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Trump team goes full-on Big Brother, and immigration attorneys get the boot
Dec. 20th, 2025 08:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
dailykos_feedInjustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
This week, we’ve got bad judges of all different stripes. Judge Aileen Cannon is back and as terrible as ever. The Trump team and GOP senators are forcing a terrible judicial nominee on Tennessee because they can’t force him on Georgia, where he actually lives. And the administration is firing immigration law judges to make way for something worse.
Aileen Cannon continues her SCOTUS audition
You’d think Cannon wouldn’t have to prove herself, what with having done President Donald Trump so many solids during the classified documents case and all.
Why, she gummed that thing up good and strong with a combination of incoherent rulings and slow-walking, but she really went above and beyond. She helpfully invented a new rule about how special counsels are extremely illegal so that she could throw out the case and protect Trump, which is clearly what she sees as her actual job.
And even though the charges are gone, Cannon’s zeal to ensure that Trump never faces the least bit of consequences has in no way diminished. You see, there’s still the matter of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the investigations into Trump’s myriad crimes. Special counsels have to file a report at the end of their cases, and—barring some reason of, say, national security—those become public.
But we can’t have that, now can we? Cannon has been stonewalling on this for nearly a year. In January, she barred the Department of Justice from releasing the report until a federal appeals court resolved whether its release would prejudice Trump’s onetime codefendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. But the DOJ dismissed their cases months ago, so that excuse won’t work anymore. Nevertheless, Cannon persisted—as did her injunction.
In February, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute filed motions seeking to intervene in the case and to lift the injunction, but Cannon has refused to rule on the motions. This has gone on so long that the groups were forced to go to the 11th Circuit in early November to ask them to make Cannon rule. The court agreed that there had been undue delay and gave Cannon 60 days to rule before it would consider stepping in.
Those 60 days have nearly run out, and Cannon has still refused to rule. But she did rouse herself to swiftly grant Trump’s Dec. 2 motion to be allowed to participate in the case—even though he is not a party—so he could register his opposition to the report being made public.
You can expect this to be the reason that Cannon will blow through the 11th Circuit’s deadline. Typically, you’d assume that a federal district court judge wouldn’t want to get jammed up with openly defying the federal appellate court, but Cannon knows they’re not her boss—Trump is. And anything to keep the boss happy, right?
Fake elector scheme, real trial
Trump has been handing out fake pardons left and right to try to take care of his election-denier homies who got jammed up with state charges.
The problem for the people who were foolish enough to invent the fake elector scheme or become fake electors is that they are prosecuted in real state courts, where Trump’s pardons don’t reach.
Enjoy your upcoming trial in Wisconsin state court, James Troupis and Michael Roman! Troupis and Roman weren’t fake electors themselves. Instead, Troupis is a former Trump 2020 campaign attorney, and Roman was a campaign aide. But Wisconsin was ground zero for the fake elector idea, and Troupis and Roman played a major role in its execution.
Both Troupis and Roman have been trying to get their indictments tossed, but to no avail. Wow, so weird that a judge wouldn’t buy the argument from Troupis’ lawyer that fake electors signing elector ballots isn’t forgery because they were signing the actual type of ballot true electors would use.
Troupis better hope his attorney has less ridiculous arguments at trial, because that one sucks.
Is it bad when the government starts keeping an attorney watchlist?
Even as a general principle, this seems bad. A government watchlist doesn’t typically lead to good things. But when we’re talking about this government and this watchlist? It’s extra bad.
An immigration attorney discovered an ICE watchlist with her name on it, squirreled away deep in the agency’s website, along with multiple other immigration attorneys—most of whom seemed to be people of color.
Given that the administration issued a memo saying that immigration attorneys are “unscrupulous” and has moved to sanction attorneys for representing immigrants pro bono, it’s pretty clear that this wasn’t a DHS holiday card list.
The list is, of course, gone now. An immigration advocacy group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but let’s be honest—we will never ever learn anything more about this. There’s also no way that the administration is going to stop making these lists.
Just stuff those judicial nominees wherever they fit
These days, we are all aware that Trump is very sad about the practice of blue slips, where senators have the courtesy of approving—or not—U.S. attorney nominees for their home states. That practice has robbed us of Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba. What a loss.
But blue slips are also for judicial nominees, which is a problem for Trump because it means that, when he tries to put forward one of his more unhinged judicial nominations in a blue state, those senators aren’t going to agree. So the administration has a new plan: Just move the nominees around and stuff them in red states.
That’s what’s happening with Brian Lea, who has been tapped for a lifetime appointment in the Western District of Tennessee. But despite the White House referring to him as “Brian Charles Lea, of Tennessee,” and GOP Sen. Bill Hagerty calling Lea a “fourth-generation Memphian,” and saying he will be “an outstanding judge for the people of West Tennessee,” Lea does not actually have any connections to the state.
Yes, he was born there, but the whole of his practice career has been in Georgia, save for the time he trundled up to the nation’s capital to clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. He was only admitted to the Tennessee state bar this year, presumably after starting his quest to land a judgeship. And he just got admitted to practice in the Western District of Tennessee, which means he’s seeking a judgeship in a district where he’s never appeared.
All his bar memberships and other professional affiliations are in Georgia, and he was up for a seat on the Georgia Court of Appeals.
In other words, he lives in Georgia and practices in Georgia, but Georgia has two Democratic senators, so Trump would run into the blue slip wall there. But the pliant GOP senators in Tennessee have no problem joining the fiction that Lea has deep ties to the state.
So Lea gets a lifetime appointment, and the people of Tennessee get to pound sand.
Article I judges purged to make way for nativist deportation freaks instead
The administration is continuing to purge immigration law judges, who—despite the name—are not really federal judges and are not part of the judicial branch. Rather, they are employees of the executive branch—Article I—and therefore don’t have lifetime appointments.
And even though immigration law judges are not exactly known for their extreme kindness toward immigrants, many of them are still not terrible enough for this administration.
That’s why they’re being shoved out the door in favor of “deportation judges” to “make decisions with generational consequences,” which is really just a roundabout way of saying “only racists can apply.”
Can’t wait to see how much they’ll have to dumb down job requirements to get enough people for this.
What is the lawyer version of the ICE doofuses who were so scared of protesters with snowballs that they called the sheriff’s office for backup and then managed to pepper spray each other?
