|
1. The Justice Department under the Trump administration has continued to show itself to be far from independent from the White House. • Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would consider President Donald Trump’s views on prosecutions, rejecting the notion of an independent Justice Department. Since Trump returned to the White House, he has overseen major changes at the Justice Department, including the firing of dozens of officials and the departure of thousands of lawyers. • The Justice Department is planning to deploy a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places throughout the U.S. for the midterm elections, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said this week. A department spokesperson told CBS News that the department will seek federal employees to volunteer for the poll-monitoring effort. • Department of Homeland Security investigators took part in a wide-ranging probe of progressive groups and labor unions as part of a crackdown on dissent during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, according to court filings. The filings allege that DHS agents secretly obtained financial records from labor unions and recorded meetings of social justice groups in private buildings, public parks and churches while the groups organized against the ICE surge. 2. The White House’s politically motivated funding decisions came into focus this week. • Attorneys for the state of Colorado say a newly uncovered White House email provides crucial evidence in their lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration retaliated against the state over election policies and the prosecution of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. The alleged retaliation included hundreds of millions of dollars in transportation and energy funding cuts, efforts to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the denial of disaster relief assistance. • Administration officials admitted in a federal court filing that they recommended terminating grants worth several billion dollars for clean-energy projects based “solely” on states’ “political identity” and whether President Donald Trump won those states in the 2024 election. • Nashville filed suit against the federal government for attempting to require changes to how local elections are administered as a condition of receiving Department of Homeland Security grants that the city uses for first responders. The lawsuit, filed Monday morning in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges the grant system, administered by Federal Emergency Management Agency, violates the separation of powers and states’ constitutional authority to administer elections. “FEMA has no authority to impose those conditions — not under its governing statute and not under the Constitution,” the suit argues. 3. The Trump administration’s deportation regime continued its cruel work, while also facing pushback from civil society and political leaders. • A federal judge in Boston has cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate temporary protected status for Ethiopian nationals. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy on Tuesday lifted the administrative stay that had been blocking the termination of TPS. The ruling follows other recent court orders allowing the administration to end protections for TPS holders from countries including Haiti, Somalia, Syria, and Myanmar as part of the ongoing immigration crackdown. • A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld an injunction that limits Department of Homeland Security agents from conducting immigration enforcement “at or near” more than 1,400 houses of worship across 33 states and the District of Columbia. The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a February 2025 ruling in favor of a coalition of Quaker, Sikh and Baptist congregations that sued to block the Trump administration’s reversal of a Biden-era policy discouraging immigration actions at “sensitive places.” • U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-CO, was denied answers about tuberculosis during a visit to an immigrant detention center in Aurora, Colorado. Hickenlooper said he was stonewalled whenever he asked a tuberculosis-related question, including who had been tested, what type of investigation had been conducted and where people exposed to the disease were located. • Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Tuesday announced he is suing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over Abbott’s refusal to authorize the extradition of an ICE agent accused of shooting a man in Minneapolis. Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty previously sent letters asking Abbott to sign extradition paperwork for Christian Castro, who is accused of shooting a man in the leg in north Minneapolis in January. Ellison and Moriarty stressed that extradition requests are intended to be administrative, and Moriarty called Abbott’s apparent “extremely rare, if not unprecedented.”
|
