*

A profile in the New York Times finds it “odd” that almost everyone loves country entertainment legend Dolly Parton even though she “has remained reluctant to make the slightest hint of a political statement.” I think that should win some sort of prize for statements that are best at missing what is in plain sight.

Do most people really want politics to play that big a part in their lives or their choice of entertainment? I don’t know, but here are some of the reactions I’ve seen this morning on social media:

• “She’s been an entertainer and a generous person. Why not leave it at that?”

• “The general idea seems to be ‘if something doesn’t have a political statement in it, it’s not good enough.’”

• “‘I don’t understand. ‘Be a good person’ is a perfectly legitimate political statement. And Miss Dolly is a heck of an exemplar.”

• “Donating a [hundred] million books is a political statement even if the New York Times doesn’t think it is.”

I could go on about how “Coat of Many Colors,” “Jolene,” and “I Will Always Love You” have something permanent to say about poverty, about the thing between men and women, and about responding to bad treatment with forgiveness and magnanimity, and that the answers to those problems of life (when they even have answers) don’t necessarily lead through politics. But I’ll go back to quoting another social media reaction:

• “Dolly Parton’s life is a political statement for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.”

*

There is a Quaker precept, “Let your life speak.” Dolly Parton’s life sang.

On Friday, August 7, federal judge Emily Marks of the Middle District of Alabama denied a defense motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive, saying the defense had not met the (substantial) burden of demonstrating that the charges were improperly motivated by retaliation against protected speech.

Leaving aside the question of how courts are to distinguish vindictive prosecutions from the regular kind at a time when the president of the United States openly instructs the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents, the merits of the dispute are now likely to begin emerging into sharper focus.

From the outset, it has seemed clear that the counts based on misinforming banks are much stronger than those based on supposed fraud against donors. In May, Alex Tabarrok wrote a helpful post summarizing a long column by payments expert Patrick McKenzie, noting that federal law criminalizes (with stringent penalties) “almost any false statement made to influence a bank, no matter how small.” As McKenzie has pointed out, these statutes are highly prosecution-friendly in part because they were drafted specifically to advance the interests of prosecutors (what, you thought it was banks?), who know that they can often prove covert actors to have falsified bank records even if it is inconvenient or impossible to prove whatever underlying criminal behavior they have engaged in, if any.

In this case, DOJ says it has adduced evidence that SPLC told untruths to banks in the course of its informant program, presumably to maintain confidentiality for its informants, who could face dire consequences if it became known they were feeding information to the opposition. There is no exception in the false bank statements law allowing a defense in situations where the underlying purpose in using the accounts is lawful, known to the authorities, or even praiseworthy.

The wire fraud charges based on supposedly deceiving donors, by contrast, seem extremely weak. The SPLC’s use of informants inside racist organizations was hardly a secret, least of all to the federal government, which cooperated with it over decades. There is much reason to think that the secrets of SPLC’s success in disrupting and discrediting these groups not only would not have been unwelcome to the class of persons who responded to their fund-raising appeals but, in fact, would have been applauded by most of them, assuming indeed they were not already aware of the covert program. First Amendment specialist Eugene Volokh has a fuller discussion, as does legal analyst Chris Geidner.

In the Trump Justice Department’s ostensible solicitude for the best interests of SPLC donors—in reality, a group that would take less than a millisecond to sort onto the “foe” side of its friend/​foe identification screen—I see echoes of other enforcement actions whose sincerity invites question. I wrote a couple of years ago about how conservative Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, stirring up legal trouble for the left-wing group Media Matters, framed his action as motivated by “concern for the well-being of Media Matters donors, whom he paint[ed] as the victims on behalf of whom he [was] acting.” As I argued then, “This is every bit as convincing as former New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s insistence that in bringing a securities fraud case over Exxon’s climate statements, he was deeply concerned for the welfare of Exxon’s shareholders.”

As the case proceeds further into discovery, the government’s knowledge and actions, both now and earlier, are likely to come under greater scrutiny. The SPLC has already let it be known that in at least a dozen instances, the FBI also obtained help from its stable of informants or acted on information provided by the SPLC to disrupt dangerous actors.

[Adapted from Cato at Liberty. Shortly after its publication, federal prosecutors added charges against former SPLC employee Heidi Beirich.]

[Image: Frank M. Johnson Jr U.S. Courthouse Complex, Montgomery, Alabama. Source: U.S. District Court, Middle District of Alabama website]

So far as I am aware, this is by far the biggest instance of unlawful noncitizen voting in the US unearthed in the past generation, so it may matter that it seems to be widely agreed that the mistaken registration did not result from intentional misconduct by the persons added to the rolls, the state, or its software vendor. Damningly, however, when the error was found and the software fixed, the state “never notified affected residents or removed their names from the rolls,” according to the NYT account. Incoming Gov. Mikie Sherrill at a press conference called this “unacceptable.” That’s for sure.

To get another issue on the table, motor-voter—using residents’ DMV interactions either to offer them the chance to register to vote or, as in New Jersey’s case, to affirmatively register them unless they choose to opt out—has been prone to harmful glitches since its introduction. In a 2017 preview of the New Jersey debacle, Pennsylvania said that it had found “1,160 records that indicate a registrant apparently self-reported and cancelled their registration because they were not citizens,” about two-thirds of whom had come in through motor-voter. Of these, approximately 248 had voted at least once, casting 642 ballots in all between 2000 and 2017. As recently as 2024, an Oregon investigation found 1,617 improper registrations, with “human error and a poorly designed computer program” blamed, of which officials say ten persons went on to vote. The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) has a clickable map in which you can check out allegations in a particular state.

At the same time, other intake glitches may work to impede legitimately eligible voters from timely and accurate registration in a manner that increases their likelihood of running into paperwork hassles when they try to vote.

Both the ballot-integrity and voter-discouragement issues are part of wider problems, chronic in some states, with outdated and inaccurate voter rolls. Critics warned from the start and have continued to warn that motor-voter in particular tends to turn over sensitive matters of intake design, data entry, and data transfer to state agencies whose expertise and mission are unrelated to elections. (Twenty-five years ago, Cato Senior Fellow John Samples was testifying about these problems to Congress.)

One possible conclusion is that Congress should consider backing the federal government away from its current explicit promotion of motor-voter, which might not really fit well with its constitutional responsibilities anyway. More modestly, we should at least take the hint that the unglamorous details of implementation matter greatly, even if they get lost in the rival claims over who is a better friend to democracy. My own view is that not only are major changes to election systems best phased in over time, but they also tend to work best when seasoned election administrators can take prominent responsibility for their design, debugging, and maintenance. That might be needed advice for backers of the Trump-backed SAVE America Act—now mercifully shelved for the year, it seems—which would have imposed drastic changes over a period of months in an environment in which all sorts of data problems were likely to emerge.

My colleague Stephen Richer has also weighed in with observations.

[adapted from a post at Cato at Liberty]

*

Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on HB 2100 – Constitutional Amendment. Between 2013 and 2021 I co-chaired three governor’s commissions on redistricting in Maryland, and in that capacity testified many times before Senate and House of Delegates committees. While I write often on election law in my capacity as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and am involved with many Maryland civic and nonprofit ventures., my comments here reflect only my own individual views and not those of any group.

I oppose this constitutional amendment, which would undo the progress Maryland has made since the days not that long ago when our state was known for having the nation’s worst House gerrymander. That is thanks above all to one courageous jurist, Judge Lynne Battaglia, and to Marylanders across the state who kept the faith that the state deserved a better and more democratic future.

The evils of extreme partisan gerrymandering have been rehearsed often enough, and I will not repeat them again here. I believe most of those who intend to vote for this bill know in their hearts that it is not something they will be proud of passing, especially in this form. I will only observe a couple of ways in which sacrificing principle harms the public.

Consider the events of this spring. The Maryland Senate had passed and sent to the Assembly a much-needed constitutional amendment establishing special elections for legislative vacancies, which have long been filled by county party committees, that is to say political insiders.

The General Assembly leadership then killed this salutary pro-democracy measure by grafting on a completely unrelated constitutional amendment meant to clear the tracks for a new and extreme partisan gerrymander. It didn’t so much as notify Sen. Cheryl Kagan, sponsor of the Senate bill and a longtime leader on elections reform, that it was doing that. So the valuable result of years of reform efforts was rudely 86-ed even after it had reached consensus.

Constitutional reform of elections is best built on the consent of both parties and on principles that can stand the test of time. “We have the power and we intend to use it to reward our friends and vanquish our enemies” is not such a principle. The premise of today’s power grab seems to be that one-party rule in this legislature will be perpetual, yet we should not assume that. American history teaches that one-party rule does not last forever – parties split, minority parties resurge or completely new parties spring up.

Please turn back while there is time.

*

In particular, Trump said he has “ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately.” Election law scholar Ned Foley identifies the central legal problem here: “I don’t believe that DHS has been given authority from Congress to ‘direct’ states to make changes to their voter rolls, and I don’t believe that the President has either statutory or constitutional authority to order DHS to issue this directive to the states.”

Then came Mullin’s remarks the next day. To quote the New York Times, the secretary “threatened local election officials on Friday with prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies.”

Again, it is unclear what criminal or civil law local election officials would break by declining to adopt policies urged by the White House. Very likely, administration lawyers have been scrambling to come up with theories on that.

Which registered voters’ names would appear on the federally directed purge lists?

Trump, in his speech, floated the claim that 278,000 noncitizens are on the voting rolls in four states. If, as appears to be the case, those numbers are based on database comparisons, Trump has every reason to know they are fiction, given the uniform experience by which speculative assertions based on similar database comparisons in the past have invariably melted away on closer inspection. As the Washington Post reports:

relying on publicly available data means that federal officials were probably not using verified and up-to-date information. States often intentionally publish incomplete identifying information on their public voting rolls — such as an incomplete birthday — to protect people’s privacy.

Election experts said that using this public data would result in confusing the identities of people who have common or similar names. In many instances, naturalized citizens remain improperly labeled as noncitizens in government databases, experts said.

Without a state’s full, official voter list, it was not clear whether the administration had access to Social Security numbers or other specific identifiers to verify its findings.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called Trump and Mullin’s claim of at least 250,000 noncitizen voters an “irresponsible number” generated using a “shoddy methodology.”

More from me and from colleague Stephen Richer, who explains why “soft matches” make such an inaccurate way to identify unlawful voters (and also points out that the documents released by the White House fail to substantiate and even in some instances tend to refute Trump’s claims). Stephen has written a lot this year on noncitizen voting claims, including the results of state investigations (and see this summary).

A signature move of this administration is the bringing of criminal charges against political enemies on absurdly flimsy grounds, as when they got a federal grand jury to indict James Comey over a picture of seashells spelling out the numbers “86 47.” While federal grand juries in some big cities have refused to indict in some of these cases—itself almost unheard of until recently—the Department of Justice has been finding ways to work with other grand juries, perhaps more geographically or ideologically amenable, to obtain indictments.

Trump and Mullin are laying the rhetorical groundwork for indicting or even arresting state and local election administrators who ignore White House voter-purge demands that the federal government has no clear authority to make. We’ll see whether they try to go through with it.

When Donald Trump publicly vowed one year ago to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, a step lacking in any colorable legal basis, he sent a shock wave through America’s nonprofit and philanthropic community. It was part of a multi-fronted onslaught that included investigations, loose talk of confiscating endowments, and even a move to purge ideologically unwelcome nonprofits from the public service loan forgiveness program. In 2021, vice-president-to-be J.D. Vance, then running for an Ohio Senate seat, said that while the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and Harvard “pretend to be charities” and get corresponding tax treatment, they are “fundamentally cancers on American society.”

There is a contrasting story to be told, though, about how the freedom to give without asking government permission or approval has given America a $600 billion philanthropic sector with unique accomplishments in advancing science, health, education, religion, and culture, among other endeavors – no other country comes anywhere close to matching it.

Last month, Cato convened a panel at its headquarters to discuss, in the words of moderator Maria Santos Bier, who directs foundation and corporate relations at Cato, “some of the threats to philanthropy today and what shared principles can safeguard it.” Attended or watched by many in the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds, the event was covered in the Chronicle of Philanthropy under the headline “Left and Right Join to Defend Nonprofit Rights.”

Joining us were two major figures in contemporary American philanthropy: Lawson Bader, president and CEO at DonorsTrust, which helps right-of-center benefactors create donor-advised funds (DAFs), and John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known for supporting many progressive causes. I was on the panel as well.

Much common ground was in evidence: on the importance of neutral and impartial law to govern the nonprofit and charitable world, on the strong spillover benefits of the sector, and on the dangers to be apprehended from government encroachment and arbitrary official action.

Palfrey called the philanthropic sector part of “what makes America so distinctive” and joined Maria Santos Bier in discussing how Tocqueville saw Americans’ habits of voluntary association as essential to its fledgling democracy. While MacArthur’s grantmaking has often brought it under criticism from varying quarters, he said the latest developments have meant that the rule of law “has needed to be defended in ways I didn’t expect.”

Palfrey expanded on these points in his 2025 MacArthur President’s Essay, several of whose themes were also explored by Bader in a widely noted essay late last year. In that piece, Bader called Trump’s move against Harvard “a political attack” on “the entire framework of American charitable independence…. History teaches that when politicians exploit the tax code to punish ideological opponents, civil liberties suffer.”

At the Cato panel, Bader noted that policy attacks on philanthropy used to come mostly from the left end of the spectrum, particularly in measures aimed at curtailing donor privacy (in the 1958 case of NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson the Supreme Court recognized some such rights as grounded in the First Amendment, with echoes that have continued through the present day). Now, he noted, at the state level, “there are just as many Republicans demanding to see donor lists as there are Democrats.”

But if fellow conservatives decide to cheer the “weaponization of government power” against philanthropy, Bader warned, “it’s only going to come back to haunt us.” Private philanthropy is crucial in providing alternate sources of support for those who may be cut out of governing circles: “Having independent sources of power in this country is the basis of a free society.”

You can watch here.

*

There were early warnings. “Months before the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was announced, Ed Martin predicted Capitol rioters would get millions, even if it took until 2028,” reports NBC News.

*

Legal journalist Roger Parloff was among the first to dig into the language of the purported settlement. He writes [see screenshots for backup on three points]:

“The Trump/Blanche ‘settlement’ fund purports to be challengeable only by those who colluded to create it.

“To help themselves to nearly $2B of our tax dollars, claimants present evidence to the (wink-wink) ‘settlement’ fund that they were victims of ‘Lawfare’ or ‘Weaponization,’ terms that are nowhere defined.

“The fund is administered by 5 people chosen by Acting AG Todd (’I love you, sir’) Blanche, and are removable at will by Trump.

“The identities of those given our tax dollars, and how much, will be kept secret from us, and known only to Todd (’I love you, sir’) Blanche.”

“The procedures for processing these claims can be as secret as Blanche’s appointees choose to make them.”

Two other provisions of note: under IV - G, H the fund must wrap up operations and liquidate by December 2028, ensuring that later administrations cannot get their hands on it (or more to the point, I suspect, its records.)

It has a second, longer section purporting to exclude judicial review. From VI - B: “there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations.”

The sum transferred is to be $1.776 billion, a number that is cute but reveals the arbitrariness at work. (There is a baldly mendacious recitation that it is the sum expected to be paid had claimants gone through regular legal process.) At any rate, no judge had anything to do with that cute number. Trump had sued the federal government claiming that his own IRS appointees had failed to prevent a rogue actor from unlawfully leaking part of his tax returns. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams had expressed skepticism as to whether the parties were genuinely adverse, since Trump appointed and could fire the officials charged with defending the U.S. Treasury against him. Trump dropped the suit, forcing the judge to relinquish her jurisdiction, and then within hours unveiled the “settlement,” which at that point could proceed without judicial supervision.

*
Under an addendum to the supposed settlement the Internal Revenue Service is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” (capitals in original) from asserting civil or criminal claims against Trump, his companies, and his family over any misconduct or deficiency connected with tax returns filed up to the present date, whether known or unknown. At least so the Acting Attorney General, Trump’s former personal attorney, has agreed.

Nice deal if you can get it! Maybe you can get it if you’re “negotiating,” adversely or otherwise, with someone who serves at your pleasure. And Trump does seem to have at least one high-exposure dispute with the feds over his taxes, per this NYT account from 2024.

At least there’s one consolation, economist Justin Wolfers observes: "He promised to release his tax returns as soon as there were no more audits pending, and now there are no more audits pending."

*

My Cato colleagues Tad DeHaven and Molly Nixon make many useful additional points in this post.

They note that in his order creating the fund, Acting AG Todd Blanche “cites as precedent several cases in which the USDA resolved discrimination claims brought by Native American, Hispanic, and female farmers, stating that those cases were ‘settled on similar terms.’”

No, they weren’t. “Those cases did indeed tap the Judgment Fund, but the eligible claimants for those funds were generally within the category of those whose cases had been settled [and] for the same USDA discrimination alleged in the lawsuits.” This new slush fund, by contrast, is not structured to assist victims of improper tax disclosure.

Instead, the level of generality as to offense committed and injury suffered is set high enough to give the fund broad discretion to reward friends and turn away foes. No neutral third party administration, no appeal, no public accounting, and of course zero court supervision from the get-go, the whole thing having been engineered to escape scrutiny by any judge. Not much of a comparison to the Clinton- and Obama-era USDA discrimination settlements (which indeed deserved the vigorous criticism I and others directed at them at the time).

It’s also true, of course, that the persons and groups given money in those settlements had not been prosecuted for crimes, often violent, meant to prevent the peaceful transfer of power following an election.

*

Harvard professor of government Ryan Enos calls this “the most brazenly corrupt action in US Presidential history.” I’m not prepared to pronounce either way on that, although it seems fair as applied to the presidents I’ve followed over my lifetime.

I’ll close by quoting Nick Catoggio for The Dispatch (paywalled alas):

“It’s simple theft packaged in the argle-bargle of ‘weaponization’ and ‘compensation’ to make it palatable to populist dimwits searching for a way to excuse it morally. Even the mechanism is postliberal to the core: Trump’s habit of using flimsy lawsuits to squeeze money out of parties that he knows won’t dare refuse him reduces law—ostensibly an instrument of justice—into a vehicle of extortion.

“How does he get away with it? You already know that, too.

“The president behaves with impunity because he believes most of his party will unthinkingly defend anything he does, and he’s correct.”

*

I had avoided trying to catch up with Akira Kurosawa’s work because I didn’t want to watch long samurai movies. Finally it dawned on me that there must be Kurosawa films on the Criterion Channel that were not long and not about samurais, and in fact there were quite a lot that are not those things, especially among his earlier output. So off I went.

My favorite of the four was No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), starring Setsuko Hara, best known for her radiant performances in Yasuhiro Ozu’s films. Three idealistic students are best friends in the Japan of the 1930s, an increasingly authoritarian place. Loosely based on real happenings, it sets up a love triangle in which Hara loves the dissident and is in turn loved by the conformist, who becomes a prosecutor. (Wasn’t We the Living kind of like that?) You can probably guess some of what happens next but not the developments of the final half hour, which push Hara to almost unbelievable extremities. It has been remarked that this is practically the only film in which Kurosawa made a woman his heroic protagonist, but I will note for the record that “paying proper honor to the parents” looms large to the very end.

In Drunken Angel (1948), an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) tries to save the health of a young gangster (Toshiro Mifune) whose afflictions include bullet wounds, TB and a drinking problem. Mifune’s physicality and violent manner almost jump off the screen and made him a big star overnight. (He was to do 15 more collaborations with Kurosawa.) There is plenty of sociological background (vice-ridden slum district with open sewers) and the music rises to a new level with K’s first collaboration with Fumio Hayasaka.

Scandal (1950) is widely regarded as one of Kurosawa’s weakest, but the subject matter (a defamation lawsuit against a sleazy tabloid) interested me, and indeed both the legal process and journalism are treated scathingly. Takashi Shimura, who played the doctor in Drunken Angel, returns here as a corrupt lawyer with maybe a conscience, one of his 21 appearances in Kurosawa films. Mifune switches type and plays the soft-spoken, well-behaved victim seeking justice, and music is again a highlight (in one extended sequence the people at a social gathering sing two Christmas songs followed by “Auld Lang Syne,” all in Japanese). Under the censorship rules the American Occupation could not be shown directly, but you could certainly detect its presence as an influence.

Shimura, a homely middle-aged guy with a lazy manner, seemed to be Kurosawa’s favorite actor around which to construct moral ambiguities, and he took center stage with Ikiru (”To Live,” 1952), about a mid-level municipal employee with a dull, unfulfilling job who learns he has not long to live and decides to -- well, what will he do with his remaining months? I’m not buying the take from some over-impressed critics that this film somehow lays bare the secrets of life, but it does have some pricelessly funny scenes, as well as some of the most caustic commentary on deadlocked government process I’ve ever seen.

In these early films Kurosawa reminds me of Ingmar Bergman in his ability to coax remarkable acting from his cast members, in his attention to background, and in his dedication to the human face as a subject.

Photo of Setsuko Hara being filmed by Asakazu Nakai and Akira Kurosawa on the set of No Regrets for Our Youth. Taken by Tadahiko Hayashi in 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)

If that’s accurate, the third-named resident has been on the Maryland rolls for thirty years since his death, and the others for roughly a decade or two since theirs. A Silver Spring woman is still on the rolls at the unlikely age of 131.

Now, as Uncapher is careful to add, the presence of stale names doesn’t mean they’ve been fraudulently voted. Election fraud is not Montgomery County’s style. But it does strongly imply that the county, for whatever reason, has fallen short on its responsibility to keep rolls properly clean. That’s bad for everyone, whether or not anyone misuses the loose names for whatever purpose, whether at the polls or by turning them into bogus signatures in support of some ballot initiative.

It’s also a failure that appears to be county-specific. (In Maryland, counties take the lead in election administration.) Uncapher writes that “among Maryland’s 308 voters aged 110 or older, roughly 70 percent reside in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties....Curiously, my single [Chevy Chase] precinct reportedly has more ‘super-aged’ voters than the entire city of Baltimore.”

Let me add a bit of personal experience for what it may be worth. I’ve canvassed voters door-to-door a fair bit in three Maryland counties, Frederick, Howard, and Montgomery. In Frederick and Howard counties, it was rare for me to be told at the door that no person of that name lived at the residence. In Montgomery, it happened a lot.

None of which is intended to take the Trump administration’s side in its newest legal dispute with Maryland. In December, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Maryland suggesting that the state had failed to comply with federal laws, including the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the former of which requires states to institute “a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names” of voters ineligible through death or change of address and the latter of which sets minimum standards for voter registration systems.

The Trump suit also demands the state’s voter rolls, a demand already rejected by federal courts in at least two states. Maryland’s officials, including Attorney General Anthony Brown and elections administrator Jared DeMarinis, are right to be concerned that for Trump to obtain custody of the voter rolls would endanger privacy (consider the DOGE experience) and pave the way for misuse of the information obtained.

But leaving aside the (important and legitimate) debates over how much federal meddling is too much, counties like Montgomery should want cleaner rolls for their own sake. Even aside from the annoyance to canvassers in knocking defunct doors, and the risk that at some point down the road bad actors will begin making sinister use of stale names, messy rolls distort estimates of turnout, complicate various forms of integrity control, and inflate the already inordinate cost of campaigning by inducing candidates to send their glossy mailers to thousands of imaginary households. If Baltimore can do better, so can the rest of us.

At the same time, it’s important that critics be accurate—not an easy task because the various bills have changed and some of the changes are intended to respond to critics. Memes and clips regularly circulate based on old versions of the bill.Consider, for example, the situation of married women and the millions of other Americans whose current name differs from the one on their birth certificate. It’s important to note that the current bill provides a workaround track that is intended to smooth out the practical problems for most people in this category. (That makes perfect political sense, by the way, since Republicans know that to win majorities at the national polls, they must depend on married women’s votes.) Note also that there’s a second workaround track for persons who cannot lay their hands on proper documentation, whether or not a name discrepancy is at issue.

The better focus for discussion is whether these workarounds would in fact work very well. More on that in a moment.

I’ve been quoted several times in the press about the bill over the past week, including by Minho Kim at the New York Times (“a terribly drafted mess”) and David Morgan at Reuters (even if it fails to pass, “it seamlessly introduces an excuse for losing the midterms” or intervening in them after claiming fraud). And Lori Robertson quotes me at length in her deep dive for FactCheck​.org on several controversies related to the bill.

In the FactCheck​.org piece, I express unease at the way the bill would give a blank check to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an up-to-now obscure federal executive branch agency, to issue guidance to states on how to enforce many of the bill’s key provisions.

For example, when states establish the “Process in Case of Certain Discrepancies in Documentation”—that is, the name-change workaround track—it would be “subject to any relevant guidance adopted by the Election Assistance Commission.” Exactly the same wording applies to the insufficient-documentation workaround track. The bill also formally assigns to the EAC the wording of the affidavits that voters would need to sign to use the alternative tracks as well as the development of a new mail voter registration application form.

That’s a lot of power, and it means that the EAC’s guidance on a variety of topics could make the difference between a harsh law that hassles voters and election administrators a whole lot or a milder one that tries to hold hassle to a minimum.

The EAC guidance may be expected to take the form of “Dear Colleague” letters, the sort that conservatives used to criticize, which are sent out without the bother of notice, comment, public hearings, and so forth. Since states that try to ignore the guidance could get in various kinds of trouble, they would have a significant practical incentive to treat it as binding.

In short, as I told Robertson, we aren’t going to find out what the bill does on many key questions until after we pass it into law and the EAC begins issuing guidance. I don’t like that: “If the EAC is going to issue guidance that causes an uproar because it sets requirements many legitimate voters cannot meet, we should know that now, not later.”

Aside from the broad and dangerous amount of power being delegated to the EAC, what really got my curiosity going was a provision directing the EAC to issue broad guidance to states “not later than 10 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.”

Even in a bill that’s full of absurd timelines and unachievable deadlines, it’s bizarre to allow only 10 days to devise and issue guidance on how key parts of this complex bill would work in practice.

My suspicion therefore is that someone’s already drafted the guidance, in whole or large part. They know what’s going to be in it. They’re just not willing to tell us.

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

Cato itself also filed two briefs in the tariff cases, one legal and one economic in content. Thomas Berry and Brent Skorup explained that “IEEPA provides no textual authority for imposing tariffs and that the Constitution vests tariff-setting power solely in Congress. The brief traces two centuries of U.S. practice showing that Congress has always retained this power, even during wars and financial crises, and has never delegated open-ended tariff authority to the executive branch.” On the economics side, Scott Lincicome, Colin Grabow and Clark Packard rebutted “the administration’s ‘fantastical claims’ regarding the supposed calamities that would befall the nation’s economy and foreign policy if the Court were to strike down the president’s ability to impose tariffs under IEEPA.”

At the most basic level, today is a victory for correct reading of statutory language. Three deciding votes (Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch) also grounded the decision in the so-called Major Questions Doctrine, which makes yet another example of how legal doctrines perceived as helping one side in the Red/Blue conflict can in fact assist the other side when the wheel turns. The Court earlier invoked the Major Questions Doctrine to strike down overreach by the Biden administration, and now it has done the same thing against Trump. (The three liberal justices peeled away on this, finding that statutory interpretation was sufficient to disallow the tariffs and that it wasn’t necessary to reach Major Questions.)

Three conservative Justices dissented (Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas) and there were some other differences between Justices. As my colleagues write, Trump unfortunately has some other statutes at his disposal by which to keep the chaos going in pursuit of his manifestly failed policy. But all in all it was a good day for freedom and the balance of powers, and a sharp rebuke to a spirit of Caesarism that should have no place in American governance.

* “Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.” [Reuters] 373 federal judges have ruled against DHS and just 28 have sided with the government; Trump-appointed judges have ruled against DHS more than two to one. [Politico]

* Democrats’ demands of DHS in funding showdown are all very well, but they mostly represent simply getting the agency to comply with what is already required by the law and the Constitution. And even that is seen as too much [Radley Balko]

* As a guest on the Stephen Colbert show the other night, Ian McKellen recited a speech often attributed to William Shakespeare in which Sir Thomas More addresses an unruly London crowd that has rioted demanding that strangers from abroad be sent back. Short and brilliant [Folger Shakespeare Library]

* “The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

“In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests." [New York Times]

* “Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals. Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.” [The Guardian]

* “Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. ’We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,’ Nikita said in Russian. ‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.’.” A Russian family’s experience in the remote Dilley detention facility [NBC News]

* Intimidating citizens who watch them on the streets: “ICE Agents Menaced Minnesota Protesters at Their Homes, Filings Say“ [New York Times]

* Also in the NYT: the Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Marimar Martinez cases weren't the only ones where DHS rushed to explain a shooting by claiming that its agents faced mortal danger, only for its story to unravel.

* October raid in rural Idaho followed some of the same practices as the notorious South Shore Drive raid in Chicago, including zip-tying kids, pointing firearms at civilians’ faces, and rounding up everyone present and then sorting them into groups for further police action based on perceived race [Mother Jones, later NYT coverage]

* Man deported from Missouri passed through notorious El Paso detention center, says he witnessed beating death in custody, starvation, and “horrific” living conditions. “Ramsingh recounts how he heard security guards taking bets on who was going to commit suicide.” [KCUR]

* Now here’s a break in the usual pattern: instead of backing lying agents to the max, ICE has admitted that two agents lied under oath in a Minnesota home raid in which detainees were accused of having attacked agents with a broom and snow shovel, and even put the agents on administrative leave. Very strange [NPR]

* “The acting director of ICE told Congress, under oath, that local law enforcement in Colorado leaked raid plans, allowing gang members to escape. After [Denver’s] 9NEWS questioned ICE’s claim and its timeline, ICE deleted the claim from its social media platforms.” [Kyle Clark]

* “At least two dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020, and their documented wrongdoing includes patterns of physical and sexual abuse, corruption and other abuses of authority, a review by The Associated Press found.” Charges include sexually abusing a woman in custody and accepting bribes to make an order of removal go away. If an ICE hiring moratorium prevents just one crime.… [Associated Press]

After dozens of demonstrators invaded and disrupted services at Cities Church last Sunday, the U.S. Department of Justice sought arrest warrants for eight persons, including six demonstrators plus journalist Don Lemon, who was there to stream the events as live news, and his videographer. A U.S. magistrate judge examined the facts and agreed to issue warrants for the arrest of the ringleader of the group and two others -- so far so plausible, since a 1994 federal law specifically makes interference with or obstruction of church services a federal offense. However, the magistrate did not see probable cause to issue a warrant for the arrest of the three other demonstrators or of Lemon and his aide, given what was known of their conduct.

There ensued an extraordinary series of events in which the government went to chief judge (and double Scalia clerk) Patrick Schiltz of the Minneapolis federal court, demanding he override the magistrate. Schiltz said he would want a few days to consult with his colleagues and asked the government to brief its position, since overriding a magistrate’s finding in these circumstances appeared wholly novel. Instead, the feds went over his head to the Eighth Circuit court of appeals demanding that they order him to act. On Friday the Eighth rejected this request, though without explanation.

This is one of many instances in which Pam Bondi’s crew have tried to place extraordinary pressure on judges who have insisted on bringing to bear independent judgment and their best reading of the law instead of jumping to comply with the government’s wishes. Steve Vladeck tells the story in more detail here. And Schiltz’s two letters, which are masterfully written, are very much worth reading.

Vladeck argues that prosecutors who feel frustrated at a magistrate's refusal this way typically have at least two decent options to keep going: they can assemble a fuller file of evidence and legal analysis and take it back to the magistrate, or they can go instead to a grand jury (of which one is meeting this week in Minneapolis). One possibility is that DOJ isn't sure it could get its way from a grand jury either -- this in the light of refusals by grand juries in many parts of the country to play their usual role of blessing charges. Vladeck’s inference -- not charitable, but I would hesitate to call it wrong -- is that it doesn't want to tolerate even short delays because it is trying to drive headlines as distinct, I suppose, from laying down the most solid basis for a successful prosecution.

Update Jan. 26 late afternoon: the Department of Justice has now withdrawn its request.

Here’s my response. A lot of people liked it, so I decided I would publish it here.

*

Your phrase “protests with no solutions” implies that protests are somehow wrong unless they secure some immediately available solution, or maybe even that the problems we marched against yesterday have no possible solution. But I don’t agree with either of those propositions.

There is nothing wrong with activating awareness and public conscience about evildoing by those in high places. Peaceful protests can and do help change public opinion. What’s more, public opinion has been changing rapidly on these issues and even under this administration, that matters. A few days ago the administration decided after a week’s delay that it would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on National Guard deployment and I think the state of public opinion is one reason it was not more defiant.

Shifts in public opinion also lead to changes in election results. Later this year we will have a chance to replace a Congress that refuses effective oversight of ICE and DHS with one willing to try it.

It is also not true that there are no solutions, in the sense of helping fix one thing even if we cannot fix everything. An effective Congress could use funding riders to order ICE agents not to wear masks, not to use vehicles without traceable license plates, and not to leave the scene of a shooting before investigators arrive. It could order ICE to cooperate with state and local investigations of whether agents have committed crimes under state law. I could add dozens more, I’m just starting with a few drawn from the Renee Good case.

I appreciate the kind words, but I wanted to say that my entire career as a writer and public advocate has been devoted to advancing values such as those of individual rights, the rule of law, and the need for limited government that stays within the bounds set by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those are all under attack in our current moment and that is exactly why I marched yesterday. If I just shrugged and said it was someone else’s problem, I would feel I was not living up to my values.

That’s what happened last fall when a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot Marimar Martinez seven times. DHS immediately portrayed her as having tried to drive into agents, but its story soon collapsed and the government withdrew charges against her and a second defendant. She survived.

On word of today’s shooting of U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good, 37, on the streets of Minneapolis by a federal agent, DHS again put out a story that the driver had been trying to run down border officers and that when one of them shot her (three times, point blank, fatally) it was in self-defense.

That’s not what local witnesses at the scene said. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune quotes two of them:

“’She was trying to get away,’ said Emily Heller, a neighbor who stepped outside to observe the situation....

“’They’re whitewashing it; that’s absolutely not what happened,’ said local resident Aiden Perzana, a data engineer for the state of Minnesota. ‘Somebody was trying to pull her out of her car. She was just trying to get away. There’s no way she was aiming for anybody. It’s just absurd.’

“Three agents surrounded her vehicle at the time it began moving, Perzana said, but there was ‘plenty of room’ for her to get through.”

Watch the videos. Look at the still photos. Check out the witness accounts. And don’t take DHS’s word for anything.

AOC: The Maduro action was about oil and regime change, not law enforcement

Conservatives: Listen to that, AOC is too radical to be allowed near power

Trump: It was about oil and regime change

To be fair, Trump & Co. had a whole lot of trouble keeping their rationales straight in the hours following the American seizure of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Would the U.S. henceforth “run” Venezuela, as Trump said, or would it stop far short of that, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated the next day? Was the seizure required on the grounds of domestic law enforcement, or of national defense, or even of the application of the venerable Monroe Doctrine?* In one corner was J.D. Vance, whose instant rationale for the rendition on X was that Trump “was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.” And yet the superseding indictment filed against Maduro, his wife and a few others says nothing whatever about oil, stolen or otherwise, save for a passing reference to an airplane owned by the Venezuelan state oil company.

An initial point of note is that under both domestic and international law U.S. courts are not supposed to try foreign heads of state over their actions in office. As in the case of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, however, the U.S. government intends to get around this hurdle simply by arguing that a defendant in the dock isn’t a foreign head of state unless the U.S. says he is. Like other nations, we routinely do treat various bad actors around the world as heads of state for practical purposes if they live in a presidential palace, successfully command the nation’s army and bureaucracy, and so forth. But as a legal matter the courts have been willing to accept the notion that none of this elevates those persons into heads of state for prosecution purposes unless we say so.

The result, as one wag put it: “It’s now the U.S. administration’s position that U.S. courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the U.S. president, accountable for crimes.”

*

Clark Neily III, my colleague at the Cato Institute where he is vice president for legal affairs, put out a statement that noted that even while courts probably won't rule against the rendition, Trump had chosen to bypass constitutional provisions designed to cabin the president's powers in using force against other countries:

As a legal matter, any challenge by Nicolás Maduro to his capture last night and subsequent rendition to the United States would run headlong into precedents involving the prosecution of Manuel Noriega in the 1990s. Courts have already upheld the unilateral seizure, prosecution, and conviction of a foreign leader under materially similar circumstances, and given longstanding judicial deference in foreign-affairs cases, judges are unlikely to distinguish that line of authority in Maduro’s case.

That conclusion, however, should not obscure the deeper constitutional concern here, which is profound. The Constitution deliberately assigns to Congress—not the President—the power to decide when the United States will initiate hostilities against foreign sovereigns. That assignment includes the power to declare war and the related authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal to private entities, both of which reflect a constitutional judgment that decisions risking international conflict, retaliation, and escalation should not rest with a single executive actor.

When a President unilaterally deploys military force abroad to seize a foreign head of state—effectively collapsing war powers, foreign relations, and criminal law enforcement into a single executive decision—the constitutional safeguards designed to cabin the use of force against other countries are bypassed entirely. That concern is not cured by the existence of a valid indictment. An indictment may (or may not) explain why a President wishes to act, but it cannot supply the constitutional authority to do so through military force without meaningful congressional engagement, let alone authorization.

In a longer piece, Neily observes that an indictment cannot supply the missing powers: “To allow prosecutorial charging decisions to serve as de facto war authorizations is to invert the Constitution’s design and subvert the democratic process itself.” Other Catoites including defense and foreign policy scholars have also weighed in, noting Trump’s unilateralism in unleashing U.S. military power — per reports, the House Armed Services Committee and the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were not notified until after the operation began — the very definite possibility of regime change quagmire, and the arrogance of proposing to "run" a country that isn't ours to run.

*

If the U.S. is going to resort to gunboat diplomacy, you might think the long-suffering people of Venezuela would at least get from it a fighting chance to regain their place among free democratic nations. Cease to hope so. One of Trump’s very first acts in addressing the press was to kick to the curb Maria Corina Machado and her opposition party, which won the election Maduro stole. (Machado, an advocate of democracy and free markets and recent Nobel Prize winner, was ruled off the presidential ballot by the Maduro regime; her party eventually settled on Edmundo González Urrutia as a replacement candidate.)

Instead the Trump administration now indicates that they prefer to deal with incumbent vice president Delcy Rodríguez, a leftist and Maduro loyalist who has defended his measures of political repression. “Weeks earlier, U.S. officials had already settled on [Rodríguez as] an acceptable candidate,” the New York Times reports. She “had impressed Trump officials with her management of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry… intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments….” Citing Miami Herald reporting, Stephen Jacob Smith writes that Rodríguez via intermediaries in Qatar has been affirmatively presenting herself to the U.S. government as a softer “Madurismo without Maduro” option.

So maybe this isn’t about regime change at all, at least not about a change to liberal democracy. Maybe it’s about fixing in place rulers who will do business with Trump.

I wonder whether we should just skip ahead to the stage where Trump pardons Maduro himself, with or without some vague promise of cooperation.

* The Monroe Doctrine established that the United States would oppose efforts by Old World powers to re-colonize or otherwise conquer territory in the Americas. That principle would seem irrelevant in this situation since no one seriously thinks a foreign power was controlling Maduro’s Venezuela. Some seem to envision a drastically expanded doctrine by which U.S. officials can simply invade and conquer any country or territory they please in the Western Hemisphere. That is decidedly not what was asserted by the historic Monroe Doctrine.

“We should fight resolutely at all times for the chief liberal goals, all of them well-tested and of the highest value, e.g., the limitation of governmental power, economy in all the public services, complete publicity, the greatest tolerable degree of free speech, and a press secure against official pressure. There is nothing for a decent newspaper in radicalism. If it ever succeeds in this country, our function will be gone and with it our liberties. They will be gone equally whether the radicalism that comes in is of the Right or of the Left.”

(Source: Mencken’s correspondence in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, with penciled emendations, via George Liebmann, President’s Letter, Baltimore Bar Library Advance Sheet, Dec. 19, 2025.)

More than 600 Americans were fired or disciplined by their employers around that time over social media posts that critics saw as graceless, hostile to Kirk’s views, or sometimes worse.

In general private employers are within their legal rights to fire employees for reasons like this, even when the relevant comments are made from personal rather than work accounts and even when they are set to “private.” But the Supreme Court has long held, FIRE observes, that “under the First Amendment, public [that is, government] employers can’t fire people simply because the government doesn’t approve of their off-duty speech.”

“Reuters reported in November that at least 600 workers — public school teachers, professors, and employees of Nasdaq, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Old Navy and Apple — were investigated, disciplined or fired. Some posts espoused or condoned violence; others did not,” according to a recent Washington Post report.

At the time, some MAGA figures spent weeks in a sort of frenzy of cancellation, publicizing names of offenders and demanding their firing even over relatively innocuous posts. (These figures seem to have quieted down lately about social media disrespect toward murder victims, no?) Vice President J.D. Vance was among those who got into the act.

“You may disagree with Monica’s take on Charlie Kirk. But letting a few angry individuals get a public employee fired for off-the-clock speech, even when it has no impact on the workplace, will inevitably boomerang back on people with views you do support,” said FIRE staff attorney Cary Davis. “When public employees are forced into silence for fear of offending someone on the internet, we all lose.”

President Donald Trump continues to use his pardon powers in remarkable ways. Now he’s pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and other offenses.

Cato asked me to write a statement on this development and here is what I wrote:

The most coherent explanation for pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández would be if President Trump had finally decided that the decades-long drug war is an expensive failure. But if that’s his belated insight, he should tell his appointees about it. He should tell Secretary Hegseth to call off the killing of crews on what he says are drug boats in the Caribbean. He should tell Secretary Noem that a minor marijuana charge years ago is no reason to expel someone who’s resided lawfully in this country ever since. He should tell his trade officials to back off on aiming tariffs at Canada on a ridiculous pretext related to supposed fentanyl traffic.

Also, if he’s rethinking the drug war, he might want to start pardoning low-level offenders, not just the ones backed by money and friends in high places.

The presidential pardon power can serve real and legitimate purposes, and Trump himself has used it in some deserving cases. But history will long remember his use of it to free political allies and persons who have benefited his cronies and family, and above all, to set free violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, even as he steps up the use of prosecution against those who protest his own policies.

It’s a White House in which impunity is dealt out by arbitrary whim, favoritism, team politics, and “pull.” We should hope that it does not in the end give mercy a bad name.

I wrote about a different issue of pardon overbreadth last week.

* Rhode Island: “The [high-school-age court] intern was reportedly shaken, so [Superior Court Judge Joseph] McBurney offered to drive him home. ICE agents then surrounded the judge’s car and demanded everyone to exit the vehicle, threatening to smash in the windows if they did not comply. Dana Smith, Head of Security Operations for R.I. Superior Court, confronted the agents and told both the judge and the intern to stay inside the car. After an argument, ICE confirmed they had misidentified the teen and left.” [WPRI]

* Federal judge Sara Ellis (N.D. Ill.), after extensive review of body cam video and other evidence, finds Justice Department’s arguments “lack credibility” given repeated contradictions between DHS claims and the government’s own evidence. [Chicago Sun-Times, judge’s 233-page opinion]

* Feds pick Charlotte, N.C. for new enforcement push: “After [46-year-old construction worker Willy] Aceituno again told the agents he was a U.S. citizen, they finally threw him out of the van.” The agents had taken his car keys, having earlier smashed his car window, pulled him out of his vehicle and thrown him on the ground. “Aceituno voted for Trump in 2024 because of the border and the economy. He now calls it ‘the worst decision of my life.’” [Adrian Carrasquillo, The Bulwark]

The Charlotte operation is being led by Gregory Bovino, the same guy who led the Chicago operation and whom Judge Ellis found had lied in her court. DHS named the operation “Charlotte’s Web” and Chris Geidner has some definite views about exactly what E. B. White, author of the classic children’s story, would have thought about that.

Also in Charlotte: “Border Patrol agents smashed a car window with a rifle before hauling out two female U.S. citizens accused of honking their horn to warn others that federal immigration officers were in the area, according to relatives and a witness.... Charlotte attorney Gary Mauney told WCNC that while citizens have a First Amendment right to film law enforcement, agents can claim authority to arrest people they believe are interfering with operations. He said warning others of Border Patrol’s presence could be interpreted that way.” [Daily Beast]

* Feds regularly charge arrestees under Section 111, Title 18, which makes it a crime to forcibly impede, assault, obstruct, or interfere with a federal officer. (Pro-ICE accounts often gloss over the requirement that force has to be involved.) A federal judge dismissed felony charges filed against an ICE arrestee that were based on “the scrapes on an ICE agent’s hand after the agent punched a hole in his car window—a use of force that the judge found to be unconstitutionally excessive.” [Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic, gift link]

* A network of Border Patrol cameras deep into the country, not just in border areas, “scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. …The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports.” [Associated Press investigation]

* From my colleague David Bier: “DHS beat, tackled, shackled, cut, and bruised US citizen Arturo Hermosillo in June. His hands turned blue. They stuffed him in a van and drove him to a station. Yet the agents told him that he was never ‘arrested,’ just ‘detained,’” a key distinction because fewer constitutional safeguards apply to detentions than to arrests. The incident began after Hermosillo recorded a CBP raid from his work van in the parking lot at a Pacoima, Calif. shopping center. [“Local Resident Recording ICE Activity Could Face Federal Charges,” San Fernando Sun]

“’The willingness to lie is unusual because you know these cases end up in court,’ Fuller says. ‘It’s fun to lie now, but eventually people are going to review the video, people are going to be under oath. It’s not a very good long-term strategy, but we’ve seen them lie about almost all of our clients.’” [“Oregon Woman Says ICE Broke Out Her Car Windows and Detained Her for Filming Them” [C.J. Ciaramella, Reason]

* “’I’ve got bruises all over my body,’ Woolf, an American Baptist minister who is pastor of Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois, told Religion News Service. He was speaking in his first interview since being released Friday afternoon after about seven hours in custody.” [“At least seven faith leaders arrested at Broadview ICE facility protest",” Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service] Cicero family claims it was pepper-sprayed on a morning grocery run [Autumn Billings, Reason]

* After a federal officer shot Marimar Martinez five times in Chicago (later reportedly bragging about it) she was charged with ramming a Border Patrol vehicle (yes, the Border Patrol operates in Chicago) and brandishing a gun. But the charges against her fell apart almost immediately and now federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss all criminal charges against her and a co-defendant.

* ProPublica investigated that flashy raid using agents rappelling from helicopters on a Chicago apartment building supposedly controlled by a Venezuelan gang. To the extent the federal claims can be checked, many have fallen apart. “As the detained men have gone to immigration court, many have asked to be sent back to Venezuela. ProPublica has observed eight of their hearings, and not once has a government attorney mentioned any pending criminal charges or membership in Tren de Aragua....We found no criminal convictions for 18 of the 21 Venezuelans we identified.”

* The D.C. Circuit having finally lifted a block, Judge James Boasberg moves forward with his probe over whether the feds committed contempt in March when they had planes proceed to El Salvador and discharge detainees even after he had ordered the planes returned home. [Associated Press, my earlier article on whether and when feds can get away with contempt]

* Gift article: “The Department of Homeland Security has diverted thousands of federal agents from their normal duties to focus on arresting undocumented immigrants, undermining a wide range of law enforcement operations in response to mounting pressure from President Trump, a New York Times investigation has found.” Among areas where efforts have been scaled back: national security, international sanctions evasion and child exploitation. (Cato scholars have written on this theme for months.)

* Great moments in 287(g) agreements: Polk County, Iowa sheriff’s office blames clerical mixup for placement of ICE detainer on 24-year-old woman who “was born in Phoenix and is a member of Arizona’s Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.” [Iowa Public Radio]

* Don’t look away: “My experience...was more traumatizing than my detention in Egypt.... I don’t think this government will stop.... Immigrants will be the first target. After that, they will target any opposition. Violating due process this time means they will violate it again and again and again.” [“We Immigrated Legally. ICE Detained Us Anyway,” NYT gift link]