Category Archives: Politics

Judge orders government to facilitate return of illegally deported Venezuelans

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Here we go again.

Another strongly worded opinion and order by a federal judge in the District of Columbia took the government to task for ignoring both prior court orders and the constitutional rights of Venezuelans illegally deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process. The opinion by James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the DC Circuit, came the same day as a colleague on the court issued an order blocking the government from retaliating against Senator Mark Kelly by reducing his rank and retirement pay.

The Guardian reported:

A US federal judge’s order that some of the Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a notorious prison in El Salvador must be allowed to return to the United States to fight their cases has been greeted with hope and a sense of vindication – but also fear – by one of the deportees.

US district judge James Boasberg ruled on Thursday in Washington DC that the Trump administration should facilitate the return of deportees who are currently in countries outside Venezuela, saying they must be given the opportunity to seek the due process they were denied after being illegally expelled from the US last March.

Boasberg added that the US government should cover the travel costs of those who wish to come to the US to argue their immigration cases.

The tone of Boasberg’s memo was one of frustration and exasperation at the government’s failure to comply with basic constitutional constraints.

On December 22, 2025, this Court issued a Memorandum Opinion finding that the Government had denied due process to a class of Venezuelans it deported to El Salvador last March in defiance of this Court’s Order. The Court offered the Government the opportunity to propose steps that would facilitate hearings for the class members on their habeas corpus claims so that they could “challenge their designations under the [Alien Enemies Act] and the validity of the [President’s] Proclamation.” Id. Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand. Believing that other courses would be both more productive and in line with the Supreme Court’s requirements outlined in Noem v. Abrego Garcia, =the Court will now order the Government to facilitate the return from third countries of those Plaintiffs who so desire. It will also permit other Plaintiffs to file their habeas supplements from abroad.

The order is just 7 pages long, and well worth reading to appreciate the extent to which the government has been extending a symbolic middle-finger at the attempts of the federal courts to press the Trump administration to comply with constitutional guidelines.

Photos from Portland

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It’s early morning on Super Bowl Sunday in Honolulu. Outside our mango trees are dancing in strong gusts of wind and a high wind warning remains in effect.

Strong winds may lead to property damage. Hazardous driving conditions due to powerful cross winds will pose a serious risk for drivers, especially for light weight and high profile vehicles. Loose outdoor items should be brought inside or secured properly. A High Wind Warning means that winds are expected to be at least 40 mph, with gusts over 60 mph. Stay away from downed power lines.

Meanwhile, here are photos of anti-ICE protests in Portland taken by numerous photographers and scraped up from the photo site, Flickr.com.

You should not need a Flickr membership to scroll through the photos, although I have no doubt that you’ll be asked if you want to set up an account.

Flickr Search

Tear Gas Mirabella

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Guest Post: A first-hand account by Neal Milner, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, and a columnist and regular contributor to Civil Beat, now living in Portland, Oregon.

ICE didn’t target anyone.
The agents on the roof did worse than that.
They targeted everyone.

My wife Joy and I were tear gassed at Portland’s Labor Against ICE demonstration on Saturday, January 31. So were a lot of others.

With no warning or provocation, ICE agents wildly and indiscriminately fired gas canisters and flash bombs into the crowd.

Several thousand people had marched the few blocks from a small park, where the rally started, to ICE headquarters.

Parents brought children, elderly people came with walkers, (there is a large retirement community across from the park). Families pushed strollers while others walked with dogs. Many cyclists too.

A surprisingly sunny Portland afternoon. Noisy but pleasant. Chanting. Calls and response. “Fuck Ice!”

No talk of violence or even confrontations. The organizers had not planned any purposeful civil disobedience. The only cops visible were a few directing traffic on nearby streets.

Overall, union based and family friendly—at least at first.

Joy and I were a couple hundred yards from the front of the crowd as it arrived at the ICE building. There was one agent observing from the roof. The crowd was across the street with no barriers, human or otherwise, between.

We were talking to two guys holding their small terrier when with no warning and no provocation, a few agents came onto the lower roof of the building and began firing the gas canisters and shooting off loud flash devices.

Before we even knew what was going on—remember there had been no warning—what we thought was smoke but was gas enveloped us and many people behind us. The stuff travels indiscriminately and really fast.

Joy and I immediately felt the effects of the gas. It’s very painful and disorienting. Fortunately, with some help we were finally able to walk on our own the few blocks to our building.

ICE didn’t target anyone. The agents on the roof did worse than that. They targeted everyone.

To make that more real, think of what that meant for three groups of people at the rally.

Older people who were less mobile: Who knows how they managed to navigate the crowd and move to shelter, trying to outrace the rapidly spreading tear gas. Our 80+ year old neighbor was hit blocks away.

Union people: besides their own struggles with the attack, how different it must have felt from picket lines where rules are so predictable.

The children: Parents brought their kids to teach them something about being a citizen and in a setting a lot more interesting than middle school social studies.

The Oregonian has a video of a little girl sitting on the ground, saying, “Owie, Owie.” That’s sure not the civics lesson her parents hoped she would learn.

There’s ongoing litigation about these Portland ICE tactics. A few days ago a judge ruled that ICE can’t act as arbitrarily as it did on that Saturday.

Good, it’s important to have a victory for freedom of assembly and the First amendment.

But what will linger with me most is the vision of that stunned, crying little girl in a pink sweatshirt covered with butterflies.

They tear gassed our children.

Oregon’s Attorney General offers an online “reading room” for documents in key federal case

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While looking online for a copy of the court order posted here yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Public Records Reading Room” created and supported by Oregon’s Office of the Attorney General.

Like Hawaii, Oregon has joined in various lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump Administration that affects the state’s residents.

One of those cases, in which Oregon joined California in challenging the deployment of national guard troops to its cities, has drawn widespread public and media interest. The online reading room is Oregon’s response.

Oregon Department of Justice has received requests under the Oregon Public Records Law for exhibits in State of Oregon, et al. v. Trump, et al., No. 3:25-cv-01756-IM (D. Or.). To facilitate access to these records, Oregon DOJ will post to this website exhibits that are not exempt from disclosure (due to the Court’s orders requiring confidentiality of certain documents) on a rolling basis.

Arranged for easy public access are more than 13 gigabytes of court records in the case, including trial exhibits introduced by the states of Oregon and California, along with the City of Portland and the federal government. There are also more than 2.4 GB of videos introduced as exhibits by ICE, and redacted versions of our depositions filed in the case.

These can be downloaded in bulk via zip files, or by clicking the links for individual files in each category, which are then listed out to allow downloads of individual files of interest.

These exhibits would normally go unseen by the public, and are not typcally included in the federal court’s PACER public document retrieval system. And they’re made available here free of charge.

As a reporter, I try as much as possible to get back to source documents so that I’m not reliant on someone else’s interpretation of events. This kind of document collection is priceless.

For example, here’s a list of the first 50 State of Oregon trial exhibits (out of 91 total).

Screenshot

It’s quite a public service. Hawaii’s Attorney General might consider following suit with key documents from its federal litigation with the Trump administration.