The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a full stay on Thursday, halting California's ban on masks for federal law enforcement agents, temporarily preventing the state from enforcing a law that would have made it a misdemeanor for ICE agents to conceal their identities during operations.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the ruling on X:
"The 9th Circuit has now issued a FULL stay blocking California's ban on masks for federal law enforcement agents."
The stay keeps the law frozen while litigation continues, marking the second consecutive legal defeat for Sacramento in its effort to dictate how federal officers conduct immigration enforcement on California soil.
Newsmax reported that California's law took effect Jan. 1 and made it a misdemeanor for many law enforcement officers, including federal agents, to wear a mask or other disguise while interacting with the public during official duties.
Medical protection, such as N95 respirators, was exempted, but the thrust of the law was clear: strip federal immigration agents of the operational anonymity they use to protect themselves during enforcement actions.
Supporters dubbed the legislation the "No Secret Police Act." California state Sen. Scott Wiener authored the bill, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.
The framing tells you everything. Sacramento wasn't concerned about transparency in policing. It was building another legal obstacle between federal agents and the illegal immigrants California has spent years shielding from enforcement.
Masked federal immigration operations drew protests and public scrutiny in 2025, and California's Democratic leadership responded not by cooperating with federal law but by criminalizing the agents enforcing it.
The Justice Department sued California in November, arguing the state cannot regulate federal officers' duties and that the law violates the Constitution's Supremacy Clause. The Trump administration argued the measure would endanger agents and intrude on federal authority.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder in Los Angeles blocked California from enforcing the mask restrictions against federal officers. Snyder concluded that the law unlawfully discriminated against the federal government.
She did allow California to enforce a separate state requirement that law enforcement officers display visible identification showing their agency and badge number, except when working undercover.
Newsom called Snyder's decision upholding the identification requirement "a clear win for the rule of law." A partial ruling that still stripped the core of his own legislation, rebranded as a victory. That's Sacramento in a sentence.
Wiener said after the district court ruling that he would move quickly to revise the law to apply more uniformly across law enforcement agencies. In other words, the law was so poorly drafted that a federal judge found it singled out the federal government for unique burdens, and the author's response was to promise a second attempt.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli weighed in Thursday with a pointed reminder:
"The state of California needs to familiarize itself with the Supremacy Clause. It does not have the authority to regulate federal agents. This is another key win for the Justice Department."
This is not a close constitutional question. States do not get to dictate the operational protocols of federal law enforcement. They do not get to decide which protective equipment federal agents wear. They do not get to impose misdemeanor charges on officers executing federal warrants.
The Supremacy Clause exists precisely to prevent states from waging guerrilla legal warfare against the enforcement of federal law.
California keeps pretending otherwise, and the courts keep telling them no.
Bondi framed the stakes plainly:
"Law enforcement officers risk their lives for us, only to be doxxed by radical anti-police activists. Unacceptable."
That's the part of this story that doesn't make it into the "No Secret Police Act" branding. Federal agents conducting immigration operations in hostile jurisdictions face real threats. Their names and faces, once exposed, become targets for harassment, intimidation, and violence.
Masks aren't theatrical props. They are protective measures for officers working in communities where local politicians have spent years encouraging resistance to federal immigration law.
California created an environment where agents need anonymity, then passed a law stripping it away. The contradiction isn't accidental. It's the strategy.
Bondi added:
"This crucial ruling protects our brave men and women in the field. We will not stop fighting bad laws like these in California and across the country."
The dispute is the latest flashpoint in a long-running clash between the Trump administration and California's Democratic leadership.
Sacramento has turned obstruction of federal immigration enforcement into something between a governing philosophy and a hobby. Sanctuary policies, non-cooperation mandates, and now criminal penalties for the equipment federal agents wear.
Each new law forces the Justice Department to spend time and resources in court rather than in the field. Each new law signals to illegal immigrants that California will fight to keep the federal government from enforcing the law. And each new law, when it inevitably fails in court, gets quietly revised and resubmitted.
The 9th Circuit, not historically known for siding with federal enforcement priorities, issued a full stay. When even the 9th Circuit tells California it has gone too far, the overreach speaks for itself.
Sacramento will try again. The DOJ will be waiting.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 1 in Trump v. Barbara, the case challenging President Donald Trump's executive order that denies birthright citizenship to certain children born on U.S. soil. It is the first time the high court has agreed to directly confront the scope of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause in the modern immigration context.
The executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, applies to children born after February 19, 2025, whose parents are either illegally present in the United States or here on temporary visas. The question before the justices is deceptively simple: what does "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" actually mean?
For decades, the political establishment treated birthright citizenship as settled law, a constitutional given that no serious person would question. That consensus is now before the nine justices, and the legal arguments supporting the challenge are far more grounded in history than critics would like to admit.
According to Just the News, the entire case turns on five words in the 14th Amendment: "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." The amendment was ratified to provide citizenship to formerly enslaved African Americans. Its application to the children of foreign nationals, including those here illegally, rests not on the amendment's text or its framers' intent, but on subsequent judicial interpretation.
Second Circuit Judge Steven Menashi has noted that the clause refers to being born under the protection of, and owing allegiance to, a sovereign. That framing matters enormously. If jurisdiction requires allegiance, the automatic extension of citizenship to children of illegal immigrants is not a constitutional command. It is a policy choice dressed up as one.
Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, argued that English common law, on which America's founding documents were modeled, tied citizenship to a reciprocal relationship between sovereign and subject. Permission to be present was linked to protection, and protection was linked to jurisdiction. As Wurman put it:
"Permission was relevant to protection and protection, as it turns out, was relevant to jurisdiction."
That framework draws a clear line between those lawfully admitted to the country and those who entered or remained in violation of its laws. Wurman also noted the historical understanding of how sovereignty operated on families:
"The sovereign operated on children through the parents, which, of course, makes sense because parents have a natural authority over their children."
If the parents have no lawful permission to be here, the logic follows that their children are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States in the constitutional sense the 14th Amendment contemplated.
Yale law professor Keith Whittington offered a nuanced point that undercuts the left's position even on its own terms. He traced the concept of sovereign jurisdiction back to English legal tradition, where a king's decision not to remove a foreign national still placed that person under the crown's governing authority. Whittington explained:
"If the king chooses to tolerate your presence in the country and does not take active steps to remove you, then the assumption is you are under the full governing authority of the king and should be treated accordingly."
At first glance, this might seem to support birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. If you're here, you're under jurisdiction. But Whittington connected this directly to the Trump administration's enforcement posture, which targets the "worst of the worst" among those here illegally. The implication is significant: a government actively working to deport someone has not chosen to tolerate their presence. The reciprocal relationship that historically undergirded jurisdiction simply does not exist.
Whittington elaborated on what tolerance actually means in practice:
"If you're not being actively removed from the country, then you are expected to play by the rules of the local jurisdiction and the government will continue to place demands on you and also expect that you will abide by local laws until the moment comes when we choose to actually take action and deport you."
This is not an argument for blanket birthright citizenship. It is an argument that jurisdiction is contingent, not automatic. And in an era of active enforcement, the category of people whose presence the government has chosen to tolerate is narrower than the open-borders crowd would prefer.
Both Wurman and Whittington agreed that the justices should not read the 14th Amendment as automatically extending citizenship to every child born on American soil to foreign parents. But they also pointed to a glaring institutional failure: Congress has never bothered to clarify the amendment's definitional ambiguities.
Whittington suggested that if Congress genuinely cared about phenomena like birth tourism, it had the authority to act:
"If Congress really cared about this, they can take steps to try to minimize how often it happens, but that's the extent of their authority to be able to do something about it."
He also acknowledged that any legislation would likely contain its own loopholes, much like the amendment itself. This is an honest concession, but it doesn't excuse decades of legislative inaction. Congress has been content to let courts do its work, and courts have been content to let a post-hoc interpretation stand in for original meaning. The result is a citizenship framework built on assumptions rather than text.
The broader significance of Trump v. Barbara extends well past constitutional interpretation. Birthright citizenship as currently practiced creates a set of incentives that no rational immigration system would design on purpose:
Every other developed nation has moved away from unrestricted birthright citizenship or never adopted it in the first place. The United States clings to it not because of constitutional necessity, but because of political convenience. Democrats benefit from the demographic math. Republicans have lacked the institutional will to challenge it. Until now.
Much of the legal and media establishment will frame this case as radical, an assault on constitutional norms by an overreaching executive. That framing requires you to accept that a 19th-century amendment designed to secure the citizenship of freed slaves was always intended to grant automatic citizenship to the children of people who broke the law to be here. It requires you to believe the framers of the 14th Amendment imagined a world in which illegal entry would generate irrevocable legal rights for the next generation.
The scholars preparing the ground for this argument are not fringe voices. They are a federal appellate judge and professors at Yale and the University of Minnesota. Their reading of the text and its historical antecedents is serious, sourced, and difficult to dismiss on the merits.
The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to do what Congress wouldn't and what lower courts have avoided: read the 14th Amendment as it was written, not as decades of political convenience have wished it to read. April 1 is not just a date on the docket. It is the first honest examination of a question the country has been told, for far too long, was not allowed to be asked.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is bringing back the very homeless encampment sweeps he campaigned on ending, a reversal forced by 19 deaths during a brutal cold stretch and more than 3,300 encampment complaints flooding the city's 311 system so far this year.
The sweeps are expected to restart as soon as Wednesday, with the Department of Homeless Services taking the lead on issuing notices. Cops and sanitation workers will still be on hand. The new process involves outreach workers visiting encampments repeatedly over seven days before the Department of Sanitation moves in to clear the site.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The approach mirrors what the city did under former Mayor Eric Adams.
Mamdani made ending encampment sweeps a centerpiece of his pre-office rhetoric, according to the New York Post. Back in December, he told reporters the practice was a failure that resulted in only a few people being placed into city shelters. When he took office on January 1, he moved fast: ordering DSNY and NYPD to leave encampments alone and not to touch anything resembling personal property nearby.
Then reality showed up.
Nineteen people died outside during the cold. Complaints poured in from every borough. City Council Speaker Julie Menin hauled the administration before a hearing last week and delivered a line that cut through the bureaucratic hedging:
"These New Yorkers should be alive today."
That's not a Republican talking. That's the City Council Speaker, a fellow Democrat, publicly holding Mamdani's feet to the fire over a policy that was supposed to be more compassionate than what came before it.
City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach framed the reversal the way spokespeople always do: not as a retreat, but as an evolution.
"When Mayor Mamdani took office, he paused the failed encampment sweep policies of the past, making clear that the city would no longer rely on approaches that simply moved people from block to block without real support."
Rauschenbach also described the new timeline as a feature, not a concession:
"The goal is to maximize placements into shelter and connect unhoused New Yorkers to the services they need so that when DSNY clears an encampment on day seven, meaningful progress has already been made."
Translation: we're doing the same thing the last mayor did, but we'd like credit for adding a week-long preamble. Mamdani's new budget does include 60 additional outreach workers, which is the administration's way of dressing the reversal in new clothes.
This is what happens when progressive governance collides with the unglamorous demands of running a city. The cycle is remarkably consistent:
An unnamed insider quoted in the reporting put it plainly:
"The fact they keep rolling back campaign promises shows they spent the summer only saying whatever made political sense."
That's not a conservative critique from the outside. That's coming from someone close enough to the operation to know how the sausage gets made. And what they're describing isn't a policy adjustment. It's the gap between what progressives say to win elections and what governing actually requires.
The fundamental problem with Mamdani's original approach wasn't administrative. It was philosophical. He treated encampment sweeps as inherently cruel, a system designed to harass the vulnerable. What he didn't reckon with is that leaving people in makeshift camps during a New York winter isn't mercy. It's abandonment with better PR.
Nineteen people are dead. The city received over 3,300 complaints from residents across all five boroughs, watching encampments grow unchecked. And the Department of Homeless Services was reportedly given no instructions on how to handle the situation after the sweeps were halted. The mayor removed the tool and offered no replacement.
This is the recurring flaw in progressive urban policy: conflating enforcement with cruelty, then discovering that the absence of enforcement doesn't produce compassion. It produces chaos, and sometimes death.
Mamdani now finds himself executing the Adams playbook while insisting it's something new. The seven-day outreach window and the 60 additional workers are real additions, but they sit on top of the same fundamental structure: the city identifies an encampment, sends people in, and eventually clears it. That's a sweep. Calling it something else doesn't change what it is.
The deeper question for New York is whether Mamdani's early months signal a mayor who learns from mistakes or one who simply retreats from them when the political cost gets high enough. The insider's observation about campaign promises rings true not because politicians break promises (they all do), but because this particular promise was so obviously untenable that making it in the first place suggests either naivety or cynicism.
Neither is reassuring when you're responsible for eight million people, and winter hasn't finished yet.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist who now runs America's largest city, dropped a $127 billion preliminary budget proposal on Tuesday that includes a 9.5% property tax increase affecting roughly three million residential units and 100,000 commercial properties. The proposal represents an $11 billion increase over the current fiscal year's $115.9 billion budget.
The catch: Mamdani says he doesn't actually want to raise property taxes. He wants the state to raise income taxes on the wealthy instead. If Governor Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature don't approve a 2% income tax increase on those earning more than $1 million, Mamdani warned he would be forced to impose the property tax hike on working and middle-class New Yorkers.
In other words, the mayor of New York City just used his own residents as hostages in a negotiation with Albany.
The city faces an estimated $5.4 billion budget gap, according to the New York Post. Mamdani's proposed property tax increase would generate approximately $3.7 billion, according to city officials. On top of that, he wants to draw more than $3.25 billion from the city's main reserves, plus additional millions from other savings accounts.
Governor Hochul pitched in $1.5 billion this week to help cover the deficit, but that barely dents a gap this size.
The budget also contains a few sizable cutbacks. Instead, it pours money into spending. The Department of Education alone would receive $38 billion, a $3 billion increase. The NYPD would get $6.38 billion, up $100 million. And the Law Department would receive $38 million to hire 200 new attorneys and 100 support staff.
Consider the math from a homeowner's perspective. A single-family home in Park Slope with a market value of $3.2 million and a city-assessed value of $44,000 would see its annual property taxes jump from roughly $8,700 to about $9,500. An Upper West Side condo assessed at $120,000 would go from $14,926 to $16,345 per year. The proposed rates break down as follows:
The last time New York City raised property taxes was after September 11, 2001. That increase came in response to a national tragedy and an unprecedented crisis. This one comes in response to a budget the mayor himself wrote.
Mamdani framed the entire exercise as a binary choice. At his press conference, flanked by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and budget director Sherif Soliman, he cast himself as reluctant:
"I do not want to raise property taxes."
Then he explained who he thinks should foot the bill instead:
"When faced with this crisis, the question is who should pay these taxes? I believe that it should be the wealthiest New Yorkers, the most profitable corporations. I believe that they can afford to pay a little bit more."
This is the socialist playbook dressed in moderate clothing. The preferred option is always a tax increase. The only question is which tax increase? Cutting spending, streamlining bureaucracy, and eliminating waste from a $127 billion budget: none of these appear to be serious considerations. The debate Mamdani wants is not whether to tax more, but whom to tax more.
And the political dynamics make the whole thing look like a theater. Hochul faces re-election this fall. She told reporters at an unrelated event on Tuesday that she was "not supportive of a property tax increase" and added, "I don't know that that's necessary." There has long been support among some state legislators for income tax hikes similar to what Mamdani proposed, but Hochul has voiced opposition to raising income taxes on the wealthy.
Political consultant George Arzt called it exactly what it is: "It's a strategy. It's posturing, for now." He added that Mamdani "is playing the same game every other mayor has played at this point in the budget process."
One unnamed Democratic insider was less diplomatic:
"It really is stunningly risky. Broad-based property tax increases are historically so deeply unpopular that he is essentially betting his political career on a game of chicken with Albany."
What makes this story remarkable is that the opposition isn't coming from Republicans. It's coming from Mamdani's own side.
City Comptroller Mark Levine warned that the property tax proposal would have "dire consequences" and said the city was under "the greatest fiscal strain since the Great Recession." His critique went further:
"Our property tax system is profoundly unfair and inconsistent, and an across-the-board increase in this tax would be regressive."
Regressive. That's a word progressives normally reserve for policies they accuse Republicans of supporting. Here, it's being lobbed at a democratic socialist mayor by his own comptroller.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who would need to approve any property tax increase, wasn't buying it either:
"At a time when New Yorkers are already grappling with an affordability crisis, dipping into rainy day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever."
One unnamed source captured the mood among city insiders: "They all know Hochul isn't going to raise taxes. Even progressives are saying what the hell is this. This whole thing is a mirage." Another source went further, calling it "one of the most outrageous, fiscally irresponsible things" and adding that Mamdani "is causing panic."
Andrew Rein, executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission, offered the most succinct rebuttal:
"The mayor should ensure that every one of the people's $127 billion is used well, before asking them to dig into their pockets."
Here is what the entire debate misses. New York City does not have a revenue problem. It has a $127 billion budget. The question that no one in city government seems willing to ask is whether a city needs to spend $127 billion in the first place.
Mamdani's preferred solution is a 2% income tax hike on millionaires. His backup plan is a 9.5% property tax hike on everyone. His third option, draining the rainy day fund by more than $3.25 billion, would leave the city exposed the next time an actual emergency arrives. What none of these options involves is spending less money.
Rein put it plainly: "The best choice is to eliminate spending that does not improve New Yorkers' lives and make government more efficient and effective."
That sentence could serve as the governing philosophy for any competent executive. But efficiency is not what democratic socialism produces. It produces $38 billion education budgets, 200 new government lawyers, and ultimatums demanding that someone else pay for it all.
The timeline ahead is tight. Albany's state budget is due April 1, though the state has a long history of missing that deadline. New York City's finalized budget must land by June 5 and take effect July 1. Between now and then, Mamdani, Hochul, Menin, and the state Legislature will engage in the kind of high-stakes negotiation that New York's political class treats as sport.
Property taxes remain the only taxes the mayor can control without state approval. That makes the threat real, even if the strategy is cynical. If Albany doesn't blink, three million residential units and 100,000 commercial properties absorb the hit.
New Yorkers who already pay some of the highest taxes in America are watching their new mayor propose even higher ones, with the justification that someone wealthier should really be paying instead. And when that someone wealthier declines to stick around for the privilege, the bill will land exactly where it always does: on the people who can't leave.
President Trump fired a pointed warning at British leaders this week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a clean energy memorandum with U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband during a European diplomacy tour that has all the subtlety of a 2028 campaign launch.
In an interview with Politico, Trump called the partnership "inappropriate," adding a characteristically unsparing assessment of the arrangement.
"The U.K.'s got enough trouble without getting involved with Gavin Newscum."
The rebuke came after Newsom spent the past week globe-trotting through Munich, signing agreements with foreign governments and openly trashing the sitting president on the international stage. He attended the Munich Security Conference, inked a cooperation pact with the Lviv region of Ukraine, and told an international audience that the current administration is merely "temporary" and will be "gone in three years."
For a governor who insists he's just doing state business, that's a lot of foreign policy rhetoric.
As Fox News reported, Newsom's European swing included two headline-grabbing agreements. The first, signed on Saturday, was a pact with the Lviv region of Ukraine that would involve California companies in "rebuilding and resiliency" efforts across defense, energy, and digital technologies. The second was the clean energy memorandum with Miliband, which Newsom's office claims would facilitate "nearly a billion dollars in new investment."
These agreements are typically structured as nonbinding memoranda of understanding and do not carry the force of federal treaties. It's worth sitting with that for a moment. The governor of a single state is flying overseas, staging signing ceremonies with foreign officials, and projecting a dollar figure that his own office generated with no independent verification, all while the agreements themselves carry no legal weight.
The State Department has historically encouraged "subnational diplomacy," particularly on trade, and governors from both parties routinely lead overseas economic missions. But there is a canyon of difference between a trade mission and what Newsom is doing. Trade missions don't typically involve telling foreign audiences that the American president is a temporary inconvenience.
Newsom has long been viewed by political strategists and analysts as a possible Democratic presidential contender in 2028. Nothing about his behavior in Munich suggests otherwise. This is not a governor managing California's economic interests abroad. This is a second-term Democrat who has run out of runway in Sacramento and is building a brand for what comes next.
Consider the posture. At the Munich Security Conference, Newsom aimed not just at the White House but at every foreign leader who has engaged constructively with the Trump administration.
"I can't take this complicity of people rolling over. I mean, handing out crowns, the Nobel prizes that are being given away ... it's just pathetic."
He previously told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that he "should have brought a bunch of knee pads" for world leaders who he believes have bowed down to the president's "transactional" diplomacy.
So the pitch to a Democratic primary electorate is taking shape:
It's audacious. It's also deeply unserious.
When Fox News Digital reached out for comment, Newsom's spokesperson delivered a response that read less like a governor's communications office and more like a campaign war room.
"Donald Trump is on his knees for coal and Big Oil, selling out America's future to China. Governor Newsom will continue to lead in his absence. Foreign leaders are rejecting Trump and choosing California's vision for the future."
Three sentences. Every single one is a campaign line. "Lead in his absence" does the most work: it frames Newsom not as a state executive cooperating with federal policy but as a rival head of state filling a vacuum. That's the 2028 thesis statement, delivered on the record by an official spokesperson.
The claim that "foreign leaders are rejecting Trump and choosing California's vision" is doing some heavy lifting as well. One energy secretary from a country currently navigating its own political turbulence signed a nonbinding memo. That's not a geopolitical realignment. It's a photo opportunity.
The deeper problem for Newsom is the contradiction sitting at the center of his argument. He wants to be taken seriously as a global leader while governing a state that can't keep its lights on during a heat wave, can't house its residents, and can't stop its population from fleeing to states with lower taxes and fewer regulations. He lectures foreign heads of state about growing a backbone while presiding over a state where small businesses buckle under compliance costs that Sacramento itself created.
Newsom insists California represents the future. But every U-Haul leaving Los Angeles for Austin tells a different story.
There's also the matter of federalism. Governors do not conduct foreign policy. They can promote trade. They can build economic relationships. But staging rival diplomatic events, signing agreements with wartime nations on defense cooperation, and publicly undermining the president's negotiating position with allies is something else entirely. It's not leadership. It's freelancing.
Trump's comments weren't just a swipe at Newsom. They were a message to any foreign government considering the California governor a back channel worth cultivating. When the president of the United States calls a partnership "inappropriate" and warns a nation's leaders by name, that registers in foreign ministries. Recent controversies over Arctic sovereignty and NATO funding have already tested relationships between Washington and its allies. No serious government wants to add friction with the White House over a nonbinding memo with Sacramento.
That's the part Newsom either doesn't understand or doesn't care about. Foreign leaders who engage with him aren't making a bet on California. They're making a bet against the current administration. And Trump just made clear that he's keeping score.
Newsom can fly to Munich. He can sign whatever memoranda he likes. He can call the president temporary. But the foreign leaders sitting across the table from him know something his spokesperson won't say out loud: a governor who has to travel six thousand miles to find an audience that takes him seriously has already told you everything about his standing at home.
An Obama-appointed federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to pay for airfare and provide travel documents to bring back hundreds of Venezuelan migrants—suspected members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang—who were deported to El Salvador. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg issued the order Thursday, declaring the administration must "remedy the wrong that it perpetrated" by removing them from the country.
The migrants would be taken into custody upon arrival. But the core demand is extraordinary: a single district court judge compelling the executive branch to reverse a completed deportation, fund the return trip, and hand suspected gang members the paperwork to board flights back to American soil.
In March 2025, President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to allow expedited removal of Venezuelan migrants suspected of belonging to TdA. This transnational criminal organization has embedded itself in American cities. Boasberg responded almost immediately with an order blocking those deportations.
The Supreme Court weighed in weeks later. In a 5-4 decision in April 2025, the justices lifted Boasberg's block, finding that the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C., when they should have done so in Texas. The highest court in the land said Boasberg's court wasn't even the right venue.
And yet according to Breitbart, here he is again—issuing orders from that same court, now demanding something far more dramatic than blocking a deportation. He wants one undone.
Boasberg framed his order as a matter of constitutional process. In his telling, the administration removed the migrants without affording them adequate opportunity to challenge their deportations:
"Were it otherwise, the Government could simply remove people from the United States without providing any process and then, once they were in a foreign country, deny them any right to return for a hearing or opportunity to present their case from abroad."
He further stated that the situation would never have arisen had the government afforded the plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them.
Set aside the legal theory for a moment and consider the practical reality. These are suspected members of a violent Venezuelan gang. They were in the United States illegally. The president invoked a law that has been on the books since the John Adams administration to remove them. The Supreme Court sided with the administration on the jurisdictional question. And a district judge is now ordering the government to buy plane tickets to bring them back.
The Trump administration has agreed to return the men to immigration custody if they arrive at a U.S. airport or border station on their own. But Department of Justice attorneys are pushing back against providing the men with letters that would help them board flights to the United States—a critical distinction.
There is a canyon between "we won't block your return" and "we will actively facilitate it." Boasberg's order bridges that canyon by force, demanding the administration not merely permit reentry but engineer it—airfare, documents, the works.
This is where judicial overreach stops being an abstraction and becomes an operational mandate. A judge is ordering the executive branch to spend taxpayer money transporting suspected gang members back into the country, the executive branch just removed them from.
The sequence is now familiar. The administration enforces immigration law. A district court judge—often in D.C., often appointed by a Democratic president—intervenes. The case climbs toward the Supreme Court. The administration wins on the merits or on jurisdiction. And the same judge finds a new angle to reassert control.
Boasberg was already overruled once on this very matter. The Supreme Court told him the case didn't belong in his courtroom. His response was not deference but escalation—an order more sweeping than the one the Court struck down.
The left has spent years insisting that "no one is above the law." Apparently, that principle has a carve-out for federal judges who keep issuing orders after the Supreme Court pulls the rug out from under them.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants suspected of gang ties were removed from the United States under a lawful act of Congress signed in 1798. The Supreme Court cleared the way for those removals. No,w a lower court judge wants to put them on planes headed back.
If this order stands, the precedent it sets dwarfs this single case. Any future deportation could be reversed by a sympathetic judge claiming insufficient process—after the fact, from a courtroom the Supreme Court already said lacked jurisdiction. Enforcement becomes provisional. Removal becomes temporary. And the executive branch's core immigration authority exists only at the pleasure of whichever district judge gets the filing first.
The administration removed suspected gang members from American communities. A judge wants them returned. Somewhere in that gap lives the question of who actually governs immigration policy in the United States—and right now, one man in a black robe is making a compelling case that it's him.
Nearly eight in ten asylum seekers are now being turned away by immigration judges, a dramatic reversal from the Biden era that signals the most consequential shift in American immigration enforcement in years. In the last quarter, asylum grant rates plummeted to roughly 20% — down from 50% as recently as May 2022, when the southern border was hemorrhaging record numbers of illegal crossings.
The numbers aren't subtle. Deportations have topped 30,000 every month since Trump took office. In the most recent December on record, 38,215 illegal immigrants were removed — nearly double the 19,265 deported in December 2023 under Biden. Daily apprehensions at the border have cratered to 245, a 95% drop from the Biden-era average of 5,110 per day.
The floodgates didn't close themselves. This is what happens when an administration decides the immigration system should enforce the law rather than process an invasion.
The Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: remove judges who weren't doing their jobs, and replace them with people who will. Over the past year, the administration fired in excess of 100 immigration judges. This month alone, the Department of Justice hired 33 new ones. Another 36 were brought on in October. The Pentagon has been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts on temporary assignments to attack the backlog.
The results are measurable. Immigration courts are now completing roughly 12,000 cases per month — nearly double the 6,000 to 7,000 monthly caseloads under Biden.
The DOJ framed the overhaul bluntly:
"After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system."
The New York Bar Association expressed "deep concern" over the judicial firings, which is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east. But the math tells a different story than the legal establishment's hand-wringing. A 3.38 million-case backlog still looms — and even at the current accelerated pace, clearing it would take an estimated 14 years. Queens County alone carries 105,635 pending cases, the third-largest backlog in the country, as New York Post reports.
When the system is that broken, half-measures aren't reforms. They're window dressing.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, offered a corrective that shouldn't need offering but clearly does:
"If you look at what asylum is supposed to be, it's a very narrow definition . . . You have to be able to demonstrate a credible fear and be able to articulate that credible fear of persecution."
He drove the point further:
"It's not because there's a gang that's doing business down the block or you can't stand your mother in law or you can't find a job."
For years, the asylum system was treated as a general-purpose admissions program. Anyone who showed up at the border and uttered the right words was funneled into a process that could take years to resolve — years spent living and working in the United States, often with little incentive to appear for a hearing that might never come. The 50% grant rate under Biden wasn't evidence of legitimate persecution on a massive scale. It was evidence of a system that had abandoned its own standards.
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge himself, connected the dots:
"It's having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate."
"Drive down" is doing interesting work in that sentence. A more honest framing: the grant rate is returning to something resembling what asylum law was designed to produce.
The policy debate never stays abstract for long. Not when the consequences have names.
Laken Riley was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, murdered by an illegal immigrant. Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and killed in 2023. Her attacker, illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez from El Salvador, received a life sentence. Matthew Denice was 23 when he was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Ecuador in Milford, Massachusetts, in 2011.
These cases became flashpoints not because they were isolated, but because they were preventable. Every one of them involved someone who should not have been in the country.
Patricia Morin, Rachel's mother, told The Post what millions of Americans already understood:
"That's what American voted for, they voted for safety… this is the top issue that got him elected, and he's keeping his word."
She didn't stop there:
"Democrats keep talking about how bad all this is and it's not compassionate, but it's not virtue when you only give compassion to the criminal and don't give a second thought to the victim who has died."
That's the contradiction the left has never been able to answer. Compassion without accountability isn't compassion — it's negligence with better branding.
The scale of what the Trump administration inherited is worth sitting with. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 2.76 million people crossed the southern border — a record. In 2023, more than 2.4 million migrants arrived at the Southwest border, with 3.2 million encounters nationwide. By August 2023, 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden's handling of the border in national polls.
Seventy percent. In a country that can't agree on pizza toppings, seven in ten Americans looked at the border and saw the same thing: failure.
Biden's own words from a 2019 Iowa campaign event aged like milk left in the sun:
"We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre."
He got his wish. Americans have a 3.38 million-case asylum backlog, overwhelmed courts, and communities paying the price for policies designed to sound generous on a debate stage rather than function in reality.
Maureen Maloney, vice president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, has been fighting for tighter borders since her son Matthew was killed in 2011. She didn't mince words:
"What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come."
She also acknowledged the sheer scale of the problem now facing enforcement:
"It's impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration."
Even with courts running at double capacity, even with deportations exceeding 30,000 a month, the math remains brutal. A 14-year timeline to clear the existing backlog means the damage from the Biden years will outlast multiple administrations. The top destinations for deportees — Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order — represent a pipeline that took years to build and won't be dismantled overnight.
But the trajectory has reversed. Courts are adjudicating cases faster. Judges with military backgrounds are applying the law as written rather than as activists wish it read. The asylum grant rate reflects what the statute demands — a narrow, specific standard of persecution — not a generalized sympathy for anyone who makes the journey north.
Patricia Morin put it simply:
"We have all these unvetted people that are here in America and we don't know if they really are who they say they are."
That used to be an unremarkable observation. Somewhere along the way, it became a controversial one. The fact that it no longer drives policy paralysis is the most important shift of all.
New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores told the world he walked away from Palantir — and millions of dollars — because he couldn't stomach the company's work with ICE.
A Bloomberg News report tells a different story: Bores resigned in February 2019, just five days after Palantir's legal department notified him of potential disciplinary action over sexually explicit comments allegedly made to a colleague.
Five days. Not a principled stand. A hasty exit.
The New York Post reported that Bores, 35, is now running to replace retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan's heavily Democratic 12th Congressional District — a race where his origin story as a tech worker who chose conscience over cash is central to his pitch. That pitch now has a credibility problem.
On January 23, Bores posted on X with the kind of moral clarity candidates love to project:
"I quit Palantir over its ICE contract, choosing principle over my career and millions of dollars."
He followed that with a second post framing himself as the target of corporate retaliation:
"They profited off of it, and are now using those funds to lie to New Yorkers and attack me."
It's a tidy narrative. A young software engineer stares down a powerful defense contractor, sacrifices a lucrative career, and emerges on the other side as a public servant. The kind of story Democratic primary voters in Manhattan devour.
Except Bloomberg's reporting — based on people familiar with the matter — suggests the timeline doesn't hold up.
According to the report, Bores worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2019. During his first year, he attended a client offsite meeting with Kimberly-Clark where an employee reportedly referenced tissue usage data and made what was described as an implicit reference to masturbation — noting that the top three reported tissue uses accounted for less than half of total usage, with the implication being obvious.
Years later, Bores allegedly recounted that anecdote to a colleague. A complaint was filed. Palantir's legal department sent Bores a notification of potential disciplinary action. Five days after that notification, he was gone.
Bloomberg's sources also reported that in his exit interview, Bores cited burnout and excessive travel — not ICE contracts — as his reasons for leaving.
Bores' spokeswoman, Alyssa Cass, pushed back aggressively. She called the Bloomberg report:
"A wildly overblown characterization from 'sources' within a company that has named Alex Bores public enemy #1."
Cass acknowledged the basics — that a complaint was filed and HR spoke to Bores about it — but disputed everything else. She told The Post:
"A complaint was filed, and HR asked Alex about it."
She added that:
"The matter was dropped."
As for the five-day timeline between the warning letter and his departure, Cass called it:
"Made up and the timeline proves it."
She said Bores had already secured another job offer before leaving Palantir. After his departure, he joined an AI-focused startup and later worked at fintech firm Promise Pay before launching a political career that landed him in the New York State Assembly in 2022.
Let's stipulate that retelling an off-color story from a client meeting may not be the scandal of the century. Workplace complaints exist on a spectrum, and the underlying incident — repeating a crude joke about tissue usage data — is hardly Harvey Weinstein territory.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that Bores built a campaign narrative around a noble resignation that appears, at minimum, to have been significantly more complicated than he let on. He didn't just omit context.
He actively constructed a heroic version of events and used it to fundraise, campaign, and position himself as a man of principle in a crowded Democratic primary.
If the Bloomberg timeline is accurate, Bores didn't quit Palantir to fight ICE. He quit Palantir because the walls were closing in — and then retrofitted the story into a political asset years later.
That's not a misjudgment. That's a fabrication strategy.
This is a familiar playbook on the progressive left: claim moral authority not from what you've actually done, but from the story you tell about what you've done. The résumé becomes mythology. The mythology becomes the campaign. And anyone who questions it is accused of acting in bad faith — in this case, supposedly on behalf of a vengeful corporation.
Bores has made artificial intelligence regulation and opposition to the ICE centerpieces of his congressional campaign. Both positions play well in a Manhattan district where the primary is the only election that matters.
But if the foundation of his candidacy — the reason voters should trust his judgment and his character — is a story that doesn't survive contact with a Bloomberg FOIA request, what exactly is he selling?
Financial disclosures show Bores and his wife hold between $2 million and $3.7 million in combined assets. He's not the scrappy idealist who gave it all up. He's a multimillionaire former tech worker who left one lucrative gig, moved through two more, and then decided to run for office with a convenient origin story.
The Post sought comment from both Palantir and Kimberly-Clark. Neither responded by publication time. Bloomberg's sources remain anonymous. The colleague who filed the complaint has not been identified.
That leaves voters in the 12th District with a straightforward question: Do you trust the man who told you one story, or the reporting that suggests it was another?
In a district that will almost certainly send a Democrat to Congress, the primary is everything. And in a primary, character is supposed to matter. Bores asked voters to believe he sacrificed millions for principle. Now they'll have to decide whether that sacrifice ever actually happened — or whether it was just another line on a carefully curated campaign page.
Manhattan Democrats deserve better than a candidate whose founding myth crumbles under basic reporting. Then again, they keep electing the ones whose myths crumble slowest.
Hillary Clinton stepped off a first-class ICE high-speed train at platform 22 in Munich's central station on Thursday, surrounded by aides and flanked by an armed German Federal police officer. The former Secretary of State had just completed the four-hour rail journey from Berlin — reportedly because a nationwide airline strike grounded hundreds of flights across Germany, including the ten hourly Lufthansa shuttles that normally run between the two cities.
The image writes itself: a former U.S. presidential candidate, once accustomed to Air Force jets and motorcades, climbing down from a Deutsche Bahn carriage because German unions decided Thursday was the day to walk off the job over retirement benefits.
Michaela Kuefner, Chief Political Editor at Deutsche Welle News, captured the scene:
"Hillary Clinton arrives by train from Berlin… No hassle from people asking about those files. No hot drinks because of a power failure in the bistro for half the trip."
No hot drinks. A power failure in the bistro car. It's the kind of detail that needs no editorial seasoning.
Clinton arrived ahead of the Munich Security Conference, which runs Friday through Sunday. But as Breitbart News reported, the real story isn't who's arriving by rail — it's the shadow that still hangs over this conference from last year, when Vice President JD Vance walked onto the same stage and delivered a speech that left Europe's diplomatic establishment in visible distress.
Vance, serving as President Trump's emissary, challenged European leaders directly on their own democratic commitments:
"For years we've been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values… But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials, threatening to cancel others, we have to ask if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them."
Conference boss Christoph Heusgen — a top German diplomat — broke down in tears in response. The speech forced a conversation that European elites had spent years avoiding: whether the continent's increasingly heavy-handed approach to speech regulation and electoral intervention was compatible with the democratic values it claimed to defend.
That conversation clearly hasn't ended.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio leads the U.S. delegation. According to the Associated Press, the conference "warily" awaits his arrival — a revealing word choice. U.S. officials indicated his speech is intended to be "less contentious but philosophically similar" to Vance's 2025 address.
Read that framing carefully. The AP treats an American official speaking plainly about democratic principles as something a European security conference must brace for. The wariness isn't about substance — it's about the discomfort that comes when someone says out loud what polite diplomatic circles would rather leave unsaid.
"Philosophically similar" is the key phrase. The administration isn't retreating from the core message Vance delivered. It's delivering it through a different voice, with a different tone — but the substance holds. Europe's allies are expected to live by the values they invoke when asking for American support. That's not contentious. That's the baseline.
What, exactly, brings Hillary Clinton to the Munich Security Conference in the current moment? The fact sheet doesn't say, and Clinton herself offered no public remarks upon arrival. She is there, presumably, in some unofficial capacity — a former Secretary of State still orbiting the international circuit that once defined her career.
There's an irony worth noting. Clinton arrives at a conference still reverberating from Vance's challenge to European democratic backsliding — the very kind of frank, uncomfortable diplomacy that the foreign policy establishment she represents spent decades avoiding. The old guard traveled to Munich to reassure. The current administration travels to Munich to recalibrate.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa told passengers with grounded domestic flights they could exchange tickets at no extra cost for Deutsche Bahn train passes. Hundreds of flights were cancelled in a single day because unions walked out over retirement benefits. Germany's infrastructure, once the pride of European efficiency, reduced Clinton and countless other travelers to four-hour rail commutes with no hot coffee.
The Munich Security Conference used to function as a comfortable annual ritual — Western leaders affirming their shared commitment to the transatlantic order, exchanging pleasantries, and returning home having changed nothing. Vance broke that pattern last year. Rubio appears poised to maintain it this year, not with provocation for its own sake, but with the simple insistence that words and actions align.
That shouldn't be a radical proposition. The fact that European diplomats greet it with tears and wariness tells you everything about how far the gap between rhetoric and reality has stretched.
Clinton rode the train to Munich. The world she helped build is the one being asked to account for itself when she gets there.
A federal judge struck down California's ban on face coverings for federal law enforcement officers this week, handing the Trump administration a clean legal victory and exposing a rift between Governor Gavin Newsom and the state senator who authored the law.
Judge Christina Snyder blocked enforcement of the mask ban on Monday while upholding a separate California law requiring federal agents to visibly display identification. The ruling turned on a straightforward problem: the law banned federal agents from covering their faces during operations but exempted state and local police. The court deemed that the carve-out was unfair.
The result is a law that was designed to obstruct federal immigration enforcement — struck down because its authors couldn't even write it consistently.
Newsom signed the mask ban last fall in response to ICE officers wearing face coverings during immigration operations in Los Angeles. At the time, the governor framed the issue in the most dramatic terms possible:
"Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, people disappearing, no due process, no oversight, zero accountability, happening in the United States of America today."
"These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government."
State Senator Scott Wiener authored the bill and reportedly intended it to apply to all law enforcement — federal, state, and local. But the version Newsom signed exempted state police, a carve-out that reportedly came from negotiations with the governor's own office, according to the Daily Mail.
That exemption became the law's fatal flaw. You cannot argue that masked law enforcement is a threat to civil liberties and then protect the right of your own state troopers to do the same thing. The court noticed.
What followed the ruling was not a unified Democratic response. It was a public finger-pointing exercise.
Newsom's press office wasted no time putting the loss on Wiener:
"Mr. Wiener rejected our proposed fixes to his bill — language that was later included in the identification bill the court upheld today. He chose a different approach, and today the court found his approach unlawful."
Wiener, for his part, immediately pledged to try again:
"Now that the Court has made clear that state officers must be included, I am immediately introducing new legislation to include state officers. We will unmask these thugs and hold them accountable. Full stop."
So the governor's team says the senator refused their fixes. The senator says he'll write a new version that does what the governor apparently wanted all along. The only people who came out of this with a clear message were the ones who sued to stop it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the ruling as part of a broader pattern of courtroom success:
"Following our arguments, a district court in California BLOCKED the enforcement of a law that would have banned federal agents from wearing masks to protect their identities."
"These federal agents are harassed, doxxed, obstructed, and attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs. We have no tolerance for it."
"We will continue fighting and winning in court for President Trump's law-and-order agenda."
The Trump administration sued to block the mask ban back in November, arguing California lacked the authority to regulate federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security urged authorities to ignore the law entirely. The court's ruling vindicated that position.
There's a reason ICE agents wear face coverings during operations. They work in hostile environments where activists film them, post their faces online, and target them for harassment. Bondi's statement pointed to a reality that California's leadership would prefer to ignore: the people enforcing immigration law face real threats from the people who oppose it.
This was never really about masks. It was about obstruction — finding any procedural lever to make federal immigration enforcement harder, slower, and more dangerous for the agents carrying it out. If you can force agents to show their faces, you give the doxxing machine fresh ammunition. If you can tie up enforcement operations in state-level compliance requirements, you create friction where the federal government is supposed to operate freely.
Newsom tipped his hand on Tuesday when he suggested the ruling should inspire a federal mask ban:
"Based on the court's decision, I think we should move in the opposite direction. We should have a federal mask ban."
"I don't believe federal agents should be running roughshod over the Constitution, putting communities that are already on edge in more terror and more distress by having masks on. No other law enforcement agency operates like this."
The governor's office added:
"No badge and no name mean no accountability."
But the court upheld the identification requirement. Federal agents will be required to visibly display identification. That's the accountability mechanism — and it survived. The mask ban was something else entirely, and the court saw through it.
Wiener says he'll reintroduce the legislation with state officers included. Whether Newsom signs a version that applies to his own state police remains an open question — and a revealing one. It's easy to demand transparency from federal agents enforcing laws you don't like. It's harder when the same standard applies to officers under your command.
California's Democratic leadership wanted to build a legal wall around illegal immigrants. Instead, they built a law so poorly constructed that it collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The court didn't need to reach the federal supremacy question. The equal protection problem was enough.
When your law fails because you carved out an exception for your own side, the court isn't handing your opponents a win. You handed it to them yourself.