In The Situation, @benjaminwittes.lawfaremedia.org contemplates Trump’s replacement of the U.S. Attorney in EDVA who declined to prosecute his political opponents like James Comey—and why he’s in a rush.

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Dönitz was convicted of war crimes for the sinking of civilian vessels. This is not a complicated question, it's been illegal for centuries.

"In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration..." www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/t...

🚨WHOA. According to @haleaziz.bsky.social, the Trump admin was actually going to implement the ICE "bounties" it has repeatedly said were false, offering $200 per arrest leading to a rapid deportation — and only walked the plan back after the New York Times got a copy of the memo.

a few thoughts (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

Judge Timothy Kelly blocks the Trump administration from carrying out any removals of Guatemalan children, writing pretty sternly that all of its claims about reunifying them with their families at their parents’ request turned out to be false, and cover for a rushed “midnight operation.”

1/ Judge Kelly cites #whistleblowers report in granting preliminary injunction blocking deportation of Guatemalan migrant children.⤵️ The whistleblowers pointed to government's own data on kids likelihood of being "victims of child abuse, including death threats, gang violence, human trafficking."

“DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

NEW: A whistle-blower report regarding the Guatemalan children who the Trump administration planned to repatriate claims that the government misrepresented its own data in court, failing to mention that at least 30 of 327 children had been flagged as vulnerable to violence or abuse if sent back.

The lawsuit:

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

We're close to reaching a chilling moment; the first time in history where the single largest group of people arrested by ICE in the interior and held in detention are people with no criminal record. The gap is now down to fewer than 300 people.

Facing skepticism from Judge Kelly, the DOJ conceded that its claim that it was reuniting Guatemalan children in the U.S. with their families at the parents’ request, had no basis in reality. Some parents had actually told officials that they’d do anything to keep the children out of Guatemala.

In it's lawsuit against Trump, D.C. notes 8 states — Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia — collectively sent ~1,350 National Guard. Notes that they've been deputized as U.S. Marshalls w/ power to make arrests and execute search warrants.

#SCOTUS all-but overruled a unanimous, 90-year-old precedent through an unexplained "administrative" stay this morning, and that's only the second-most-problematic thing it did before lunchtime.

The Trump administration has appointed Heather Honey to a top election security position. She is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results.

“Tell me this is not what authoritarianism looks and sounds like,” our columnist Ezra Klein writes. “And so the question is: What are Democrats going to do about it? What can they do about it?”

The Justice Department's acting deputy chief was caught on a hidden camera saying that the government will "redact every Republican" from an Epstein client list and "leave all the liberal, Democratic people."

NH NHing again

JUST IN: Kavanaugh concedes #SCOTUS rulings can lack precision because they're collective views of justices, defends Roberts amid flack, takes conciliatory tone with judges despite warning against defiance 2 weeks ago www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

🚨EXCLUSIVE: Federal judges tell NBC News the Supreme Court has got to do a better job of explaining emergency rulings, with frequent decisions in favor of Trump at least appearing to validate harsh criticism of the judiciary at a time of rising threats: www.nbcnews.com/politics/sup...

Firefighting veterans believe the management team overseeing fire crews played a key role in handing team members over to immigration authorities, shares Stateline. buff.ly/CicG9BT

After the Supreme Court stepped in last month, allowing the Trump admin to forge ahead on canceling NIH grants, Judge Young today addressed two of the court’s conservative justices, who wrote an opinion taking him to task for not using their shadow docket orders to inform his own. Our story:

Just now: Before starting a hearing over NIH funding, Judge William Young apologized to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for what he described as failing to recognize that their orders on the emergency docket should be treated as precedent. "I stand corrected," he said.

$1,000,000 a day.

JUST IN: Judge who blocked the transfer of about 600 Guatemalan minors from US to Guatemala Sunday is keeping a very tight leash on the government. Echoes of Alien Enemies Act litigation simply deafening here. Earlier: www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

I made a spreadsheet of all the federal cases filed as part of Trump's DC crackdown. It's not going great

Also tonight: Judge Jia Cobb has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from dramatically scaling up its use of expedited removal on people arrested far from the southern border — a main pillar of its mass deportation campaign.

Even though the 9th circuit today affirmed Judge Chen’s ruling from March barring Trump from ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans, because of the Supreme Court’s emergency order in May, the government can still proceed as though nothing happened. Now SCOTUS will have to decide on the merits:

JUST IN: Complex moves by DC Circuit appear to moot (for now) Trump admin's emergency appeal at #SCOTUS on effort to force admin to spend up to $12B in appropriated development aid. En banc ord storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... Revised panel opinion: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Current and former DOJ lawyers say Leo Terrell, Trump’s pick to lead an antisemitism task force, has voiced open disdain for what he calls “lawyer talk,” berating staff who try to follow proper procedures for investigating civil rights complaints.

Scoop: The Trump administration appears to be considering a move to label wind farms as intentionally harming migratory birds, a classification that would in the eyes of some legal experts label *any* project illegal. It would definitely be fought in court if pursued. @heatmap.news

The Trump administration wants to hire 10,000 new ICE officers by next year, Nick Miroff reports. He went to Texas to find out who’s answering the call:

yup. I wrote something similar last week christinapagel.substack.com/p/grand-desi... "the very word “America” conjures up the celebrated ideal of “America the free”. But “America the free” are just words and they are rapidly losing all meaning."

BREAKING (AGAIN): The White House said it has fired CDC director Susan Monarez, who clashed with @seckennedy.govpeeps.us over vaccine policy. Confirmed by the Senate, she had refused to resign unless the WH fired her. GIFT: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/h...

“Trump’s allies have made it clear they expect Google to bend. On Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who is effectively operating as a MAGA enforcer inside the federal government, turned up the heat, declaring that a blackout would be ‘a terrible outcome.’”

After all the fancy constitutional arguments & faux historical glosses, this is the practical endpoint of the unitary executive theory. Because when presidential power is effectively unchecked, the only thing preventing it from devolving into authoritarianism is the decency of the officeholder.

NEW: Donald Trump is betting the courts won’t stop him from firing a Federal Reserve board member “for cause” — and legal experts think he may be right. That would leave a ‘supine’ Congress and market forces as the only remaining checks w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

News Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan loses her bid to dismiss her indictment on immunity and 10th Amendment grounds. The judge will hold a hearing on Sept. 3 to discuss scheduling. Ruling storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

JUST IN: The Trump administration seeks to dismiss the lawsuit by Enrique Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders over their Jan. 6 prosecutions. There's simply no evidence the evidence against them was fabricated or knowingly false, DOJ says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the result as “Calvinball jurisprudence,” in reference to the popular “Calvin and Hobbes” comic. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” Jackson wrote. “We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”

New decorations on the DOL

Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has been released, have been informed by ICE that he could now be subject to deportation to Uganda, and he's been told to report to ICE next week, a source confirms to me. A few points about this, because there will be a lot of bullshit about it. 1/

The country’s foreign-born population shrank by 1.4 million people from January to June as Trump cracked down, marking the first decline since the 1960s, per @pewresearch.org. Trump took 181 executive actions in his first 100 days to curtail immigration. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

ICE continues to hold a reporter because he filmed them. “The reports claim Guevara’s journalism ‘contradicts societal norms,’ among other complaints.“

Asked by reporters about the post last week, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for D.H.S., called the question “embarrassing” and said, “Where are we quoting a white supremacist?” Alan Feuer smartly chronicling many of the ways extremist groups and their ideas have permeated the Trump bubble:

this is little more than a vendetta being pursued by the federal government against a man it unlawfully removed from the country and was forced to bring back

Judge Orrick in California extended an order from April tonight blocking the Trump administration from withholding funding to a total of 50 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions across the country. The earlier order applied to just 16.

BREAKING: #SCOTUS, 5-4, allows admin to proceed with termination of NIH grants under Trump DEI/gender policies. But also 5-4 vote to leave in place ruling voiding the NIH memos enforcing the Trump policies. Roberts w/libs. Barrett swings. Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

👍 An appeals court ruled today to **uphold** an order blocking grant terminations for U of California researchers So good news for UC folks. Could also mean the case will soon end up at the Supreme Court (along with one that’s pending there now for NIH terminations).