Supreme Court blocks Trump’s efforts to quickly deport Venezuelans

In the previous post, I wrote about the Trump gang’s efforts to quickly deport large numbers of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that has only been used three times in its history: the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, claiming that these people were members of the gang Tren de Aragua and formed the invading force of the Venezuelan government.

Today, in a 7-2 opinion (predictably with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees must be given time to challenge their deportations

The court emphasized that the men — whom the Trump administration has labeled “alien enemies” — are entitled to more due process than the administration has so far provided. That means advance notice of their deportations and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the deportations in court, the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In particular, the justices faulted the administration for its attempt last month to carry out swift deportations just one day after providing a bare-bones deportation notice to the detainees. The Supreme Court intervened at the time to stop those deportations, and in Friday’s decision, the court elaborated on its decision and extended its order blocking them.

“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court’s opinion said, without deciding exactly how much notice is required.

A small victory for due process against a government that has no regard for the law or human rights.

Trump administration policy: “Only tell us what we want to hear”

The Trump gang, in its feverish determination to deport as many people as possible, has been running roughshod over constitutional protections such as due process. It has argued that this is allowed because the US is currently being invaded by foreign forces. This would come a surprise to pretty much anyone given the lack of fighting in the towns and rural areas of the country. Few would be even able to tell you who the invading forces are. To put you out of any suspense, the invading army is supposed to consist of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua acting under the direction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. As a result Trump is invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation on various trumped up charges that the people are members of this invading army.
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Film review Oppenheimer (2023), runaway fusion, and runaway AI

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..

While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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Tariff uncertainty not over

Chinese and US trade representatives agreed to suspend for 90 days 115% of the sky-high tariffs each had imposed on the other. This still leaves tariffs of 30% on Chinese goods to the US and 10% on US goods to China, plus a few other assorted tariffs that had been in existence earlier.

Trump had been bluffing that the US could withstand the pain that the high tariffs that were clearly causing, in his usual childish way.

Donald Trump on Wednesday acknowledged that his tariffs could result in fewer and costlier products in the United States, saying American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls”, but he insisted China will suffer more from his trade war.

The US president has tried to reassure a nervous country that his tariffs will not provoke a recession, after a new government report showed the US economy shrank during the first three months of the year.
…

“You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open,’” Trump said, offering a hypothetical. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

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A story that will make your blood boil

Price gouging of US consumers by drug companies so that they can make enormous profits off patients so that they can pay their executive massive salaries and inflate their stock prices is a well-known scandal. Yet another example involves a drug known as Revlimid, marketed by a company Celgene to treat the bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.

When David Armstrong was diagnosed in 2023 with this disease, he began a quest to find out why a drug capsule taken daily that costs just 25 cents to make is sold for nearly $1,000. What he found is a tale of disgusting greed and cynicism by the people who run these companies, who kept raising the price over and over again, 26 times in all over the years, just because they can, uncaring about what it did to people desperately trying to live.

That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.

They also bought off doctors.
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Rümeysa Öztürk released but not safe from further harassment

Finally, after being kidnapped during daylight hours in a public street near Tufts University where she was a graduate student by masked unidentified people in unmarked cars who were later revealed to be ICE agents, and then quickly transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Rümeysa Öztürk was released today after 45 days in captivity. Her release had been ordered by a federal judge.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
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No surprise: Tourism industry is cratering

The horror stories about US immigration officers harassing visitors to the country keep piling up. It seems like they seek even the most trivial of reasons to give visitors a hard time. Take this example.

Two teenage girls from Germany were detained, arrested, and deported at an airport in Hawaii after immigration officials said it was suspicious they had not booked a hotel room.

Backpackers Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland while undergoing a round-the-world trip. The duo planned to spend five weeks in Hawaii before moving onto California and Costa Rica for the next legs of their journey.

But despite having ESTA travel authorization, immigration officials accused them of attempting to enter the U.S. to work illegally, and they were placed in handcuffs and taken to a nearby detention center they later learned was a deportation facility.

Upon arrival, they were subjected to full-body scans, strip searches and forced to wear green prison jumpsuits, German outlet Ostee Zeitung reports. They were then placed in a holding facility with serious criminals, including an alleged murderer who had been locked up for 18 years, and were forced to spend the night in a freezing cold double cell.

“It was all like a fever dream,” Maria told the German outlet. “It was a shock; we didn’t expect it. We had already noticed a little bit about what was going on in the U.S. But at the time, we didn’t think it was happening to Germans. That was perhaps very naive. We felt so small and powerless.”

After a sleepless night in the freezing cell, the girls were woken early and escorted back to the airport in handcuffs. Upon arrival, they were forced to board a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Tokyo and were told they would receive their passports back once they arrived in Japan.

Included in their travel documents were interrogation transcripts signed by the girls, which “contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” said Charlotte after the ordeal. “They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US.”

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Just what we don’t need: another war

As if the ever-increasing cruelty and brutality of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and the long-running war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not creating enough misery in the world, we now have the possibility of yet another conflict, this time between India and Pakistan.

Those two countries have been having tensions along their border for a long time, fueled by the dispute over Kashmir. While the intensity has waxed and waned, it was usually limited to skirmishes between troops of these two countries patrolling the s0-called line of demarcation. But the most recent flare-up looks like the most serious in a long time, with an attack on Hindu tourists in Kashmir resulting in India launching a wave of missile attacks and Pakistan vowing to retaliate.
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