Disturbing DOJ Pressure Over Eric Adams Case Sparks Resignations

The corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams may have been dropped and the case dismissed, but the fallout still continues. 

Three federal prosecutors announced their resignations Tuesday, saying that they would quit their jobs rather than admit wrongdoing in continuing to pursue the case against Adams, The New York Times reports. 

In an email, prosecutors Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom, who all worked on the Adams case, said that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made their admitting to wrongdoing a condition of their reinstatement from administrative leave, after corruption charges against Adams were dropped in February.  

“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” the trio wrote in the email, adding, “Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington.”

Adams spent much of 2024 openly lobbying President Trump to intervene in the federal charges against him for bribery, fraud, and soliciting political donations from Turkish officials in exchange for favors. His efforts paid off two months ago, although comments from Trump’s border czar Tom Homan made it seem like the DOJ was dropping charges in exchange for Adams cracking down on immigrants in New York City. 

Seven prosecutors resigned last month rather than carry out the order from Washington to drop the charges. Now, even though the case was dismissed with prejudice, preventing the Trump administration from using it as leverage over Adams in the future, it appears that the administration tried to get a show of fealty from Manhattan federal prosecutors. While three of them refused, Trump’s DOJ has won the chance to install loyalist attorneys to protect the president and his friends.

A federal judge has ordered that the Trump administration has until 5 p.m. Tuesday to reinstate the legal status of 133 students who had their visas revoked. Many international students have been targeted by the Trump administration for their activism around Israel’s war on Gaza, while others have had their visas revoked over minor incidents.

Judge Victoria Calvert issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the students, who argued that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “abruptly and unlawfully” terminated their records on the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, making them vulnerable to deportation. The judge’s order of reinstatement applies retroactively to March 21, 2025.

“The Constitution protects everyone on American soil, so the Trump administration cannot ignore due process to unjustifiably threaten students with the loss of immigration status, and arrest and deportation,” said ACLU senior staff attorney Avika Friedlin. “We believe this ruling shows the students are likely to prevail on their claims, and we are pleased the court ordered the government to halt its unlawful actions while the lawsuit continues.”

The Trump administration has already terminated the visas of more than 1,550 international students, putting them at heightened risk of deportation. The Georgia case will be heard for a preliminary injunction on Thursday.

Donald Trump has taken his tirade against immigrants with tattoos to new heights, baselessly claiming that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos clearly associate him with MS-13.

“This is the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that the Courts are trying to save from being deported?” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday night. “He was supposed to be, according to the Judge and the Democrats, a wonderful father from Maryland, but then they noticed he had ‘MS-13’ tattooed onto his knuckles (and lots of really bad stories about his past!).”

The post includes a photo of Trump holding up a photo of a hand, supposedly Abrego Garcia’s, with a marijuana leaf, smiley face, cross, and skull tattooed across the knuckles. On top of each individual tattoo is written M-S-1-3, the president’s way of explaining each tattoo clearly translates to an individual letter or number, which all together spell … MS-13?

“This is the gang that is, perhaps, the worst of them all. What is wrong with our Country?” Trump’s post concluded, leaving out any explanation for how he broke the tattoo code.

Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported to El Salvador last month due to an admitted “administrative error” by the Trump administration, though officials have since doubled down on unfounded claims that Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13. Now the president is resorting to one of his favorite, but most outrageous, justifications for deporting Latino men without due process: They have tattoos.

After he ignored court orders and deported 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a megaprison in El Salvador, Trump cited photos of their tattoos as proof that they were part of Tren de Aragua. One man had a tattoo of a rose and a skull; another had a tattoo of a soccer ball. Even if gang-affiliated tattoos were sufficient evidence to deport someone (they’re not), none of those are associated with Tren de Aragua. In fact, experts on the gang have revealed that Tren de Aragua does not have affiliation tattoos.

“The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who published the definitive book on TdA, told The New Yorker at the start of the month. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.”

Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, but all the administration has done is continue to push lies about the 29-year-old’s identity. A growing number of Democrats are traveling to El Salvador to push for his release.

“While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” California Representative Robert Garcia said in a statement Monday. “That is why we’re here—to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”

It’s a pretty bad sign when people start making comparisons to the Great Depression, right? 

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that after the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed nearly 1,000 points, it was “headed for its worst April performance since 1932.” But that wasn’t the only historically significant market drop. 

The S&P 500, which has dropped 9 percent since Donald Trump announced his destabilizing “reciprocal tariff” policy earlier this month, has seen the worst performance since Inauguration Day for any president going back to 1928, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

Also on Monday, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022. Typically when the market sinks, as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic, the dollar goes up and Treasury yields drop. Now the opposite is true—meaning that the costs of imported goods will be even higher than the boosted prices caused by Trump’s tariffs on nearly every country in the world. This also leaves investors with few safe spots to wait out the volatility caused by Trump’s tariffs. 

“It’s the hallmark of the ‘no confidence’ trade,” Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told the Journal. “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.” 

The market seemed to recover slightly Tuesday from the significant sell-off during the previous session. But still, there was trouble on the horizon.

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs would slow growth, not only for the U.S. but globally.  The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told reporters that the odds of a recession in the U.S. had increased from 25 percent in October 2024 to 40 percent. 

A Venezuelan man ordered to be deported has vanished into the “black hole” created by the Trump administration’s illegal denial of due process for immigrants.  

Ricardo Prada Vásquez was marked for deportation among a group of detainees sent to El Salvador last month as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. But now his name does not appear in the government’s records of immigrants to be detained and deported, Venezuelan authorities can’t find him, and his family hasn’t heard from him in more than a month, according to a Tuesday report from The New York Times.

The 32-year-old father was detained by immigration authorities on January 15 after accidentally driving over the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Michigan to Ontario, while he was working as a food delivery driver. He had immigrated to the U.S. in November 2024 using the CBP One app, and was permitted to remain in the country while his case was considered. 

Prada was initially able to stay in touch with his friend in Chicago, Javier, who spoke to the Times under the condition that he only be referred to by his middle name, for fear of becoming a target of immigration authorities. On March 15, Prada called Javier and told him he was being deported, and expected to return to Venezuela. Javier was the last known person to have contact with Prada. 

“He has simply disappeared,” Javier told the Times. 

Prada’s name was not included in the list of immigrants removed to El Salvador. 

Prada’s family waited to hear from him but heard nothing. “He fell off the face of the earth,” said Prada’s mother, Maria Alejandra Vega. “It was sheer agony.”

Prada was among the group of Venezuelan immigrants who were moved south toward Texas, ahead of the Trump administration’s staging of a massive deportation under the AEA of detainees it alleged were gang members. Many of these individuals had no criminal record, and evidence of their gang affiliation was thin.

Prada’s family told the Times that he was not a member of a gang. He did have tattoos, which is one of the characteristics ICE authorities have used to determine alleged gang affiliation. He was initially moved to an ICE facility in Ohio before being sent to the El Valle Detention Facility in south Texas, where, after failing to secure a lawyer, he was ordered to be deported.

“This case represents a black hole where due process no longer exists,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School, told the Times. 

“This case shocks the conscience,” he said. “I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law.”

Over the weekend, the Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration pause all deportations under the AEA after reports spread that the government was planning to remove another group of Venezuelan immigrants, in violation of the high court’s prior ruling that detainees be given the opportunity to “actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

The court’s ruling sent Donald Trump into a rage Monday, as the administration has continued to ramp up its rhetoric against due process. In reality, there are no “activist” judges stymying the president’s wishes, but judges requiring that power to be administered according to the rule of law. And the right of due process is exactly what might ensure that the government does not lose a human being.