We got married here In 2011. It truly is the happiest government building I’ve ever visited. I love this.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

This is really beautiful and sad. A great read for all the Trekkies on LawSky. You know who you are.

New Foreword up on SSRN, previewing new projects on the history of constitutional history and what it can teach about legal frameworks at the heart of our "constitutional crisis"-federal Indian law, territorial law, expansion, immigration, and executive power. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This a good piece. Among other things, the first part of Catherine's paper on the civil service is a very readable restatement of the conventional wisdom <positive> on the rise of the nonpartisan civil service. I taught from it this year and will do so again. 1/3

“They've overstayed a visa. They've missed an appointment with an immigration judge. Alright, that warrants a slap on the wrist, a wagging disapproving finger, and perhaps a small fine for the bureaucratic burden. These are administrative violations” www.liberalcurrents.com/abolition-am...

This action "is a ringing alarm bell warning all of us of the extent to which this administration has succeeded in degrading our governing institutions in such a short period of time." My statement progressivereform.org/cpr-blog/epa...

Well, teaching Massachusetts v. EPA just got more fun.

"Here, too, law and order are being produced, not by courts that rapidly retreat from confrontation under a presumption of regularity, or agencies that disclaim responsibility for their own violence, but by collective practice that emerges when formal guarantees prove selectively unreliable."

This feels like a @msmith750.bsky.social article.

Starting to think the whole thing where we give people any kind of authority at all over other people was a mistake.

He literally says in this clip that ICE will keep in Minnesota “quick reaction forces” — a military term — to go after “agitators.” Remember that those on the ground in MPLS have spent more than a week trying to tell everyone that Trump’s prior “deescalation” was a ruse and ICE is still operational

You really have to read this thread

I’ll believe this when the Minnesotans on here confirm it has happened. But if this is real, then they are retreating again. Did Homan announce the next target? Usually they frame it as “we won here, now we move on,” but did they not even do that?

"The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data."

Now in print and available from HILJ: From Business Plans to International Rights, my job talk paper! Infinite thanks to the patient editors at HILJ and to so many others.

Huh

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

There's a hot new move going around popular fronts where a near-contender in a contested primary endorses the leftier winner as a bulwark against the forces that ran the reactionary spoiler. It's called "Landering" and it kicks ass.

The closest modern historical parallel is the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay for intercepted Cubans and Haitians during the HW Bush and Clinton administrations, where at maximum capacity roughly 12,000 migrants were detained. But those migrants were never in the physical US.

It's great this is getting more attention. Immigration attorneys have long complained about this interstate shell game. It's a feature endemic to the U.S. system of detention and deportation, even if it has accelerated or worsened under Trump 2.

We are murdering people and it is basically just background noise at this point. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/u...

The lawless killing spree at sea continues. As usual, the "designated terrorist organization" supposedly operating the vessel is unidentified. And based on recent history, the likelihood that the USG successfully rescues the survivor seems low. Real killing in a make believe armed conflict.

BREAKING: On February 2, Sec. Noem issued a memo asserting the lapse in appropriations for DHS meant there is no Sec. 527 — the provision protecting congressional oversight visits to immigration detention facilities — and she was issuing a new (third) policy requiring seven-day notice for visits.

I'm at the point where every US news story makes me want to write a 10,000 word essay connecting all the political and legal developments of the past 20 years—just to conclude that everything is the same as it used to be but stupider now. Is this a Piaget stage?

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

So uh Ring just up and said they've got a huge centralized private surveillance network they can leverage all at once huh

TB and Covid active in a troubled El Paso immigrant tent camp where 3 people have died over a 6 week period ( including one ruled a homicide) & following a measles outbreak at the Dilley family detention center. Reach out if you have info on Dilley/ East Montana www.texastribune.org/2026/02/07/i...

As the presumption of regularity crumbles before our very (tired) eyes, do we fall back to a posture of neutrality about the government's statements? Or does it become a presumption of irregularity?

Interesting amicus brief by @democracyforward.org in Trump's $10b tax lawuit. They convincingly make the claim that there is no case or controversy if the President is on both sides of the litigation. Interesting consequence of the UET. democracyforward.org/wp-content/u...

This is a really powerful book and worth your time.

1/ Important read from my friends Charlie Trumbull & @mikeschmitt.bsky.social Bottom line: A sentence you could easily miss in the Trump DOJ/OLC's Maduro memo concludes a new category of *civilians* can be lawfully killed during armed conflict. It is wrong. www.justsecurity.org/130603/olc-m...

This is very useful and in general i agree. But I am very curious about what folks think these days about the "[x authoritarian thing] would crash markets" article of faith. The extent to which capital seems pretty chill with US authoritarianism has been quite striking over the past year.

This is very useful and in general i agree. But I am very curious about what folks think these days about the "[x authoritarian thing] would crash markets" article of faith. The extent to which capital seems pretty chill with US authoritarianism has been quite striking over the past year.

Every paragraph in this story is more upsetting than the last. We're really focused right now on the violence in the streets. But what's going on in these centers is the routine violence of this system.

Bump

Every American needs to watch this:

The sheer stupidity of everything is overwhelming. The Freedom Fries era was probably about as stupid, actually, but I was younger then and didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how stupid.

This is unsurprising but extremely troubling news for anyone familiar with the United States’ moral cowardice on cluster munitions. theintercept.com/2026/02/06/p...

New, from me: Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants. The new rule is dishonest and unmoored from reality in its effort to formalize the politicization of the federal government 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-sch...

OPM has just released guidance on the rule. I'm working through the final rule itself and then will turn to the guidance. I'll note anything that I think is new as I go. www.opm.gov/chcoc/latest...

Time for an old-school #legalwriting thread crowdsourcing all of the lawyers on here. I'm interested in what you think about law student use of generative AI in writing samples. If you are hiring students, do you think about this? Do you care? 1/2

The only response here is a motion to enjoin the whole operation If the government's position is "I'm sorry your honor but we don't be the capacity to both respect constitutional rights and conduct the operation as it is currently being conducted" the answer is "then you must stop the operation"

🚨HOLY CRAP. The Trump admin just took a SLEDGEHAMMER to due process, largely eliminating the Board of Immigration Appeals process and MANDATING DISMISSAL of ALL appeals (which cost $1,000 thanks to OBBBA) filed after tomorrow unless a majority of the BIA votes to hear the case.

And who says BlueSky is a bubble with no diversity of opinion?

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

A lot going on here, but off the top: rest assured that when the Trump Admin invokes “Tren de Aragua” it’s just a scary sounding term for “immigrants” or “brown people.” Also, wasn’t aware that ICE had authority to enforce state property law.