Appeals Court slaps down Trump

After the US Supreme Court said that the Trump administration needed to facilitate Kilmar Ábrego García’s release from a prison in El Salvador, they started, as predicted, playing word games to not do anything, arguing that ‘facilitate’ only meant that if he should turn up at the US border, they would let him in but that they need do nothing more. They had earlier admitted that sending him had been a mistake but said that since he was now in the custody of El Salvador there was nothing that they could do.

The president of El Salvador came to the White House and he and Trump gave a joint press conference where they yucked it up and seemed to find it highly amusing that an innocent man is now in a foreign prison separated from his family here, and has been reportedly traumatized by the experience. It was disgusting to see how little regard they had for the fate of an innocent man.

The case went before a three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and they blasted this line of reasoning in a unanimous opinion, saying that the word ‘facilitate’ did not allow the government to do nothing
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Supreme Court says Trump must return man illegally sent to El Salvador

I posted three days ago about how Trump faced his first major test before the US Supreme Court about the extent of his powers in a case involving a man who was sent illegally to a prison in El Salvador.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that Trump’s action has to be reversed.

The US supreme court upheld on Thursday a judge’s order requiring Donald Trump’s administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis last week issued an order that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.

The supreme court, in an unsigned decision, said that the judge’s order “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.
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Trump’s ‘act first and fight the courts’ policy faces first major test

[UPDATE: Chief justice John Roberts has lifted the midnight deadline today and asked lawyers to present written arguments by 5:00pm tomorrow (Tuesday).

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily paused a court-imposed midnight deadline to return to the US a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, agreeing to a request from President Donald Trump that will give the justices more time to consider the case.

Chief Justice John Roberts granted the “administrative stay,” a move that will extend the deadline until the court hands down a more fulsome decision in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported on March 15.

]

It is clear that Trump thinks that the president can do anything they want, the laws and norms of democracy be damned. He takes any action that he likes and then fights any challenges vigorously in the courts. He has been sued many times and lost in the lower courts but refuses to reverse the action, instead taking it to the next level of the Appeals Courts. So far, none of these cases have made it to the Supreme Court. The key question is what he will do if even that body, so friendly to him, rules against him.

Today we are going to see what happens in the case of a Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was deported to El Salvador and is being held there in a maximum security prison.

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Wisconsin and Florida elections

There were three major elections yesterday, two for congressional seats in Florida and one for a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. The Florida seats were vacated by the resignations of Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz. Gaetz, a controversial figure accused of having sex with underage girls as well as using drugs, did not resign because of that but because, incredibly, Trump had nominated him for the position of attorney general. But when even some Republicans viewed his nomination unfavorably, he withdrew it.

Waltz resigned because Trump appointed him as national security advisor, where he has recently been criticized for allegedly including the editor of The Atlantic magazine in a high-security chat group over the unsecured commercial channel Signal. It turned out that this was not the only unsecured group chat Waltz had created to discuss sensitive information, having created 20 more on Signal. He seems sloppy and incompetent to say the least.
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This is what a police state looks like

You are walking along a public street in daylight when suddenly you are surrounded by people dressed in black with masks on their faces who then handcuff you and take you away in unmarked vehicles to an unknown destination and not allowed to contact anyone. This is what happens routinely in authoritarian countries where the rule of law has broken down and death squads operate with impunity.

But this happened on Tuesday on the streets of a Boston suburb to a Fulbright graduate student from Turkey attending Tufts University.

Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.

The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered.

After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.

In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

Here is video of the event.

Book and TV review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I am fond of the books of Charles Dickens but for some reason never got around to reading this particular one that was published in 1853. It is argued by some critics to be one of his best works. I was stimulated to read it because I came across a 2005 BBC adaptation into a seres that looked like it might be good but I thought I should read the book first.

I am not an authority on Dickens so will leave it to others to judge whether this may or may not be one his finest works but it is undoubtedly very good and one of the most Dickensian in its flourishes and plotting. Coincidences, a Dickens staple, abound and people who seemed to be unconnected suddenly discover that they are in fact related, even very closely.

Dickens also has a penchant for creating eccentric characters with strange names and here we find them in abundance. In this book alone are Jarndyce, Guppy, Turveydrop, Jellyby, Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, Pardiggle, Squod, Tulkinghorn, Clamb, and Grubble. You rarely find a Smith or a Jones or a Brown in a Dickens novel. Interestingly, Dickens’s own name was considered strange at that time, as one critic wrote, “Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.” This shows that names that we now consider as ordinary became so by virtue of familiarity. If Dickens had not become so famous, his name might still have been considered ‘queer’.
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The courts are the only thing holding Trump back

Trump and Musk seem to think that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want. As far as Congress is concerned, they are right because the Republican majority seems to be quite willing to roll over for the two of them and be subservient to their whims, abandoning their constitutional role of being an independent branch of government to serve as a check and balance on executive power.

It is the courts that can do something and they have, up to a point.

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Abelson, a Baltimore-based appointee of former President Joe Biden, said longstanding court precedent bars the federal government from “leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.”
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Creating a government of crooks, fools, and cowards

Danielle Sassoon, acting acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned rather than be complicit in Trump’s demand that she drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.

You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.

Following her resignation, six other career federal prosecutors in that same office have resigned in the Southern District of New York because they too refused to drop corruption charges against Adams, as ordered of Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump.
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Challenging Trump in the courts

Trump and Musk are treating the government as if it were a private company that they own and that they can fire people at will, put in place anyone they like, and order the agencies to do whatever they want. When it is pointed out that some of the agencies and personnel are statutorily authorized, their response is simple. They simply declare the statute in question is unconstitutional. Of course they have been taken to court multiple times and judges have weighed in to stop the madness.

Here is just one example.

A judge blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to fire the head of a body that protects whistleblowers and investigates corruption.

Late on Wednesday Judge Amy Berman Jackson reversed the White House order sacking Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), and reinstated him in his post pending a court hearing set for 26 February.
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Fears over pornography

In a long essay, Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of History at the University of Delaware, writes that there is a persistent belief in the US that viewing pornography is harmful. While that belief has remained largely constant over time, what has changed are views about what kinds of erotica causes harm, what form the harm takes, and who is harmed, whether it harms those involved in the creation of it or those who view it or both.

Currently, the danger is perceived to that to young people and as of January 19th of this year, 19 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have age requirement verification requirements for adult-content sites. But not qll sites are complying. Some, especially one of the biggest sites Pornhub, have simply chosen to not provide access to people from those states.

Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN (virtual private network) services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification – that pornography harms the minors who view it – is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.

These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In 2014, Mexico enacted an age verification law. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed late in 2022, imposed several restrictions on Pornhub and other large pornography sites, including age-verification requirements. A similar measure in Britain, the 2023 Online Safety Act, took effect in January 2025. France, which already required age verification in an earlier law, recently blocked four pornographic sites (Pornhub was not among them) from operating within its borders after finding that the sites failed to check users’ ages adequately. Members of the Canadian House of Commons continue to debate the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would require age verification. There, as elsewhere, civil libertarians warn that these laws fail to define ‘sexually explicit material’, and raise serious privacy concerns. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts.

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