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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
Monday, February 10, 2025
Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say - The New York Times
Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say
"Law professors have long debated what the term means. But now many have concluded that the nation faces a reckoning as President Trump tests the boundaries of executive power.

There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis, but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.
It can also be obvious, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” he said on Friday. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”
His ticked off examples of what he called President Trump’s lawless conduct: revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal spending, shutting down an agency, removing leaders of other agencies, firing government employees subject to civil service protections and threatening to deport people based on their political views.
That is a partial list, Professor Chemerinsky said, and it grows by the day. “Systematic unconstitutional and illegal acts create a constitutional crisis,” he said.
The distinctive feature of the current situation, several legal scholars said, is its chaotic flood of activity that collectively amounts to a radically new conception of presidential power. But the volume and speed of those actions may overwhelm and thus thwart sober and measured judicial consideration.
It will take some time, though perhaps only weeks, for a challenge to one of Mr. Trump’s actions to reach the Supreme Court. So far he has not openly flouted lower court rulings temporarily halting some of his initiatives, and it remains to be seen whether he would defy a ruling against him by the justices.
“It’s an open question whether the administration will be as contemptuous of courts as it has been of Congress and the Constitution,” said Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “At least so far, it hasn’t been.”
That could change. On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance struck a confrontational tone on social media. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote.
Professor Shaw said a clash with the courts would only add to a crisis that is already underway. “A number of the new administration’s executive orders and other executive actions are in clear violation of laws enacted by Congress,” she said.
“The administration’s early moves,” she added, “also seem designed to demonstrate maximum contempt for core constitutional values — the separation of powers, the freedom of speech, equal justice under law.”
Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, added that a crisis need not arise from clashes between the branches of the federal government.
“It’s a constitutional crisis when the president of the United States doesn’t care what the Constitution says regardless whether Congress or the courts resist a particular unconstitutional action,” she said. “Up until now, while presidents might engage in particular acts that were unconstitutional, I never had the sense that there was a president for whom the Constitution was essentially meaningless.”
The courts, in any event, may not be inclined or equipped to push back. So much is happening, and so fast, that even eventual final rulings from the Supreme Court rejecting Mr. Trump’s arguments could come too late. After the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are disassembled, say, no court decision can recreate them.
In many cases, of course, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority may be receptive to Mr. Trump’s arguments. Its decision in July granting him substantial immunityfrom prosecution embraced an expansive vision of the presidency that can only have emboldened him.
Members of that majority are, for instance, likely to embrace the president’s position that he is free to fire leaders of independent agencies.
The court may nonetheless issue an early, splashy ruling against Mr. Trump to send a signal about its power and independence. Striking down Mr. Trump’s order directing officials to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants would seem to be a good candidate, as it is at odds with the conventional understanding of the Constitution and the court’s precedents.
Such a decision would have an added benefit: It would be hard to disobey. From its earliest days, the Supreme Court has been wary of issuing rulings that might be ignored.
“I’m reminded of Marbury v. Madison, when the government did not even bother to show up before the Supreme Court to defend its position — strongly suggesting it would flout any court order against it,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Even as the court ruled that the administration of Thomas Jefferson had acted unlawfully, she said, “the court carefully crafted its opinion in that case to avoid a ruling requiring executive branch compliance.”
Much has changed since that 1803 decision, and the Supreme Court’s stature and authority has grown. “Nonetheless,” Professor Frost said, “the Supreme Court may find it hard to defend the laws Congress enacted against executive usurpation when the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to do the same.”
Professor Karlan said she worried that the justices would rule for Mr. Trump for fear that he would ignore decisions rejecting his positions. “The idea that courts should preserve the illusion of power by abdicating their responsibilities would just make the constitutional crisis even worse,” she said.
Mr. Trump has already disregarded one Supreme Court decision, its ruling last monthupholding a federal law, passed by lopsided bipartisan majorities, requiring TikTok to be sold or banned. Mr. Trump instead ordered the Justice Department not to enforce the law for 75 days, citing as authority for the move his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States.”
Defiance of Supreme Court decisions is not unheard-of. Southern states, for instance, for years refused to follow Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that banned segregation in public schools, engaging in what came to be known as “massive resistance.”
The Brown decision is now almost universally viewed as a towering achievement. But its enforcement required President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide to send members of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., to escort Black students through an angry white mob.
Not all presidents gave the court’s rulings the same respect. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. A probably apocryphal but nonetheless potent comment is often attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Even before this weekend, Mr. Vance has said that Mr. Trump should ignore the Supreme Court. In a 2021 interview, he said Mr. Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.”
He added: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took note of such threats in his year-end report in December.
“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s.”
“Within the past few years, however,” the chief justice went on, “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
That view has many supporters, though some use caveats. “It would be an extremely grave matter for a president to defy an actual (unstayed, in-effect) order of a federal court in a case that is indisputably in the court’s jurisdiction,” Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator, wrote on social media.
But considering discrete clashes may be relying on an outdated paradigm.
“One way to look at the administration’s assault on legal barriers is that it is seeking to establish ‘test cases’ to litigate and win favorable Supreme Court decisions,” Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith wrote in their Executive Functions newsletter. “But the typical test case is a carefully developed, discrete challenge to statutory or judge-made law with some good faith basis.”
Mr. Goldsmith is a law professor at Harvard and a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Bauer was White House counsel for President Barack Obama. They are students of Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the powers of the president.
Mr. Trump’s executive orders have some features suggesting that they mean to test legal theories in the Supreme Court, they wrote. “But in the aggregate,” they added, “they seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to ‘amend’ Article II across a broad front.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak"
Sunday, February 09, 2025
Relief for immigrants as legal services restored after Trump-induced chaos | US immigration | The Guardian
Relief for immigrants as legal services restored after Trump-induced chaos
"Asylum seekers and others have better access to their legal rights after a court temporarily lifts a stop-work order

Immigrants and asylum seekers caught up in Donald Trump’s mass enforcement crackdown will at least have a better chance at knowing their legal rights – for now – after a court intervened to restore some vital advice services.
Last month, the federal government issued a stop-work order targeting programs that provide information and guidance to people facing deportation, via services such as independent legal help desks.
But the administration was promptly sued and a temporary court order was issued that restarted four programs that had been abruptly halted by the Department of Justice.
Even though short-lived, that unexpected break in legal services took its toll, after a chaotic week and a half of furloughs, cancelled detention visits and general confusion created a domino effect of inefficiencies within the US’s overloaded immigration court system.
The temporary court order restoring business as usual may be just that – temporary – as the Trump administration and its allies continue to fixate on attacking the few federal programs that secure some semblance of due process for immigrants.
“Often the people providers meet with are fleeing violence. They are just trying to protect their families and stay with their communities. They’re just trying to attend church, they’re just trying to attend school. So I don’t know in what world this makes sense,” said Kel White, associate director of learning and development at the Acacia Center for Justice, which administers the four programs targeted by the justice department’s stop-work order.
Across the US, about two-thirds of people fighting in the courts against being forced to repatriate are unrepresented. Some are behind bars in remote, isolated facilities with restricted access to the internet. And they have no right to appointed counsel, like in the criminal court system, which makes hiring an attorney a costly and often untenable prospect.
So when contracted legal service providers received the justice department’s order to pause three federally funded legal orientation programs and one legal representation program on 22 January, some of the country’s most vulnerable people lost access to their first or only touchpoints with credible legal advice.
“What we’re really concerned about is that this is perhaps more intentional and part of a broader effort to ensure that people don’t have access to information, and don’t have access to counsel,” said Laura St John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
On the ground, fallout was swift: posters with details about where to receive legal help were pulled down at detention centers. Organizations serving immigrants were denied permission to do group presentations for detainees, even on their own dime.
Vulnerable children traveling alone were no longer being assigned lawyers. And even as affected legal service providers sued for reinstatement of the programs – in a separate lawsuit from one that ultimately restored operations – some were also being forced to consider layoffs.
“Why create these inefficiencies? Why impact our communities in this way?” White asked. “These are very basic, simple programs that provide essential information about due process.”
When, for example, the Florence project gives group legal orientations to detainees in Arizona, presenters start with the fundamentals: why people are detained, what they should expect in the courtroom, and what the judge’s and government attorney’s roles are. They also describe non-citizens’ rights during hearings. Then they explain eligibility requirements for a vast array of immigration pathways – all the way up to US citizenship.
“It’s making sure people understand what’s available to them, but also when there is nothing available, which does happen with some regularity, that people don’t waste their time, effort and energy fighting for a case that doesn’t exist,” St John said.
Similarly, in Chicago, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) runs a court help desk – one of many nationwide – where people in immigration proceedings arrive knowing very little. So help desk staff do information sessions, file mandatory forms before deadlines and keep immigrants from being wrongly deported through appeals. Overwhelmed judges and court personnel often refer confused families their way.
“Taking away the immigration court help desk, the legal orientation programs, all of this is really engineered to create the kind of chaos that will lead to unlawful deportations,” said Azadeh Erfani, policy director at the NIJC.
One of the documents the NIJC’s staffers often help to file updates someone’s outdated or erroneous court location, so that, for instance, a mother with a five-year-old child doesn’t have to drop everything and travel from Chicago to Denver for court – or worse, miss her court date and be ordered to leave the country as a no-show.
Without programs like the NIJC’s, untold numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers would probably be deported without ever seeing a judge, all because of an unfiled form.
“I think what’s lost sometimes is that people have risked their lives to get to this point,” said Adela Mason, director for two of the targeted orientation programs at Acacia. “They’ve traveled across multiple countries, often in life-threatening circumstances. People aren’t trying to evade their court date. They’ve fought for sometimes years to get before a judge and present their claim.
“And so for them to lose that opportunity … because they didn’t know that they had to fill out X form as part of asking to change their case to X city, it’s just so unjust.”
During the programs’ freeze, legal service providers got very little information from the justice department. Even now, some detention centers have delayed rescheduling visits. Legal providers are having to renegotiate to get their informational posters back on the walls, and they are still waiting for rosters to know who is new to the facilities where they are contracted for orientations.
Meanwhile, some organizations are bringing back whiplashed staff members who were just furloughed, and judges will need to reschedule court dates after missed consultations.
“We’re celebrating that we are back providing services to our immigrant community who needs those services, and to our courts who need that efficiency,” White said. “But we are living in a world of uncertainty now.”
A Guide to the Lawsuits Against the Trump Executive Orders - The New York Times
A Quick Guide to the Lawsuits Against the Trump Orders
"Dozens of suits have been filed that seek to stop some of President Trump’s executive orders. Here’s a brief rundown.

By Mattathias Schwartz and Seamus Hughes
Mattathias Schwartz reports on the federal courts from Philadelphia.
The legal war over President Trump’s blizzard of executive actions is intensifying, with new lawsuits and fresh rulings emerging now day and night.
Judges are already making their mark: As of Saturday, eight rulings have at least temporarily paused the president’s initiatives. Other cases have not been decided. No matter the initial rulings by judges, many decisions are likely to be appealed, and some might reach the Supreme Court in the months to come.
The dozens of lawsuits fall into four main categories.
Immigration
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — both legal and illegal — has resulted in at least 10 lawsuits, seven of which challenge his executive order revoking universal birthright citizenship. The plaintiffs seeking to defend the 14th Amendment’s longstanding guarantee to birthright citizenship include two groups of state attorneys general, nonprofits representing pregnant mothers, and an attorney from Orange County, Calif., who is representing his pregnant wife.
So far, the judges hearing these cases have been skeptical of Mr. Trump’s move, issuing two preliminary injunctions that have put the president’s order on ice. But one of the cases yet to be heard is before Judge Timothy James Kelly of the District of Columbia, who was nominated to the bench by Mr. Trump.
The other lawsuits against the president’s immigration policies challenge immigration agents’ authority to enter houses of worship; a memo that speeds up and broadens the scope of deportations; and an order that makes it harder for refugees to claim asylum in the United States. On Friday, San Francisco and other cities sued to block an executive order that would withhold federal funds from cities that do not assist with enforcing Trump administration immigration policies.
Budget Freezes and Firings
This category of litigation will likely grow as the administration attempts to assert its control over federal employees, lay the groundwork for potential mass firings and withhold spending that has been previously appropriated by Congress.
Mr. Trump’s attempt to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal funding has run aground in two cases, one filed by a group of nonprofits in conjunction with Democracy Forward, and another by a group of 22 state attorneys general. An effort to gut the United States Agency for International Development is also at least partially on hold.
The administration’s “Fork in the Road” offer, sent by email to roughly two million federal employees by the government’s Office of Personnel Management, encouraging them to resign, was blocked, for now, by a Massachusetts judge on Thursday.
Three lawsuits challenge Mr. Trump’s effort to overhaul the civil service, stripping away job protections from tens of thousands of employees and giving the White House unilateral firing authority if they fail to “faithfully implement administration policies.”
Other lawsuits challenge the Trump administration’s attempts to unilaterally fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, one of several agencies that are supposed to be independent of the executive branch. A lawsuit to stop Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive data at the Treasury Department yielded an agreement to do so for now.
Transgender Rights
Two lawsuits challenge an effort by the Trump administration to force the transfer of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing, and to deny them gender-transition medical care. One of those suits led to a restraining order that would temporarily keep the new policy from being carried out.
Out of more than 150,000 federal inmates, fewer than 50 are transgender women who are housed in women’s facilities, according to an administration official.
Other lawsuits address Mr. Trump’s attempts to ban transgender people from serving in the military, to deny federal funding from hospitals that offer gender-transition care to people under the age of 19, and to prevent transgender people from having their identities reflectedon their U.S. passports.
Jan. 6 Investigators
Two groups of F.B.I. agents and bureau employees sued to block Mr. Trump from releasing the names of agents and staff members who participated in the investigations into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to head off what they fear is a looming purge. On Friday, the government agreed not to release the names while the case was being heard by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the District of Columbia, a nominee of President Biden.
Charlie Savage, Zach Montague, Madeleine Ngo and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting."
Saturday, February 08, 2025
Why is Trump punishing South Africa and who are the Afrikaners he wants to give refugee status to? | AP News
Why is Trump punishing South Africa and who are the Afrikaners he wants to give refugee status to?
"CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump followed through on his promise to punish South Africa by signing an executive order Friday stopping all aid to the country over what he called a human rights violation against a white minority group.
The Trump administration says a land expropriation law South Africa recently passed was “blatantly” discriminatory against its white Afrikaners, who are descendants of Dutch and other European colonials. The Trump administration said the South African government was allowing violent attacks against Afrikaner farming communities.
South African soldiers line the street leading to Cape Town’s city hall where South African President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his annual state of the union address, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht)
It also accused South Africa of supporting “bad actors” in the world, including the militant Palestinian group Hamas, Russia and Iran.
Land distribution in South Africa has been a complicated and highly emotive issue with racial connotations for more than 30 years since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule in 1994.
It was thrust into the global spotlight after Trump and his South African-born adviser Elon Musk criticized the South African government’s policies as anti-white, sometimes with false statements.
What is the law Trump is referring to?
The new Expropriation Act gives the South African government scope to expropriate land from private parties, but only if it’s in the public interest and under certain conditions. Trump referred to it last Sunday when he first announced his intention to stop funding to South Africa.
He said South Africa’s government was doing “terrible things” and claimed land was being confiscated from “certain classes.” That’s not true, and even groups in South Africa who are challenging the law say no land has been confiscated. The South African governmentsays private property rights are protected and Trump’s description of the law includes misinformation and “distortions.”
However, the law has prompted concern in South Africa, especially from groups representing parts of the white minority, who say it will target them and their land even though race is not mentioned in the law.
Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, right uses a shuttle the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
The law is tied to the legacy of the racist apartheid system, and colonialism before that, and is part of South Africa’s efforts over decades to try and find a way to right historic wrongs.
Under apartheid, Black people had land taken away from them and were forced to live in designated areas for non-whites. Now, whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s population of 62 million but own approximately 70% of the private farming land, and the government says that inequality needs to be addressed.
Who are Afrikaners?
Afrikaners are a group of white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers who arrived around 370 years ago. They speak Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, and make up many of South Africa’s rural farming communities.
Afrikaners were at the heart of the apartheid regime, and tensions between some Afrikaner groups and Black political parties have lingered after apartheid, although South Africa has largely been successful in reconciling its many racial groups and most Afrikaners consider themselves part of the new South Africa.
Some examples of Afrikaners who gained international prominence include EFC fighter Dricus du Plessis, golfers Ernie Els and Louis Oosthuizen, and actor Charlize Theron.
Trump’s executive order addresses serious human rights violations in South Africa, according to his administration, and says the South African government has allowed violent attacks on Afrikaner farmers and their families. Trump said the U.S. will establish a plan to resettle white South African farmers and their families as refugees.
How is Elon Musk involved?
The Tesla billionaire and Trump ally was born and raised in South Africa but left after high school in the late 1980s, when South Africa was still under the apartheid regime.
He has for years criticized the current leadership in his homeland, accusing them of anti-white policies and ignoring or even encouraging a “genocide” with regards to the killings of some white farmers. Those killings are at the center of claims by conservative commentators — and now amplified by Trump and Musk — that South Africa is allowing attacks on white farmers as a means to remove them.
The South African government has condemned the killings and says they are part of the country’s desperately high violent crime rates across the board. Experts say there is no evidence of genocide and the killings make up a very small percentage of homicides. For example, a group that records farm attacks says 49 farmers or their families were killed in 2023, while there were more than 27,000 homicides in the country that year.
Musk also accused South Africa this week of having “racist ownership laws,” an apparent reference to his failure to get a license in the country for his Starlink satellite internet service because it doesn’t meet affirmative action criteria.
What does Trump’s order do?
Trump’s order stops hundreds of millions of dollars a year the U.S. gives South Africa, most of it to help its HIV/AIDS response. The U.S. gave South Africa around $440 million last year and funds 17% of South Africa’s HIV program through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Parts of that funding had already been threatened by Trump’s global aid freeze, but it will now all be stopped in a major blow to South Africa’s health sector. South Africa has around 8 million people living with HIV — with 5.5 million of them receiving antiretroviral medication — and U.S. funding is vital in supporting the largest national HIV/AIDS program in the world.
Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa delivers a speech during a plenary session in the Congress Hall, during the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Michael Buholzer/Keystone via AP)
The executive order also said South Africa had taken an anti-American stance — even “led the charge” — on many issues, accusing it of supporting Hamas, Russia and Iran, and being too close to China’s ruling Communist Party.
South Africa has long been a supporter of Palestinians and a critic of Israel and has maintained close ties to Russia because of its help in fighting apartheid. Trump’s order appears to require a significant shift in South Africa’s foreign policy to allow the aid to start again."