Our client Leo Garcia Venegas and two other victims of DHS’s lawlessness got to introduce themselves to Secretary Noem today. The room fell silent when they stood.

Our client Leo Garcia Venegas and two other victims of DHS’s lawlessness got to introduce themselves to Secretary Noem today. The room fell silent when they stood.

Really sharp contrast between DC and NYC.

New Case: One day off our win in Newton, Iowa, we've launched a new retaliation case in Apache, Arizona. This one's like a Coen Brothers movie. A local prosecutor sent two henchmen (on the gov payroll) after his wife's opponent for school superintendent. youtu.be/zZIN9M_Sjlg

New Case: One day off our win in Newton, Iowa, we've launched a new retaliation case in Apache, Arizona. This one's like a Coen Brothers movie. A local prosecutor sent two henchmen (on the gov payroll) after his wife's opponent for school superintendent. youtu.be/zZIN9M_Sjlg

Another @ij.org 1A Retaliation Victory! A mayor and police chief arrested Noah Petersen for calling them fascists in a public meeting and saying the police department is "pro domestic abuse." Today, the court denied them qualified immunity & granted Noah summary judgment. ij.org/press-releas...

I fear it will soon be impossible to parody Josh Blackman

Arresting people who call you a fascist is not, imho, the best way to beat the accusations.

Another @ij.org 1A Retaliation Victory! A mayor and police chief arrested Noah Petersen for calling them fascists in a public meeting and saying the police department is "pro domestic abuse." Today, the court denied them qualified immunity & granted Noah summary judgment. ij.org/press-releas...

NEW: Homeland Security officials are asking companies to help them combine all of their face and fingerprint systems together into one giant biometric platform. Buttttttt it's unclear how workable this really is since DHS uses a wide mishmash of proprietary algos.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders' plan to build a huge mega-prison in rural Arkansas has drawn major opposition, with some residents saying it's made them think differently about incarceration in the face of organizing. Now that's bleeding into a local election, as candidates vow to fight the governor. NEW:

Grateful to @jaredmcclain.bsky.social for talking about this case on the @ij.org podcast. He highlights the subject of my next academic article, which I touch on in prior work: the equitable relief paradox. Injunctions w/ too few details are too vague; w/ too many details violate federalism.

The way the Tenth Circuit neutered the ACLU's injunction against the Kansas Two Step reflects so much about what is wrong the judiciary's approach to enforcing our rights against unconstitutional policies.

My grand theory of prediction markets v. sportsbooks: It's Cannabis Again

It’s been nice to see so many people from accros the industry step up and help. And it’s not going to stop with habeas. Next week we’re training our fifth group of lawyers on how to bring FTCA suits for damages. Probably close to 1,000 attendees by now.

McLaughlin and Bovino said a dozen times they make arrests based on reasonable suspicion. Homan walking it back got the first time the same week she’s gone makes me think someone finally got sick of losing in court because their spox was being too honest about what ICE does every day.

We filed our brief opposing the gov’s motion to dismiss our case against the ICE raids of construction sites in Alabama. Remarkably, they don’t even argue any of it is legal. They just don’t think anyone should be able to stop them. www.courtlistener.com/docket/71498...

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

1. DHS surges 3,000 officers to Minneapolis without doing anywhere near enough prep first. 2. Hundreds of habeas cases overwhelm local courts. 3. Dozens of DOJ lawyers quit in disgust/anger. 4. The DOJ brings in JAGs to cover. 5. A JAG was just held in contempt and fined $500/day for ICE's failures.

My God...

My essay on the Kavanaugh concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo is now live with the @nyulawreview.bsky.social online. Many thanks to the incredible editors who helped bring this piece to completion (rage-writing it in one week meant we did a lot of work on it post-acceptance!).

end qualified immunity and make cops carry personal liability insurance

This raid didn’t get much press at the time because it’s Idaho. But it’s truly shocking. And it shows that these policies work like we’ve alleged in Alabama. The scale just makes it so much harder to minimize the harm of a show-me-your papers regime. These people weren’t let go “promptly.”

Court battle over surveillance footage at the Broadview ICE detention center reaches new levels of kafkaesque absurdity: The DOJ claimed it *couldn't afford* hard drives to put video footage on. Plaintiffs bought THE US GOVERNMENT hard drives. ICE "lost" them. www.404media.co/government-l...

That’s right. And if anyone hears of an agent physically lifting someone’s face to take a picture, I’d love to hear about it.

It’s always bad to negotiate whether the ruling party can ignore the Constitution. It also ignores how hard the Court has made it for any plaintiff or lower court to stop unconstitutional policies. All they left us is political pressure.

Memphis has been severely overcovered. Most southern cities have. There are these task forces all over with agents from agencies across DOJ and DHS. It's not just ICE/CBP, and it's not just the few main cities that make the news. Check out all the agencies making immigration arrests in Mobile:

I Was Arrested for Doing My Job as a Reporter. Who’s Next? By Georgia Fort Gift link!

They just blindly shot through the fucking door. "Additional photographs show damage consistent with a bullet fragment lodged in a bedroom wall down the hallway — suggesting it traveled between a mattress and a portable crib in a room where several small children sleep."

I saw it too:

DHS doesn’t even bother trying to lie well. The man whose skull was shattered told the hospital he’d been struck by ICE officers, an ICE officer told hospital staff the guy “got his sh*t rocked,” then when it became clear how badly he was injured, they claimed he deliberately ran into a wall.

If this weren’t dystopian enough, it won’t even work. DHS treats biometric data as the only legitimate form of ID.

there's this new dynamic where the DOJ cannot win in court and is (relatedly) incapable of meeting the minimum threshold of professional legal conduct, and so an increasing percentage of its actions are purely for intimidation and content

It started as arrest first ask questions later. But now they’re breaking down windows and doors and driving people around to an empty area to use their new tech toys to decide whether you get shipped off to Texas or just get put on a list. It’s violent no matter what.

If we are really doing unitary executive theory all the way down, this should be thrown out for lack of adversarialness. You can't sue yourself.

Federal agents cornered Marimar Martinez, shot her several times, boasted about it, arrested her, lied about her to the public and in the police report, and falsely charged her with assaulting them. Now the government wants to keep evidence of their lies secret to protect these agents' "privacy."

In trying to smear the victim, they’re making a stronger case for premeditation given what we know about their list of dissidents from Tom Homan’s statements and what happened to Miramar Martinez. It’s like broken-windows policing but they claim the power to kill you for it.

They spent a lot of energy in court arguing that the unitary executive is solely responsible for everyone working in the administration. And then after a year-long escalation of masked, militarized police terrorizing cities and they expect us to believe it was all one guy who doesn’t even run CBP.

Bovino has said he’s taking his orders from Noem, who is in charge of about a dozen agencies now focused on immigration raids. Noem has said she’s taking her orders from the WH. The problems aren’t one person or one agency.

Having militarized police break into someone’s house without a judicial warrant is even more dangerous tonight at night.

Normally I’d suggest people avoid “I don’t believe in phrenology BUT …” takes, but here the exclamation point after “don’t” really reassures me as to his bona fides.

"You raise your voice, I erase your voice." ICE in Minneapolis are erasing your rights. Please share our new video of what's happening in our city. youtu.be/W1dyNcRGRXY

That’s right. Give us the right to sue that explicitly gets rid of qualified immunity. Then we can finally force some accountability that doesn’t depend on the police and politicians policing each other. Call your reps.

This is what I was talking about. Glad to see it get some coverage: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

The fact that they are making Bovino the fall guy shows that they are worried, but it does not mean that any policy changes. It's a signal to increase the pressure even more, not back down.

Greg Bovino being gone is good (and the first tiny shred of accountability). It’s also the first crack in their resolve. But the dangerous and lawless policies are administration-wide. ICE is still breaking into people’s homes without a warrant. One fall guy can’t slow the work ahead.

They’re grabbing up refugees and shipping them to Texas despite their status. Some have had to find their own way home once they win their release.

One thing that irks me: people keep calling the folks on the streets in Minneapolis protestors. They are not generally there to protest, they are there to observe and document. This is the product of organizing and mutual aid. It is telling that these acts of citizenship are seen as protest!