DL Open Thread: Friday, April 11, 2025

Supreme Court Gets One Right.  Sort-of:

The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Always with a caveat:

“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the district court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the district court’s authority.”

The case will now return to the trial court, and it is not clear whether and when Mr. Abrego Garcia will be returned to the United States.

The ruling appeared to be unanimous. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a statement that was harshly critical of the government’s conduct and said she would have upheld every part of the trial judge’s order.

“To this day,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”

We now return you to Bizarro World, in progress since Imauguration Day.  Starting with–the future Trump University?:

The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.

The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a precondition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.

A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary move by the Trump administration, which has threatened government funding as a way to force colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues from campus protests to transgender women in sports and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Please note that Columbia had already capitulated.  Illustrating once again why capitulating to Trump leads only to demands that they capitulate further.

More Bizarro World stuff.  How do you kill immigrants without even ‘killing’ them?  Here’s how:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were allowed into the country under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now, the administration is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with six people familiar with the plans.

The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.

The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead. As a result of being added to the death database, they would be blacklisted from a coveted form of identity that allows them to make and more easily spend money.

Their “financial lives,” Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”

The move is the latest in an extraordinary series of actions by the Trump administration, pushed by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to harness personal data long considered off limits to immigration authorities in order to advance President Trump’s vision for a mass migrant crackdown. This week, several top officials at the Internal Revenue Service moved to resign after the tax agency said it would help locate undocumented immigrants.

Meet The Politically-Connected Company Building Detention Camps.  No-bid contracts, revolving-door employees, they’ve got it all covered:

In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasn’t there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.

The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

In March, one of the company’s tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the president’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasn’t posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the “incumbent contractor,” the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site — which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults — on March 10.

There’s lots more.  But let’s quote someone from the ACLU on what can/will likely happen:

The plans are “a recipe for disaster,” said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.

“All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones — the list goes on — all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel,” Cho said.

Amerika in 2025.  Try not to get used to it.

Gov. Meyer’s State Of The State Address.  I wasn’t there, didn’t listen.  Did you listen?  If so, what are your takeaways?:

The governor acknowledged the difficulty of crafting the state budget amid major policy shifts at the federal level, including funding freezes and cuts plus varying levels of tariffs.

“In building this year’s budget, our team is managing swings in revenue and expenses in the tens of millions of dollars — sometimes from one hour or day to the next, sometimes from one headline out of Washington to the next,” he said.

Here’s some news:

Meyer also touched on the Port of Wilmington, where a battle over nominees to the Diamond State Port Corporation Board has played out between the governor and Senate leadership. Meyer has submitted a slate of names who are scheduled to get a hearing next week.

One can only hope that the Senate votes on these nominees next week.

What do you want to talk about?