It's coming fast and furious and it's mostly very bad and getting worse.
A news station in Los Angeles, KTLA, reports that unknown people kidnapped a woman at night and tried to make her sign self-deportation papers. The woman, Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon, known as Juli, is a community leader and mother from Los Angeles. She was reportedly taken by unidentified men and transported directly to the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro without standard immigration processing. When she demanded her right to speak to an attorney, she was taken to a warehouse where she wasn’t given any food, and she was being told that she was going to be kept there until she signed voluntary self-deportation paperwork.” Armed, masked men in unmarked vehicles allegedly took her at gunpoint. The men did not identify themselves as law enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security has categorically denied that Juli Calderon was taken by ICE agents, while her family and attorneys maintain she was abducted by unidentified individuals who may have been operating outside the law.
Apparently no one knows with certainty if this is a hoax or if Juli was taken by ICE agents, other federal agents, or an outside the law paramilitary group. When Trump said he didn't want to bother with due process, one can reasonably believe that this is what he meant. The problem with the hoax theory is that Trump has shown contempt for due process, the rule of law and inconvenient truth. Maybe ICE is lying. Maybe not.
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Regarding ICE, it appears to be a federal agency that may have gone full-blown rogue criminal. At the least, its attitude toward its job is terrifying.
ICE has time to make trash like this,
but not time to see if someone is being held illegally
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The AP reports that a former FBI agent who supported djt's 1/6 coup attempt has been hired by the DoJ to work on weaponization of the DoJ.
A former FBI agent who was charged with joining a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and cheering on rioters is now working as an adviser to the Justice Department official overseeing its “weaponization working group,” which is examining President Donald Trump’s claims of anti-conservative bias inside the department.
The former FBI supervisory agent, Jared Lane Wise, is serving as a counselor to Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin Jr., who also serves as director of the working group, according to a person familiar with the matter.Attorney General Pam Bondi called for creating the “weaponization” group in February to investigate claims by Trump and Republican allies that the Justice Department unfairly targeted conservatives during President Joe Biden’s administration.Wise, who worked as a special agent or supervisory special agent for the FBI from 2004 through 2017, was arrested in Oregon on Capitol riot-related misdemeanor charges in May 2023.
Wise repeatedly shouted, “Kill ’em!” as he watched rioters assaulting officers outside the Capitol, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. Wise clapped his hands and raised his arms ”in triumph” after he entered the building through the Senate wing door, the affidavit says. He left the building about nine minutes after entering.
Police body camera footage showed Wise berating police officers outside the Capitol and repeatedly shouting, “Shame on you!”
“I’m former law enforcement,” he told them.” You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it.”
Q1: Who is the disgusting Nazi Gestapo here, lying authoritarians like Pam Bondi, Ed Martin and Jared Wise, or regular police just trying to do their jobs?
Q2: What is more likely regarding the goal of the DoJ's "weaponization working group", (1) making sure the DoJ is not biased, weaponized or effective against "conservatives" (authoritarians and kleptocrats, especially elites and pro-Trump rioters), or (2) making sure the DoJ is biased, weaponized and highly aggressive against Democrats, political opposition and critics of djt?
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In her substack, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance comments on various things like the recent USSC recent decision in the Casa case, ICE's alligators and djt's reaction to the concentration camp in the Florida Everglades:
The Roberts Court let Pandora out of the box, and now there seems to be no putting everything back in. First it was criminal immunity and the pass on prosecution given to presidents. Last Friday it was Casa, the birthright citizenship/nationwide injunction case, where Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that just because the president acted unconstitutionally, that didn’t mean the courts could tell him no, in essence taking away the best, quickest, broadest remedy that could be used against a president hell-bent on imposing his own policies on the country, whether or not—and it has been mostly not of late—the Constitution authorizes him to do that.
The big things are bad. Presidents can’t rewrite amendments to the U.S. Constitution—there is a process for doing that. But in 30 days, birthright citizenship will be gone, unless the Supreme Court, which has just left on vacation after delivering the bad news in Casa, decides to step back in. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”It’s also the small things. Like the official White House account retweeting an absolutely disgusting image, associating Trump with the alligator and swamp-snake guarded prison Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has apparently built to house noncitizens who are being detained by ICE. Perhaps it’s by way of an apology to Trump for having the temerity to attempt a run at him in the primary.
Q: Are we up to our eyeballs in alligators, literally, figuratively or both?
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In light and fluffy news, which we need a lot more of, the NYT reports that Malaysia has just banned all shipments of plastic waste from the United States. That amounted to about 35,000 tons last year. The ban was prompted after some jackass sent more than 100 shipping containers of hazardous materials, improperly labeled as raw materials, from Los Angeles. Also reported is that about 91% of all plastics used in the US are not recycled. Most of it winds up in landfills.
Well OK, that wasn't very light or fluffy. But it's better than all that DoJ, ICE, alligators and kidnapping stuff.