A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Lawless Retaliation and Abuse
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s dark journey through the lawless Trump immigration system took another grievous turn Monday morning when he was detained by ICE in Baltimore only three days after being freed from criminal custody in Nashville.
After his unlawful removal to El Salvador, his imprisonment there for months, a White House-led smear campaign targeting him, and the Trump administration’s retaliatory criminal case against him, Abrego Garcia now faces the threat of removal to a third country: Uganda.
In a filing Saturday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys alerted the federal court overseeing the criminal case in Tennessee that the administration had tried to leverage him Thursday into pleading guilty to the trumped-up human smuggling charges against him by offering to send him to Costa Rica after he served his U.S. jail sentence on the smuggling charges. But after Abrego Garcia was released on bail Friday without agreeing to plead guilty, the administration notified his lawyers that it would deport him to Uganda and ordered him to report to the ICE office in Baltimore this morning.
“[T]he government took further coercive actions that leave little doubt that the entire federal government is engaged in a coordinated effort to punish Mr. Abrego for fighting back against its unlawful conduct,” his attorneys wrote in the filing.
The rapid series of events over the weekend is exactly the scenario his lawyers have been warning about for weeks and which U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland had tried to forestall long enough to allow the judicial branch to weigh in before Abrego Garcia was spirited abroad again, outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
Trump’s brutalization of Abrego Garcia for having the temerity to challenge his wrongful removal to El Salvador — which the administration has conceded was a mistake — is a cruel face-saving move and a grotesque flex of executive power. Abrego Garica initial removal in March was in violation of an immigration judge’s order that specifically barred him from being deported to El Salvador. Since then the administration has done everything in and even beyond its power to avoid correcting its error; instead, it has piled on Abrego Garcia with more indignities and ever-greater punitive measures.
From the outset, the case was a measure of whether the federal judiciary would hold the line against Trump’s executive excesses. Time and again, the administration defied court orders, slow-rolled the case, acted in bad faith, and set the courts up to look like chumps. Judge Xinis was the target of most of the administration’s misconduct, and after being initially wrong-footed rallied and stopped giving the administration or its lawyers the benefit of any doubt.
Ultimately, Xinis barred Abrego Garcia’s removal to a third country without notice and chance for his lawyers to challenge it. Xinis took that step only after the administration spent three days in court across a week in July making the preposterous argument that it had no idea what it would do with Abrego Garcia if he was released from criminal custody.
As Lawfare’s Anna Bower reminds us, the administration kept insisting to Xinis in court that it would handle the Abrego Garcia case like any other detention case and wouldn’t even begin to make decisions until he was detained. And even then, it would be handled by a lowly case officer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a judge or courthouse onlookers more unconvinced by an argument.
The events of the past few days have confirmed what Xinis and everyone else expected. The administration would find a way to retaliate against Abrego Garcia again and it would be anything but a normal case. After Abrego Garcia was detained this morning, the Department of Homeland Security renewed the smear campaign against him, recycling venomous allegations against him, some of which courts have already rejected.
Thread of the Day
Good Point
Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer observes that Trump’s wild ambitions to end mail-in voting and replace voting machines in favor of paper ballots may exceed his power as president but seem to be a new litmus test of party loyalty for GOP election administrators:
What is especially striking is Trump’s statements in his tweet and again at the Oval Office press conference that he is working toward these goals along with the “Republican party.” This is almost certainly a move to make participation in this plan for “honest elections,” at his direction, a test of party loyalty. Republicans at all levels of election administration will have the choice to be either with him or against him in defending against losing control of the House in 2026.
Hegseth’s Pentagon Purge Continues
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and removed two other generals as part of an ongoing political purge of the Pentagon. No reasons were given for their terminations.
Only the Best People
President Trump is nominating Sergio Gor, White House personnel chief who has overseen the purges of government workers, to be U.S. ambassador to India.
Trump’s Brain Broke Sometime Around 1989
John Ganz, on the out-of-date luxury of Donald Trump:
As Trump redecorates the White House in faux rococo style, perhaps something like what Balzac is talking about accounts for the continued public fascination with the dated ’80s glitz and glamor that Trump represents. And it’s back, baby! This new generation seems intent on recapitulating the crass materialism, as well as the casual homophobia, misogyny, and racism of the 1980s.
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