Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Most of (convicted felon) Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are brazenly unconstitutional, and stand to be reversed in Court rulings by thoughtful, law-abiding judges. But the red elephants in the room are the sycophantic, compliant judges he appointed during his last term such as Aileen Cannon of Florida. She let him off the hook in his classified documents case, in defiance of settled statutory law and legal precedent. Her record also includes a defiance to honor legal boundaries of judicial independence, with conflict of interest problems as troubling as those of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. All in service to a president bent on replacing the Democratic Republic with Christian Nationalist Theocracy, but whose only use for a Bible is a prop for a PR stunt.
Trump and his cronies have borrowed from the playbooks of other self-coup makers, including the Hungarian Viktor Orban and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter’s Likud party has become an Israeli version of MAGA, as he and Trump have fueled and supported one another’s’ political campaigns, and efforts to avoid criminal consequences for their very criminal acts. Netanyahu’s visit today to Washington, D.C., can only be a negative for civil liberties in this country and in the Middle East. Trump’s campaign to quash First Amendment-Free Speech protections mirrors at home the active role the US now plays to support Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza. In a way, an attempt is being made to transform all of us into Palestinians, people who possess no rights, no true citizenship and no legal standing.
Trump’s strategy has been to swamp the nation and Court system with so many illegal, draconian Executive Orders, that they can’t all be addressed in a timely manner to be heard and properly adjudicated. It’s like throwing a fine China plate of fries and ketchup on a White House dining room wall, to see what sticks. Many of those orders are already facing legal pushback from multiple lawsuits and court rulings. Attorneys General (from Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon) and civil rights groups have challenged his Order to end birthright citizenship, in five separate lawsuits, after it was paused on January 23. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour ruled it to be a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment due process clause, and blocked it, allowing the legal challenged to stand for now.
Elsewhere, civil rights organizations and religious groups sued to block the Order for expedited deportations and overturning asylum rights and protections, as a violation of due process. Trump has tried to expand the expedited removal process to cheat around the constitution’s “due process” protections. This was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of Make the Road New York, an immigrants’ rights organization.
Trump’s very personal Laken-Riley Act is brazenly unconstitutional as it violates due process, allowing any immigrant accused of theft or violent crime to be detained and deported, before they are convicted. Though case law would seem to favor immigrants’ rights, the ultimate arbiter would be the Supreme Court, which has a troubled recent history of honoring regressive statutes, and delivering decisions favorable to Trump’s agenda.
Formidable legal challenges have also been filed by an Illinois immigrants-rights group to Trump’s attack on sanctuary cities, such as San Francisco, which restrict local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities on fast-track deportations. Trump’s raids on churches and spiritual centers by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is being challenged by a Quaker coalition of five meeting houses. The Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, said, “The very threat of government officials wearing ICE-emblazoned jackets outside of our religious service will have a significant impact on our communities and ability to practice our faith.” Raids on houses of worship violate rights to freely practice religion under the Constitution, in addition to settled administrative laws that protect religious freedom.
“Supreme Leader,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint, 2024
Speaking of Netanyahu, one of the most consequential and disturbing plans on the Right, titled “Operation Wrath of Zion,” aims to cancel the visas of foreign students and naturalized citizens involved in college campus protests supporting Palestinians, to summarily deport them ASAP. The plan is to use an AI program created by Stellar Defense and Cyber Intelligence to identify anonymous protestors, and deport them. The legal issues in conflict with this are many, and deeply troubling. (Any ruling is dependent on the judicial lottery of who hears the case.) This operation has close ties to the Israeli far right-wing student group Betar, which began working with US Senators Ted Cruz and John Fetterman (both strongly anti-Palestinian) to give the Trump administration supposed “legal cover” for rounding up suspects for deportation. Last week, Betar-US bragged about helping ICE with ID and deportation efforts, posting on TwitteX, “Join us at the jihad rally as we assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts.” These people have bought the grand con, and been duped into a phony sense of righteous indignation.
In short, the Palestine issue is being used as a wedge issue to attack first amendment rights. It isn’t clear who said, “The greatness of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members.” A concomitant principle is that “a civilization’s weakest members can often be positioned so as to take away the rights of those adjacent to them.” In the face of this onslaught, America’s best and brightest are often genuflecting in anticipatory obedience. The New York Times noted on January 30, “Universities have set up task forces, tightened discipline policies and used surveillance cameras to track protesters’ movements. They have hired private investigators to examine cases of anti-Israel speech and activism.” This brings a rush for college administrators to comply with Trump’s Executive Order 13899 on Combating Anti-Semitism. As if he cares about any Jews, other than his enablers. This Order brings dissonance to anyone who remembers Trump’s openly Fascist Rally at Madison Square Garden in November, and Elon Musk’s proud Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. But many right-wing Jews pretend that never happened and are conned by Trump’s alleged “love” for Israel, which is in reality built on apocalyptic visions of a world without Jews.
Trump’s Order brings pressure on college administrators to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered anti-Semitic or supportive of terrorism, so that those students or staff members could be investigated or deported as noncitizens.” By extension, they consider protests supporting Palestinian rights to be anti-Semitic and therefore acts of ‘terrorism.’ Trump has promised, “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” While the anti-Defamation League is invested in Trump’s grand con of US Jews, leaders of other Jewish groups are thoughtful and skeptical. Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs argued, “Everyone in the United States has basic due process rights, and when we start applying them selectively, we don’t only threaten our values, we ultimately threaten our safety too.” Such a stance in favor of basic civil liberties is the most effective way to combat the real blight of antisemitism in American society. Trump has amplified the pressure on college administrators to consider any expression of support for Palestinians to be an expression of anti-Semitism, thus entrapping students in deportation orders. Only thoughtful Court rulings can turn this back.
But any ruling is dependent on the judicial lottery of who hears the case.
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