DL Open Thread: Friday, January 30, 2026

Delaware Healthcare Provider Facing Texas-Style (In)Justice Speaks:

A Delaware telehealth abortion provider is being sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The lawsuit accuses Debra Lynch’s telehealth service, Her Safe Harbor, of violating Texas law by routinely sending abortion-inducing pills to women across state lines. Texas has banned most abortions, with medical providers risking decades in prison and at least $100,000 in fines. The drugs are illegal there and state law makes it a felony to supply them by mail or other means.

Lynch said Wednesday that she was not scared of Paxton’s legal threat.

“Every time the phone rings, every woman reaching out for help, that is our concern,” she said. “He’s already harming the women of Texas and the children of Texas so severely that anything he threatens to us just pales in comparison.”

David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, said the case against Lynch is weak. It cites as its only evidence interviews Lynch gave to several media outlets last year. In those reports, she discusses sending the medication to places in Southeast Texas, including “Beaumont, Fulshear, Tomball, Houston, and El Paso.” Paxton filed the lawsuit in Jefferson County, Texas, claiming a “substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to this claim occurred” in the county.

“The fact that it’s being done this way, that it’s just based on her statements to a newspaper, that is not how lawsuits normally work,” Cohen said. “This case is really strange in the lack of evidence, and I think it’s far from what would be needed to prove civil liability and, even more, for criminal liability.”

Will Delaware’s Shield Law protect Lynch?  We, and she, don’t know:

“None of us do, and we went into this knowing that,” she said. “But I don’t think that anyone in any state can say that they feel confident that the shield laws in their state, whether it be New York or California or wherever or Colorado, because none of them have been tested in a court of law.”

“While shield laws may be on the books in multiple states, there is no way to feel confident, because there is no court that has validated interpretation of those shield laws,” she said.

Lynch took a stand.  I stand with her.

Cruz Calls For Arming Of Protestors…:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday called for the U.S. to arm Iranian protesters amid the Iranian government’s crackdown in the country.

“We should be arming the protesters in Iran. NOW,” Cruz wrote Tuesday in a post on the social platform X.

“For the Iranian people to overthrow the Ayatollah—a tyrant who routinely chants ‘death to America’—would make America much, much safer,” Cruz’s post continued.

You’re smart.  Don’t need me to point out the obvious.

ICE Skates–For Two More Weeks:

Senate Democrats on Thursday struck a deal with President Trump and Republicans that could avert a government shutdown and buy more time to negotiate restrictions on the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The agreement, if it holds, would allow the Senate to act before a Friday midnight deadline to fund a large portion of the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. It would also provide two weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security while lawmakers and White House officials negotiate over Democrats’ demands to rein in federal immigration agents.

Senators said they hoped to vote on the deal on Friday, after their hopes of pushing it through on Thursday night faded amid objections from rank-and-file Republicans.

Mr. Schumer and the president began negotiations late Wednesday to resolve the dispute and head off a government shutdown, according to two officials familiar with the talks who described them on the condition of anonymity.

The administration’s talks with Democrats began after the lawmakers unveiled a set of demands they said they would insist on in exchange for voting for homeland security funding. They included banning immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to wear body cameras and visible identification, an end to random immigration sweeps, requirements for judicial warrants for stop and searches and requirements for immigration officers to follow the same use-of-force standards as community law enforcement.

They also want an independent investigation of the two fatal shootings in Minneapolis.

“No more secret police,” Mr. Schumer said. “The Republican majority must step up to the plate. Republicans in Congress cannot allow this violent status quo to continue. They must work with Democrats on legislation — real legislation.”

DINO senators to begin searching for a ‘compromise’, aka retreat, in 3-2-1.

Meet OMNI–The Airline Avelo Wishes That It Was:

Just before being put on board her deportation flight, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac.

There was no company name or logo on the Boeing 767, but she soon learned the airline was called Omni Air International. She’d never heard of it, nor of Stonepeak, the private equity firm that purchased Omni in April 2025, nor of its billionaire CEO, who was an immigrant himself. She had no idea that Omni’s ICE work had quadrupled since the sale, or that its flights were getting longer and, because of that, crueler.

There were 10 female deportees clustered in coach, with about 180 men seated behind. Tran noted a variety of accents and ethnicities, and wondered how many stops were planned and how long she’d be shackled. When an ICE-contracted guard walked by, she asked about their flight time.

“Where are you from?” he responded. Vietnam, she said—though she hadn’t been there since her family fled when she was 10. The Maryland mother of four had long put a 2001 theft conviction behind her, becoming a health care worker and small-business owner, but at an ICE check-in three days earlier, she was arrested and flown to detention in Alexandria, Louisiana.

The guard winced: “Sorry, you’re the last stop.” He told her she wouldn’t arrive in Hanoi until Thursday. It was Monday night in Louisiana.

Both emphasized ATSG’s subsidiaries in cargo transport (including planes leased to Amazon), ground services, aircraft leasing, and maintenance, with only passing mention of its charter airline, Omni, described as “a leading supplemental provider of passenger transport for the US Department of Defense and other agencies.” Nowhere do they say that for years, Omni has been the only large-jet airline flying shackled passengers on long-haul ICE flights to Africa and Asia.

Like Dorrell, Omni has a knack for staying under the radar, even as it profits from Trump’s migrant crackdown; Omni, ATSG, and Stonepeak did not respond to detailed questions. But since the sale, Omni has flown thousands of deportees delivered to its planes by ICE.

In the eight months following Stonepeak’s acquisition, public flight data suggests Omni carried out 77 trips under ICE subcontracts, making 194 stops in 42 countries, including authoritarian regimes like Cambodia, Cameroon, China, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laos, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Over the same period in 2024, records suggest Omni flew only 20 ICE trips to just 14 countries.

But beyond facilitating potential human rights abuses, Omni’s flights themselves are becoming increasingly inhumane. In 2024, only six trips lasted more than 24 hours, with the longest lasting 38 hours. But of the 77 trips carried out between Stonepeak’s mid-April purchase and the end of 2025, 31 lasted between 24 and 50 hours before the final stop. Migrants onboard until then would have spent all that time, and likely more, shackled. A man deported to Laos in October told me he was shackled for 73 hours after his Omni plane unexpectedly returned to Louisiana, which flight data confirms. He and nearly 200 others were kept restrained overnight before a second takeoff; at least 20 elderly deportees were so weak from sleeping on the floor that they needed to be pushed across the tarmac in wheelchairs and carried to their airplane seats, he said.

Well, they’re the ‘worst of the worst’.  Guess they got what they deserved.

Gee, You Think The IRS Will Give Him The Entire $10 Billion?  The correct answer is ‘yes’:

Donald Trump on Thursday sued the US treasury department and Internal Revenue Service for $10bn over the disclosure of his tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.

In a complaint filed in Miami federal court, Trump, his adult sons, and his namesake company said the agencies failed to take “mandatory precautions” to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking their tax returns to “leftist media outlets”, including the New York Times and ProPublica.

The plaintiffs said they suffered “significant and irreparable harm” to their reputations and financial interests, and may seek punitive damages because the leaks were either willful or resulted from gross negligence.

Thursday’s lawsuit puts Trump in the unusual position of suing government agencies that are part of the executive branch, which he leads.

Governor Meyer’s Proposed Budget–Early Response Appears To Be Positive:

Meyer’s proposed investments come even as regular inflationary growth in government operations from last year put Delaware at a roughly $500 million deficit, according to the latest projections from state budget officials. That deficit is driven almost entirely by the rising cost of health care and projected salary increases for state workers rather than falling revenues. 

Meyer said he will overcome that gap through a series of cuts that will also provide an additional $42 million to put toward his budget priorities, which include allocations for teacher and state employee raises, more money for affordable housing incentives, and nearly $140 million in Medicaid funding.

Still, on Thursday, Democratic leaders in the legislature said they were pleased by Meyer’s proposed budget. State Sen. Trey Paradee (D-Dover), who co-chairs the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) that considers and amends the recommended budget, said the governor’s stated priorities align with some of the biggest issues currently facing Delawareans.

“I’ve got to say I’m really pleasantly surprised,” Paradee said. “I think this is a good starting point for the work that we’ll be doing in February.”

House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown (D-Delaware City) said she liked Meyer’s presentation but needed to see a more specific breakdown of his proposal.

“I have not seen the details, especially around what’s being cut,” she said. “When we talk about cuts and we’re talking about health care, what are we cutting?”

Members of Republican leadership expressed cautious optimism about Meyer’s proposed budget, commending his efforts to close the gap between the state’s revenues and its expenses.

“I think the governor’s recommended budget is probably the least gap of any we’ve seen in years,” Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View) said. “And I was so happy to see that.”

At least, it doesn’t sound like budgetary brinksmanship is in the General Assembly’s future.

What do you want to talk about?