The Kavanaugh Stops will continue until morale improves.

I can’t say I know exactly how it all would have played out, but I would much rather live in the alternate universe where the leaders of Columbia University had stood up for the institution and all of its faculty and students.

NEW—US Department of Education sent out standard Out of Office language to employees on Wednesday in light of shutdown. Later yesterday, workers tell me they found someone had updated their auto-responses without consent to a new one blaming Democrats. Version of original on left, updated on right:

Like Mahmoud Khalil's case, Mario Guevara's shows how courts will let the Trump administration use facially legal, bureaucratic mechanisms in unconstitutional ways. In a concurrence, Judge Kidd stresses that the First Amendment protects Guevara. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The regime is deporting an Atlanta journalist and being pretty open about the fact that it‘s in direct retaliation for his coverage: “An immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond in July, but the government filed a stay, claiming that his reporting on law enforcement activity was dangerous”

UPDATE: Three of the six Instagram users targeted by the DHS subpoena have now filed separate motions to quash, and as of yesterday all three judges ordered Meta not to comply with it, for now. The IG users also asked to consolidate their cases. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

To keep her in detention in Texas, the Trump administration pointed to Leqaa Kordia’s remittances to family in Palestine.

ICE targeted Leqaa Kordia for protesting the war in Gaza. To keep her in detention for six months and counting, the Trump administration made her get sworn affidavits from family members in Palestine about money Leqaa sent them for food, fuel, and medical bills.

She Sent Money to Family in Gaza. ICE Claimed It’s Evidence She Supports Hamas. by @shawnmusgrave.bsky.social theintercept.com/2025/10/02/g...

One constant in judicial critiques of "the Government" and "prosecutors" remains, even as Judge Sooknanan lists out cases with egregious issues: judges RARELY name the prosecutor, even when the constitutional violation is extreme.

Judge Sooknanan has some problems with recent “prosecutorial machinations” in Washington, D.C., cataloguing a list of abuses and excesses she says have exploded in recent weeks ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

Judge Young's opinion is resonating with a lot of people. A student wrote to me: "Every once in a while, you read an opinion that gives you heart and reaffirms your faith in the law and in the profession of lawyering and, for me, this is one of those cases." knightcolumbia.org/documents/ah...

This has been in the works for a long time & it’s thrilling to see it out in the world. Radley’s reporting has a lot to teach us about how we got to our present moment in the US. (Shoutout to my stellar colleague, producer Laura Flynn, who has taught our household everything we know about podcasts.)

It just cannot be emphasized enough, as the differential treatment of Slaughter and Cook illustrate yet again, the Roberts Court’s vision of separation of powers is not the Founders’, nor the Constitution’s, but just their own. This isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just disingenuous. (1/2)

Masked federal agents pushed two photojournalists to the ground in a hallway outside a New York immigration court Tuesday morning, resulting in one journalist receiving treatment by emergency medical personnel. https://wapo.st/42gz4Cg

The Intercept is launching a new podcast series reported and hosted by @radleybalko.bsky.social, a trailblazing investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. theintercept.com/2025/10/01/c...

I just received this statement from ICE re: Barbara Mariana Gomes Marques May in which they can't even be bothered to get her age right (she's 38.) She never received the notice to appear in 2019, and was at the final step of her green card process with her US citizen husband when she was taken.

Mike Johnson has to be one of the most empty little suits that's ever been in the speaker's chair.

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

A judge just smacked down the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian speech, comparing it to the Red Scare. The Reagan-appointed judge kind of went off. Read more: interc.pt/483AWlr ✍️ @shawnmusgrave.bsky.social 📹 @jordanuhl.com

I couldn't possibly capture all the things that are extraordinary about Judge Young's ruling, but here's my abridged attempt. theintercept.com/2025/09/30/r...

Federal court: DHS took agents away from national security investigations in order to arrest students for criticizing Israel, participating in pro-Palestinian protests, publishing op-eds calling for divestment.

Honestly, this entire opinion is just jaw-dropping. The first postings I saw on Bluesky were about the first page, which is lovely in its own right and exemplifies one of the less-well-explored roles of a judge in a democracy: to explain what is going on legally to non-lawyers. There's way more.

If Judge Young gets impeached for this bracingly honest opinion, I would not be surprised in the LEAST. It's not just the cover page — look at how he describes testimony from the acting ICE director, Todd Lyons on masked agents: "disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable."

JUST IN: American Oversight asks the 11th Circuit to vacate Judge Cannon's blockade of the special counsel Jack Smith's report on Trump's handling of classified material. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

To explain: At the start of his opinion, Judge Young includes an anonymous note received by his chambers, which reads “Trump has pardons and tanks..what do you have?” Responding to the note, Young says we have our “magnificent Constitution” and “here’s how that works out in a specific case —“

Kavanaugh stops.

Fight Over Hidden Report on Trump Documents Case Goes to Appeals Court Meanwhile, previously secret passages in court filings over grand jury fights in two cases against the president have been revealed. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

This passage nearly broke me.

Another craven act of surrender by Big Tech. There is exactly zero merit to this lawsuit. For Google to pay Trump off adds it to the long list of companies that have decided to be complicit in his attack on free speech www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Pritzker: "In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists & protesters when unprovoked what would we call it? If officials marched down streets harassing civilians & demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we'd have trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism"

Today’s capitulation. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Kavanaugh stops

One note about this: This person is being chased because he’s brown, appears to work in delivery, and is going about his day in a specific part of town. Not wanting to be seized when faced with imminent indignity and carceral violence is a human response, not one limited to immigrants.

Troops. In an American city. Using full force. Your now-regular reminder that Republican members of Congress are letting this happen.

In a ruling that was hailed as a First Amendment victory, a U.S. judge dismissed wiretapping charges against journalist Timothy Burke. thedissenter.org/us-judge-dis...

What happened at SCOTUS today? The case over $4 billion in foreign aid led to an unsigned Friday SCOTUS order that, in effect, means Trump can overturn certain laws — and that preventing him from doing so is a "harm" for which SCOTUS can grant him relief. Here's my report at Law Dork:

Federal prosecutors in L.A. have indicted three women for allegedly 'doxing' an ICE agent. My latest: www.latimes.com/california/s...

I used to be very (small c) conservative re. court reforms because of all the "what if" arguments re. possible abuse of such reforms. But forget all of that. The abuses are coming from SCOTUS itself. The majority is exercising sheer political will, not reason. TIME FOR REFORM. Expansion, at minimum.

Scoop: Trump fired a U.S. Attorney in Sacramento less than six hours after she told his California border patrol chief to abide by court orders and the Constitution while conducting his immigration raids. With @haleaziz.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

This is an infuriating and shameful scandal. The Roberts Court is condoning Trump’s law breaking, again, pure and simple. There is no serious path forward for democratic government without Supreme Court reform.

Hi, just a note— The local ICE/ERO agent directing his team to fire at reporters' faces in Chicago this morning has been threatening press since we showed up at immigration court in June. His agents shot us both at close range last week, too. None of this started today!

My latest: As the United Nations convened in NYC this week, 10 new countries recognized Palestine as a state. Despite this, these 5 nations still ship WEAPONS TO ISRAEL, funding the genocide in Gaza. Critics called this a "performance of justice." @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2025/09/25/p...

A separate filing notes that a grand jury REJECTED a third charge for James Comey. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

“To say the military leadership is anxious would be an understatement,” one defense official told The Intercept.

WOW. The lead plaintiff is a Latino man who's been here legally for 24 years. He was grabbed off the street by plainclothes federal agents who didn't even ASK about his status. He was detained overnight and only released once a supervisor realized he had been illegally arrested.

If you've received a notice from Meta, Google, etc., about your online accounts being subject to "law enforcement process" -- it may be an administrative subpoena. And I want to hear about it: shawnmusgrave.82 on Signal.

Kash Patel says the suspected Texas ICE shooter "searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents." DHS recently sent subpoenas to Meta for information on social media accounts that track ICE actions, on broad immigration enforcement authority grounds. Worth watching what happens here now.

Today's bonus "One First" looks at how #SCOTUS's removal rulings have reconfigured the relationship b/w stare decisis and emergency relief. "There may be persuasive justifications for such a bizarre reconfiguration of equitable relief. But, once again, the justices aren’t deigning to provide them."

“They’re trying to reset the boundaries on what is permissible speech,” said Mr. Zúñiga. “It’s part of the message they’re sending: They want people who are ideologically aligned to be the ones traveling to the United States.” Ideological exclusion ⬇️ www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/w...