The Trump Report 9/4/2025
Echoing the flights that took innocent men to a Salvadorian prison, the Trump administration tried to fly a large number of refugee children to Guatemala after 2 AM on Saturday. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan worked through the night to block the flights, ordering children removed from one flight which had already been boarded. The timing here was absolutely intentional. Judge Sooknanan started making phone calls at 3AM in the morning on a holiday weekend and was predictably unable to reach anyone at the appropriate agencies for hours. In a hearing, the government said all of these children were being returned to their parents who had requested their return. They lied. (Drew Ensign, the lawyer for the government in this hearing is already under investigation for contempt because of the lies the government told about the removals to El Salvador.)
Several of the children expressed their fears of being sent to the country. Some of the parents in Guatemala expressed they did not want their children removed from the United States. Some of the children said their parents abused them and were fearful of returning to them. Two of the children do not even HAVE any family in Guatemala.
There are several articles about the ridiculous legal justification the government tried to argue in court here, but the bottom line is that the government once again tried to remove a large number of migrants to a country where they would face danger while knowingly doing this in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend in an attempt to avoid judicial intervention. When that intervention happened anyways, they lied to the court about the removals. Again. Anna Bower, of Lawfare, had an excellent summation of the hearing where the above information is taken from.
Speaking of lacking legal jurisdiction, the US military destroyed a boat carrying 11 people on its way to Trinidad & Tobago. Marco Rubio said the boat was carrying drugs and the people on it were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Yes, that’s one of the gangs they said men were members of to justify their illegal removals to El Salvador. Quite simply, there are no Constitutional or legal justifications for this strike. In fact, as of last night, the Pentagon was still trying to figure out under what legal authority they could tell the public the strike took place.
The US military killed 11 people without bothering to figure out if their killings were legal. Multiple spokesmen for the government have justified the strike by saying the boat was carrying drugs. Trafficking drugs is not a capital offense. Rubio openly said the boat could have been intercepted rather than destroyed. The idea there was some sort of immediate threat to the United States is absurd given where this strike happened, marked by an X here:
Medicare is going to start using outsourced AI companies to review claims, paying a bounty for any denials. US health insurance companies have been doing something similar for years now and the results have been wildly inaccurate.
The whistleblower at the Social Security Administration who recently exposed that USDS (Doge) employees had copied the entire SSA database onto an unsecure server was forced to resign.
To justify sending federal troops into DC, the White House cited journalist Benny Johnson’s claim that his home in DC had been “burned to the ground” and murders took place on his front lawn. Johnson was fired from Buzzfeed for widespread plagiarism. He was then suspended from IJR for a separate act of plagiarism. Last year it was revealed that the Russian government was funding Johnson’s journalism. So it’s of no great shock to learn that his claim of murders on his lawn and his house burning down were outright lies, much like the White House lies about high crime rates in the cities they are conducting these operations in.
There have been several court victories since my last newsletter so I’ll be closing with positive stories.
Another court has declared the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs illegal. The power to levy taxes is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution - as a power of Congress, not the president. While Congress has passed laws giving a limited ability to raise tariffs in certain emergency situations, the justifications the administration has given are all over the place and do not rise to the level of emergency. In several instances their justification of an emergency state was merely “trade deficits” which are not emergencies. He has also imposed tariffs on multiple countries we have trade SURPLUSES with. The court’s decision will not take effect until mid-October. Trump has already appealed to the Supreme Court. This should be a slam dunk case - authority is not given to the president to raise tariffs. However, predicting what this Supreme Court will do in this case is more or less impossible.
A court has ruled that the government’s cancellation of funding to Harvard was both illegal and retaliatory. The judge frequently quoted the president himself saying that every time Harvard fought back, he would take away more money from them.
This topic has come up several times, but OMB Director Russel Vought has argued for years that the president controls spending and may simply not spend funds allocated by Congress for any reason at any time. There is no legal basis to this view as the Constitution, like with tariffs, explicitly gives spending power to Congress. A judge just today enforced the Constitutional view of the matter. Vought has been withholding billions in foreign aid mandated by Congress, the Republican Congress. That isn’t legal. This is one of many cases working their way to the Supreme Court over whether the president can unilaterally decide not to spend money required by the laws passed by Congress. (There is of course a mechanism for the president to prevent the government from spending what Congress mandates - he could have vetoed the law requiring said spending.)
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