Injustice 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.
Welcome to the week where we learned that the First Amendment is lib-coded and apparently more of a suggestion than a requirement.
Here’s Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming explaining how she used to be really into free speech but not so much now:
Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore.
Oh. Okay. Can we ask why the First Amendment became optional?
I feel like something’s changed culturally. And I think that there needs to be some cognizance that things have changed. … We just can’t let people call each other those kinds of insane things and then be surprised when politicians get shot and the death threats they are receiving and then trying to get extra money for security.
Lummis doesn’t mean “politicians” here. If she did, she would have said this in June, when Minnesota state Sen. Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated by a hard-right conservative. She means “far-right activist Charlie Kirk and anyone else we deem worthy.”
Kayleigh McEnany, one of Trump’s four first-term press secretaries, is also completely over the First Amendment, just OVER IT, YOU GUYS:
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Kayleigh McEnany on Jimmy Kimmel's suspension: "For all the concern about the 'the First Amendment, the First Amendment,' what about all the amendments that Charlie Kirk lost? Because Charlie Kirk has no amendments right now. None."
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 19, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Yes, if Charlie Kirk has no amendments, the rest of you get none as well. That’s just how the Constitution works.
Even the Pentagon’s lawyers are worried Trump is doing war crimes
The Department of Defense helped Trump strike two Venezuelan boats that the government says it totally, definitely, absolutely knew to be chock-full of drugs and narco-terrorists. Can you see that proof? No. It goes to another school; you wouldn’t know it. Instead, the administration will just keep pumping out snuff films showing the bombing.
There’s just the teeny-tiny issue of whether this sort of thing is strictly legal. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell says they are indeed super-duper legal: “Lawyers up and down the chain of command have been thoroughly involved in reviewing these operations prior to execution, none questioning their legality and instead advising subordinate commanders and [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth that the proposed actions were permissible before they commence.”
Jesus. Not one of them can talk like a normal person. They now all have to talk like Trump, a mishmash of braggadocio and the sort of vibe that you get when a high schooler learns a couple new words but not actually how to use them.
Somehow, not everyone is comforted by this reassurance, so some of those lawyers up and down the chain of command are apparently now scrambling to figure out a way to give the military personnel doing the strikes some sort of legal protection so they won’t be personally liable. So, no real worry about the whole international, human-rights-violating, war-crime problem, it looks like?
Real heroes all around.
Even Trump appointees know the administration is lying about deportations
On Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee to the Washington, D.C., federal bench, issued a preliminary injunction stopping the administration from sending unaccompanied children to Guatemala.
This is the case where a Biden appointee, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was on emergency duty the weekend the complaint was filed, and she literally spent the weekend pounding the phones to try to stop the administration from deporting a bunch of kids in the dead of night.
The administration told the court that these dead-of-night deportations were totally cool because they were requested by the Guatemalan government and the children’s relatives in that country.
If the administration thought they’d have a better shot with Kelly, who is the one permanently assigned to the case—but nope. Kelly didn’t buy the administration’s lies at all, writing:
There is no evidence before the court that the parents of these children sought their return. To the contrary, the Guatemalan attorney general reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom defendants found eligible for their ‘reunification’ plan. And none of those that were located had asked for their children to come back to Guatemala.
Seriously, just imagine being on the “deporting children under cover of darkness is Good, Actually” side of things like the government is here.
One judge spells it all out
The Trump administration has been housing migrants on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, and everything about it is just so illegal, not the least of which is the refusal to allow entry to lawmakers. On Thursday, federal agents must have been so absolutely hyped that they could zip-tie nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers and arrest dozens of others.
They are probably less hyped about Judge Lewis Kaplan’s 84-page opinion that accompanied his preliminary injunction requiring improvements to the space. Kaplan found that the plaintiffs being held there are likely to succeed on their claims that the conditions of their confinement violate the First and Fifth amendments.
And just so the administration can’t do one of its patented “gosh, we just didn’t know what you meant, your honor,” moves, Kaplan’s preliminary injunction is six pages long and breaks down everything from minimum floor space to requiring private places to call attorneys, to allowing people to keep their asthma inhalers—you name it. There’s really no other way to deal with an administration that has proven ceaselessly innovative in finding new ways to harm migrants.
Hell yeah, petit juries are getting in on the action too
We’ve been blessed with myriad stories of Washington, D.C., grand juries refusing to indict people on U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s wildly inflated felony charges. Now, a petit jury—the type that is in the courtroom—has also told the administration to pound sand.
A jury in Los Angeles just acquitted a protester charged with striking a federal officer during a demonstration. How long did it take them to deliberate? Just a shade over an hour. The government first charged Brayan Ramos-Brito with a felony, saying he struck a federal agent. Then they dropped it to a misdemeanor assault and had the Border Patrol sector chief come to court and testify that he totally saw Ramos-Brito strike the officer. The problem for the government was that while videos shown at trial did indeed show a federal officer shoving Ramos-Brito, they didn’t show Ramos-Brito hitting the agent.
Related | Jeanine Pirro can't indict a ham sandwich, and Harvard gets a win
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles didn’t feel like commenting on that humiliating verdict, because who would, really? But they were eager to say that they had totally gotten guilty pleas on misdemeanor assault charges in three other cases. Not really sure how that takes the sting away here, but whatever helps you sleep at night.
