Judge Rules Trump Must Return Men Deported to El Salvador Mega-Prison

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of over 100 Venezuelan men it sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador last year. 

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issued the ruling Thursday, giving the government one month to begin the process, noting that the men did not receive proper notice, due process, or a court hearing. Boasberg also said that the men would be able to petition for their return to the U.S. from overseas. 

“Against this backdrop, and mindful of the flagrancy of the Government’s violations of the deportees’ due-process rights that landed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the solution-less mire Defendants propose,” Boasberg wrote.

If the government still has any of the men’s passports and identification documents, it has to return them, Boasberg added If they transferred those documents to El Salvador, “it shall make good faith efforts to obtain” them. The Trump administration will also be required to cover the air travel costs for any of the men sent to third countries who wish to return to the U.S.

The Trump administration has been fighting in court over the Venezuelans it sent to the brutal CECOT prison for nearly a year. The most famous case has been that of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose imprisonment was overturned in federal court and upheld by the Supreme Court. The government still resisted returning him to the U.S., but nearly three months after he was sent to El Salvador, it finally brought him back home where he awaits a final decision on his status.  

Others, including people deported for merely having tattoos deliberately misconstrued as gang symbols, haven’t been so lucky, languishing in a prison well-known for human rights abuses as part of a $6 million deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Now, if this ruling holds up, they will get some measure of relief from a merciless deportation policy. 

New Jersey’s newly elected Governor Mikie Sherrill is the latest Democratic state leader to take action to protect her state’s residents from President Donald Trump’s deadly federal immigration crackdown.

Sherrill signed an executive order Wednesday barring Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering, accessing, or using nonpublic areas of state-owned property without first receiving a judicial warrant. Examples of nonpublic state property include government offices, childcare centers, residential medical facilities, and state university residence halls.

While the Trump administration and federal law enforcement have tried to smear and threaten civilians monitoring ICE activities, Sherrill doubled down on blocking their efforts.

The governor also announced that she would launch a portal for residents to submit details of their interactions with ICE agents in New Jersey. The portal is intended to allow state investigators to hold ICE agents accountable for the kinds of illegal actions Americans have witnessed across the country, including the use of excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions.

“Today, we are making clear that the Trump administration’s lawless actions will not go unchecked in New Jersey. Given ICE’s willingness to flout the Constitution and violently endanger communities—detaining children, arresting citizens, and even killing several innocent civilians—I will stand up for New Jerseyans’ right to be safe,” Sherill said in a statement Wednesday.

Earlier this month, Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s new Democratic governor, ordered state agencies to stop cooperating with ICE.

A MAGA lawmaker is blaming ICE’s heightened violence on local Minnesota leaders.

Senator Ron Johnson tore into Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison during a Senate hearing Thursday, accusing him of causing the deaths of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, both of whom were shot and killed last month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“I, as a government official, would have said, ‘Back off. Let us work with ICE. Let’s cooperate with them. Let’s see if we can’t deescalate this,’” Johnson said. “But you, attorney general, did the exact opposite.

“Two people are dead because you encouraged them to put themselves into harm’s way!” Johnson said. “And now you are exploiting those two martyrs. That was a tragedy. It never should have happened.”

The Wisconsin Republican then claimed that activists in the region were being “trained” and “deployed” to escalate the situation with federal officers, citing instances in which protesters—such as Pretti—were captured on film kicking ICE vehicles.

On the ground in Minneapolis, that level of fabricated insurgency doesn’t seem necessary—locals are so irate with federal law enforcement and immigration agents that they have literally chased agents out of town.

But federal agents’ unwelcome presence, in Johnson’s view, not only precipitates but also apparently warrants the agents’ impulsive violence.

“Is it any wonder they’re at hair-trigger alert?” Johnson continued. “A tragedy was going to happen, and you encouraged it, and you ought to feel damn guilty about it.”

Then, after Johnson concluded his time speaking, he raised his voice again: “Yeah, sit there and smirk. Smirk. It’s sick! It’s despicable.”

Given an opportunity to respond, Ellison said that Johnson’s “theatrical performance” was “all lies.”

“You disgust me,” Johnson spat back.

After more than a month of protest and pushback from residents and local officials alike, Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that ICE would withdraw from Minnesota. But Homan warned that “quick reaction forces” would remain in the state to go after so-called “agitators.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come to another impasse over DHS funding, which is set to expire February 13. The two parties have been unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on whether to reform the violent agency.

Democrats have agreed to pass the package so long as Republicans concede to 10 demands on how to reel in ICE agents, such as requiring them to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property.

GOP congressional leadership, however, does not seem willing to change the status quo at all, decrying the seemingly bare minimum stipulations as “impossible” and “totally unrealistic.”

Two-thirds of young American men disapprove of President Trump, according to a damning new poll from the centrist Third Way think tank.

A nationwide survey of 1,462 men between the ages of 18 and 29 found only 38 percent generally approve of Trump’s first year of presidency. Fifty-eight percent say Trump has “negatively impacted their finances.” Sixty-five percent are struggling to pay the bills. And 61 percent believe that the president isn’t carrying out his campaign promises.

This report should sound alarm within the Trump administration. A bloc Trump won by 14 points in 2024 seems to have completely turned against him, and they’re citing issues from Epstein to the economy as driving factors. The respondents’ top three concerns were the draconian immigration raids (60 percent very concerned), lack of transparency on the Epstein files (63 percent), and Trump’s making massive health care cuts while offering tax breaks to the one percent (66 percent). Trump being the anti-woke president who lets you say slurs again doesn’t seem to be satisfying his base any longer. And perhaps the worst part—they hate JD Vance too. Only 26 percent of respondents were confident enough to proclaim their support for a President Vance in 2028.

See the full poll here.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was slammed for spying on members of Congress who viewed the Department of Justice’s unredacted files on Jeffrey Epstein.

When Bondi appeared at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, she repeatedly referred to a binder of prewritten personal attacks, but it seems her notes contained something else too: a record of what lawmakers had looked up when given early access to the files this week.

One photograph of Bondi’s notes showed that they included a section called “Jayapal Pramila search history,” and appeared to include a list of the documents the Washington state Democrat had reviewed.

“This is spying, this is the DOJ spying on members of Congress and what we search,” Jayapal told reporters Wednesday night.

Speaking to MS NOW, Jayapal questioned whether the DOJ had intentionally laid a trap to get intel on Democratic lawmakers. “Is this [the] whole reason they opened [the files] up to us two days early? So they could essentially surveil members to see what we were gonna ask her about?” she said.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters that he had reason to believe that the DOJ was monitoring all lawmakers’ search history as they searched the files for evidence of a sex-trafficking operation. “I think it’s outrageous that they would do that, and it’s Orwellian,” Raskin said.

Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee told Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manriquez that while keeping tabs on lawmakers’ search history wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was obviously problematic.

“It is a gross abuse of our ability to do and conduct oversight. They are essentially spying on us as we are looking through, and trying to do any sort of investigation, and bring about any sort of transparency about these Epstein files,” Lee said.

And Democratic lawmakers weren’t the only ones who had a problem with being spied on.

“It’s creepy,” South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace told reporters.

Jayapal told NPR News that after discussing the issue with House Speaker Mike Johnson, she believed there was “bipartisan agreement” that lawmakers should be able to review the files without being surveilled.

Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam had already warned on X Tuesday that the DOJ was “keeping a history” of all the files lawmakers were viewing. Congress members who were given access to the supposedly unredacted files were forced to share just four computers, navigate a broken search function, and were only permitted to take notes on a legal pad, the Democrat wrote.