Trump’s Deportation Scheme Is Completely Overwhelming the Courts

President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportation scheme is completely crushing the U.S. court system—and that’s by design, Politico reported Sunday.

On July 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a two-page memo expanding its policy on mandatory detention without bond to apply not only to immigrants who were caught illegally crossing the U.S. border, but to any undocumented immigrant.

Under the new policy, every undocumented immigrant is treated as someone “seeking” to enter the U.S., even if they have lived here for years, have families, hold jobs, and are in the process of seeking citizenship. Previous administrations have never applied this rule to immigrants already in the United States.

The result was an unprecedented surge on the legal system, as judges scrambled to hear thousands of detainees’ cases before ICE could whisk them away to other states.

Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas told Politico that his courthouse typically sees 1,500 lawsuits every year—but as of May, they’d already hit 4,000 cases. “We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” he told Politico.

Since ICE’s new policy on mandatory detention without bond was implemented, 469 judges have ruled that it is unlawful, while just 54 have sided with the Trump administration. Judges have ruled against detentions without bond more than 16,000 times in the last year.

“The third branch of government is saying no. We’re not going to do it this way,” Biery said.

Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California, told Politico that the strain has been felt by judges and court staff alike. “All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck,” he said.

In 2021, Nunley’s court saw just four immigration habeas cases. In May alone, his court saw 675. The judge has had to pull in other jurists from Hawaii and California to help shoulder the burden.

All over the country, the courts are pushing back, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz told Politico. Until July 1, Schiltz was the chief of Minnesota’s federal district court. “The judiciary is the glue that’s holding the country together,” he said. “I do believe that’s true right now.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to fast-track hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly into deportation proceedings without interviewing them. The government has also rapidly expedited the removal of immigrant children.

President Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to punish former Olympian David Hearn on the made-up vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool may backfire.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, was forced to drop the felony charges against Hearn on July 31 due to a lack of evidence, faulting Trump’s handpicked contractor for a shoddy renovation instead. But on Sunday, Trump was still pushing his false claim that Hearn actively vandalized the pool’s lining, claiming on Truth Social that a National Park Service career employee, “a highly credible witness,” watched Hearn “‘violently’ ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”

Hearn’s lawyers—Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund, Mary Dohrmann of Washington Litigation Group, and Steve Levin of Steptoe LLP—said in a statement Monday that they aren’t going to take “continued harassment” from the president.

“The government is continuing to attack an innocent man. Our first filing in the case on July 10 included photographic evidence from before Mr. Hearn touched the Reflecting Pool proving that he caused no damage,” the lawyers told Mediaite. “Our other filings provided even more proof. Finally, the U.S. Attorney’s own motion on July 31 admitted the damage was caused by a ‘botched installation and not vandalism.’ We are reviewing all legal remedies, including for this continued harassment. It is outrageous.”

This means that Hearn could sue Trump and the Department of Justice over the false claims, which the DOJ have already disavowed in court. There are a lot of unanswered questions over how Pirro’s office secured an indictment against Hearn in the first place with such faulty evidence. She later blamed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for deliberately misleading her office about Hearn’s actions.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are looking to open an investigation into how Hearn was charged and demand documents from the Justice and Interior Departments relating to that decision. Hearn’s lawyers are also seeking access to transcripts of the federal grand jury proceedings. Trump’s tantrum over the failed Reflecting Pool renovations may soon turn into a big legal headache for him and his administration.

Taylor Farms, the source of this summer’s cyclospora outbreak that’s causing an explosive diarrhea epidemic, now has to recall multiple products over a salmonella risk. 

On Sunday, the Trump-linked company announced it was recalling a dozen different prepared food products, including jalapeño peppers, salsas, and guacamole due to salmonella contamination. Taylor Farms said the products came from Coast Citrus Distributors, and that the company was no longer sourcing peppers from one Sinaloa, Mexico, farmer. 

The recall comes a week after another salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers from Mexico, which has made at least 345 people sick in 27 different states and resulted in 36 hospitalizations. Restaurant chains including Chipotle and Qdoba have since stopped using the peppers. 

This summer has seen numerous food-borne illnesses spread across the U.S. following layoffs and staff cuts in regulatory agencies. The cyclospora outbreak has resulted in at least 18,517 cases across nine states listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a New Republic analysis, and two deaths were reported in Michigan last week. (State officials noted that cyclosporiasis is usually not a life-threatening illness, and that both people who died had underlying health conditions.) 

Last month, close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas had to be recalled due to salmonella fears. The New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.  

Last year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the CDC team that would have handled the cyclospora outbreak. The people left behind, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are now dealing with one crisis after another with little public confidence that more aren’t on the way. 

It seems President Donald Trump’s fascination with AI-generated images must be genetic. 

In two separate posts on Instagram Sunday evening, Eric Trump shared a series of photographs from the LIV New York Golf tournament at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. 

Both posts included the same picture of the president, who was photographed grinning beside two of his grandchildren—and the image appeared to have been altered using AI. 

The background of the photograph was warped into an improbable-looking armchair, and a hint of loose flesh could be spotted floating behind one of the grandkid’s ears.  

Looks like it was a very normal weekend with grandpa!

Donald Trump himself also posted an AI-altered image from his weekend at Bedminster—thinning his body, straightening his posture, and transforming his slack-jawed appearance into his once-signature steely look. 

In reality, photographs of the 80-year-old president revealed bruises on his arm. 

Trump’s affinity for self-aggrandizing AI slop wouldn’t matter so much if he were just someone’s elderly relative posting on Facebook. But the president of the United States is clearly more interested in leading his own fan club than he is in, well, governing. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has bet big on video gamers to fix the country’s dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers—but it probably won’t pay off.

Duffy announced the results of DOT’s unorthodox hiring campaign to use a “supercharged” hiring process to recruit gamers Sunday night. Since launching in April, the DOT has reached 94 percent of its hiring goal, bringing in more than 2,000 new air traffic controllers—“the most in a single year.”

The secretary claimed candidates belonging to the “best and brightest” campaign were now “reaching the Academy quicker than any class before them, thanks to the most streamlined hiring process.”

But Duffy may be counting his chickens before they’ve hatched. Turning a trainee into a certified professional controller takes up to two years, and roughly one third of trainees never complete the process. Every unsuccessful trainee costs the government roughly $130,000.

While gamers may have the multi-tasking skills, high cognitive function, and spatial awareness the Federal Aviation Administration is seeking, will they be given the support they need not to rage quit?

Air traffic controllers experience extreme stress and burnout, and it doesn’t seem that the FAA is going to be able to fix that problem any time soon.

In May, the FAA announced that it would reduce its air traffic controller staffing target from 14,633 to 12,563, citing modernized staffing models. In reality, the agency planned to increase the amount of time employees spent managing air traffic after discovering that air traffic controllers had logged 2.2 million hours of overtime in 2024, costing the government roughly $200 million. Even with the reduced targets, the FAA remains short roughly 1,800 controllers. Nationally, about two-thirds of the FAA’s largest facilities remain below 85 percent of their staffing targets.

It’s also surprising that simply a “streamlined” hiring process would result in so many applicants being approved for training. Typically, less than 10 percent of applicants gain admission to the training academy in Oklahoma City.

The FAA announced in March 2025 that it had streamlined the process of hiring air traffic controllers by implementing a “fully automated” qualification process, allowing applicants to proceed individually, not in a group, and making the comprehensive medical and security checks concurrent. It’s not immediately clear why those changes would dramatically boost the number of successful applicants if the application process still includes pre-employment tests, including an aptitude test designed to weed out applicants lacking mental acuity.