In this week’s episode, Ben is joined by Dex Hunter-Torricke, founder of the Center for Tomorrow and former head of communications and marketing at Google Deepmind. Prior to that, he also worked at The Oversight Board, SpaceX and Facebook. Together they discuss:
It’s easy to make fun of the federal government for paying well over market for items. We’ve all heard the stories about $900 toilets and $400 hammers and lol’ed generously, perhaps without considering that maybe the toilet was for a space shuttle or a submarine and therefore couldn’t be off-the-shelf. Maybe the hammers aren’t being used to bash in nails but used to assemble sensitive equipment that requires certain materials and reduction of blunt force.
Then again, maybe the government just spends excessive amounts of money because it has excessive amounts of money to spend. The current administration has increased our national debt to levels that seem almost hyperbolic. And this particular administration has thrown so much federal funding at ICE that it has surpassed the FBI — the mf’in FBI! — as the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency.
You’d think being over-funded would make you relaxed. With this sort of largesse, there’s really no reason for ICE to live from government shutdown-to-government shutdown. You just get what you need, splurge a little on some extras, and know that at least you won’t be furloughed the next time Congress decides an impasse is better than jettisoning toxic proposals that will never receive bipartisan support.
But what’s happening here? This just looks like the government being taken for the sucker it is by a specialist in predatory pricing.
This incident would never have come to light without the intervention of local Minnesota journalists. Reporters working for NBC affiliate KARE 11 obtained public records that show the federal government massively overpaid for vacant buildings after local officials decided CoreCivic was asking too much for a prison property it no longer had any use for.
CoreCivic found itself sitting on empty prison property in Appleton, Minnesota. The town of less than 1,400 people sits far closer to the South Dakota border than the Twin Cities. With the administration focused almost entirely on Minneapolis with its ICE-aided revenge tour of “Places Where Trump Failed To Secure A Majority of the Popular Vote,” a vacant prison in a rural area would rarely have piqued the federal government’s interest.
It certainly failed to generate any local interest when CoreCivic first offered it for sale, even though CoreCivic claimed it would include any recent improvements while generally stating that the prison that had been closed for 16 years had “ran when parked.”
KARE 11 obtained an email dated May 7, 2025, from CoreCivic representative Kelly Durham to the Deputy Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.
The CoreCivic email states: “Yes, we would be willing to sell the facility to the State.”
Then, CoreCivic states its asking price: “Sale price is $75M inclusive of the upgrades CoreCivic has identified would be needed to re-activate the facility.”
A turnkey opportunity — one that had been garaged for years and apparently only driven on alternate Sundays by CoreCivic security personnel. What’s not to like? I mean, other than the fact it was located far from the current federal action and probably smelled the way things that have been abandoned for more than a decade tend to smell. (Granted, lots of prisons smell “abandoned” even when they’ve been operating at over-capacity for decades…)
The state did not wish to make CoreCivic $75 million richer just because it failed to pre-plan for this eventual (and apparently inevitable) divestment. The state of Minnesota walked, leaving CoreCivic with its empty investment that was located somewhere most people in the “caging people” business would consider to be too far out of the way to be worth the trouble.
But someone rode to CoreCivic’s rescue. It was an administration that already has a far-too-cosy relationship with private prison companies. And it was an administration that had recently given ICE far more money than it could responsibly spend.
This all added up to the obvious: ICE outbidding absolutely no one to obtain this empty prison located in Sticksville, USA for far, far, oh my god so far more than CoreCivic had valued it less than a year earlier when it was just looking to dump it on the locals.
One year later, the Trump administration agreed to use taxpayer funds to buy the same abandoned prison from CoreCivic, Inc., for $495.6 million.
This exaggerated purchase price matters for several reasons, not the least of which is the purported reason Trump has offered for his incessant — and often, violent — anti-migrant efforts in the state of Minnesota.
The price difference, $420 million, is more than taxpayers are estimated to have lost in Minnesota’s much-publicized Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.
If you’re wondering why ICE might agree to pay a highly inflated price for property previously offered for hundreds of millions of dollars less, wonder no further. This is just more Trump administration corruption achieving terminal velocity at the expense of taxpayers who just want to fill their gas tanks without going broke.
Federal records show CoreCivic donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.
Its CEO also made significant personal contributions to Trump-affiliated political committees.
It’s not just long-abandoned Minnesota prisons making bank for CoreCivic now that Trump has the purse strings. As the report points out, the same day ICE vastly overpaid for this prison, it snapped up another empty prison in Kansas for $238 million. One month earlier, CoreCivic took Trump to the cleaners for another $1.5 billion, unloading two unused facilities located in California.
It doesn’t really matter whether or not Trump’s anti-migrant activities might eventually fill these overpriced purchases with people whose rights have been violated. It only matters that the government wrote the checks and the recipient of this massive waste of taxpayer funds will remain profitable enough to throw money at the next set of politicians who might be willing to return the favor in the near future.
And even if mass incarceration in preparation for mass deportation trends downward following the forced exit of lots and lots of MAGA legislators, the United States has long had a hard-on for mass incarceration. And it’s apparently willing to pay top dollar to obtain places to lock people up, even when there’s absolutely no one else competing with it during the bidding process.
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By now you’ve seen that after over a week of waiting to make sure that every vote was counted, Democrat Scott Colom has defeated incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the new Senator from Mississippi — the first Black senator the state’s voters have ever chosen (during Reconstruction, Mississippi had two Black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, but that was before the Seventeenth Amendment, when state legislatures still picked senators). There is, of course, some satisfaction in seeing Colom, specifically, defeat Hyde-Smith, given that she directly blocked his opportunity to be appointed to the federal bench three years ago.
Colom won for a bunch of reasons (strong candidate, great ground game, putting in the hard work of meeting voters across the state) but one that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle — especially at a moment when hating the internet is popular — is his smart use of the open internet to get his message out there and to draw attention to the race both within Mississippi and across the wider nation.
Lots of people are now trying to do postmortems to explain how Colom won, especially since the Democratic establishment totally wrote him off. Matt Yglesias — who, for unknown reasons, is still listened to by Democratic leadership — openly scoffed at the idea of the Democratic Party spending money on Colom just a few months ago.
There were plenty of factors behind the win, even though the national party mostly ignored him until the final month. Obviously, the national environment that turned the expected “blue wave” into a “blue tsunami” helped at the margins. But Colom and his team had an incredible ground game, and he spent months personally meeting with Mississippi voters, especially in communities that are often ignored:
“We didn’t have hundreds of million dollars to come in to spend – we did it going door to door, festival to festival, earning support,” Colom said at a canvassing event on the Mississippi coast. “We’re gonna shock a lot of people, but I’m not gonna be shocked. The people of Mississippi are behind this campaign: they understand Mississippi matters.”
But some of the credit also has to go to how well he used the open internet to route around the money gap. While he didn’t have all that money for TV ads, he and his team created some incredibly memorable ads that went viral on social media, with perhaps none more powerful than his response to Hyde-Smith suggesting — in a very “let them eat cake” manner — that voters frustrated by beef prices just “pick another protein”: “Pick another protein? Shiiiiiit. I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
That ad (and a few other clever and catchy ones his team made) spread on its own, which meant he didn’t have to spend money he didn’t have putting it on TV. It’s been credited with helping put his campaign on the national map in its final weeks. Indeed, the virality of the ad actually helped open up more traditional funding from the Democratic Party that had avoided the race before. Colom himself has called the ad “game changing” while noting they were able to create it and get it out there “with SO little” support.
In an interview with Politico, the guy who created the ad, who Colom shouted out in that tweet, Ryan Sayles, admits that he’s never worked in a campaign and just focused on what he thought would resonate with people in Mississippi. The fact that they could just put it on the internet (and didn’t have to run it through political machinery) was part of the benefit:
I think the dope part is, we didn’t run that ad by anybody. … We didn’t go around getting OK’s from anybody … we just put it out. But also … I’ve never worked on a campaign, and I think that I didn’t have a sense of what Dems normally did. You know what I mean?
We just did what we liked, and that was one of the big things Scott always talked about. “Man, if we are good with the content, we are good.”
That matters right now, when so much of the political class seems to hate the open internet and keeps demanding that we “regulate” it into something locked down. When the party establishment decided Mississippi wasn’t worth the money, the open internet was what let Colom go around all of them, take his case straight to the voters — and then drag the national party into realizing he had a chance. I have no idea how Colom views internet regulations — though Mississippi’s state legislature has passed some horrific anti-internet laws. But when he’s inevitably asked to vote on bills to lock down the internet, I hope he remembers what the open internet did for him.
The increasingly unpopular president’s ability to cash in on his position shows no sign of showing down.
Earlier this year you might recall that Truth Social, the president’s dodgy, propaganda, tribute, and social media company, began charging customers for early access to Trump’s incoherent tirades and brain farts. More specifically, the “Truth API” allowed news organizations, trading firms and other companies to pay $60,000 to $100,000 per month for a direct feed of early posts on the social network.
Given the fact this was yet another way for companies and donors to curry favor with the president, and gain early access to potentially market-impacting (idiotic) decisions, the move was rightfully criticized as more corrupt insider trading bullshit in an ocean of corrupt, Trump-era, insider trading bullshit.
“Trump Media and Technology Group reported Monday that revenue surged 205% in the third quarter, which it says was “primarily driven” by selling a high-speed feed of posts on Truth Social.”
Its filings indicate that about 60 percent of the company’s revenue now comes from this patronage early access system. There’s of course no way to independently confirm these financials in a country where the SEC, the courts, and lobbying and campaign finance regulators have been hollowed out like a cheap Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.
Bloomberg is among the companies that thought it was the good idea to pay for early access to Trump’s verbal diarrhea, but the news company hasn’t much been interested in talking when approached by other news organizations for comment. Most of the news organizations covering the company’s earnings, including Bloomberg and Comcast NBC, curiously “forgot” to mention most of its very dodgy history.
You’d have to assume more transparency (and charges) could come later if a reconstituted Congress prioritizes an investigation and some well-placed subpoenas.
While Trump Media has a purported market valuation of $1.13 billion, the company stock is down 69% so far this year. Once Trump’s power collapses and this dodgy patronage machine no longer serves its purpose, you have to wonder exactly what kind of sad and sorry rubes will be left holding the bag.
It’s now been nearly two straight years of embarrassment for America as measles has come back from the dead. As a reminder, America achieved elimination status for this disease 26 years ago and kept that status for more than two decades. It was only when the anti-vaxxer movement gained steam, culminating in the appointment of RFK Jr. to Secretary of HHS, that measles gained a foothold in early 2025. The way a country can lose its elimination status is supposed to be continuous spread of measles over the course of a calendar year. We have, obviously, experienced exactly that the last two years as evidenced in this CDC chart.
According to Politico, a U.N. body will convene this week. They must decide whether America maintains its measles-eliminated status. This pivotal choice will deeply impact the health secretary’s reputation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a known vaccine skeptic. Now, he leads the nation’s response to this massive crisis. As Politico notes, this is a “legacy-defining moment” for him. The situation comes at a very challenging political time. The Make America Healthy Again movement wants to stay relevant. Politico highlights that this movement is “fighting to maintain its political relevancy.”
When we do lose our elimination status, that might be the one silver lining in what is otherwise a national embarrassment. If it takes the U.N. pointing out that our country is so broken politically that we’ve allowed charlatans and fake science to usher measles back into our lives in order to destroy the MAHA movement, or at least the anti-vaxxer portion of it, so be it. Progress isn’t linear, as the saying goes, and perhaps a kick in the teeth is exactly what we need to reinvest in science and health. It’s a shame people had to get sick and die to make it happen, of course, but that’s where we are.
This is a problem that is currently getting worse, not better. And that is due to waning vaccination rates. This map will give you an idea of just how big a problem this is. Note that measles is so infectious that herd immunity protections require roughly 95% of the population to be inoculated against it.
If we lose elimination status and Trump still doesn’t fire Kennedy, he must be impeached when the next Congress is in session. If that isn’t done, the future measles deaths and infections will be on all of their heads.
The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public, prop up oligarch interests, and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.
Or last year, when the paper fired its last Black opinion columnist, Karen Attiah. Her offense? She shared some of Charlie Kirk’s own racist words and expressed some personal thoughts on gun control, which Bezos’ editors lamented included some “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men.”
In short Attiah, who hired Saudi-murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WaPo’s opinion pages, was fired for the cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and racist rich people. Attiah sued, and won, the arbitrator in the case ruling that the Post’s management’s decision wasn’t based on any actual, meaningful offense whatsoever.
Amusingly, Attiah outlasted both of the Murdoch-orbit editors at the paper (Adam O’Neill and Will Lewis) responsible for her firing. This week she announced that while she could technically have her job back, she wouldn’t be returning to the paper:
“My arbitration win was a monumental victory for unions, for journalists, and for free speech. As the last full-time Black columnist in the Opinions section, I recognized how important the win was for Black journalists, especially those pushed out of newsrooms in recent years.
While I remain proud of the victory, I came to the painful realization that returning to The Washington Post meant coming back without the guaranteed freedom and institutional support to do what I loved: use my voice, seek truth, and serve readers.”
Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.
The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race, foundational trans rights, and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes or having competent and well-funded regulators.
So seeing an opportunity in Trumpism, all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times, Politico, and countless others) tried to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors. It’s not really working. The result has been ethical columnists and journalists going off and starting their own worker-owned independent ventures and newsletters, while establishment media continues to enthusiastically dismantle whatever was left of its sagging credibility.
Ahead of the midterms, conservative election activists discussed plans to wield a powerful new weapon in the war against fraud: a data tool built by one of their own that could identify suspicious voters and help with contesting their ballots.
The system was put to the test this week in Forsyth County, Georgia, where a member of the county’s election board provided other officials with what he suggested was evidence of wrongdoing: four allegedly dead voters.
But it turns out all four are alive and well, ProPublica determined. The board rejected the attempt to challenge their ballots.
The effort, though, shows that even after last week’s blue wave, those who believe the 2020 election was stolen have continued to relentlessly search for ways to contest Republican losses. In Georgia, Democrats swept statewide offices.
The board member who initiated the Forsyth County challenge, Max Clavijo, is a member of the Election Integrity Network, a group led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell that works to restrict voting and tighten election laws and rules. Mitchell worked closely with Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election and, since he retook the presidency, has been central to his push to assert greater federal control over voting.
In the run-up to the midterms, on right-wing media and on private organizing calls, EIN participants outlined plans to search voter rolls with a software tool known as ELLY’s Election Monitor and contest ballots the tool deemed suspicious.
ELLY was developed by EIN member Rick Richards. It aggregates public data from state voter files, federal change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries, property websites like Zillow and other sources. In Georgia, State Election Board members and top staffers have urged counties to use the tool to search their voter rolls for signs of fraud.
Richards talked about ELLY’s national potential on a podcast in late September, on which right-wing media personalities and activists touted its capacity to help GOP candidates contest their defeats. “We can prove the fraud that’s gone on in every state,” one commentator said. “This data will be able to set up challenges to those who lose.”
The following month, on a private call with EIN members and other conservative activists, Richards promised to provide data from more than 3,000 counties to “citizen monitors” and GOP candidates to try to prove fraud, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica.
In an interview, Richards told ProPublica that he gave Clavijo data on Forsyth County at Clavijo’s request. He said in a subsequent email that their actions were meant to inform the board and remain confidential. Clavijo didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica.
Richards refused to answer questions about whether Clavijo’s effort was part of a wider EIN campaign to contest votes cast in the midterms.
“That’s irrelevant,” he said. “The data is the data. People can use it for what they want to.”
Mitchell, EIN’s leader, didn’t respond to questions about the group’s plans related to ELLY, either in Georgia or nationally.
In the months since some on Georgia’s State Election Board started promoting ELLY’s use, its accuracy has been much debated. The tool doesn’t have access to personal identifiers such as voters’ Social Security or driver’s license numbers or full dates of birth, which increases the potential for mismatches involving people with the same names.
State Election Board members and Richards have defended ELLY. Accusations that the data is unreliable were “horse hockey,” Richards told ProPublica, explaining this was “a Southern colloquialism for B.S.”
Late last week, according to several people familiar with the matter, Clavijo circulated documents to board members and Forsyth County’s election director. Based on data from ELLY, Clavijo questioned whether the names of more than 22,000 people on the county’s voter roll were correct and disputed the eligibility of 69 voters. In addition to four he claimed were deceased, he alleged others had moved out of the county or state, had voter ID irregularities or had registered under fictitious names, giving an initial as their first name.
During the meeting, Clavijo claimed that he was not trying to disrupt the election’s certification or formally challenge the voters, a process outlined in statutes that can lead to ballots being tossed or voters removed from the rolls. (Richards also said they had not formally challenged ballots.) Clavijo said he was merely seeking “to clean the voter rolls” and inform the board so officials could investigate further.
But other board members accused him of doing an end run around the formal challenge process. Barbara Luth, the board chair, said she felt “sorry for” Clavijo because activists were bypassing the challenge procedure “by coming to you and having you submit it.”
Under fire from fellow board members, Clavijo admitted he could not vouch for the data’s accuracy.
“I did not make any explicit accusation that the information was 100% correct,” he said.
The cover letter Clavijo submitted with the challenges said that they had not been verified with any “human review,” according to sources familiar with the matter.
Richards and Clavijo submitted obituaries for the voters they claimed were dead, but there were discrepancies between the information in them and the voters’ records. All of the obituaries said or suggested the deceased lived outside of Forsyth County, which would have made it impossible to vote there. One said the person lived in Arizona.
ProPublica confirmed that all four are actually alive.
Alexis Ramirez, a night-shift nurse, told ProPublica that she cast her ballot during early voting. She was surprised to hear her vote had been contested — and why.
“It’s kind of crazy that they attempted to do that without trying to prove it first,” she said.
Saramma George, another voter Richards and Clavijo claimed was dead, said she was “really angry” to have the validity of her ballot questioned.
In the third case, ProPublica spoke with a voter’s son, who said she was alive but didn’t want to talk to ProPublica. Her “ballot is valid,” he said.
The fourth voter, Chris Strickland, said, “I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it’s false. I’m alive. I’m here.”
The majority of the challenges — 38 of them, according to people familiar with the matter — involved voters who’d registered using an initial.
One voter, Alexander Knight, told ProPublica that he goes by his middle name and that the information in voter records mirrors how Department of Driver Services officials suggested he be identified on his driver’s license.
“I am real,” he told ProPublica.
Four other challenged voters said they, too, abbreviated their first names. A. Joseph Guntherberg confirmed he routinely used the same formulation of his name, adding that blocking his ballot would not help the challengers: “My candidate didn’t win.”
Richards said it was up to county election workers to check ELLY’s data — he merely gathers it to facilitate efforts to maintain accurate voter lists.
But at the meeting, Joel Natt, a Republican board member, said the responsibility lay with challengers to justify their accusations. “This has no relevance to anybody here until” they provide solid evidence, he said, “through the proper channel.”
The GOP and Ted Cruz are trying to rush the appointment of Brendan Carr’s personal legal aide Danielle Thumann Severs to the FCC. While simultaneously refusing to seat any new Democrats to the Commission or extend the term of Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who has been a very vocal critic of FCC boss Brendan Carr’s media censorship campaigns and abuse of power.
Their goal is to use the lame duck session to illegally impose a 3-0 FCC majority so they can rush through all sorts of dodgy efforts; from the further “deregulation” (read: elimination of all oversight) of telecom and media giants, to Carr’s ongoing efforts to harass journalists that criticize the President. They should have the votes to confirm Severs, though Democrats can certainly slow-walk the confirmation (recall what the GOP did to popular reformer Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the FCC).
Severs had her first hearing this week before the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, and it didn’t go particularly well. She refused to answer basic questions, and generally received an appropriately-cold shoulder from Democrats fresh off of their landslide midterm victory:
“After the American people last week overwhelmingly rejected the MAGA agenda, there is no justification for this committee to advance partisan nominees during the lame-duck period,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said.”
Other Democrats at the hearing promised looming new year investigations of Carr’s numerous instances of illegal destruction of consumer protection and media consolidation limits, as well as his long-list of efforts to trample the First Amendment and undermine public-interest journalism:
“I don’t think Chairman Carr is going to be around more than another three or four months because when we have the gavels in here, he will be here once a month,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said. “And Mr. Carr, if you’re listening now, know you’re going to be in this body once a month, if not more, and in the House of Representatives as well, answering questions, and you don’t have the protection of the gavel any longer.” Luján said Democrats will use “subpoena authorities that you have to respond to so we can get to the bottom of the nonsense and the cover-ups that have been taking place.”
Some Democrats made it clear that as a personal aide to Carr, Severs is effectively just a warm body who’ll exist to rubber stamp Carr’s agenda for the remaining two years of Trump’s Presidency:
“Ms. Thumann Severs, your career has largely been spent serving Brendan Carr,” Hickenlooper said. “[You are] currently Chairman Carr’s senior counsel; previously, you were legal advisor to Commissioner Carr. Your official duties include near-daily meetings with Chairman Carr and working to advance his agenda, amplify his messaging.”
Severs stated she personally helped draft Carr’s efforts to dismantle E-Rate, the $3 billion a year program that helps drive affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. Since it’s illegal to simply destroy a program dictated by Congress, they’re trying to effectively erode it while pretending the changes won’t prove fatal.
Severs also refused to address Carr’s ongoing harassment of companies like ABC for their “sin” of hosting politicians Donald Trump doesn’t like, or platforming comedians that made fun of the President’s wife. Carr’s efforts on that front have even involved creating a conspiracy with the help of right wing broadcasters that ABC violated FCC rules by simply hosting newly elected Texas Senator James Talarico.
Democrats, if you’re listening: that last one should be very fertile ground for subpoenas, since it’s clear Carr had Trump friendly broadcasters — including Sinclair and NexStar — alter paperwork to help him pretend that ABC had violated the law (see: pages 3-4 of this ABC/Disney filing with the FCC).
Severs refused to meaningfully answer questions when asked about Carr’s efforts to strip away ABC’s broadcast licenses for the sin of upsetting Republican interests:
“Thumann Severs answered that the FCC “has a responsibility to fully investigate any complaint… and to evaluate that complaint on the merits. I don’t think a decision should be made purely based on someone’s discontent with the content being aired.”
“Based on publicly available material, which is all I have seen on that particular matter, the licenses were called for early renewal as part of an investigation into potential rule violations,” Thumann Severs said today.”
About as weak as you’d expect for somebody hand-picked to prop up Carr’s extremist ideology.
Severs might still be confirmed, but a 3-0 Republican majority would technically be illegal under the Communications Act, potentially putting any FCC rulings under less stable FCC footing. At the same time, Trump’s weakening health and political power will make it increasingly difficult for Carr in the face of companies that are already starting to take his threats less seriously.
The timing of this order by a Colorado federal court is so tight it may not be directly related to another federal court’s frustrated expression of its complete distrust of federal immigration officers, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.
Pretty much ever since Trump took office for a second time, immigration enforcement has become little more than a wholesale, nationwide refusal to respect rights that have long been granted to migrants. The largest factor — something that has generated more than 10,000 decisionsagainst the administration — is this administration’s decision to re-read long-standing law as permitting what it’s been doing since early 2025: refusing bond hearings to detained migrants.
The Trump anti-migrant machinery has pushed two novel theories to justify its refusal to respect due process rights. It has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act — last seen as an excuse to toss Japanese migrants in concentration camps during World War II — to claim (without facts in evidence) that most of the migrants it has detained are threats to national security. Second, it has decided an immigration law passed in the late 1970s should be read to mean that any migrant is “seeking entry,” even if they’ve already been in the country for months, years, or decades.
While that law allows the government to bypass due process rights when detaining people in the act of illegally crossing the border, it has never been interpreted to mean that any migrant is “seeking entry,” even if they successfully entered the country years ago.
Consequently, judges are pretty fucking sick of ICE’s eternal bullshit. Earlier this week, a federal judge in Oregon released a court order that suggested every federal court in the land stop taking the government at its (written) word and start subjecting federal officers to cross-examination, given how often their sworn affidavits have been devoid of facts.
The same thing is happening now in Colorado. Whether or not last week’s court order (issued in a distant jurisdiction by a judge who cannot set nationwide precedent) was a factor here is unknown. But it is another federal judge deciding ICE is no longer a reliable narrator. If it wants to push an unproven narrative — or otherwise explain why it has refused to follow existing law and recent court orders — the officials who are making these decisions need to explain it to a judge in person.
This is the impetus for this order — one that springs from ICE’s new (and apparently unofficial and legally unjustified) policy of re-arresting migrants moments after they’ve been freed from detention by district court orders. That’s what happened to a migrant who has lived peacefully and productively in the United States for 26 years. The man — identified only as “Emmanuel” due to his ongoing problems with ICE — had his habeas petition granted by a federal court. But his freedom was immediately interrupted by the immigration officers waiting to ambush him at the same courthouse where he had secured a release from custody.
But the day he was released wasn’t the day he would ultimately get his freedom.
“An ICE officer came and said, ‘Oh, I’ll escort you out,'” said Emmanuel. “[He] handed me my bag and said, ‘Ok, you’ve been released,’ and as soon as I stepped out one step, there were five ICE officers that were waiting outside in bulletproof vests and cameras and everything. And they grabbed me, and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been re-arrested from that release.'”
These actions — which are now SOP for ICE — have resulted in demands for in-person testimony by at least one ICE official from the court handling Emmanuel’s case.
Federal judge Charlotte Sweeney has ordered the field office director for ICE to be in her courtroom Monday morning to address his agency’s practices.
The justice system doesn’t allow this to happen in actual criminal cases. Defendants released by courts are free to go, not just “free” until they run into law enforcement officers who apparently can’t handle a loss in court.
What’s happening here will be seen more often. And hopefully, more of this will include ICE officers and officials actually having to make personal appearances in court where they’ll actually have to explain their actions, rather than just assume some copy-pasted boilerplate is all a system of checks and balances (to say nothing of the victims of these rights violations) are entitled to.