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 another week where the Trump administration’s wholesale abandonment of the rule of law has required everyone else to try their damndest to uphold it. We’ve got clergy suing the administration, judges finding it in civil contempt, and actual criminal cases getting dismissed. It’s a brave and stupid new world.
Who is the general in the war on (imaginary) fraud?
The Trump administration is launching its new “fraud enforcement” division at the Department of Justice. This isn’t aimed at real fraud, of course. The DOJ has shut down crypto enforcement, paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and drastically slashed the number of employees focused on political corruption.
Instead, this new division is intended to harass blue states and any individuals President Donald Trump feels like targeting.
Vice President JD Vance, shown on Feb. 24.
Ostensibly, Colin McDonald, associate deputy attorney general, will lead the new division. If you had any doubts that McDonald was picked because he would reliably carry out Trump’s wishes, know that McDonald was the co-chair of the “Weaponization Working Group,” which seems to exist only to torment Trump’s political opponents.
But maybe it will actually be led by Vice President JD Vance, whom Trump announced would be the leader of the “war on fraud” during his interminable State of the Union speech. Or is it that Vance will be heading an entirely different anti-fraud task force? Who can say! The administration isn’t being clear on the matter. And why bother with details when the purpose of this new division is really to continue the degradation of the DOJ?
Christian nationalists prevent pastoral care
Time for the latest lawsuit by actual religious people who are desperately trying to make the faux-religious Christian nationalists in the administration follow both the law and the moral dictates of their ostensible faith.
This time around, a group of Minnesota clergy and churches is suing the administration to give them access to the Whipple Federal Building—where Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding detainees—to provide pastoral care.
However, this is the same Trump administration that let ICE goons shoot pastors in the head with pepper balls for the crime of praying peacefully. But according to the Department of Homeland Security, letting clergy visit and pray with detainees means detainees “could become agitated.” Yeah, it’s not the detainees that have problems with being agitated here.
Civil contempt, again?
The Trump administration’s actions in court have been outlandish—ignoring court orders, lying to judges, and generally trashing the place. Thanks to that, lower courts have had to take unprecedented actions against the federal government and DOJ attorneys in an attempt to hold the administration to the rule of law.
Earlier this week in Minnesota, U.S. District Court Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, held the administration in civil contempt, ordering the government to pay $568.29 to Fernando T., who was shipped to Texas in direct violation of a court order and released in El Paso, Texas, without any of his belongings. The detainee’s lawyer paid his airfare home, and the government now has to pick up the tab.
An immigrant deported from the U.S. peers through the window of a plane last February.
This isn’t even the first time this month that the administration has been slapped with civil contempt in Minnesota. On Feb. 18, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino found Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara in contempt for failing to follow her order in a case, ordering him to pay a fine of $500 per day until a detainee’s identification documents were returned.
The lower courts shouldn’t have to resort to this sort of thing, but what other choice do they have when the administration has gone rogue?
An office in shambles
The administration’s spree of abductions and arrests in Minnesota has flooded the courts there with habeas petitions, with hundreds of detainees challenging their incarceration. The U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota has needed to field all of these, but that comes at the expense of successfully prosecuting people suspected of genuine criminal behavior. Those people are now getting out of jail free.
A federal judge in Minneapolis had to release an accused gang member on a gun case because the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t bring him to trial within 70 days, the deadline when a defendant invokes the right to a speedy trial. Instead, they kept him locked up for 169 days and never got around to that trial. The judge dismissed the complaint with prejudice, meaning the DOJ can never refile it.
The defendant had numerous previous convictions, including for drug dealing and being a felon in possession of a gun, but blowing the speedy-trial deadline means he walks. But hey, at least the Minnesota streets are safe from two-year-olds.
Executive branch’s inaction turns the judicial branch into beggars
The federal judiciary is asking Congress to let it take control of managing the nation’s federal courthouse buildings before they descend further into decrepitude.
Currently, the General Services Administration is the landlord for the judiciary, but it sounds a lot like that agency is an absentee landlord. Per the federal courts, there is a backlog of $8.3 billion—yes, billion—of necessary repairs. Even emergency repairs are taking years to fix.
Of course, the Trump administration has responded with typical smugness. One GSA spokesperson said the judiciary should focus on the rule of law while the GSA manages federal real estate.
Okay, sure, but the point is that the GSA isn’t managing these buildings well. So the judiciary has to go, hat in hand, to implore Congress to turn over control since the executive branch is essentially AWOL on this. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like the miracle of government efficiency we were promised.
