My jaw dropped further and further as I read this article. I think the tribunal were extremely generous to the barrister, who, as the article points out, took money from probably vulnerable clients and then couldn't be bothered to actually do what they paid him to do

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

the government is too right wing for Dan Hodges now? fucking hell

My round up of week one of UK-France removals...

Quite

The court made this point several times in the afternoon session

Will the Home Secretary learn to stop pushing meritless appeals for purely political reasons? (no)

I am going to do myself an injury from laughing at this mess

If I were a senior Home Office official heading a crack team tasked with selecting the first handful of people to send to France I would have selected someone who hadn’t been shot and then spent time in Libya, the Mediterranean Centre of Trafficking.

Honestly I do recommend lawyers check out the YouTube videos of the hearing - the *tone* of those judges' questions!

We're getting some detail of the trafficking claim The man says he was a victim of forced Labour in Ethiopia, and was not paid for 2 years while farming in the desert and was shot by his employer The Home Office said it was an "employment dispute" and shooting was not "menace" to force labour

Court has been pushing on the question of what is the lawful basis for departing from this guidance (which was also stated in the decision letter), counsel for SSHD unable to answer

The government appealed this decision and I'm at the ongoing Court of Appeal hearing for it The judges are grilling the home secretary's barrister on the reasons for departing from the Home Office's own statutory guidance on trafficking decisions and noted they changed it the next day

It's not currently looking like appealing last week's interim relief decision was a particularly good idea

Really illuminating and interesting piece www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Home Sec’s harmful, inaccurate “last minute legal challenges” rhetoric + claims of modern slavery system misuse has not calmed an environment where NGOs have closed offices for safety fears. Read @freedomfromtorture.bsky.social Kolbassia Haoussou's testimony www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

Latest post from us: The reality behind “last minute” legal challenges to removal | Sonia Lenegan

There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

Man who died on Bibby Stockholm ‘tricked’ into going on barge, inquest told

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

(Smugly) “And how does my good honourable friend propose to pay for the mass camps?”

PM wistfully sighing saying man if only we could go full fat fascism that would be nice but think of the cost and the work

And Labour have finally responded to Reform’s repugnant ILR proposals by … endorsing them?

really dislike that "Boriswave" used to be something you'd exclusively see being used by racist Twitter accounts but it's now made its way to the political mainstream, including today's Playbook headline

This episode rather demonstrates the damage you can do by getting it wrong in the first place. Later corrections never make the same splash as the initial 'mistake'.

More than 150 lawyers and refugee NGOs report being ‘pressured into silence’ by far-right protesters

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Obviously this piece is absurd, and mainly designed to exploit rifts between Hermer and the rest of the govt. But it’s also part of a deeply sinister attempt to delegitimise legal work on behalf of asylum seekers, in an environment where death threats & actual attacks have already occurred

UK recognises Palestine as an independent state

Australia joins UK and Canada in formally recognising Palestinian state

People love it

Being nice to trans people really did turn out to be a load bearing part of liberal democracy ey

It is fucked up what they did to the headphone jack

A little bit of navel-gazing on the last twelve months of trying to run a start-up local news organisation with no investment or plan, entirely funded by readers. www.londoncentric.media/p/london-new...

Peer reviewing manuscripts and now seeing that there is a box to check that the reviewer has not fed the manuscript into AI. This is a good step, but a sign that some reviewers are behaving very poorly.

Every stage this Bill clears brings us closer to the safe and compassionate assisted dying law that people across the country are calling for. This reform has won the support of the public, MPs and now Peers, moving it decisively closer to becoming law. www.dignityindying.org.uk/news/assiste...

Exc: 13 Afghans who worked with the British Army are being deported back to Afghanistan despite being under the care of the British High Commission in Pakistan after delays getting them to the UK. inews.co.uk/news/politic...

God this is grim. Shabana Mahmood has *already* changed the modern slavery guidance to try to stop people at risk of being forcibly removed to France from asking for a reconsideration - even though it's *her own* Department's processes that are responsible...

This is very good on the importance of legal advice. Anyone talking about removals without mentioning this is essentially advocating for an unfair system. We *know* that the Home Office will try to get away with as much bad and unlawful behaviour as they can, this is why lawyers are vital.

“The rushed nature of the process created an environment in which asylum seekers didn’t feel safe to reveal their gender identities or orientation.” Monique Failla of Monash University, on gendered experiences of structural violence in Australia’s fast track process. #BorderCrim2025

And more importantly - some excellent Thames related proposals!

This story is so absurd and so appalling. It’s so debasing for society that the anti-trans panic has some people thinking that it’s their business what’s in anyone else’s pants.

Mahmood’s response is ‘completely disingenuous unless she is completely clueless about how the system is operating… the “intolerable” “last minute attempts to frustrate a removal” are a direct result of the system designed by the Home Office’ @sonial77.bsky.social freemovement.org.uk/home-office-...

"Once you use ChatGPT, you don't want to think for yourself anymore" THAT IS A TERRIFYING SENTENCE

‘Forgive us, Palestinian brothers, sisters,’ says Algerian ambassador to UN Amar Bendjama after devastating outcome.

Thought this seemed like a very good piece (which it is) and then woah who is this very grumpy seeming person, probably not having the best post-holiday week but making an excellent point...

Trump Spends Entire U.K. Trip Trying To Figure Out Where He Knows Prince Andrew From theonion.com/trump-spends...

I've checked with the electoral commission and Sexist Boys' Club is available to register as a party name.

NEW: Britain’s fiercest libel firm, Carter-Ruck, acted for the $4bn OneCoin fraud and threatened its critics. Now they’re being prosecuted at the SDT. Their response? An anonymity order to cover it up. But Carter-Ruck just lost that order - and it's all coming out. Thread