Trump Sues His Least Favorite City Over Immigration

The Justice Department is suing the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois for not caving to the Trump administration’s performative, fear-inducing immigration raids.

The DOJ wants to stop the city from enforcing its sanctuary city laws that they say “interfere with and discriminate against” Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown—yet another installment of the beef between the president and the city, which goes back to a canceled 2016 campaign rally.

Last month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said that immigrants would be protected, “whether you’re undocumented, whether you are seeking asylum, or whether you’re seeking a good-paying job.

“We’re going to fight and stand up for working people. That’s what Chicago is known for,” he continued. “We’re going to continue to do that regardless of who’s in the White House.”

Last week, “border czar” Tom Homan complained that Chicagoans were too knowledgeable for ICE to carry out effective raids.

“Sanctuary citizens are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well-educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE,” Homan said. “I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you’; ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it ‘Know your rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’”

On Saturday, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker let Trump know he was “not afraid” of any retaliation he may receive from the president for his actions.

“We’re not gonna have our police here locally coordinating with federal officials to have them taken away.… It’s a reckless set of policies that [Trump is] engaging in,” Pritzker said on MSNBC’s The Weekend.

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Pritzker’s office, Alex Gough, said, “Instead of working with us to support law enforcement, the Trump Administration is making it more difficult to protect the public, just like they did when Trump pardoned the convicted January 6 violent criminals.”

Johnson said in his own statement that the “safety and security of Chicago residents remains the priority for the Johnson Administration. Chicago will continue to protect the working people of our city and defend against attacks on our longstanding values.”

Justice Department lawyers refused Thursday to ensure that a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases wouldn’t have their names revealed as retribution for investigating and arresting a violent cohort of Donald Trump’s supporters, according to a new report from NOTUS.

On Monday, FBI employees were forced to respond to a questionnaire probing their involvement in the nearly 2,400 cases that stemmed from the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While the agents involved hadn’t committed any partisanship or wrongdoing by simply doing their jobs, it’s not clear that Trump, who pardoned 1,500 rioters upon returning to office, will see it that way.

Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who was appointed wholly by accident, has emerged as a staunch defender of agents involved in the January 6 investigations and refused to turn over the list of names. Instead, he presented only their employee ID numbers.

FBI special agents have already filed two lawsuits to protect the identities of those on the list. In D.C. District Court Thursday, lawyers representing the FBI employees argued that the information could potentially be weaponized by Trump, Elon Musk, or the Department of Government Efficiency.

But lawyers for the Justice Department wouldn’t give a straight answer when asked by District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb whether the names would be kept confidential, noting that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for FBI agents to have their names made public in court papers.

“We need to consult with our superiors,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Simon, according to NOTUS. Later, in an email, prosecutors said simply that they currently had no “intention” to publish the names and would notify the federal judge if they changed their minds.

Pamela M. Keith, the attorney representing nine anonymous FBI employees, said that the department’s unwillingness to promise that the names wouldn’t be released was something that “stood out” to her, NOTUS reported.

A federal judge has suspended President Donald Trump’s mass federal employee buyout scheme until at least Monday, when arguments on the program will be heard at a court hearing.

“I make no assessment at this stage of the merits of the claims,” Judge George O’Toole Jr. said at the hearing in Boston on Thursday, NBC News reported. The Trump administration offered federal workers the choice of a return to full-time in-office work or to quit with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. An email sent at the time stated that there “will NOT be an extension of this program.”

The buyout plan, also known as the “Fork in the Road” initiative due to its similarity to Elon Musk’s offer to Twitter employees in 2022, has been sending shock waves throughout the federal government. Trump has been very clear that it is a direct attempt to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his image. Over 60,000 employees, or about 3 percent of federal workers, have accepted the offer.

“We are grateful to the judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Earlier on Thursday, a federal judge partially halted Musk’s DOGE henchmen from accessing government databases, making the Boston ruling the second setback of the day for the Trump administration. But the future of this “Fork in the Road” effort remains to be seen, as it has also been challenged by multiple federal employee unions.

A U.S. District Court in Washington on Thursday partially blocked Elon Musk and his DOGE groupies from further accessing government databases.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly approved a temporary restraining order that prevents two DOGE-affiliated employees from accessing anything other than read-only records from the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s systems.

The restricted employees are Tom Krause and Marko Elez, who will be permitted access on an “as needed” basis, according to the filing. Prior to joining Musk’s federal team, Krause served as a chief executive of a Silicon Valley software company, while Elez is a 25-year-old engineer with experience at two of Musk’s companies: X and SpaceX.

“The Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” the order reads.

The order was in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of labor unions against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, alleging that the newly minted Trump appointee had provided Musk and his team “full access” to Americans’ personal and financial information.

The order barred “any person who is an employee (but not a Special Government Employee) of the Department of the Treasury and who has a need for the record or system of records in the performance of their duties.”

The agreement will stay in place until February 24, when both parties are expected to return to court for a long-term preliminary injunction, according to ABC News.

Senator Ron Wyden is calling out Donald Trump and Elon Musk for carrying out a “coup” in their slash-and-burn takeover of federal agencies.

During an appearance on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, gave a grim answer to host Nilay Patel’s intrepid question of “What the fuck is going on?”

“That is the question of the hour,” Wyden replied. “And it is almost impossible to divine an answer because it moves from minute to minute. Donald Trump essentially governs by whim.”

“I’m very troubled by the type of policies that they are pursuing that when you add them up, looks and feels like a coup,” Wyden said, noting that Democrats had been trying to stop Trump and Musk where they could.

“If I were to embrace it in a sentence apropos of ‘what the hell is going on here,’ is that Trump and Musk are ignoring the checks and balances of our republic, and for all practical purposes I’d call that a coup.”

After pillaging USAID over the weekend and illegally shuttering the agency, Musk then gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, which could affect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments, all of which fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee. In a letter to Wyden Tuesday, the Treasury Department insisted that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is merely performing an audit of the system, and not, as some sources have suggested, rewriting code. Wyden told The New Republic that the letter “reeks of a cover-up.”

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” Wyden said to TNR.

Wyden has been sounding the alarm on the Trump-Musk takeover in other ways. In a statement Tuesday urging his colleagues to vote against the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Wyden said that what the U.S. is witnessing is nothing short of “an authoritarian takeover of our federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”

“They’ve set their sights on a full purge of anyone in government that doesn’t bend the knee and follow their orders,” he said in the statement, saying that their actions had “dubious legal and constitutional authority, and flies in the face of Congressional authority.”

Decoder’s full interview with Wyden will be published Monday.