Tag: judge
Donald Trump

Internet Erupts As Trade Court Strikes Down Unlawful Trump Tariffs

A federal trade court halted Wednesday President Donald Trump's attempt to impose broad tariffs on imports using an emergency-powers statute.

The decision, issued by a three-judge panel from the Court of International Trade in New York consisting of Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald Trump appointees, followed multiple lawsuits claiming that Trump overstepped his legal authority, destabilized U.S. trade policy, and triggered economic turmoil.

Currently, at least seven lawsuits are contesting the tariffs, which have been a central element of Trump’s trade agenda.

Social media users including legal commentators welcomed the decision. Graham Steele, who is a fellow at Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, wrote: "IEEPA grants the President a lot of authority, and this President still found a way to exceed that authority."

"YOU CAN'T WIN IF YOU DON'T FIGHT. ANOTHER EXAMPLE. FIGHT," writer Amanda Carpenter said in a post on the social platform BlueSky.

International Relations professor David Burbach wrote on Bluesky: "This could be gigantic, IIEPA's grant of unilateral emergency trade powers to the President has been the loophole through which they are trying to shove the whole tariff thing. I'm sure this gets to SCOTUS."

Legal journalist Chris Geidner posted one excerpt of the ruling to Bluesky in which the panel ruled that the tariffs were "unlawful to all," writing: "After forcing challengers out of district courts, here’s how the specialty court slaps Trump around."

"Trump’s first-term [U.S. Trade Representative] Bob Lighthizer built a very careful legal strategy to ensure tariffs wouldn’t be overturned in court," tweeted author and Columbia University researcher Eddie Fishman. "Second-term Trump admin hasn’t been so careful."

Small business owner Aaron Rubin wrote on X: "Unless the government wins an emergency stay on appeal, CBP has to stop charging all reciprocal and fentanyl related tariffs and refund any paid duties."

"So if you are a foreign government negotiating with the Trump administration about the IEEPA 'Liberation Day' tariffs, and the tariffs have now been struck down (pending a probable appeal), it may be time to recalibrate your negotiating position," China Trade Monitor co-founder Simon Lester tweeted.

AlterNet reached out to the White House for comment.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Maggie Hassan

Habeas Corpus And The Cabinet Of Clowns

She did not even know what habeas corpus is. It should come as no surprise, judging from her actions.

At a hearing, she was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat:

Senator Hassan: "Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus?"

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem: "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to — "

Hassan: "No. Let me stop you, ma'am. Excuse me, that's incorrect."

It's not just incorrect. It's completely backward. Habeas corpus is not the president's right to be able to remove people from this country at will. He doesn't have that right. Habeas corpus ensures that. Without it, people could be detained at will because the king or the fuhrer or the president doesn't like them.

Habeas corpus developed in the English courts in the 1600s in opposition to the divine right of the king to incarcerate. A petition for habeas corpus was the way you enforced the rule of law. It reflects a principle enshrined in the Magna Carta that "No man shall be arrested or imprisoned ... except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land."

"Habeas corpus" technically means that "you have the body," you being the warden or the executive, unlawfully, in violation of my constitutional rights. Because you have the wrong man. Because there is a court order protecting me. Because you have no legal authority to deport me. All of the detainees who are challenging their unlawful detention and deportations are relying on habeas corpus petitions to federal courts.

In the first Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress made clear that the federal courts have jurisdiction to consider habeas petitions from federal prisoners. After the Civil War, Congress expanded that jurisdiction to include state prisoners held in violation of federal law or the Constitution. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1830, the "great object" of the writ of habeas corpus "is the liberation of those who may be imprisoned without sufficient cause." The "writ of habeas corpus," the Supreme Court has recognized, "is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action."

This is what Trump adviser Stephen Miller, whose influence in the Muskless White House cannot be overestimated, wants to get rid of. He is, according to news reports, actively floating the idea.

Unfortunately for Miller, and fortunately for the rule of law, the Constitution has something to say about this. Article 1, which deals with the power of Congress, provides that "The Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Most recently, it was suspended by the Act of Congress in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor; before that, it was suspended three other times including during the Civil War. At that point, President Abraham Lincoln, whose actions Noem cited as a precedent for suspension of the right, tried to suspend the right when Congress was out of session; his actions were challenged and rejected by the Court. Two years later, Congress authorized the suspension.

But Kristi Noem didn't seem to know any of this when she testified that the president had the right to deport anyone he wanted to, without their having a right to go to court to protest. Asked by Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey how many times habeas corpus had been suspended or where the authority to do so came from, she said she didn't know. She didn't even know which Article the Suspension Clause is found in, that is Article 1, which is about the power of Congress, not the president.

The woman in charge of detaining college students and deporting gay hairdressers and separating families and sending people to third countries in the Third World should know better. Noem claims she isn't a constitutional lawyer. You don't need to be a constitutional lawyer to know what habeas corpus is, any more than you need to be a medical doctor to know you shouldn't take your grandchildren swimming in bacteria-infected fecal water. What is with this ignorant Cabinet of clowns?

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Shameless Grandstanding: Bondi And Patel Overreach In Feeble Case Against Judge

Shameless Grandstanding: Bondi And Patel Overreach In Feeble Case Against Judge

When word broke on Friday about the arrest of a sitting Wisconsin state court judge, Hannah Dugan, on charges of obstructing the arrest of an illegal immigrant, my immediate reaction on Bluesky was “Whoa. Feels like massive overreaching.”

Having now reviewed the charging documents and some accounts of colleagues, my off-the-cuff assessment stands. The arrest of Judge Dugan was a long stretch that is hard to square with the principles of federal prosecution which govern the decision whether to charge every federal case.

A perusal of the facts, as laid out in the affidavit of an FBI agent accompanying the criminal complaint, easily isolates the weak spot in the case.

The six-agent team that had gathered in Milwaukee County Circuit Court to arrest Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who was appearing in Judge Dugan's courtroom on domestic violence charges, had not worked out a protocol for Ruiz's arrest. Dugan was angry when she learned of their presence and demanded that they speak with the chief judge. She then returned to her courtroom, adjourned Ruiz’s case, and directed him to leave through the jury door.

Although the key detail is obfuscated in the FBI affidavit, the jury door led directly back to the same public hallway, where one agent was waiting as Ruiz and his counsel emerged. (The others were conferring with the Chief Judge.) The agent followed Ruiz and his lawyer and went down the elevator with them. Other agents joined them and sought to arrest Ruiz in front of the courthouse. Ruiz ran and was arrested after a foot chase lasting the length of the courthouse.

For those wanting more facts, this long Twitter thread by Ann Jacobs of the Wisconsin Election Commission dissects the allegations and highlights the many weak aspects of the case.

Based principally on these details, the FBI has charged Dugan with two federal crimes: harboring or concealing Ruiz so as to prevent his discovery and arrest (18 U.S.C. §1071) and “corruptly obstructing or impeding the due and proper administration of law,” i.e., Ruiz’s deportation.

The challenge for the feds will be proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Dugan intended to prevent Ruiz's arrest. It seems at least equally plausible that Dugan wanted to avoid any scene in or in front of her courtroom. The idea that Judge Dugan was seeking to prevent Ruiz’s arrest doesn’t add up. She directed Ruiz to leave through another door but, as she well knew, into the public hallway where the agents were waiting. That's hardly consistent with a desire to prevent his arrest. And of course, he was arrested in short order.

It's very unlikely that a Wisconsin jury is going to view this case sympathetically in the first instance. But if Dugan testifies and proffers another explanation, it's hard to see how a jury convicts her beyond a reasonable doubt. Indeed, if the case goes to trial, the feds will be at genuine risk of losing, ignominiously, on a Rule 29 motion based on a finding from the judge that no reasonable jury could find that the government proved intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

In any event, here's my prediction that Judge Dugan will not be convicted on these charges.

It's also worth noting the likely impact of the case. Ruiz was in court to answer serious charges of domestic abuse, which seem to be his only brush with the law since he entered the country without authorization. Given the widespread publicity, we have to expect that other people here illegally will be far less likely to risk arrest on federal immigration charges by showing up for court. That's a far greater cost to public safety than the short chase that Attorney General Bondi emphasized.

(I also want to note this was not the only immigration-based story unfolding over the weekend. We saw two particularly cruel instances of administration officials apprehending two different women who were making their scheduled reporting visits to the ICE office, wreaking havoc on their families.)

So the case is fairly weak, and the FBI overreached. It's not the first time that's happened, and it's not unique to the Trump administration. Of far greater concern is the unprofessional and corrupt political exploitation of the charges by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Patel’s social media post trumpeting the arrest, which he quickly deleted, was the least of it. His gross abuse of discretion began with the decision to physically arrest and handcuff Judge Dugan at the courthouse as she was arriving for work Friday. A defendant like Judge Dugan should have been permitted, and 999 times out of 1000 would have been permitted, to surrender voluntarily after receiving a summons. FBI and DOJ rules give guidance for when to physically arrest a charged defendant – e.g., that the defendant is a flight risk, or a danger to the community, or is likely to destroy evidence, or has an extensive criminal history. Every one of the factors points to self-surrender rather than arrest, much less in sensational fashion at the courthouse as she arrived for work.

Treating Judge Dugan like a violent, dangerous criminal was obviously designed to score broader political points about the Administration’s wholesale deportations initiative. Patel decided to humiliate Judge Dugan for a sensational headline and to strike fear into the hearts of other judges. That not only contravened DOJ guidelines; it was bush and cowboyish.

Which brings us to Attorney General Bondi and her deeply embarrassing and unlawful exploitation of the arrest. Within hours of the episode, Bondi took to the airwaves of Fox News, where she cheerfully trashed Judge Dugan. She presented the allegations in the complaint as fact and added her own editorial denigrations. She said of the judge, “shame on her,” and of the charges, “you can’t make this up.” She continued, “we could not believe that a judge really did that,” and “what has happened to the judiciary is beyond me,” finally asserting that Judge Dugan is “deranged.”

Since she came to office, Bondi has had a consistent tin ear and an abhorrent proclivity to pepper her every public statement with blandishments of Trump and a suggestion that DOJ attorneys work for him personally, rather than the public.

It is a fundamental constitutional requirement in this country that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, and that the government must prove all elements of a criminal charge beyond a reasonable doubt. It is probably the single most important rule that a prosecutor must live by.

Accordingly, the U.S. Attorney’s Manual, the operating bible for federal prosecutors, requires strict adherence to that command. That includes forbidding prosecutors from offering opinions on a defendant’s guilt, supplying their own character assessments, or making any statement that could influence the outcome of a trial at the charging stage.

It is drummed into the head of every federal prosecutor that in announcing the filing of charges, you stick to the four corners of the charging document. Moreover, you emphasize that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, a statement that appears routinely in every press release announcing an indictment.

Bondi’s diatribe transgressed all of these guidelines and more. For any prosecutor, state or federal, Bondi’s trashing of a just-charged defendant was breathtaking. In this and multiple other instances in her short tenure – her speech introducing the President at the DOJ particularly jumps to my mind – she has appalled DOJ veterans of all stripes and eras. She is a disgrace to her office.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of theTalking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing toTalking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg

Judge Threatens White House With Contempt Over Deportation Order

Citing a “willful disregard,” Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has found probable cause that the Trump administration could be held in criminal contempt of court after officials defied his order to not remove Venezuelan migrants from the country based on a centuries-old wartime law.

Boasberg, first appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, on Wednesday “said he would launch proceedings to determine whether to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt,” The Washington Post reported.

Pointing to the “broader showdown between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary,” the Post reported that Boasberg “[said] the Trump administration’s actions on March 15, as the removal flights proceeded despite his order to the contrary, ‘demonstrate a willful disregard … sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.'”

The judge wrote: “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”

But Boasberg also offered the administration some options: essentially, file “a declaration explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so,” or, file “declaration(s) identifying the individual(s) who, with knowledge of the Court’s classwide Temporary Restraining Order, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16, 2025.”

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explains that Boasberg ordered “them either to fix their mistake, or identify who made those decisions (presumably for further sanctions).”

“The Constitution,” Boasberg also wrote, citing previous rulings, “does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’

Watch CNN’s report below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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