Wednesday, December 24, 2025. ICE prepares to ramp up for 2026, courts grow increasingly doubtful of statements made on behalf of ICE, the Supreme Court rebukes Chump, and much more.
Big news.
Ana Faguy (BBC NEWS) reports on the big story of the week:
The US Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration's bid to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area, over the objections of local and state officials.
In an unsigned order, the top court said the president's ability to federalise the National Guard likely only applies in "exceptional" circumstances.
The National Guard consists of primarily state-based troops that typically respond to major issues like natural disasters or large protests.
The ruling marks a rare departure for the conservative-majority court which has largely sided with the Trump administration in recent months. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker called it "a big win for Illinois and American democracy".
I say the big story of the week. Under a Barack Obama presidency or a George HW Bush presidency, I could make that statement. With the Convicted Felon in the White House, I really can't. Yes, it's Wednesday, the middle of the week. Yes, tomorrow is Christmas and that should also mean it's less likely that big news is emerging. But we have an apparently dementia plagued crook -- a convicted on several felonies crook -- in the White House so who knows?
But this verdict is a big news.
First off, the verdict was not at all expected -- not from a Court whose image is they grant Chump everything he wants. As William Brangham (PBS NEWSHOUR) noted, "The court's conservative majority has frequently sided with the administration on previous tests of presidential power. " Leila Fadel (NPR's MORNING EDITION) pointed out earlier today, "It was an interim ruling, the sort of preliminary case in which the court majority has deferred to the Trump administration again and again. This time, the court said the president failed to cite any law that would justify using the Guard under federal control to enforce the law." :Second, it's news because it is based on and it backs the Constitution -- something that cannot be said of many of the Court's decisions in this decade. Third, it overturns a nightmare Chump has put into play. Fourth, it has impact beyond Illinois. Kate Riga (TAKING POINTS MEMO) explains, "The brief ruling radically changes the landscape for Trump’s Guard deployments, likely meaning the end of similar occupations in other blue cities. It also all but goads Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, something he’s been talking about doing since his first term."
How did it happen?
On yesterday's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Kat Lonsdorf provided this walk through, "Yeah, so this case stems from back in September when President Trump federalized the National Guard against Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's wishes and sent them into Chicago for what Trump said was protection of federal immigration officers and facilities. Just a reminder, this all happened as the administration launched a new and increasingly aggressive immigration operation in the city. Two lower courts ruled against Trump's deployment of the Guard there, blocking troops from the streets. And in October, the administration issued an emergency appeal up to the Supreme Court." Alex Nguyen (MOTHER JONES) picks up the baton there, "In October, Trump called 300 members of the Illinois National Guard into federal service to protect federal agents enforcing immigration policies in Chicago under a federal law that allows the president to federalize members of the Guard if they are “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.” He federalized members of the Texas National Guard the next day. The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Trump abused that federal law to punish his political opponents." As for how the decision happened, Adam Liptak (NEW YORK TIMES) details one factor:
The Supreme Court’s refusal on Tuesday to let the Trump administration deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area was in large part the result of a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by a Georgetown University law professor named Martin S. Lederman.
The argument Professor Lederman set out, and the court’s embrace of it, could help shape future rulings on any further efforts by President Trump to use the military to carry out his orders inside the United States.
Professor Lederman’s brief said that the government had misunderstood a key phrase in the law it had relied on, which allows deployment of the National Guard if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
The administration said “the regular forces” referred to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Professor Lederman argued that the great weight of historical evidence was to the contrary.
The regular forces, he wrote, was the U.S. military. And, he added, “there is no basis for concluding that the president would be ‘unable’ to enforce such laws with the assistance of those forces if it were legal for him to direct such a deployment.”
Professor Lederman wrote his brief over a weekend. “I hesitate to acknowledge that,” he said on a podcast last month, “but it’s really true that I didn’t have like some great background knowledge in this statute.”
A veteran of the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department unit that advises the executive branch on the law, Professor Lederman identified what he called a glaring flaw in the administration’s argument. “None of the parties were paying attention to it,” he said.
But the justices were.
NPR's journalists Kat Lonsdorf and Steve Inskeep addressed the verdict on MORNING EDITION:
INSKEEP: What did the decision say?
LONSDORF: So the court ruled 6-3 against Trump, which is rare. It's one of only a handful of times the conservative court has ruled against the president in the emergency docket this term. It was an unsigned opinion, and it was really technical, but basically, the court wrote that the president failed to explain why the situation in Chicago warranted an exception to what's called the Posse Comitatus Act. That's a law that prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, writing that they, quote, "strongly" disagreed with the way the court handled this case. They said the court should've remained focused on the narrow question in the administration's appeal, which they said was specifically around using troops to protect federal officers and facilities and not domestic law enforcement more generally.
INSKEEP: I guess we should remember the basic principle here is that federal troops shouldn't be used on civilians to enforce civilian laws except...
LONSDORF: Right.
INSKEEP: ...In certain cases. So how did this particular case end up before the court?
LONSDORF: Right, so this case stems from back in September when President Trump federalized the National Guard against Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's wishes and sent them into Chicago for what Trump said was protection of federal immigration officers and facilities. Remember, Steve, this all happened as the administration launched a new and increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the city and there were protests. But two lower courts blocked that deployment, so in October, the administration issued an emergency appeal up to the Supreme Court.
Also on MORNING EDITION today, Leila spoke with SCOTUSBLOG's Amy Howe regarding the decision:
HOWE: Not necessarily. You know, this case came to the court. The solicitor general, the government's top lawyer in the Supreme Court, was asking the justices to rule based on one question - whether the federal courts can decide whether the president can deploy the National Guard troops at all. And after a little bit, the Supreme Court asked the litigants on both sides for additional briefing on a question raised in a friend-of-the-court brief by a Georgetown law professor named Marty Lederman, who said, you don't need to get into really the question that the SG's office has asked you to decide. The real question at the center of this case is a technical question about whether or not the term, regular forces, in the statute on which the president relied refers to the regular forces of the U.S. military. And, you know, even if the president has the power to deploy, he said, the regular U.S. military forces to execute federal laws in Illinois, he hasn't tried to do that in this case. And so that's what they asked the litigants on both sides to brief, and that suggests that they were looking at this case skeptically.
FADEL: This ruling is part of the emergency docket. It's preliminary. It's temporary. But the justices did explain their reasoning. What do the opinion and the dissents tell us about the court's thinking on presidential authority here?
HOWE: So as Kat said, this was a rare loss. The justices had given the Trump administration another loss just a couple of days earlier on another temporary ruling. And the majority opinion didn't say a lot. But I think what this majority opinion and the decision signals is that the Supreme Court is certainly willing to give the president a lot of leeway, a lot of presidential power, but there are limits in how far they're going to let the Trump administration and the president go.
FADEL: How significant is the decision? I mean, we heard Kat say this isn't a precedent-making decision. Does it then have no impact on other cases involving the deployment of U.S. troops to U.S. cities where the governor doesn't ask for help?
HOWE: The cases that the Supreme Court decides on the emergency docket are sort of a weird animal because, on the one hand, they are preliminary, as Kat said, but they will still carry significant weight.
FADEL: OK.
HOWE: And we saw that over the summer when the Supreme Court decided a case involving the termination of National Institute of Health grants. And Justice Gorsuch's decision, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, actually chastised a lower-court judge for not following an earlier decision on the court's emergency docket. He said decisions by the Supreme Court on the emergency docket may not necessarily be conclusive on the merits, but they really do carry a lot of weight going forward. So I would expect that this would really carry a lot of weight in the litigation going forward, although not necessarily in the litigation regarding troops in the District of Columbia, where I live, because those are a slightly different animal.
FADEL: Would it have impact on the administration's decision-making right now? I mean, Trump said he'd like to send National Guard troops to San Francisco and other cities. Does this ruling stop him from ordering future guard deployments in these other cities or not?
HOWE: I think it's going to make it a lot more complicated because the Supreme Court, in ruling that the Trump administration hadn't shown that it was able to send the troops, in the case of Chicago, said that the president must determine that he's unable with the U.S. military to execute U.S. laws. And there really only are going to be exceptional circumstances in which he can legally call in the military to do so, so the Supreme Court is setting a really high bar.
That's not just a musical interlude. Country music artist Frank Ray is in the news for speaking out. Yesterday on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Rose Gilbert reported:
GILBERT: Ray is Mexican American and has spoken publicly about the challenges immigrants face, including in his 2023 song, "Jesus At The Taco Truck."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JESUS AT THE TACO TRUCK")
RAY: (Singing) I met Jesus at the taco truck.
GILBERT: But this time, it's personal. On Thanksgiving Day, Ray woke up to a panicked call from his sister. Her husband, a Mexican national named Juan Nevarez, had been stopped by border patrol at the airport.
RAY: She's in tears. She's like, they just detained Juan at the El Paso airport, saying that his work visa no longer gives him legal status in the United States.
GILBERT: Nevarez has a five-year work permit, which he renewed just this spring. Still, he was detained and taken to an ICE processing facility in Otero County, New Mexico. That's where he's being held now, waiting for a hearing that will decide if he can stay in America with his wife and four children, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
ALYSSA NEVAREZ: We don't understand why this happened.
GILBERT: That's Alyssa Nevarez. She and Juan have been married since 2007. They grew up in neighboring border towns - one in Mexico, the other in the United States. Nevarez crossed the southern border illegally several times. And because those are still on his record, they've not applied for a green card.
NEVAREZ: He has that authorization to be here, to work, to provide for his family, you know? Why did they do this?
Why?
No answer to that. But we do know why Juan and Alyssa's lives are being destroyed, like so many others across the country -- this once great country. It's a two-word answer: Donald Chump. Our modern day Hitler will be remembered historically but it will be for all the wrong reasons. nd his children and their children will live with the shame that the Chump name will bring them.
The US government has offered imprisoned Dallas resident Yaa’kub Ira Vijandre $3,000 to leave the country, a move that decisively exposes the fraudulent character of the Trump administration’s claim that he is a “terrorist.”
[. . .]
Vijandre was not an “illegal alien” when ICE abducted him in October,
just as he was not a “terrorist” when the government revoked his
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections in December.
He entered the United States as a 14-year-old child and lived in the US
without documentation for over two decades. His DACA status was
terminated only after federal agents targeted his social media posts
opposing genocide and prison abuse.
Responding to an immigration judge who accused him of “endorsing or espousing terrorist activity,” in an interview with The Guardian
earlier this month from inside the Folkston detention center, Vijandre
said, “I never expected anything like that … being accused of
‘glorifying terrorism;’ they attacked my religion, my faith.”
He described degrading and abusive conditions inside the ICE facility. He said guards treated detainees “like animals” and recounted being denied basic human needs. While visiting the detention center’s library, Vijandre said he asked a guard for permission to use the bathroom. The guard responded by instructing the Filipino American photojournalist to “just piss on yourself.”
The stories pile up of the way Chump is destroying so many lives. Dan Gooding (NEWSWEEK) reports:
I'm thrilled Muhammad is free and thankful for justices like Estudillo. But let's not pretend for one moment that Muhammad's life wasn't destroyed with four months of being held, four months away from his friends and family. Kidnapped and imprisoned. Lives are being destroyed. Where's Chump's payout on that? I mean try to overthrow our democracy on January 6th and Chump's leaving you pardons and payouts and probably chocolates on your pillow too. But what about what he owes -- what we as a country -- owe these people we are wrongly imprisoning, these people we are kidnapping off the streets? What do you think your life would e like if you had been kidnapped and imprisoned? Let's say you were lucky enough to be released, what would you life be like after that? How safe do you now feel on the streets of your own country?
And what about the trauma being inflicted as a result of what's taking place? Especially if you are an immigrant or could be racially profiled as possibly one? Billy Witz and Kevin Williams (NEW YORK TIMES) note today, "Naturalized citizens in Ohio’s capital, Columbus, have taken to carrying passports with them. Businesses and nonprofits that serve immigrants around the city are delivering goods to customers who are afraid to venture outside their homes. Churches in immigrant neighborhoods are all but empty." How do you get over that trauma?
And make no mistake, this illegal operation is about inflicting trauma and terror. Tom Latchem (DAILY BEAST) notes, "Leaked internal chats show President Donald Trump’s team ordering ICE officials to 'flood the airwaves' with 'propaganda' videos of migrants being chased, shackled, and mocked—regardless of their veracity."
And the plan for 2026 is not to stop this illegal program but instead to expand it. This was addressed in two segments of MORNING EDITION today. First:
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The Trump administration says it wants to accelerate efforts to take away the citizenships of some naturalized Americans. As NPR's Lilly Quiroz reports, it's part of the administration's efforts to remove immigrants - Americans, in this case - they say should not be in the U.S.
LILLY QUIROZ, BYLINE: In a document circulated recently to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Department, the administration says it wants to denaturalize 100 to 200 people per month in 2026. It also says USCIS should work with the Department of Justice to meet that quota. NPR hasn't seen the document, which was first obtained by The New York Times. USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser told NPR that the goal is to prioritize the denaturalization of people who have been found lying or misrepresenting themselves in the naturalization process. Now, the Trump administration wanting to denaturalize people is not new. Establishing a quota is. Elizabeth Taufa is with the San Francisco-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center. She says denaturalization has historically been used in rare cases.
ELIZABETH TAUFA: The traditional example was, like, Nazis who had lied about their Nazi membership and come to the United States and assumed a different identity. And later on, it was found out that they were war criminals, and so they were denaturalized as a result of that.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We've called up Mariam Masumi Daud, who is an attorney who specializes in immigration law. She's based in Northern Virginia. Good morning.
MARIAM MASUMI DAUD: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Well, what do you think about the idea of a quota?
MASUMI DAUD: I think a quota is something that's going to have a chilling effect, especially on eligible immigrants who may want to apply for citizenship. This really pulls away USCIS agency resources from its core functions. Giving this as a priority to the Immigration Service will essentially cause individuals to not only not apply for citizenship, but create backlogs for other types of immigration cases that people may want to pursue. And citizenship is something that's really supposed to be secure. And a policy that emphasizes denaturalization by having quotas and having this high volume really risks creating more of a two-tier system of citizenship, where naturalized Americans might feel...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
MASUMI DAUD: ...Conditionally American, and that's a problem.
INSKEEP: I do want to put this in the perspective of the numbers, however. There are tens of millions of Americans who are naturalized citizens. I just was looking it up. In fiscal 2024, 800,000 people were naturalized. And this quota would be between 1,200 and 2,400 people a year - a tiny fraction of the number of people who are actually out there as citizens, right?
MASUMI DAUD: It is a tiny number. But again, I think the problem here is that it's going to create fear in a lot of people. So although, you know, the numbers here are very small, the broader implications are that individuals will really feel anxiety and unsafe about whether or not their citizenship is going to be intact. And I think that's really the big problem here.
INSKEEP: When you have worked denaturalization cases in the past - defending someone, I presume - what sorts of violations or alleged violations have there been?
MASUMI DAUD: Those have involved cases where there have been serious problems with respect to an individual's identity and very strong allegations regarding fraud. And so as someone who has seen individuals go through the denaturalization process, I want to stress that it is traditionally something that's used in rare cases and in extreme situations. It is not something that has been meant to be used in a sweeping way. And that's where this policy becomes very concerning because when there are quotas given, that's where there is a concern for an abuse of the policy.
We have got to stand as a nation and oppose the illegal actions of ICE. They run into people's cars and then lie that the car was surging towards them. They break into homes, they break into cars. They kidnap. They beat up women in the halls of our courtrooms. They're now invading in use bathrooms -- Malcolm Ferguson (THE NEW REPUBLIC) notes, "A bunch of masked male Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in tactical gear broke into the women’s bathroom of Cato nutrition bar factory in New York, even forcing a stall open while a woman in there used the toilet. They can be heard telling her to pull her pants up." They threaten, they bully, they assault -- and on this one, I'm just talking about what they do to witnesses, not what they do to suspected immigrants. Chump has created a Gestapo force that he presides over. Remember that when the human rights lawsuits start coming in.
Lawsuits? We've noted since the start of the year that ICE is forever lying and lying to the press, lying to the courts, lying to the American people. Back in October, Ava and I noted:
They terrorize pregnant women. They terrorize the challenged and/or disabled. Who is safe on the streets of America when ICE is let loose? Children? They're tear gassing children. When they're not zip-tying them.
And there is no oversight.
They're a department of liars led by the lying Homeland Secuirty Secretary Kristi Noem.
Tricia, like Kristi, is a repeat offender when it comes to lying to the American people. Nicole Charky-Chami (RAW STORY) notes:
And here's where the media keeps failing us. Homeland Security officials have been caught in one lie after another. It's so bad that judges can't really take their claims seriously at this point. But the media too often repeats claims regarding ICE without noting the long pattern of lies from them this year.
We were all taught about the little boy who cried wolf. You don't lie because you'll be known as a liar and the time will come when you need to be believed but you're known as a liar.
A lesson we're taught as children is too much for ICE and the officials over ICE to grasp. That might be shocking if we hadn't already addressed the relaxed 'standards' when it comes to hiring ICE agents.
The courts have grown increasingly tired of the lies and they are treating ICE reps and attorneys like anyone else who is caught lying while appearing before them. Tom Latchem (DAILY BEAST) reports:
A Trump-appointed federal judge has accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement of brazenly lying in court filings and defying court orders in a lawsuit over conditions in a federal detention facility.
U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, who was commissioned to the Eastern District of New York in December 2019 during Donald Trump’s first term, is threatening the federal agency with contempt after ICE refused to provide photographs of a holding cell used for unlawful, days-long detention—and made claims to the court he said were “evasive and demonstrably false.”
Brown issued a 24-page order on Dec. 18 describing the hold-room at the federal courthouse in Central Islip as “putrid and cramped.”
The following sites update
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Merry Christmas12 hours ago
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Bari Weiss—a Poetic Inspiration12 hours ago
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The Crooked Court18 hours ago
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Even his mother knew18 hours ago
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The attacks on Jasmine18 hours ago
