ICE is back to assaulting protesters
The scene outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility is all too familiar
Masked federal agents are once again assaulting protesters, this time outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility.
Demonstrators have been holding a round-the-clock vigil for six days outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark in support of immigrants inside who are engaged in a hunger and labor strike over inhumane conditions and violations of their due process rights.
ICE agents on Monday and Tuesday responded with brutality when protesters tried to block their vehicles.
On Monday, Sen. Andy Kim was among those caught in a cloud of pepper spray after he positioned himself between agents and demonstrators in an attempt to de-escalate a face-off. (See this photo from photographer Dakota Santiago, and this one from NJ.com’s Jelani Gibson.)
On Tuesday, agents used pepper spray and tasers against demonstrators. And on Tuesday night, agents viciously shoved protesters, hit them their batons, and pepper-sprayed them in the face. At least two men were thrown to the ground and arrested. Here’s some alarming video. Protesters said one of the arrested men was a medic and a veteran.
Several Democratic officials have visited the protesters to show their support, including Kim, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, and Representatives Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver. (McIver still faces jumped-up criminal charges for a scrum outside that same facility a year ago.)
The Department of Homeland Security, under the new management of Markwayne Mullin, appears far from chastened. It has responded to the protests with a series of hostile tweets and press releases attacking “New Jersey sanctuary politicians” for “spreading smears about ICE.”
Independent journalist Amanda Moore captured the moment as detainees at Delaney Hall flashed the lights inside the facility and protesters cheered.
And Status Coup News interviewed a 10-year-old whose father is detained inside. “If they’re such big and bad,” she said, pointing at ICE agents, “why don’t they just take theirs masks off?”
Scientists Fight Back
Protect Democracy’s Allie Cashel writes:
Scientists are fighting back. A resistance that began as individual acts of courage is now taking collective shape, and what has emerged over the past several months is beginning to look like the early architecture of a movement.
For instance:
The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD) has built a growing coalition of workers and allies mobilizing the federal workforce to refuse compliance with dangerous and illegal orders, building networks across every federal agency in every state.
After HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the dismissed scientists “formed the Immunization Scientific Advisory Collaborative (ISAC) and published independent, evidence-based evaluations of the reconstituted committee’s proceedings,” Cashel reports.
And graduate students have formed a nationwide coalition called Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), which has produced more than 200 op-eds for the students’ hometown newspapers.
The CBC Responds to Redistricting
The Congressional Black Caucus is calling on major corporations across the U.S to oppose redistricting efforts intended to eliminate majority-Black U.S. House districts.
“Five years ago, more than 150 companies publicly declared that democracy and equal access to the ballot were fundamental American values,” the group’s letter to corporate leaders said. “For those companies that previously chose to speak, this moment demands continued courage and consistency.”
Last week, the caucus and the NAACP called for Black athletes to boycott public universities in states that are trying to eliminate districts held by Black lawmakers.
But most of all, the caucus is focused on voter registration and mobilization, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, the caucus’s chair, told the Washington Post. And in the longer run, they hope to revive the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Last Week in the Courts
A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed the criminal case against immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, calling it the result of vindictive prosecution. Abrego Garcia is a Maryland father of three whose travails have become a focal point for the anti-immigration movement. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. concluded Justice Department officials filed the criminal charges as retaliation for Abrego Garcia’s legal victories in his deportation case.
Two more federal judges — in Maine and Wisconsin — have ruled against the DOJ’s demand that state’s turn over their voter registration rolls. Democracy Docket reports that the latest dismissals bring the DOJ’s record to 0-8. In Maine, Judge Lance Walker wrote that a DOJ lawyer’s argument that this was a routine request from the Civil Rights Division, not intended to create a national voter registration database, was “almost immediately undermined by the issuance of an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a ‘State Citizenship List’ in order to ‘assist in verifying identity and Federal election voter eligibility.’”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is asking a federal judge in Alabama to dismiss criminal fraud charges it argues were the result of vindictive prosecution. (The brief cites the Abrego Garcia case, above.) Meanwhile, a letter from more than 440 civil and human rights, faith, environmental, nonprofit organizations, and labor unions called the SPLC prosecution “a naked attempt to weaponize the criminal justice system to silence speech and activities this administration dislikes.”
Resistance groups are already fighting Trump’s outrageous new $1.8 billion slush-fund.
Democracy Forward sued on behalf of a coalition of organizations and individuals who argued they would be harmed by “its implicit endorsement of dangerous conduct.”
And CREW sued on the grounds that the slush fund “is unlawfully structured to evade transparency laws including the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act and usurps Congress’s authority to spend taxpayer money.”
A Lemon of a Case
This is what happens when inept MAGA prosecutors pursue a ridiculous case against journalists covering a protest.
Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are among 38 people charged with criminal conspiracy for a protest at a St. Paul church this winter.
As MPRNews reports, newly unsealed documents show that “U.S. Magistrate Judge John Docherty denied requests in February for five separate search warrants, including for YouTube information of independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon.”
Docherty’s ruling is really quite stunning. His conclusion:
Before the Court are five applications for search warrant by Homeland Security Special Agent Timothy Gerber. None of the five applications establish probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime will be found in the places to be searched, all of the warrant applications improperly refer the Court to material outside the search warrant application itself, and all of the warrant applications seek sealing without, however, a motion to seal or a proposed order being supplied to the Court. The applications are all DENIED.
Docherty revealed the prosecution’s absurdly broad and invasive demands:
The warrant seeks “subscriber information in any form kept,” including the names of subscribers, the mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and email addresses of subscribers, the telephone numbers of subscribers, and the Internet Protocol addresses from which the “Don Lemon Show” was accessed, among other information. There is no attempt made to explain why the compilation by the government of a comprehensive index of subscribers to “The Don Lemon Show” is evidence that a crime was committed.
An Ode to Bruce
The great labor journalist Steven Greenhouse writes in the Guardian:
The Bruce Springsteen concert I went to in Brooklyn last week was unlike any concert I’ve attended in decades. It was far more than a fabulous, joyous concert; it was also an inspiring resistance event.
From the get-go, the Boss made clear that this concert would be part of the anti-Trump resistance. It was a three-hour-long ode to the resistance and a thunderous call to Springsteen fans to step up and do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. In this way, Springsteen is serving as a model for how celebrities can stand up against Trump and fight for what’s right.
Springsteen performs at Nationals Stadium in Washington tonight. I’ll be there!