Category: Law

404 Media on ICE Lying

Posted on by documentingdescent

I don’t generally want to quote or use articles by other publications except as PDFs to confirm events did, in fact, actually happen. However, there are certain exceptions to that.

404 Media’s excellent encapsulation of the lies being told by the Trump administration, Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, ICE, etc… You should have a read. I will place some choice quotes below the link.

DHS Is Lying to You About ICE Shooting A Woman

“In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said at a press conference, “it was an act of domestic terrorism” and “a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.” 

DHS lied. Trump lied. Noem lied. The Honda was already turning to the right away from the officers when the one who allegedly feared for his life fired the shots. There were no other officers up the road where the car did fully level out, meaning no other fellow officers were at risk. 

This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt. DHS’s serial lying has become such a problem that even a judge called it out. In November, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis wrote a more than 200 page opinion that in large part catalogued DHS officials’ bullshit. Parts of the opinion were scathing: “The Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible.”

DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality. Its words carry no weight or meaning for those who care about what really happened. Only those who want to believe what it says.

I have preserved their article as a PDF here, in case it disappears from there server for any reason.

ICE Shoots, Kills Bystander in Minneapolis

Posted on by documentingdescent

Today in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her car. Apparently he opened up through her driver’s side window and shot her four or five times in the face and chest. She drove 100 feet and collided with a utility pole, already dead when people reached her car.

Kristi Noem has already spewed her bullshit, as normal. Per the article above, Noem insisted that the shooting was justified and that the victim was a “domestic terrorist” who endangered officers’ lives. This is contradicted by video of the incident, and by eyewitness accounts. And lest you forget: there is zero reason to believe anything Noem or ICE/DHS says, ever. They have consistently lied about every single event that may make them look bad. Every. One.

The shooter was vaguely in front of the car, but not in danger of being struck; it is very obvious the driver was trying to turn around and avoid interacting with the ICE agents. I will not be posting the video here, but suffice to say this will also be difficult to memory hole due to multiple videos from multiple angles and reportage from major news stations.

If this were a police officer who had done this under any other circumstance (except possible a protracted police chase) the chances of this being an unwarranted shooting are close to 100%. Even the LAPD and LASD wouldn’t be able to get away with executing someone in cold blood under the claim she may have hit them with a car, given this video.

The Trump militia proceeds apace.

Some Speculation, Epstein Files

Posted on by documentingdescent

So, I know I haven’t been keeping up with all of the small developments, especially during the government shutdown, but frankly, I didn’t think anything super noteworthy happened that was appreciably different than previously.

ICE, DHS, and CBP continue to act like warrantless SS officers, doing whatever they want without review, redress, or constraint. Or, if you prefer, an invading army. I didn’t post about everything they’ve done because if I did, that is all this blog would ever be. That isn’t to say it isn’t important, but there is a limit to what I am able and willing to spend time on.

The admin continues to be a nest of vipers the corruption of which would stagger even Caligula and Nero – for instance, the carve out in the CR to fund the government includes a proviso to let 8 republic senators sue to the DOJ for investigating them for their January 6, 2020 actions, essentially cravenly handing them between 500k and a million dollars each.

I mean, it’s fucked, but it’s the same flavor of fucked it has been.

Now, I’m gonna do something I generally don’t want to do here and that is to speculate on future events.

You see, more of the Epstein Files have been released, and the house is poised to release all of them – or at least most – because now the “yeas” for it have a majority: Adelita Grijalva has been sworn in, and is voting to release the files. What’s more, ghoul monsters like Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have refused to cave and are ALSO voting to release the files. I guess they know their constituents will probably have their heads if they don’t.

So what’s Trump gonna do?

Well, there’s good money on him deciding to invade Venezuela.

They actually moved a carrier group there last month, and were also weighing ground attack options as well.

I’m no military expert, so I don’t know all of the background movers in this particular case – like who’s propping this up as a good idea vs bad idea. But you can bet your bottom dollar that Trump will find SOMETHING to try to distract from the Epstein files if he can. And this is a ready made distraction.

How Do Ya Like That First Amendment?

Posted on by documentingdescent

Hope you enjoyed your Bill of Rights, because even more than in prior years, it’s the Bill of Rights* – with the asterisk denoting ‘some limitations apply’.

The natural outgrowth of this Charlie Kirk shit has been, rather predictably, for Trump and his minions to decide that cracking down on the Left and the Democratic party is the only way out of this horrible state of affairs. I mean, why wouldn’t they? They’ve been itching for some kind of leftist to punch a cop or look sideways at an ICE agent, to give them an excuse to declare martial law and start crushing people under their boots.

The alacrity with which the administration is moving right now certainly suggests that Stephen Miller already had this plan waiting in the wings, prepped for him to push the button and fire up his brownshirts. Of course, there’s no actual connection between left wing policies and murderous intent, but truth is not a quality that matters much to this admin. The fact that Tyler Robinson may have had a trans roommate or may have been dating them and may have been tired of Kirk’s hate-spreading is less important than The Message: The Left Is Here To Destroy America.

Concurrent to all this, the Department of Justice removed a study they themselves commissioned during Trump’s first term, because it indicates the vast majority of all political violence in the United States is perpetrated by the right wing. Even if you don’t want to spend your time reading through the NIJ report on how conservatives will gleefully murder their opponents, it’s easy to count the attacks and compare figures.

If your memory is bad, go back a few days ago, when Fox News talking head Brian Kilmeade suggested the solution to the homelessness epidemic in the United States would be to just kill anyone who’s homeless. Oh, sure, he walked it back and apologized, but don’t get it twisted: this ghoul meant it, and he’s sorry he got called out for being a psychopath. He’s just saying the quiet part out loud.

And people like him have the temerity to lecture others on being heartless about Kirk’s death? Get fucking real.

Speaking of which, Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on Charlie Kirk has gotten him removed from the air indefinitely – ABC (aka Disney) followed suit after Nexstar (owners of a lot of local, rural TV stations) pulled him. Both pulled him after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr basically said “No mocking Trump or I’ll go out of my way to fuck you over.” Good thing Trump vowed not to weaponize government. So what did Kimmel say that was so horrible?

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

That’s it? I say worse things when I stub my toe on the way to the toilet. Sinclair Media’s gone so far as to say they won’t reinstate Kimmel unless he both apologizes and donates an undisclosed sum to Kirk’s Turning Point USA group. Which will happen around half past never.

Make no mistake as to why ABC/Disney and Nexstar are doing this, however: they have no deep-seated love of Trump or his crew. But they do both love money. Nexstar as a proposed merger with TV giant Tegna, and ABC/Disney is trying to buy streaming service FUBO. Both of these require FCC approval. This is 100% pay to play bullshit from the FCC and Carr.

Carr’s gone even further after his success with Kimmel: he says the FCC is gonna pull the licenses for anyone who’s critical of the Trump administration. The linked article says Trump said this – and he did – but earlier today Carr concurred with what Trump suggested. That’s not how FCC licenses work, but when has legality or “how shit works” ever stopped these clowns?

You know you done gone too far into Fascism Central when both Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson are speaking out against what you’re doing. When you lose Bowtie Franco and Turdblossom, you fucked up.

The Feds are also actively grasping with their little hands at voter registration rolls across the United States, claiming they need to “examine voter registration to safeguard election integrity”. Yeah, that’s not within your power or purview, and states rightly should tell you to go fuck yourself.

Transparent efforts to see who to target for intimidation and/or malicious prosecution.

The FBI is also rolling full tilt into insanity, with Kash Patel at the helm. Mr. Internet Troll, Mr. 4chan Shitposter himself. He’s got two big winners here, and I can’t even really comment on them, they’re both so fucking horrifying and stupid.

#1: Backing up Trump’s play, Antifa is a terrorist organization! This doesn’t actually mean shit; only designating something a foreign terrorist organization has legal meaning and unlocks things. Domestic? Well, we generally don’t give a shit about that. He coulda done this at any time, so why now? Somebody pointed out that he’s like a shark when it comes to being in the news: he has to keep swimming or he’ll die. He’s thrown his base red meat, because if he’s not in the headlines, he’s losing. Besides, it’s not like an official declaration will meaningfully change how law enforcement will kick the shit out of you. They were always gonna.

#2: FBI to Categorize Trans People As “Nihilistic Violent Extremist” Threat Group, Report Says. This is coming from Ken Klipperstein and he’s rarely wrong, so I expect this to happen. How the fuck do you categorize a sexuality/identity as… a political movement? You know what, I’m not even gonna bother. It’s evil and it’s stupid and these people should never be given a moment’s peace for the rest of their goddamn lives.

Rumors, Venezuela, No Citizenship for You!

Posted on by documentingdescent

Lots of rumors flying around about Lance Twiggs, who is supposedly Tyler Robinson’s roommate. Several right leaning news outlets are using the word “partner” in their headlines, implying Robinson and Twiggs were romantically involved. There is no evidence for that at this point, not even in those articles. Even Twiggs’ identity is actually speculation at this point, but speculation amplified by Fox News tweets.

Naturally, conservative outlets are taking this as gospel, along with claiming that being in college ‘radicalized’ Robinson – never mind he was in college for one semester and dropped out, several years ago. They are also claiming that since he is reported to have “become more political lately” this means he veered left. Again, there is no evidence for this, for or against.

Some are claiming he’s a member of Nick Fuentes’ followers, the Groyper Army, and maybe his assassination was due to the long running beef between Fuentes and Kirk. Again, no evidence for or against this as of yet.

We just do not know his motivations at this time. What we can determine from his bullet engravings: dude was terminally online and deeply steeped in meme culture, but definitely steeped in Groyper meme culture. Maybe he was one, maybe he just used there memes (as many do), but dude is a terminally online mofo.

We will not speculate on his motives.

A new bill in Congress would give the Secretary of State the discreet and unopposed right to strip and deny passports from citizens at his sole discretion. Basically if Rubio (or whoever) decides you’ve been bad, they can take your passport away without due process. Sure, you can complain to get it back… but you’re complaining to the Secretary of State who took it away.

The key provision of the bill is that you can have your passport taken away merely by being charged with material support for terrorism, including writing and speech.

I don’t think I need to belabor the point that this is incredibly illegal and vile but I’m sure they’ll try and push it through regardless. I don’t think it’ll make it, but something to keep our eye on.

Remember I was talking about how we might be gearing up for military action in Venezuela? Well, we’re moving F-35s to Puerto Rico, which while not confirming the prep, certainly points in that general direction. I don’t think we generally keep F-35s stationed there for the most part. They only report 5 being repositioned there, however, which seems more like a surgical strike group than anything larger. Probably anti-cartel bombings, if Trump’s posturing is to be believed.

Supreme Court: Being Brown is Sus

Posted on by documentingdescent

The Supreme Court today lifted a restriction on ICE/CBP that prevented them from stopping and questioning people based on their job, the language they were speaking, or color of their skin. In essence, being brown or working blue collar jobs is now considered grounds to suspect somebody doesn’t have valid immigration status in the United States.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the order went too far in restricting ICE/CPB, and furnished us with this gem of wisdom:

To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.

To paraphrase LawDork, aka Chris Geidner, “Brett, do you know what the 4th Amendment is?” Or more succinctly, since ICE/CPB was grabbing people SOLELY on these factors, why are you pissing on us and telling us it’s raining by suggesting there are other factors they give a shit about?

I guess I didn’t expect anything else from the Supreme Court right now, but I’m still disappointed and infuriated.

RFK Jr. and Chicago Getting the National Guard Treatment

Posted on by documentingdescent

There’s been a lot of stuff in the “No Shit” file lately, so I haven’t posted about it. A little recap on the no shit department files:

  • Ray Dalio, a billionaire, is warning Trump is turning the United States into an autocracy.
  • US job growth has ground to a halt, thanks to Trump, and no amount of firing of statisticians can hide it, because now the report is coming from staffing firms.
    • Of course, Trump says we won’t see the real numbers for another year.
  • They keep trying to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The judge in the case – Boasberg, I think, still? – said “Under no circumstances are you to remove Abrego Garcia from the country” and the lawyers said ‘yeah, we get it’ but now ICE is threatening to deport him to Eswatini.
    • Naturally, this is all just their revenge for making them look stupid. And, as usual, the right wing nuts are talking about his criminal record (there isn’t one) and gang connections (which he doesn’t have).
    • User AdventurerBKRB on Reddit: “Are we just picking countries out of a hat now?”
  • DEVGRU, aka “Seal Team Six” (don’t make me go down that rabbit hole) botched a North Korean mission during Trump’s 1st term and killed some civilians to cover it up.
    • Honestly, nobody should be surprised by this – during a mission of this sort, that’s what they do. I’m not mad about it, I’m just surprised any info about this has come out. The details are gruesome, but this isn’t even in the top 50 of “fucked up stuff the US has done internationally”.
  • For instance, attacking Venezuela to weaken Maduro and make Trump feel like the big-dick in the room. All potential at this point, but nothing has happened yet. This comes after missile striking a “drug boat” that wasn’t carrying drugs, but migrants, and was carrying them to Trinidad rather than the USA. Rubio changed the report because Trump wanted it to say USA and for it to be a drug boat.
    • You don’t load a drug boat with 11 non-crew members. You load it with drugs. You also don’t load a boat that cannot physically make it to the USA with drugs, if its destination is to the USA. Also you don’t aim it at Trinidad.

RFK Jr. did so badly during his hearings this week that his own family is calling on him to resign. Naturally, the folks in the hearing – the government folks, that is – would rather yell and make a spectacle than take concrete action on RFK and his lunatic, anti-scientific, disastrously stupid policies. The Republican members refused to even allow him to be sworn in as a witness, probably because they knew he wouldn’t be able to keep from lying the whole fucking time.

If RFK is allowed to remain in his position, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people will die as a direct result of his policies. Indirectly, I can’t even start to count. RFK should be confined to a small padded room for his beliefs, not allowed to determine if you or I can have vaccines.

Luckily for me, Washington, Oregon and California have formed the Western States Health Alliance so we don’t all die due to his fuckery. Some of the first steps in what people were calling “soft seccession” – something Ireland did, I guess, during British rule? Just basically doing shit their own way and ignoring federal mandates by saying “Okay” and then not complying.

Trump’s gearing up to pull a Los Angeles in Chicago – deploying National Guard troops from other states there to “bring crime under control.” Never mind, Chicago’s safer than it’s been in about 35 years. Never mind that there are MUCH more dangerous red-state cities. No, this is again – like Operation Excalibur – an ego thing and an optics thing and a public flex. Courts have already ruled the LA deployment violated posse comitatus, albeit like four or five days ago. This will not go the way he thinks it will. It will likely be a giant nothing, especially with the reticence of Guardsmen to have anything to do with it. Oh, they’ll go. They’ll just most likely end up picking up garbage like they did in DC.

Basically, I don’t think Pritzker is gonna stand for this shit. Some more hot headed folks online have been calling for Pritzker to activate the Illinois National Guard and station them on freeways and whatnot to physically keep the other NG troops out. While I think this would be an interesting turn of events, I don’t see it happening because Pritzker plays a longer game than that, and that’s more of an escalation than he probably wants to risk right now.

This action is causing even some MAGA pundits to pull back and say hold up there, hoss. Megyn Kelly, despite being a first order piece of shit and wishing Pritzker would “ask Trump for help with Chicago’s rampant crime” noted that this would be an illegal deployment.

Reddit user whichwitch9 kinda hit the nail on the head, IMO:

It’s the influencers starting to panic. The American public is getting fed up, and it’s no longer profitable to be fully Maga. They need to get the double speak going to start giving themselves plausible deniability. This is what Rogan is doing, as well. Stephen King is right when he says in a few years people will be denying they voted for Trump. Don’t let them forget we know who they are. People like Rogan and Kelly are responsible for elevating and sane washing Trump leading up to the election. He was already saying batshit stuff, but conservative news outlets were brushing it off as jokes or playing small video snippets. It’s very clear none of it was a joke now, and the signs he was mentally declining were real.

Federalization, National Guard, Bullshit Roundup

Posted on by documentingdescent

Gonna do a roundup, since a fair amount of time has passed, and it’s important to catalog this stuff, but it’s so widely reported there will be no chance of it getting memory holed – maybe spun, but not forgotten all together.

Following Trump’s resounding successes in deploying the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles (spot my sarcasm, please), he opted to federalize Washington DC and deploy the National Guard there. So for the past week and change, the National Guard and ICE have been marching all over DC. ICE has asking people for identification and proof of citizenship, harassing folks at Metro stations, and in at least one case, arresting someone for filming them. The NG just got deputized to enforce some law, and are now authorized to be armed starting today.

By all accounts, the people of DC are not terribly enthusiastic about this bullshit.

While technically legal, due to how the NG works, this is still functionally the deployment of a branch of the military into a US city for the express purpose of creating security theater, frightening the populace, and causing a goddamn ruckus for the president’s ego.

What’s more, he’s on the verge of activating and deploying the NG to 19 other states, as well as threatening Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco with deployment as well. All in the name of a nonexistent crime wave; San Francisco had 35 murders in 2024, whereas Memphis had 294. In their first 10 days in DC, they bragged they’d made 400 arrests. This is pretty much exactly in line with arrest rates prior to them showing up at all.

Make no mistake, they are laying the groundwork to enact a military takeover of places that resist Trump. Hilariously, he’s not sending anybody back to LA, probably because we showed how little shits we gave about their authority.

Silver lining: the federal budget for the National Guard deployments may be empty by the end of September, at this rate.

The FBI also raided John Bolton’s house a day after he spoke out against Trump. The charge? Retaining classified documents. You can’t make this shit up, I swear. Like the saying goes, every accusation is an admission. This kind of lawless retribution is exactly what he promised he’d do – an administration based on revenge and retribution. John Bolton is a piece of shit of the highest order, but this is also the act of a tyrant king.

The whole Texas redistricting thing is ongoing. Texas has decided to have a mid-decade redistricting to give Republicans five more seats in the House, despite there being no provision to do so. So California’s opted to do the same and put it on the ballot. Predictably, Republicans are losing their minds about Democrats not playing by the rules and cheating, etc.

Fuck your rules. You don’t play by them. Why should anyone else?

The Supreme Court is set to rule on if ICE can detain and arrest people based on their appearance alone – specifically ‘apparent ethnicity’. I do not have high hopes for this court making any sane decisions, to be honest. But there’s a tiny sliver that thinks they won’t go, “Yeah, being brown is legally grounds for suspicion.”

ICE has also been busy locally – opening fire on a family in their car when the family refused to submit to masked thugs who refused to produce a badge, and just started barking orders. They drove off, and the ICE goons opened up. ICE got the LAPD to go to the family’s home with the charge of ‘attempted murder’ (running over the ICE goons) except… the bodycam footage showed they didn’t try to run anyone over. And LAPD didn’t do shit.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia got picked up by ICE again, despite winning every court case. Now they wanna ship him to Uganda. They tried to get him to plead guilty to some bullshit crimes with the promise they’d ONLY deport him to Costa Rica. So now they wanna put him in Uganda, despite all the shit Judge Xinis said they couldn’t do. Obviously, Abrego Garcia’s main crime has been embarassing the administration. So they’re gonna get him.

Whenever this is over, if any of these ICE goons – especially the people in charge – are still around (assuming it ends within this generation), there will need to be a reckoning.

This is a disease for whom the cure is bullets in the head. I am done pretending otherwise. Trials, with evidence, everything in the open, and for those guilty: death by firing squad.