SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
deportations
Don’t Despair: Trump Keeps Losing Bigly
The courts, backed by impacted people, are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power.
Sep 05, 2025
US President Donald Trump is on a losing streak this week. Just look at the latest judicial decisions challenging his policies, from mass deportations to tariffs to his troop deployments to US cities.
The courts are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power.
These cases illustrate the point:
Immigration
Over Labor Day weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempted to begin deporting up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. In the dead of night, the first children were loaded onto planes in south Texas. “These are unaccompanied children who do not have a parent or a guardian with them,” Efrén Olivares, an attorney representing the minors, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.
At 1:00 am on Sunday morning, Olivares and his colleagues filed an emergency complaint with the federal court in Washington, DC. Judge Sparkle Sooknanam was woken after 2:00 am, and by 4:00 am she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportations until the children had the immigration hearings to which they have a legal right.
Meanwhile in Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the nation’s most conservative, ruled that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport people was illegal.
Tariffs
The Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal and unconstitutional, noting that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs. The ruling was “a sweeping decision that unequivocally rebukes President Trump’s idea that he can impose tariffs on American consumers on his own,” Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued the case, said on Democracy Now!
Domestic Deployment of the Military
Trump says, “We’re going in,” threatening to invade Chicago using, among other forces, the Texas National Guard.
But in California, a federal judge, invoking the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of military in domestic law enforcement, ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, along with several hundred US Marines, was illegal. Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops [from] engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”
These are just a few of the recent court cases that have rebuked Trump as he attempts to subvert the US Constitution.
We recently got a personal glimpse into what judicial wins over Trump look like. In the high mountain air of Telluride, Colorado, we had a chance to spend time with E. Jean Carroll, the renowned advice columnist and journalist. She was at the Telluride Film Festival for the premier of the new documentary, Ask E. Jean.
Carroll had a long and storied career as the advice columnist for Elle Magazine, and has published several books. In recent years she became known as one of the most prominent women to accuse Donald Trump of sexual abuse, saying he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, in Manhattan.
The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people.
Carroll sued Trump in civil court, and a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing her. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote, “Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.” She was awarded a $5 million settlement from Trump. After the verdict, he called her a liar. She then sued for defamation, and won an additional jury award of $83.3 million.
Carroll cut an elegant figure, walking along Telluride’s main avenue with the sweeping Continental Divide as a backdrop. Her film premiered to rave reviews, and, should there remain a film distributor in this country not cowed by threats of lawsuits from Trump, it should be available for viewing by a wide audience. The film highlights the story of one courageous woman refusing to be defined as a victim of Donald Trump, providing inspiration, no doubt, to the hundreds of survivors of Trump’s old friend, the now-dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them spoke this week outside the US Capitol, demanding the full release of the Epstein files. The Trump administration, which controls the files, is resisting.
Behind each lawsuit are impacted people, whether immigrant children pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and thrown on planes, or people standing up in the streets of LA confronting illegally deployed troops, whether sexual abuse survivors banding together, or federal workers fired en masse.
The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people–people at every level organized in opposition, defending democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Trump on Unlawful Deportation Scheme
The ACLU hailed the ruling for "reining in the administration's view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts."
Sep 03, 2025
A federal appeals court late Tuesday ruled against a Trump administration scheme that cited an 18th-century wartime statute to justify its clandestine deportation of alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned under harsh conditions without accountability and limited legal recourse.
The 3-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—among the most conservative of the US appellate courts and more likely to side with Trump—said lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security did not present a satisfying case arguing that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows for the arrest and deportation of "enemies" by presidential authority during wartime or an active invasion, could be used to target alleged low-level gang members, in this case those of Tren de Aragua or TdA, which has roots in Venezuela.
Trump and his team had argued the gang members were being directed by the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro, but have presented no evidence to support such claims. And while the group is known for some levels of violence and illegal drug trafficking, civil rights groups—led by ACLU—challenged the deportation of alleged members as a clear violation of domestic immigration law and principles of due process.
Critics of Trump also said it was laughable to treat a criminal gang like TdA as equivalent to an invading army. They warned that Trump's overreach was only part of his broader authoritarian push to claim wider and more dangerous power to target, intimidate, and harm immigrant communities.
"TdA was not the kind of organized force or engaged in the kind of actions necessary to constitute an invasion or predatory incursion," wrote Judge Leslie Southwick in the panel's 2-1 majority decision.
The court granted the preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs, barring further deportations from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—where alleged TdA members are currently being held—until the case, almost certainly destined for the US Supreme Court, is finally decided.
Lee Gelernt, who argued the case for the ACLU, said the Trump administration's "use of a wartime statute during peacetime to regulate immigration was rightly shut down by the court."
The ruling, Gelernt added, was "a critically important decision reining in the administration’s view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Malicious Abuse of Power': Trump Slammed for New Arrest of Ábrego García and Deportation Threat
"This vindictive behavior is not just about Mr. Ábrego García; this is once again the administration showing that it can weaponize the law to punish people standing up for their rights and make our immigrant neighbors afraid," said one advocate.
Aug 25, 2025
A crowd of community members who had gathered outside an immigration office in Baltimore on Monday chanted, "Shame!" as a lawyer for US resident Kilmar Ábrego García announced that he had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents once again—days after he was finally released from prison after a monthslong ordeal.
Attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told the crowd that assembled to show support for Ábrego García that ICE had ordered the Maryand father and sheet metal worker to report to its offices for an interview on "false" pretenses and said his legal team is filing a habeas corpus petition to challenge the administration's plan to deport Ábrego García to Uganda.
Ábrego García's lawyers are arguing in the Federal District Court of Maryland that ICE re-arrested him without allowing him to express "fears of persecution and torture in that country."
The team is asking the court to ensure that Ábrego García "is not put on any flight to any country whatsoever, whether it's Uganda, South Sudan, what have you, unless and until he has had a full and fair trial in an immigration court as well as his full appeal rights," said Sandoval-Moshenberg.
It’s not clear what charges Abrego Garcia is facing, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg says, or where he will be detained.
Sandoval-Moshenberg says another federal lawsuit is being filed to challenge the planned deportation to Uganda, of any other third-country. pic.twitter.com/9YYKd0hOfG
— Mikenzie Frost (@MikenzieFrost) August 25, 2025
As Common Dreams reported, when Ábrego García was released from a jail Friday in Tennessee—where he'd been held on human smuggling charges since being returned to the US in June following his mistaken deportation to El Salvador—the administration informed his legal team that it may deport him once again to Uganda.
That threat was made when Ábrego García declined an offer to be sent to Costa Rica as part of a plea deal in which he would be required to plead guilty to human smuggling.
Another lawyer for Ábrego García, Sean Hecker, said Monday that "the government's campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought."
Ábrego García's ordeal has been at the center of outrage over the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda and President Donald Trump's $6 million deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, under which hundreds of migrants have been deported to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
Ábrego García was initially sent to CECOT in March, and US Department of Justice officials acknowledged that his deportation had been the result of an administrative error. He was accused of being a member of the gang MS-13 based on a statement from an anonymous police informant, and a judge ruled in 2019 that he could not be deported to his home country of El Salvador due to concerns over torture and persecution there.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Monday said Ábrego García was being processed for his new deportation order, but did not say where the administration plans to send him. She repeated the Trump administration's unproven claims about the Maryland resident, calling him "an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator" and said he would not "terrorize American citizens any longer."
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who visited Ábrego García when he was imprisoned in El Salvador and demanded his release, condemned Noem for continuing to "spread lies about his case."
"Instead of spewing unproven allegations on social media, [officials] need to put up or shut up in court," said Van Hollen.
"The federal courts and public outcry forced the administration to bring Ábrego García back to Maryland, but Trump's cronies continue to lie about the facts in his case and they are engaged in a malicious abuse of power as they threaten to deport him to Uganda—to block his chance to defend himself against the new charges they brought," Van Hollen said. "As I told Kilmar and his wife Jennifer, we will stay in this fight for justice and due process because if his rights are denied, the rights of everyone else are put at risk."
Sarah Mehta, deputy director of policy and government affairs at the ACLU, said Ábrego García's arrest on Monday put "the Trump administration's obsessive and petty cruelty... on full display" and condemned the "latest move to deport Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland father they admitted to wrongfully deporting to a torture prison, to a country with which he has no relationship."
"This vindictive behavior is not just about Mr. Ábrego García; this is once again the administration showing that it can weaponize the law to punish people standing up for their rights and make our immigrant neighbors afraid of being rapidly exiled, including to places where they may be persecuted," said Mehta.
The Times reported Monday that Ábrego García "expressed willingness to leave the United States to accept refugee status in Costa Rica" after initially rejecting the plea deal.
An order handed down by the chief federal judge in Maryland in May requires the government to give Ábrego García a two-day reprieve before being expelled from the country following the filing of the habeas corpus petition.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, suggested the administration has continued targeting Ábrego García simply because he and his legal team brought nationwide attention to the fact that officials had wrongly deported him and other migrants.
"The entire weight of the federal government has been brought against this man for one reason, and one reason alone," said Reichlin-Melnick. "He tried to get them to fix a mistake they admit they made."
Ábrego García acknowledged other families that have been impacted and separated by Trump's mass deportation policy before entering the ICE facility on Monday.
"To all of the families who have also suffered separations or who live under the constant threat of being separated," he said, "I want to tell you that even though this injustice is hurting us hard, we must not lose hope."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular