Federal Judge Delivers Scathing Rebuke to Trump’s Deportation Regime

A federal judge offered a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump’s massive deportation scheme, while blocking the government’s attempts to remove immigrants who entered the country on parole.

U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb blocked three recent Department of Homeland Security actions that expanded the expedited removal of parolees, arguing that new policy changes were arbitrary and capricious and had exceeded its statutory authority.

In her 87-page ruling, Cobb slammed the Trump administration’s extrajudicial removals of immigrants who had been temporarily granted entry to the United States while awaiting admission application results, calling the case “a question of fair play.”

Plaintiffs who had followed the rules of their parole had suddenly been detained by immigration authorities. In some instances, their asylum cases had been abruptly dismissed, but in others they had not. Immigrants who had entered the country on parole were made subject to expedited removal, which provides minimal opportunities for immigrants to challenge their deportation.

“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” Cobb wrote. “Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here, restricting their ability to seek immigration relief and subjecting them to summary removal despite statutory law prohibiting the Executive Branch from doing so.”

“This case’s underlying question, then, asks whether parolees who escaped oppression will have the chance to plead their case within a system of rules. Or, alternatively, will they be summarily removed from a country that—as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges—may look to them more and more like the countries from which they tried to escape?”

Cobb determined that the parolees represented by the plaintiff nonprofit organizations, and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like them who’d been paroled at a port of entry, faced “imminent, irreparable injury” that “outweighs any harm to the Government or the public from pressing pause.”

The government actions, including the termination of the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program in March, would be stayed until a final verdict is reached.

The FBI went through the Epstein files and redacted Donald Trump’s name, according to the “FOIA Files” newsletter by reporter Jason Leopold, published in Bloomberg Friday.

It was previously reported (in a July letter to the Justice Department from Dick Durbin, the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member) that, under Attorney General Pam Bondi’s direction, FBI Director Kash Patel ordered around 1,000 FBI personnel to sift through more than 100,000 Epstein-related documents throughout two weeks in March. Working on 24-hour shifts, the staff were reportedly instructed to “flag” records mentioning Trump, prompting Durbin to ask the DOJ: “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

Leopold reveals that Trump’s name was blacked out—as were the names of dozens of other public figures. The files then went before a unit of FOIA officers, and “Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.”

The FOIA team reportedly cited an exemption protecting individuals from “clearly unwarranted invasions[s] of personal privacy” and another protecting “personal information in law enforcement records.” As Leopold notes, it’s not very rare that even prominent public figures’ names are redacted from records on privacy grounds.

The rest is history: Bondi reportedly notifying Trump that he appears in the files; the DOJ and FBI releasing the case-closed memo; the ensuing (and ongoing) public outcry; the congressional attempts to force the files’ release; and, now, speculations that Trump might corruptly wield the pardon power to pressure Ghislaine Maxwell, the currently imprisoned Epstein co-conspirator, to clear his name.

The bottom line here, Leopold writes, is that the chances of Trump’s name being unredacted anytime soon are slim to none. We can wait for all the people mentioned in the files to die. Or Trump could decide to voluntarily waive his privacy rights, allowing his name to be unredacted, which at present seems very unlikely.

One of Trump’s economic advisers grasped at excuses for Trump’s pitiful job growth numbers on CNN Friday morning, citing “seasonal adjustment quirks around teachers,” among other reasons.

July’s job numbers came in far lower than anticipated, and the administration issued revisions for stated job growth in May and June—reducing nearly 260,000 jobs off its last two reports. Stephen Miran, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, attempted to explain the chasm between prediction and reality.

CNN reporter Kate Bolduan pointed out that this marks the weakest month of jobs growth since December 2020, during the pandemic. Bolduan asked Miran what he attributed those numbers to, if not “the uncertainty created, in part, by the president’s trade war.” Miran rattled off reasons.

“About 40 percent of that is due to seasonal adjustment quirks around teachers, some of it is due to declining foreign-born employment, even as we created more American-born employment, and that is going to net out in a way that you see ultimately reflected in the data like that,” Miran said.

“Seasonal quirks” could hardly be responsible for such a massive revision, given that they occur, predictably, every year.

“Finally, there’s the uncertainty: Don’t forget, we are in the midst of restructuring the global trading system in a way that hasn’t been done in decades,” Miran said, echoing Bolduan’s assumption that the trade war was to blame, in so many words. “The president is standing up for American workers and American firms for the first time in decades,” Miran argued, “and of course that was going to induce some uncertainty.”

Miran was later asked about an auto parts maker in Detroit that blamed Trump’s tariffs after being forced to shut down a warehouse and lay off 100 workers. “It’s always convenient to blame political changes when your business fails,” he replied curtly.

May through July has been the weakest three-month period for job growth since December 2020, reported independent journalist Jamie Dupree on X. The next-weakest period was in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.

If we must rely on Trump’s unwavering commitment to his stated tariff rates and deadlines, we may be heading back in that direction.

The White House just botched the distraction from its Epstein scandal.

A declassified report, intended to add fuel to a debunked theory that Hillary Clinton cooked up the Trump-Russia connection in 2016, actually reveals that a critical document in the plot was the likely invention of Russian spies.

The 29-page annex to the special counsel’s 2023 report includes alleged communications made by Clinton that several Republicans have claimed were intended to “smear” Trump with Russian collusion. But the documents outline that, despite having spent considerable time and resources to prove the connection was real, special counsel John H. Durham could not do so.

The foundational document includes an email, dated July 27, 2016, and allegedly sent by a Soros Open Society Foundations staffer, that claimed the Democratic presidential candidate had signed off on a proposal to tie Trump to Russia in an effort to distract from the fact that she sent and received emails during her time as secretary of state from a private server.

“HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” the email reads in part. “That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level. The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue.”

Durham concluded that the purported communication was most likely manufactured.

Trump administration officials, however, were quick to hype the supposed findings of the release. FBI Director Kash Patel bragged on social media that the annex included “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax,” and CIA director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that the documents proved there was “a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.”

Amid rising intraparty tensions over Trump’s apparent ties to the pedophile and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the president has wildly alleged that investigations into his presidential campaign’s ties with Russian assets were the invention of President Barack Obama. Several of his allies have followed suit, calling for investigations as to whether the forty-fourth president committed “treason.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee met with the U.S.-backed aid organization that’s been setting death traps for starving Palestinians.

Huckabee said Friday morning that he and special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza to “learn the truth” about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, whose aid sites have become the locus of mass casualty events on a near-daily basis.

The United Nations reported Thursday that at least 859 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to receive aid at GHF sites between May 27 and July 31, mostly by the Israeli military.

Huckabee seemed pleased after receiving a briefing from the Israeli military and meeting with GHF workers on the ground. “GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!” Huckabee wrote in a post on X.

But GHF has now been implicated in hundreds of Palestinians deaths, as the widespread famine in Gaza worsens.

“Israeli forces are not only deliberately starving Palestinian civilians, but they are now gunning them down almost every day as they desperately seek food for their families,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”

GHF’s funding sources are opaque, but Trump said Friday that Israel had agreed to match a $30 million donation, according to Reuters.

GHF has also been criticized as systematically ineffectual. Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who’d been working for the group as a security contractor described GHF as “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning.”

“It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic,” he told Mother Jones. Aguilar also alleged that his fellow contractors used nonlethal and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways, cheering as they fired blindly into a crowd of Palestinians.

For his part, Huckabee doesn’t seem all that interested in easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—seeing that it would require him to acknowledge Palestinians’ humanity. Earlier this week, Huckabee said that France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state was “like letting the Nazis have a victory after World War II.”

And for all of Trump’s too-little too-late statements about the starvation in Gaza, he seems to feel about the same. After Canada issued a statement backing a two-state solution Thursday, Trump lashed out in a Truth Social post, threatening a prospective trade deal between the U.S. and Canada.