20, 2025. Khalil and CCR are the plaintiffs; the defendants are DOJ and four of its components (the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of Information Policy, and the National Security Division), plus the FBI, the State Department, DHS, and ICE.

The underlying FOIA request goes back to May 29, 2025 — CCR asked all nine agencies for records of their communications with anti-Palestinian groups, including Canary Mission and Betar, about Khalil and other targeted activists. The complaint lays out, agency by agency, a pattern: acknowledgment, then a claim the request was “too broad,” then administrative closure, then appeal, then silence. By the time CCR filed suit six months later, every defendant agency had blown through FOIA’s statutory response deadlines, and none had produced a single record.

The complaint brings four claims: that the agencies failed to make a timely determination and release responsive records, that they improperly denied expedited processing, that they improperly denied a fee waiver, and — for records specifically about Khalil himself — that DOJ violated the Privacy Act by withholding them. It asks the court to order an immediate search, bar the agencies from charging fees, and compel disclosure within ten days of any order.

Where that leaves him

Khalil is 31. His son was born while he was in a Louisiana detention center. He has now spent more than a year moving between five separate legal fronts — a habeas case, an immigration appeal, a FOIA suit, an administrative tort claim, and now a civil rights conspiracy suit — none of which has yet reached the question underneath all of them: whether the government can use immigration law to remove a lawful permanent resident for what he said, and whether it did so at the direction of private groups with no legal authority to make that call.

The Third Circuit found it lacks jurisdiction to answer that question right now. The BIA found against him but can’t act on it. The FOIA suit is still trying to get the government to produce the paper trail that might answer it definitively. And the newest complaint asks a federal judge in Manhattan to decide, for the first time, not whether Khalil broke immigration law, but whether the people trying to remove him broke his.

None of the five cases has answered that question. All five are still open.

We covered two of the people who filled in while she was out. Rubio explained his way into a string of disclosures — the War Powers Act, the coalition of one, the nuclear program exposed. Vance managed the room instead, staying pleasant, objecting to question framing, answering the adjacent question when the real one was inconvenient.

Today, Leavitt was back behind the podium for the first time and delivered a briefing that ran through a blockade, a reversed shooting policy, a foodborne outbreak, an unattributed drone attack, a diplomatic question she couldn’t answer, a family investment she wouldn’t, and a preview of tonight’s speech. The method that built her reputation came back with her.

Before a single question was asked, Leavitt ran through the schedule and the “good news.”

Tonight at 9 p.m.: the president’s address on “election integrity.”

Friday: a FIFA reception at Trump Tower in New York.

Sunday: the World Cup final, which she called “the most watched, most secure, and most successful World Cup in American history.”

Then the economy: June’s inflation report showed prices down 0.4%, “the largest monthly decline in more than six years.” That figure holds up — it matches the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own release for June, the largest monthly drop since April 2020.

Real wages, she said, are up “roughly $1,000” since the president took office, after falling nearly $3,000 under the previous administration. That one doesn’t hold up as stated. The same day, using the same BLS data, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and IBTimes all reported that real hourly wages are up just 27 cents an hour since January 2025 — essentially flat, with inflation erasing most of the nominal gains. June alone was a strong month for real wages, helped by falling gas prices. Her figure reads like that one month annualized, not the cumulative picture since he took office.

Walmart and Sam’s Club, she said, are cutting prices on thousands of items after “answering the president’s call.” The price cuts are real. The credit isn’t confirmed: Walmart’s own announcement never mentioned Trump or the administration, and a company spokesperson declined to comment when Trump claimed the cuts came at his request.

Then the Trump Accounts: 6.5 million children enrolled so far, including her own two, signed up “during my maternity leave.”

Then the border: the 14th straight month of zero releases of people without legal status, Southwest apprehensions down 94% versus the same period under the previous administration. Both numbers are consistent with DHS’s own recurring monthly announcements — self-reported agency figures, not independently audited, but the trend line has held for over a year.

And then a list, six cases, read back to back, of people ICE says it arrested “this past weekend alone.” Six cases, six of the worst offenses on the books, delivered before a single question landed. The nationalities, charges, and states are too granular to confirm or refute against public records. All unverified.

The Answer Was Nothing

A reporter identified as Maggie asked the only question in the room with real stakes on its own: what did the president know about his sons’ 20% stake in a Kazakhstan tungsten deal, and when did he find out?

The deal was signed November 6. The investment by Trump’s sons, made through Dominari Securities, closed six days earlier and wasn’t disclosed at the time.

Leavitt’s answer: “For my understanding, Maggie, nothing.” She added that the president and his family “would absolutely never do anything that would put the president in a place of a conflict of interest.” Pressed on whether the president learned about the deal from news coverage after the fact, she said: “That’s my understanding of the matter. Yes.”

“For my understanding, Maggie, nothing.”

Nothing — that’s the full answer to whether the sitting president knew his own sons had a stake in a deal his administration was actively negotiating. Not a timeline, not a phone log. A flat denial and a character reference.

A Reversal, Described as Continuity

Two ICE agents killed two men in six days: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Joan Durán Guerrero in Maine. Neither was the intended target of the operation that killed him. Neither shooting had body camera footage. DHS paused most vehicle stops this week. Trump publicly overturned that pause on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

Leavitt’s version today: “vehicle stops are continuing. Verbal guidance has been given to all field offices across the country… The President and the Secretary of Homeland Security are on the same page that vehicle stops are a necessary tool that ICE agents need.”

On the same page, in her telling, describes two men who reversed a federal policy within about 24 hours of each other.

On body cameras — absent from both shootings — she said: “Over half of all ICE field offices now do have body cameras, and the remainder of the field offices are expected within 60 days. It’s been a slower rollout than we would have hoped, but that’s because of Democrats’ decision to shut down DHS for several weeks.”

The DHS-specific shutdown ended April 30 — eleven weeks ago.

A Second Scandal, One Word Apart

A reporter asked, almost in passing, who’d be running the teleprompter tonight “after this report that the other guy is now under investigation for making money off of reading the president’s speech.”

Confirmed independently: Gabriel Perez, Trump’s teleprompter operator since 2016, is under CFTC investigation for allegedly betting more than $100,000 on Kalshi’s “mention markets” — wagers on which words and phrases the president would use — across more than a dozen speeches over three months, including a December primetime address and a January appearance in Davos. Kalshi froze roughly $90,000 of his winnings and referred the trades to federal regulators in March.

Leavitt’s first answer: Perez “is complying with the CFTC, but has been put on paid administrative leave.” A few minutes later, unprompted, she corrected herself: “paid administrative… I’m sorry, without pay, the administrative leave is unpaid. To be very clear, that was a decision by the president.” Roughly fifteen minutes after that, a different reporter asked her to confirm it a third time. “He’s on unpaid administrative leave right now,” she said.

Three answers to the same fact, inside one briefing.

Asked whether White House Counsel knew this had been going on since earlier this year, Leavitt said there’s “a plan in place” and that Perez “violated the plan.” She didn’t say how a pattern running at least three months went undetected by the White House and was instead caught by the trading platform itself. Asked separately whether White House staff have access to Kalshi and Polymarket on their office wifi, and whether anyone else is suspected of similar trades, she said: “I’ve never tried, so I don’t know” and “not to my knowledge, not that I’ve been made aware of.”

A Question About Minab She Wouldn’t Take

Sky News’s Mark Stone asked about February’s missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran — 120 children and 26 teachers killed, by Sky’s count — and a Sky News investigation concluding it was a U.S. targeting mistake. Preliminary findings reported independently by the New York Times, CNN, and Reuters months earlier point the same direction: outdated intelligence, a school building once part of an adjacent military compound, a Tomahawk strike that hit both. Stone asked why the president keeps saying “it wasn’t America” when he hasn’t even read the report.

Leavitt: “I can’t speak to Sky News investigation respectfully because I have not read it,” and referred the question to the Department of War. Pressed again — Stone cited a military source calling it human error — she said “the president feels that way because he knows that our military always acts in good faith,” then pivoted: Iran, she said, “is well known for killing women and children,” and told Stone he “should focus on that in your reporting.”

The strike killed more children than were named in the entire deportation list read at the top of the briefing. The investigation she declined to discuss has been open since February.

Two Questions, One Answer

Earlier in the briefing came a two-part question: what is the U.S. doing to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, and separately, what is it doing to preempt a Houthi move to choke off the Red Sea oil route.

Leavitt flagged the structure herself — “two separate questions” — then answered exactly one of them.

On Hormuz, she led with hardware: “more than 10,000 U.S. sailors, Marines, and airmen, along with two aircraft carriers and more than 20 warships and dozens of aircraft, are executing the blockade mission.” In the blockade’s first 24 hours, she said, CENTCOM “redirected two compliant commercial vessels and disabled one non-compliant vessel.”

On gas prices, she said there “may be temporary disruptions in the oil market,” credited the SPR release and the Jones Act waiver, and closed with the reason for the war: “to ensure that Iran, a terror state, can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

The Houthis and the Red Sea route — the second half of the original question — never came back up. Iran’s Health Ministry, separately, reported more than 35 people killed and 300 injured in this week’s strikes, a figure independent outlets could not verify.

Who Launched the Attack?

A reporter said Iran had launched a drone attack on U.S. facilities in Erbil the day before, threatening American personnel in the Kurdistan region, and asked what message Leavitt had for those responsible.

Her response: “Who launched the attack? You’re saying Iran. Yesterday, well, I think I’ve addressed that previously in saying that the Iranian Iran has unfortunately shown to violate the word that they struck with the president of the United States. They’re paying consequences for that and the strikes that the president has authorized in the recent days.”

She didn’t confirm the attack. She didn’t deny it. She repeated the reporter’s attribution back as a question, then pivoted straight to U.S. strikes as consequences for it — consequences for an event she’d just declined to confirm happened at all.

I’ll Get Back to You

Asked about the NATO summit in Ankara and Turkey’s role in de-escalating the Ukraine conflict, Leavitt first had to be corrected — she hadn’t attended. “I was not actually,” she said, when the reporter assumed otherwise.

Her actual answer: she’d “check with the National Security Council and get back to you,” then spent the rest of it on how much the president enjoyed the trip and his relationship with President Erdogan.

The question was about a live diplomatic mechanism in an active war. The answer was about a good trip.

An Outbreak, Managed with Adjectives

The cyclospora outbreak spreading through food-production regions got two questions: whether federal officials are on the ground testing farms and facilities, and whether CDC and FDA funding cuts have slowed the response.

To the first, Leavitt said the White House is “closely monitoring the situation” and has “a handle on the situation,” and confirmed only that case counts are “unusually high” compared to a typical year. To the second: “No, we’ve talked to the CDC and FDA specifically about that, and not at all. They have the resources they need.”

Neither answer contained a number, a location, or a timeline. The reassurance was in the adjectives.

The Speech Before the Speech

Tonight’s address got more airtime than anything else in the room, from multiple angles.

Asked whether he will address Iran after 6 days of consistent attacks or is it solely about relitigating 2020, Leavitt said: “It’s not a matter of importance. It’s just a matter of timing.” She previewed “a very important announcement with respect to the integrity of our elections” and noted the president “sometimes is thinking about these things up until he walks out.” (Judging by that response, expect the Iran war to get more airtime than previously scheduled in tonight’s speech.)

A second reporter pushed harder: 2020 has already had recounts, audits, and lawsuits; 2024 is “widely believed to be safe and secure”; why can’t the president let it go? Leavitt didn’t answer the question asked. She said the findings tonight “will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president,” and that everything he says “will be backed up by facts and evidence that will be provided this evening.”

A third reporter asked the obvious follow-up: the president has been in office more than 540 days — if tonight’s claims are backed by evidence, why hasn’t anyone been charged? “He hasn’t revealed it yet. He hasn’t declassified the documents yet,” Leavitt said, adding, “I don’t speak on behalf of the Justice Department.” Asked directly whether there will be charges: “You’ll have to ask the Justice Department. I don’t charge people.”

A fourth exchange, near the end of the briefing, raised Republicans on Capitol Hill who worry the speech should focus on the economy instead. Leavitt said reporters “have not heard the speech yet,” argued the administration can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” and pointed to the president’s travel schedule — including a stop “touring a Mack truck facility” in Pennsylvania — as evidence he hasn’t lost focus on the economy.

Courts, state election officials, and independent reviews have already examined the underlying 2020 fraud claims and found no evidence of widespread fraud. By the time the briefing ended, tonight’s speech had been previewed four separate times, and the content of it — the actual findings — had been described in exactly zero of them.

Two Messages, Different Days

A reporter read two quotes back to back: Trump, on the Iranian government, calling its officials “liars… cuckoo… scum, sick people, vicious, violent people”; and Vance, on Joe Rogan’s podcast the night before, saying he was “frustrated” by people who claim the U.S. can’t negotiate with Iran. Asked to reconcile the two, Leavitt said the comments came from “different times throughout this conflict” and that the president and vice president are “on the exact same page.”

On whether Americans still detained in Iran would become a condition of any deal, she said she’d “never create a red line… without his blessing,” then pointed to the administration’s broader record on returning detained Americans.

Trump Accounts, As It Stands Right Now

Asked whether the $1,000 government deposit into every Trump Account amounts to wealth redistribution, Leavitt rejected the framing, citing private donors including Michael Dell. Asked whether children born to undocumented immigrants are excluded from the accounts, she didn’t answer directly — she said only that “all American citizen children are able to access the Trump accounts as it stands right now.”

Pressed specifically on whether children of undocumented immigrants qualify, she said it wasn’t something she’d discussed directly with the president.

A Run of Friendlier Questions

Leavitt opened the briefing by introducing two “new media” seats — Rachel Bayd and Ben Black — and calling on Bayd first. The format runs a specific way: a personal or friendly-sounding question that hands her room to deliver a message she wanted out there anyway, in the shape of an answer rather than a talking point.

Bayd’s opener asked for her secret to balancing two children under two with the job. Leavitt said there’s no secret — “you just have to show up every day” — and that “there’s nothing better than being a mother.” The question wasn’t really about parenting logistics. It was a setup, and she used it.

The rest of the room’s softer moments followed the same shape without the seating chart behind them. Asked what she’d want visiting World Cup fans to take away from their trip, she said Americans are “a kind people” who don’t “get enough credit from the international media.” Asked whether the president will now root for Argentina after criticizing Spain’s NATO spending, she admitted she’d forgotten to ask him and would “get you an answer.”

The last of these closed the briefing. A reporter opened by telling Leavitt that “Americans that I speak to care deeply about election integrity,” asked why the “mainstream media” was trying to discredit a speech nobody had heard yet, and closed by asking for a message to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Leavitt answered in full: “I think that the mainstream media should air the president’s speech and allow the American people to draw their own conclusions from it… it’s important that the American public hears directly from the president of the United States on a topic that… is very near and dear to the hearts of many Americans across the country: the integrity of our elections. This should be a nonpartisan, noncontroversial issue.”

No containment. No deflection to the National Security Council. When a question invited the answer she wanted to give, she gave it, at length, on the record.

In Memory, Then Back to Business

Asked about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s death and whether it would push the Senate to move faster on the Save America Act, Leavitt offered condolences — Graham was “beloved by so many here at the White House, especially the president” — then moved directly to the bill’s status inside the pending budget reconciliation package.

Rubio explained. Vance managed. Leavitt contains. Today that meant a list of six criminal cases before the first question, three different answers to one yes-or-no fact about her own staff, a declined comment on an investigation into dead schoolchildren, a full accounting of blockade tonnage, a promise to check with the National Security Council, a shrug at an unconfirmed drone strike, adjectives standing in for outbreak data, and one word for the question about the president’s own family and $1.6 billion.

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It was December 2025, inside an ICE detention facility in Texas. A pod officer told a detainee identified in court filings only as C.Y. that she had an incoming call. She was walked to the phones in the visitation area. She asked the officer who was on the other line.

He told her: the Iranian consulate. She said she didn’t want to talk to them. He told her she had no choice — she wouldn’t be allowed back to her pod until she answered.

So she answered.

The woman on the other end was a representative of the Iranian Interest Section — Iran’s stand-in for an embassy it isn’t allowed to have in Washington. She knew C.Y.’s name. She knew her A-number. She knew the basis of her asylum claim and exactly where it stood in the process. She told C.Y. she had the entire transcript of her fear interview in hand.

ICE had sent it to her. C.Y. hung up.

What the lawsuit says

That call is one piece of evidence in a new federal case, Iranian American Legal Defense Fund v. Rubio, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and now before Judge Ana C. Reyes. The plaintiff, IALDF, is a nonprofit that provides legal support to Iranian nationals, including asylum seekers held in ICE detention. Its complaint, filed July 7, alleges that since March 2025, the federal government has been sharing the confidential immigration files of detained Iranian asylum seekers with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran — the same government those detainees are seeking protection from. I covered the complaint itself, including the March 2025 meeting that started the arrangement and the regulations it allegedly violates, here.

On July 15, IALDF filed a motion asking Judge Reyes for a stay of the policy under 5 U.S.C. § 705 and for a preliminary injunction. Nothing has been decided. There is no ruling yet, and this piece describes allegations in a complaint and a motion, not findings a court has made. What follows is new: the record filed alongside that motion, including declarations from twelve detained asylum seekers and from the IALDF attorneys who collected them.

What detainees say happened to them

IALDF’s motion is supported by declarations from twelve detained asylum seekers, identified only by initials to protect them and their families still in Iran. Read together, they describe a repeated pattern: ICE summoning Iranian detainees to a facility’s visitation area to meet a man described to them as the Iranian “Consul,” who turned out to be a senior Interest Section official — and who arrived already knowing their names, their A-numbers, and the status of their cases.

Two declarants, identified as P.M. and S.O., describe this happening in December 2025 at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. According to the memorandum’s account of P.M.’s declaration, the official who met with her had her husband’s case information as well — and told her that her husband, also an asylum seeker, would be placed on a chartered deportation flight to Iran. P.M. is a Christian convert who was active in protests against the Iranian government. She feared her husband would face interrogation, torture, or worse for his conversion and for having sought asylum — information the U.S. government had already shared with the same regime he fled.

A declarant identified as R.T. describes a different kind of pressure. In May 2026, despite having a pending, previously-credible case, she says ICE officers brought her to what she was told were routine papers — and that when she refused to sign what turned out to be third-country deportation paperwork, an officer physically forced her finger onto an inkpad and pressed her fingerprint onto the document. Her removal toward Louisiana was halted only after her attorney obtained a temporary restraining order.

Each declarant closes on a documented result, not a summary of fear: a husband’s flight date disclosed. A fingerprint forced onto paper. A transcript read back over a phone line.

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What the court must now decide

IALDF’s motion asks Judge Reyes for two things: a stay of the disclosure policy under § 705 of the Administrative Procedure Act, and a preliminary injunction requiring the government to identify and notify anyone whose information has already reached the Iranian government, so those individuals can move to reopen their cases.

To get there, IALDF has to clear the usual preliminary-relief bar: a likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, and a balance of equities in its favor. On the merits, IALDF’s argument is that the disclosure is final agency action that conflicts with the plain text of §§ 208.6(a) and 236.1(e) — not a discretionary judgment call, a straightforward violation. On harm, IALDF points not just to the risk to individual detainees but to its own organization: intake interviews that now take roughly 20% longer, an estimated 20–25% reduction in the number of new clients it can take on, and additional hours each week spent screening for contact with Iranian officials — all according to declarations from IALDF’s Interim Executive Director, Ali Rahnama.

None of that has been ruled on. Judge Reyes has not held a hearing on the record described here, and nothing in this piece should be read as a decision.

What’s still unresolved

At least three deportation flights have already gone to Iran under the disclosure policy IALDF is challenging — in September 2025, December 2025, and January 2026. According to a declaration from Cyrus Mehri, an IALDF board member who spoke directly with a senior Iranian Interest Section official, two people being removed on the first of those flights cut their wrists in protest before boarding and were taken to a hospital.

Nobody has been told, as a matter of court order, whether their own file made it to Tehran before they did. That’s what IALDF’s motion is actually asking for: not just a stop to the policy going forward, but notice for the people it may have already reached — so they can find out, and so they can ask a court to look at their case again.