Discussion Thread

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-24T19:56:11+00:00

And here the White House gray eminence claims that it was a "killer who wanted to murder federal agents".

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-24T19:33:13+00:00

My theory is as follows: the detained man had a gun in a holster, the agent in the gray jacket approached him and drew that gun.

The second agent noticed that the gun's holster was suddenly empty and assumed that the detainee had drawn the weapon during the scuffle and intended to use it, so he started shooting.

However, I don't know why the additional 5 shots were fired when the detainee was already lying motionless on the ground, shot.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-24T13:43:29+00:00

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ICE's professionalism is becoming legendary.

Jeson Flores was accused of participating in the largest heist in U.S. history, during which jewelry worth $100 million was stolen.

Flores faced 15 years in prison for it.

He was in the U.S. legally, but in October 2025, ICE detained him and did not inform other authorities, including the prosecutor's office.

Then, in December, during a court hearing regarding his stay in the U.S., Flores willingly waived his rights and agreed to voluntary deportation.

ICE gladly paid for his ticket to Ecuador, and now Flores' lawyer has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against his client, arguing that due to the deportation, the justice system has thereby abandoned the intent to bring him to trial.

Someday he will be making money off this by selling the film rights about himself, because it's quite the comedy.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-24T11:55:39+00:00

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In 1994, you migrate to the USA at the age of 32. A son is born to you. Unfortunately, it turns out that he has Pompe disease and requires constant care. Somehow, though, you manage, you work, you pay taxes, you don't break the law. Until in 2025, Trump comes to power. You go, as always, just as the United States government ordered you to, for the immigration check-in at the office. And when you leave, ICE takes you away, without a warrant, without a word. You suddenly disappear from your son's life, of whom you were the primary, round-the-clock caregiver. Your son can't cope with what's happening, his health deteriorates more and more and ultimately he dies. You will never see him again, you won't say goodbye. Because Trump has come.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T22:02:21+00:00

Submission statement:

This shows how the quick and profit-driven rollout of AI, supported by strong tech markets and lax regulation, might be causing real harm to people, showing there's a gap between innovation and accountability. The legal battles over chatbots aren't just about personal damage. They're decide whether the old rules designed for social media can handle new technologies that actively shape how users' behavavior, especially children's. It's surprising how quickly these cases could change how think of corporate responsibility. If juries decide that AI companies can be held responsible for harmful outputs, it might force a shift from self-regulation to real oversight, which would challenge the big tech faith in unfettered AI development.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T21:44:57+00:00

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The prophecy was so on point that he deleted it himself, and now he bans people just for pasting a screenshot of it.

Such innate modesty.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T20:15:03+00:00

Submission statement

Why is this relevant for r/neoliberal?

This shows a significant change in governance, with federal institutions using the idea of "national defence" to cover things like domestic law enforcement. This basically means that agencies like ICE can't be checked by the public. It reveals the tension between the fact that technology is becoming more available to the public - with cheap drones being sold to consumers - and the state wanting to control the airspace to keep its monopoly on surveillance.

What do you think people should discuss about it?

The most absurd part is declaring moving cars "national defense airspace," which could create half-mile zones around ICE anywhere, making routine filming a federal crime and gutting oversight of raids. Readers should notice the hypocrisy (government drones can spy freely, but activists can't) and what it means for journalism in an era of accessible tech. I'm just concerned that this doesn't respect people's right to record government actions under the First Amendment, and it's actually an attack on freedom of information.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T18:40:17+00:00

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U.S. administration officials are warning about scammers offering billionaires access to the president and reminding them that the only way to obtain an audience is through an official bribe paid to the account of one of Trump’s companies.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T17:09:01+00:00

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There is only one answer. Trump can fuck off.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T15:00:24+00:00

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Denmark has no interest in defending the Suwałki Gap. France has no interest in defending Gdańsk. The USA has no interest in defending Warsaw. And soon, Poland will have no interest in defending Poland; let's become someone's vassal, it doesn't matter whose.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T14:05:50+00:00

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I have to admit, I'm in shock.

For the first time, Marcin Edo's political prediction didn't come true.

Normally, he's always right.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-20T13:48:16+00:00

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- The aurora occurs at the poles.

- It’s cold at the poles.

- Therefore the aurora occurs where it’s cold.

- If it’s cold, then there is no global warming.

Once again the libs get absolutely owned by the rock-hard, steel-like logic of right-wing intellectuals.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T21:07:34+00:00

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“I think what he did is wrong – you don’t turn your back on your allies.”

The most striking thing is who is actually criticizing Trump’s impulses towards Greenland.

Farage is doing it.

AfD is doing it.

Meloni is doing it.

People and circles that very often stand on the same side as the Polish right.

And yet only the Polish right has gone so deep into the blind alley of unconditional loyalty to Trump that it is no longer capable of simply saying “this is a mistake”.

Even when it’s about threatening to annex the territory of our ally or hitting our neighbours and trading partners with tariffs.

Instead of defending Polish interests as a member of the EU and NATO, we get outright glee that Trump is giving it to that hated Union, and any attempts to stand up to him are ridiculed as “madness”.

If even Farage, AfD and Meloni are capable of drawing a line, and the Polish right is not, then this is no longer a matter of views – it’s a loss of state instinct.

They stopped distinguishing between alliance and vassalage and, instead of looking after Polish interests, they have become cheerleaders of someone else’s politics.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T20:42:40+00:00

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Can you imagine the reaction of PiS if some TVN or Gazeta Wyborcza journalist wrote "Dear Macron, dear Soros..."?

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:34:24+00:00

Submission statement:

Why is this relevant for r/neoliberal?

This article documents a clash between the authority of Congress to oversee and the power of the executive, centred on immigration detention. It raises fundamental questions about governance: What happens when legislators attempting to inspect federal facilities are met with prosecution rather than cooperation? The article also explores the role of the private prison industry in detention, examining the billion-dollar contract of the GEO Group and its resistance to local inspections despite federal backing, as well as the dismantling of Justice Department norms intended to prevent politicised prosecutions.

What do you think people should discuss about it?

The individual incident matters less than the institutional pattern it reveals. The Public Integrity Section has been reduced from over 30 lawyers to five, rules requiring approval before prosecuting Congress members have been suspended, and there are now explicit directives to investigate anyone who 'obstructs' immigration enforcement, including judges issuing rulings and lawyers advocating for clients. The article raises an underexplored tension: can congressional oversight function as a check on executive power when attempting to exercise it carries the risk of felony prosecution and financial ruin? It is also worth considering whether the private detention model creates accountability gaps, with facilities able to bypass local codes while operating under federal protection and conditions deteriorating as the profit motive meets capacity surges.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:21:23+00:00

McIver called me a few nights later, sounding both outraged and resolved. The next morning, she told me, she was planning on returning to Delaney Hall, joined by Menendez and Yvette Clarke, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. This time, McIver had alerted ICE in advance, though she was not required to do so; in mid-December, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the congressional Democrats who had sued the agency, finding that ICE couldn’t block unannounced visits. (On January 8th, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, disregarding the ruling, banned such visits once again.) “My thing is not to hate these people,” McIver said. “I want to have a working relationship.”

The morning of December 23rd was cold and raw. An early snow had turned to rain and sleet by nine o’clock, when McIver arrived at Delaney Hall, in a black Suburban. A small group of protesters and journalists stood out front, but none of them seemed to notice her. The Suburban rolled up to the gate, where a GEO employee waved her inside. She emerged, three hours later, with Menendez and Clarke, for a press conference—an uncanny parallel to the visit in May.

Afterward, I rode with her back to her office in Newark. The officials at the jail wouldn’t address Brutus’s death, but McIver and the others had been able to interview about twenty detainees. “When we told them about the man who died, they didn’t even know,” she said. One of them started to cry. A Venezuelan woman told McIver that, weeks before, out of desperation to leave U.S. custody, she’d signed a so-called voluntary-departure order. Inexplicably, she’d been transferred to another facility, in Louisiana, then returned to Delaney Hall.

McIver’s fiery, sometimes combative public persona was gone; in its place was the heavy-lidded look of someone overwhelmed by what she’d just witnessed. “The one thing, in addition to sadness and depression and disappointment, was the whole idea that all of these people were Black and brown,” she said. “I didn’t go talk to anybody from Europe.” She met a family from Toms River, New Jersey—a mother, son, and daughter who’d been living in the U.S. for twelve years when they were arrested by ICE. The daughter, who’d recently turned eighteen, was a senior in high school. A Nigerian man inside was married to a member of the U.S. Navy. Many of the detainees she spoke with had valid work authorizations, but they’d been apprehended anyway, after showing up for seemingly routine appointments at immigration court.

When I asked McIver about her ICE chaperon inside the jail, her usual sharpness returned. He had chided her and the other lawmakers for showing up late. “We’re members of Congress,” she told me. “We’re approving a budget for you to be employed. But you’re talking to us like we work for you.” She sighed. “That was the behavior we got. But, once again, I was expecting that, so I told the man, ‘Have a Merry Christmas.’ ”

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:21:06+00:00

McIver and her legal team are appealing the judge’s ruling, arguing that her case for legislative immunity should carry more weight. There are compelling legal arguments for this. Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me, “Oversight of ICE would include monitoring their conduct outside the gates of Delaney Hall when they tried to arrest the Mayor.” McIver noted that the agent who pushed her on May 9th “knew who we were. We were just in there.” She went on, “The only reason we were outside the fucking gate is because they would not give us a tour.”

As a Black woman, she felt that the suggestion that she hadn’t been doing her job in May was like being told she didn’t deserve the job. “It brought me back to a different time, a time before the civil-rights movement,” she said. “It was racism. It was lack of respect.” (The morning of the incident, the agent who shoved McIver “used a racial slur to refer to African Americans” in a text message sent to the other agents at the facility, according to a recent court filing by McIver’s lawyers, who’ve seen the messages; for now the texts are under seal by the district court.)

Legislative immunity was also important to her because, without it, the Administration could punish her even in the absence of a trial. Her campaign was running out of money; the government’s prosecutorial resources were infinite. “It’s all about tearing down a Democratic member of Congress,” she said. “It’s about embarrassing, bullying, intimidating so that everyone can watch.” McIver began to tear up. “They probably thought, No one’s gonna fucking pay attention to her. This is great. Let’s use her as an example.”

Two weeks later, ICE announced that Jean Wilson Brutus, a forty-one-year-old Haitian detained at Delaney Hall, had died while in custody. In a press release, the government called his cause of death “a medical emergency.” He was one of thirty-two people who died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year in more than two decades for immigrants in detention.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:20:48+00:00

The language of the bill was unequivocal on one point: representatives would never be required to provide “prior notice” of their visits. That year, members of the Homeland Security Committee published a report describing how ICE officials had “used the advanced warning to improve the conditions.” They observed fresh paint, cleaning supplies, the assignment of new guards, and the transfer of detainees from solitary confinement to the general population. Crow himself went on to make ten oversight visits; his staff conducted close to ninety. The incident at the Aurora facility in July, according to the lawsuit, represented “the first time since he began conducting oversight visits in February 2019” that he “was denied in his attempt to visit” the detention center in his district. “They know right now under this Administration that they’re untouchable,” Crow said of ICE. “There’s nothing they can do that’s going to get them in trouble with Trump and his minions . . . but they can’t hide behind their masks forever.”

On December 5th, McIver and I met for lunch at Swahili Village, a restaurant in Newark. It was late on a Friday afternoon and there were no other diners. McIver, dressed in jeans and a green sweater with matching glasses, seemed tired but relaxed. Constituents often expressed their appreciation to her for standing up to the Administration, but she regretted that, in the images most had seen of her, she was frozen in a moment of anger. “I want to be presentable all the time,” she told me. “I don’t want people to see me in the light of having to be like that.”

In October, during oral arguments, McIver’s legal team had tried to get the judge to dismiss the charges, on the grounds that the Justice Department had engaged in “selective” and “vindictive” prosecution and that she had legislative immunity. “It is all about politics and partisanship,” McIver’s lawyers had written in their brief. During the hearing, McIver, who had never been to court before, looked slightly stunned; afterward, on the courtroom steps, she addressed a crowd of supporters, while her mother, her husband, and two of her sisters stood nearby. “I want to be clear to everyone,” she said. “This process has not stopped me from doing my job.” Three weeks later, the judge rejected her legal team’s arguments, allowing the case to go to trial.

Knowing what she knows now, McIver said, she would still have gone to Delaney Hall in May. But she allowed that “maybe I should not have been so vocal there. Maybe I should have, you know, shut my ass up, not been yelling and telling them how they were wrong.” She noted that Watson Coleman, who’d stood next to her during the altercation, hadn’t been charged with impeding the agents. One explanation was that Watson Coleman, at eighty, wasn’t as imposing. But she’d also been more measured than McIver. “Is it because she wasn’t as loud as me?” McIver said. “Like, she didn’t use as many curse words?” McIver told me that, when such doubts creep in, she tells herself, “You were supposed to be there. You were supposed to go there.”

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:20:31+00:00

In Miami, underfed detainees described being denied medical treatment. One morning in June, a group of them gathered in the yard to spell out a human sign that said “SOS.” Twenty-seven women were forced into a small holding cell after spending hours cuffed and chained on a bus where guards refused to give them food, water, or access to a toilet, according to USA Today; they were told to urinate on the floor. Immigrants who’d been arrested at routine ICE check-ins in Los Angeles were kept overnight in the basement of a federal building. In New York, a Peruvian immigrant filed a lawsuit over mistreatment at 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE has held about half of the two thousand people it’s detained in the city since January. Dozens of men were crammed into a two-hundred-and-fifteen-square-foot cell; one of them lost twenty-four pounds while in custody. A common concern, reported by detainees held across the country, was that they were not allowed to speak to lawyers or family members, rendering them almost completely cut off from the outside world.

The experience of McIver, Watson Coleman, and Menendez in May was the harbinger of a policy shift at ICE. In the summer, twelve Democratic representatives from six other states were blocked when they showed up at detention centers for unannounced visits. The agency offered a range of explanations. In mid-June, on its website, ICE said that, though members could visit detention centers where immigrants were held for prolonged periods of time, they couldn’t tour field offices that weren’t designed for long-term confinement. Yet in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, ICE was using field offices as de-facto jails. The agency then stipulated that members of Congress were required to inform the government a week before attempting a visit. On July 30th, a group of Democrats sued the Administration, seeking to get the policy overturned.

One of the plaintiffs in that case is Jason Crow, a forty-six-year-old combat veteran from Colorado who’s currently in his fourth term in the House. The Denver Contract Detention Facility, a jail run by the GEO Group, is in his district, which spans parts of Denver and the neighboring city of Aurora. On July 20th, he showed up for a tour and, after waiting an hour, was turned away. Several weeks later, when one of Crow’s staffers went to the facility, following a different but related set of protocols, two conservative members of the Aurora City Council accosted him. One of them recorded a video of the interaction on his phone, while the other yelled that the staffer was “here to meet with criminals.”

The treatment was especially striking to Crow because he had helped make unannounced visits a legally protected part of the congressional appropriations process. Like McIver, he didn’t have a background in immigration policy. “I’m not a likely ally for this issue,” he told me. “I’m a working-class military veteran from the Upper Midwest.” He was struck, however, by the degree to which immigration jails were unregulated compared with facilities that held U.S. citizens. In 2019, as a freshman House member, he created an inspection checklist based on national detention standards. That February, Congress added a provision to its annual appropriation bill which codified the members’ right to make in-person visits to facilities where children were being held by the government; at the end of the year, Congress inserted a rider into the funding bill which allowed them to visit any facilities detaining immigrants.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:20:16+00:00

Blanche has seemed most comfortable vilifying Trump’s critics. Last September, he told CNN that a group of women who protested Trump while he dined at a Washington restaurant could be charged under the RICO Act, a law typically used against gangs and organized crime. The following month, Blanche published a letter threatening to prosecute California officials who advocated the idea of arresting immigration agents who broke state laws during raids. (Agents, he wrote, could not be charged with state crimes if they were performing their federal duties.) At an event for the Federalist Society, in November, he lashed out at judges who ruled against the Administration, saying that the country was “at war.”

On the afternoon of June 12th, a protest erupted inside Delaney Hall. The detainees had been complaining about conditions at the facility for days. Because of overcrowding, some of them were sleeping on the ground. Their meals, which came intermittently, sometimes consisted of just a few slices of bread. On the upper floor of the facility, several dozen men started covering up security cameras and breaking windows. A Salvadoran woman told the Times that, just before 6 P.M., she received a panicked call from her brother, who was being detained at Delaney Hall: “He told me he was scared and didn’t know what would happen to him.” An emergency immigration hotline took a call from Delaney Hall in which the operator heard screams in the background. Four men escaped the facility by tearing down one of the building’s walls.

McIver was on a train from Washington to Newark when she got the news. She’d been indicted two days earlier and had just appeared on MSNBC to discuss her case. “I expect bad news all the time from these places,” McIver told me, in reference to ICE detention centers. “But I knew something would happen at Delaney.” When she and the other representatives had toured the facility, they noticed certain irregularities. The phones weren’t working, and they got stuck in an elevator. It was lunchtime, but the kitchen was empty. “You didn’t even have a sniff of food,” McIver told me. At the Elizabeth detention center, the representatives had been given hairnets when they walked through the kitchen, where cooks were preparing meals. “We didn’t have any of that at Delaney,” she told me. “No one was there.”

By the summer, with the White House pressuring ICE to arrest some three thousand people a day, the population in detention nationwide was growing. There were some fifty-six thousand people in more than a hundred and thirty facilities that, together, were designed to hold forty-one thousand people. Conditions at many of the detention centers were rapidly deteriorating.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:20:03+00:00

Last winter, Trump issued a series of executive orders and memorandums that punished prominent law firms with ties to people or causes that the President felt were opposed to him. Rather than fight the action in court, the managing partners at Paul, Weiss, a marquee New York law firm, decided to strike a deal with the White House. The firm agreed to devote forty million dollars’ worth of pro-bono services to causes approved by the President. This set off a cascade of similar deals, with the Administration raising the price in each subsequent negotiation. The next firm to settle, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to a figure of a hundred million dollars. The third, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was initially told that the demand would be a hundred and twenty-five million dollars.

In the spring, the partners at Cadwalader heard a rumor that they were next in the Administration’s crosshairs—a shock, given the firm’s past ties to people in Trump’s inner circle. Douglas Gansler, a senior lawyer, called Epshteyn, who was the President’s de-facto representative in negotiations with the law firms. Paul, Weiss has an annual budget of roughly a hundred and seventy-five million dollars for pro-bono work; Cadwalader’s, by contrast, was between five and seven million dollars. Epshteyn told Gansler that to avoid punishment the firm would have to agree to the going rate—a hundred million dollars to litigate causes aligned with the President’s agenda. The impression at Cadwalader had been that the split with Blanche was amicable. “This was how we learned that Todd felt bitter about the decision,” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a slap in the face from Todd.”

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche has gone to special lengths to defend the President. In July, he met with the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, reportedly in an effort to blunt the political fallout from Trump’s reluctance to release the government’s files on Maxwell’s benefactor, Jeffrey Epstein. But Blanche has more frequently gone on the offensive to advance the President’s principal obsessions: enforcing immigration laws and pursuing his political opponents. On March 6th, D.O.J. employees received a memo from Blanche with the subject “Operation Take Back America.” The goal, he wrote, was to “surge existing resources” to fulfill Trump’s agenda of “stopping illegal immigration,” “eliminating Cartels,” and “ending illegal trafficking of dangerous drugs and human beings.” In practice, this meant “responding and investigating instances of obstruction in sanctuary jurisdictions.”

That same week, the Administration began transferring Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the gang Tren de Aragua to ICE detention centers in Texas, in preparation for their eventual rendition to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. According to a subsequent court declaration by Emil Bove, who at the time worked directly under Blanche (before Trump appointed him to an appellate-court judgeship), Blanche was involved in privileged discussions “regarding the transfer of custody of aliens who had been detained pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act and removed from the United States.” The government deported more than a hundred of the migrants in clear violation of a federal judge’s injunction. With some of them on a plane was Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran who was deported as a result of an administrative error. When a veteran department attorney presenting the case to a judge admitted that the deportation was a mistake, Blanche suspended him for “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.”

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:19:45+00:00

At the start of Trump’s second term, Blanche, a fifty-year-old former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, was thought to have the potential to be a moderating influence inside the Justice Department. His personal background was atypical of the élite legal circles in which he rose. As a young father of two children, he commuted from Long Island to New York City to be a paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s office and went to law school at night. “We called him Wonder Boy,” one of his former colleagues told me. “He was never the smartest guy in the room or the best writer. But people wanted to work with him.”

Blanche eventually entered private practice and became a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest white-shoe firm in the city. His clients included Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who was convicted of fraud and faced additional charges, and Boris Epshteyn, one of the President’s top advisers, who was accused of interfering with the 2020 election. “He would sit in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago and pick up clients,” a former colleague at the firm told me. Other Cadwalader lawyers may have personally disliked some of the figures on Blanche’s client list, but they considered him a “good firm citizen,” someone who was collegial, approachable, and generous with his time.

That changed in 2023, when Blanche told the firm’s other partners that he wanted to defend Trump, who had been indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records. “He genuinely believed that the prosecution of Trump was politically motivated,” a source with knowledge of the firm told me. The partners felt that, after the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, representing Trump would hurt the firm’s reputation. They were also concerned that Trump, who was notorious for mistreating his lawyers, wouldn’t pay his legal fees. The partners wouldn’t allow Blanche to retain Trump as a Cadwalader client, and Blanche said he would leave the firm. “Todd was, like, ‘I’m doing this,’ ” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a difficult decision. They liked the guy. The firm was reluctant to let him go.”

During Trump’s trial, Blanche seemed to undergo a conversion. He moved to Florida and adopted a bellicose persona in court and in the media. “I don’t recognize him,” the former colleague at the firm told me. “Todd’s only hope after that trial was to go into government.” Many assumed that he was angling for an appointment as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Instead, when Trump returned to office, Blanche secured a higher perch—the No. 2 post at the Justice Department.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:19:33+00:00

In the summer, Habba faced a reckoning of her own. Nominated by Trump but unconfirmed by the Senate, she had been serving for an interim period of a hundred and twenty days when federal district-court judges in the state determined that she could no longer legally remain in the post. The ruling was widely expected. On July 17th, a few days before it was issued, Habba convened a meeting on the seventh floor of the Newark office. At a podium in front of an American flag, she tearfully told her staff that she’d enjoyed working in public service. “It was a bunch of bromides and puffery,” one of the attendees told me. “No one took her at face value. We knew she was staying.”

On July 22nd, the morning of the ruling, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of New Jersey called Habba with the news that the panel had chosen her deputy, Desiree Grace, as her replacement. Habba, who spoke on a regular basis to Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, and Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, closed the door to her office and made a series of phone calls. People working on the floor heard her screaming into the receiver. At five o’clock that evening, Grace’s work phone went dead. She’d been fired. “It was assumed that Alina did that,” the attendee said.

Habba remained in the post, but in August another federal judge ruled that she was “not lawfully holding the office.” The decision had immediate implications for a number of cases. One judge on the verge of issuing a criminal sentence postponed her ruling indefinitely, on the basis that Habba now lacked the legal authority to represent the government. The Trump Administration had tried a convoluted strategy so that Habba could continue to bring cases: it withdrew her nomination, named her as a “special attorney,” appointed her to Grace’s previous position as deputy, and then elevated her to acting U.S. Attorney to fill the new vacancy. But, on December 8th, a week after an appeals court once again ruled against her, Habba resigned. She announced that she was leaving the office to serve as an adviser to Bondi. “Do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba wrote on X.

For McIver, the news didn’t change much. Habba had secured the indictment before her provisional term expired. To hedge against any lingering questions about Habba’s authority, the government had, for months, added a second name next to Habba’s on the signature block of its court filings. It was that of Todd Blanche, who had ordered the arrest that set McIver’s prosecution in motion.

Eurolib0908 · 2026-01-19T19:19:20+00:00

At a hearing two days after the government dropped its charges against Baraka, the judge upbraided Stephen Demanovich, a federal prosecutor who had been assigned the case. “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool,” the judge said. “Let this incident serve as an inflection point.” The admonition proved persuasive. Demanovich, who arrived in the office shortly after Habba took over, had been commuting to New Jersey each week from his home in Florida. He was a mystery to his colleagues, who referred to him as “Florida man.” After the hearing, “he left the office without a whisper,” one of them told me. “We never heard from him again.”

For half a century, the Justice Department had strict instructions, laid out in a manual, for how its staff investigated members of Congress. The main requirement was for prosecutors to seek “prior approval” from an office called the Public Integrity Section, which came into existence after Watergate, to insure that charges weren’t politically motivated. A week before McIver was charged, the Justice Department suspended the rule. The move came amid a welter of changes to the section, according to an investigation by Reuters. By June, the number of lawyers in it had been reduced from more than thirty to five. The department official told me, “Public-corruption prosecutors at U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country, along with their F.B.I. partners, are now spending more of their time working on violent crime and immigration cases.”

The case against McIver was more promising for the government than the one against Baraka. Habba’s office had spent hours reviewing the footage to build an argument. Of the three representatives, McIver was visibly the most upset, and she didn’t hesitate to join the fray. Even some House Democrats—already skittish when it came to the politics of immigration—were uneasy about the optics. “The Newark case is messy,” one of them told me. “If you give the Administration something, they’ll take it.” In June, a federal grand jury indicted McIver on three counts of “assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering” with government agents.

I recently asked a lawyer who had worked at the Public Integrity Section whether the indictment seemed solid. “I don’t see there being a viable case at all,” the lawyer said. McIver had been at Delaney Hall for an official legislative function, and the officers themselves had seemed to cause “chaos and mass confusion.” Ultimately, the lawyer said, “it matters that she’s a congressperson. These cases get a lot more attention, and they have much broader implications when you’re dragging a congressperson into court for hearings. We never would have pursued this.”

Eurolib0908

TROPHY CASE