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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.


This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Trump Spurned by 30 Companies as He Seeks Bond in $454 Million Judgment

Trump Spurned by 30 Companies as He Seeks Bond in $454 Million Judgment

“Donald J. Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that he faces “insurmountable difficulties” as he tries to raise cash for the civil fraud penalty he faces in New York.

Donald Trump in a navy suit and blue tie stands behind a barricade in a court hallway.
Donald J. Trump’s filing one week before the bond is due raised the prospect that the former president might now face a financial crisis.Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, raising the prospect that the state could seek to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties.

The court filing, coming one week before the bond is due, suggested that the former president might soon face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue.

Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump in the fraud case last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case, might soon move to collect from Mr. Trump.

Still, even if the higher court rejects his appeal, Mr. Trump is not entirely out of options. He might appeal to the state’s highest court, quickly sell an asset or seek help from a wealthy supporter.

Mr. Trump’s team has also left the door open to exploring a bankruptcy for corporate entities implicated in the case, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. That option, however, is politically fraught during a presidential race in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee, and for now it appears unlikely.

The former president has been unable to secure the full bond, his lawyers said in the court filing on Monday, calling it a “practical impossibility” despite “diligent efforts.” Those efforts included approaching about 30 companies that provide appeal bonds, and yet, the lawyers said, he has encountered “insurmountable difficulties.”

The company providing the bond would essentially promise to cover Mr. Trump’s judgment if he lost an appeal and failed to pay. In exchange, he would pledge cash as collateral, and he would pay the company a fee as high as $20 million.

But Mr. Trump does not have enough liquidity to obtain the bond. The company would require Mr. Trump to pledge more than $550 million in cash and securities as collateral — a sum he simply does not have.

Although the former president boasts of his billions, his net worth is derived largely from the value of his real estate, which bond companies rarely accept as collateral. Mr. Trump has more than $350 million in cash, a recent New York Times analysis found, far short of what he needs.

The judge in the civil fraud case, Arthur F. Engoron, levied the $454 million penalty and other punishments after concluding that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other benefits. The case, brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, has posed a grave financial threat to Mr. Trump.

He might have to post an appeal bond worth more — possibly above $500 million, to reflect the interest he will owe — in order to prevent Ms. James from seizing his assets on March 25.

Under the law, Ms. James could have moved to collect from Mr. Trump as soon as Justice Engoron ruled, but she offered a 30-day grace period, until March 25. It is unclear whether she will provide Mr. Trump extra time or if she will move swiftly to collect. Nor is it clear whether the appellate court will rule on his plea for help before the deadline.

Mr. Trump could also seek to appeal to New York’s highest court, and it is unclear whether Ms. James will hold off on the seizure while he pursues that route.

A spokeswoman for Ms. James did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and claimed that Ms. James and Justice Engoron, both Democrats, are out to get him.

“This is a motion to stay the unjust, unconstitutional, un-American judgment from New York Judge Arthur Engoron in a political witch hunt brought by a corrupt attorney general,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement. “A bond of this size would be an abuse of the law, contradict bedrock principles of our republic, and fundamentally undermine the rule of law in New York.”

The looming deadline could not come at a worse time for Mr. Trump. He also faces four criminal indictments, including one in Manhattan that is tentatively set for trial in mid-April.

And just last week he finalized a $91.6 million bond in a defamation case he recently lost to the writer E. Jean Carroll, a costly deal that drained him of precious cash.

Mr. Trump, who obtained that bond from the insurance giant Chubb, pledged an investment account at Charles Schwab as collateral, records show. He most likely pledged more than $100 million in cash and stocks and bonds that he could sell in a hurry — investments that are now no longer available for him to use in the civil fraud case.

A nearly $500 million bond, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote on Monday, “is unprecedented for a private company.”

Yet Mr. Trump’s legal team “devoted a substantial amount of time, money, and effort” to finding one, according to a court filing by Alan Garten, the top lawyer at Mr. Trump’s family business.

Using four separate brokers, the lawyers approached more than two dozen companies that provide appellate bonds, including Chubb and Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run for decades by Warren E. Buffett, Mr. Garten said. He added that most of the companies were either unable or unwilling to handle a bond of this size, and that none were willing to accept property as collateral.

Their best bet appeared to be Chubb, but within the past week, Chubb notified Mr. Trump’s lawyers that it, too, could not accept property as collateral.

“This presents a major obstacle,” Mr. Garten wrote.

Mr. Trump’s company has not ruled out the possibility of having the corporate entities declare bankruptcy, the people with knowledge of the discussions said. That move would automatically halt the judgment against those entities and prevent Ms. James from seizing some of the former president’s properties.

But Mr. Trump, scarred from an experience in the 1990s when some of his companies filed for bankruptcy, is likely to balk at a filing.

And even if he supported it, bankruptcy — which Mr. Trump used to describe derisively as “the b-word” — might not be a cure-all, legal experts said. Seeking court protection could trigger defaults in loans he holds, and would most likely set off litigation over whether Mr. Trump is still responsible to pay his company’s debts.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers on Monday also submitted a filing from one of his insurance brokers, Gary Giulietti, who said his team had for several weeks been “scouring the market” for a bond.

“Simply put, a bond of this size is rarely, if ever, seen,” he wrote.

Mr. Giulietti, who testified as an expert witness at the trial, also occasionally golfs and dines with Mr. Trump.

In his decision, Justice Engoron criticized his testimony, saying that in more than 20 years on the bench, he had never encountered an expert witness who “not only was a close personal friend of a party, but also had a personal financial interest in the outcome of the case.”

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction

Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction

“In an interview in his chambers and in a new book, the justice, who retired in 2022, discussed Dobbs, originalism and the decline of trust in the court.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer sitting for a portrait with his hands beneath his chin wearing a dark suit and red tie in front of a pink wall.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer retired a little reluctantly in 2022, under pressure from liberals who wanted to make sure the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority would not get any more lopsided.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s Supreme Court chambers are not quite as grand as those he occupied before he retired in 2022, but they are still pretty nice. As before, they include a working fireplace, which was crackling when I went to visit him on a temperate afternoon in late February to talk about his new book.

In earlier interviews, Justice Breyer could be rambling and opaque. This time he was direct. He said he meant to sound an alarm about the direction of the Supreme Court.

“Something important is going on,” he said. The court has taken a wrong turn, he said, and it is not too late to turn back.

The book, “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” will be published on March 26, the day the Supreme Court hears its next major abortion case, on access to pills used to terminate pregnancies.

The book devotes considerable attention to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. Justice Breyer, who had dissented, wrote that the decision was stunningly naïve in saying it was returning the question of abortion to the political process.

“The Dobbs majority’s hope that legislatures and not courts will decide the abortion question will not be realized,” he wrote.

He was more forceful during the interview. “There are too many questions,” he said. “Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that.”

The book is a sustained critique of the current court’s approach to the law, one that he said fetishizes the texts of statutes and the Constitution, reading them woodenly, without a common-sense appreciation of their purpose and consequences.

Without naming names, he seemed to call on the three members of the court appointed by President Donald J. Trump — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — to reconsider how they approach the role.

“Recently,” he wrote, “major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court. Major changes take time, and there are many years left for the newly appointed justices to decide whether they want to build the law using only textualism and originalism.”

He added that “they may well be concerned about the decline in trust in the court — as shown by public opinion polls.”

Textualism is a way of interpreting statutes that focuses on their words, leading to decisions that turn on grammar and punctuation. Originalism seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted, even though, Justice Breyer said in the interview, “half the country wasn’t represented in the political process that led to the document.”

There are three large problems with originalism, he wrote in the book.

“First, it requires judges to be historians — a role for which they may not be qualified — constantly searching historical sources for the ‘answer’ where there often isn’t one there,” he wrote. “Second, it leaves no room for judges to consider the practical consequences of the constitutional rules they propound. And third, it does not take into account the ways in which our values as a society evolve over time as we learn from the mistakes of our past.”

Justice Breyer did not accuse the justices who use those methods of being political in the partisan sense or of acting in bad faith. But he said their approach represented an abdication of the judicial role, one in which they ought to consider a problem from every angle.

In his chambers, he recalled another era, when three different Republican appointees — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter and Anthony M. Kennedy — largely shared his basic approach to the law.

“Sandra, David — I mean, the two of them, I would see eye to eye not necessarily in the result in every case, but just the way you approach it.” Justice Breyer said. “And Tony, too, to a considerable degree.”

Justice Breyer retired a little reluctantly, under pressure from liberals who wanted to make sure that President Biden could appoint his successor and that the conservative supermajority on the court, currently at 6 to 3, would not get any more lopsided. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former law clerk to Justice Breyer, now occupies his seat.

Justice Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, has returned to Harvard Law School, where he taught before becoming a judge. But he said he missed his old job.

“When you’re a professor, you’re mostly involved in what people decided already in the past,” he said. “When you’re a judge, you’re also interested in that, but what you’re deciding is going to affect present and future. And that’s hard. Because you don’t really know how it will work out. You have to do your best there. I like that kind of job.”

He shrugged, seeming to contemplate the passage of time. “What can you do?” he asked. “It’s the human condition.”

Justice Breyer’s critics say his approach allows judges too much freedom to turn their preferences into law. I asked him for an example of a case in which the law required him to reach a conclusion at odds with his personal views.

“What about all the capital punishment cases?” he asked. Though he urged the court in a 2015 dissent to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty, he did not adopt the practice of some earlier justices of dissenting in every capital case. “That doesn’t mean I approved,” he said.

He added, more generally, that he hoped his book would reach both a broad audience and a narrow one.

“I’d love people to read it,” he said. “I’d like for you to agree with me. So would every author. I’d like even to get the members of this court to read it and to say, ‘Oh, not a bad point. Not a bad point.’ And that’s all.”

White House’s Efforts to Combat Misinformation Face Supreme Court Test

White House’s Efforts to Combat Misinformation Face Supreme Court Test

“The justices must distinguish between persuading social media sites to take down posts, which is permitted, and coercing them, which violates the First Amendment.

A person on a scooter rides past shrubbery near the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court this term has repeatedly grappled with fundamental questions about the scope of the government’s authority over major technology platforms.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday on whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating what it said was misinformation on social media platforms.

It is the latest in an extraordinary series of cases this term requiring the justices to assess the meaning of free speech in the internet era.

The case arose from a barrage of communications from administration officials urging platforms to take down posts on topics like the coronavirus vaccines, claims of election fraud and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Last year, a federal appeals court severely limited such interactions.

Alex Abdo, a lawyer with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the Supreme Court’s review of that decision must be sensitive to two competing values, both vital to democracy.

“This is an immensely important case that will determine the power of the government to pressure the social media platforms into suppressing speech,” he said. “Our hope is that the Supreme Court will clarify the constitutional line between coercion and persuasion. The government has no authority to threaten platforms into censoring protected speech, but it must have the ability to participate in public discourse so that it can effectively govern and inform the public of its views.”

The court this term has repeatedly grappled with fundamental questions about the scope of the government’s authority over major technology platforms. On Friday, the court set rules for when government officials can block users from their private social media accounts. Last month, the court considered the constitutionality of laws in Florida and Texas that limit large social media companies from making editorial judgments about which messages to allow.

Those four cases, along with the one on Monday, will collectively rebalance the power of the government and powerful technology platforms in the realm of free speech.

A second argument on Monday poses a related constitutional question about government power and free speech, though not in the context of social media sites. It concerns whether a state official in New York violated the First Amendment by encouraging companies to stop doing business with the National Rifle Association.

Monday’s first case, Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23-411, was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, along with individuals who said their speech had been censored.

They did not dispute that the platforms were entitled to make independent decisions about what to feature on their sites. But they said the conduct of government officials in urging them to take down what they say is misinformation amounted to censorship that violated the First Amendment.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed, saying that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had most likely crossed constitutional lines in their bid to persuade platforms to take down posts about what they had flagged as misinformation.

The panel, in an unsigned opinion, said the officials had become excessively entangled with the platforms or used threats to spur them to act. The panel entered an injunction forbidding many officials to coerce or significantly encourage social media companies to remove content protected by the First Amendment.

Two members of the panel, Judges Edith B. Clement and Jennifer W. Elrod, were appointed by President George W. Bush. The third, Judge Don R. Willett, was appointed by President Donald J. Trump.

The Biden administration filed an emergency application in September asking the Supreme Court to pause the injunction, saying that the government was entitled to express its views and to try to persuade others to take action.

“A central dimension of presidential power is the use of the office’s bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans — and American companies — to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote.

In response, lawyers for the states wrote that the administration had violated the First Amendment. “The bully pulpit,” they wrote, “is not a pulpit to bully.”

The court granted the administration’s application, put the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on hold and agreed to hear the case.

Three justices dissented. “Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

“Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote.Michael Caterina/South Bend Tribune, via Associated Press

Justice Alito added: “At this time in the history of our country, what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate.”

In a Supreme Court brief, the administration said it must be free to speak vigorously in pursuing its policy agenda. “So long as the government seeks to inform and persuade rather than to compel, its speech poses no First Amendment concern — even if government officials state their views in strong terms, and even if private actors change their speech or conduct in response,” the brief said.

There was no evidence, the brief added, that the government had coerced the platforms. “Although the Fifth Circuit stated that White House officials threatened the platforms with legal reforms,” the brief said, “the only statements it identified were general responses to press questions untethered from any specific content-moderation request.”

Lawyers for Missouri and Louisiana said the administration routinely crossed the line from general persuasion to particular demands.

“The government can speak freely on any topic it chooses,” the states’ brief said, “but it cannot pressure and coerce private companies to censor ordinary Americans.”

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Ankle Monitors and Curfews: Inside Biden’s New Tracking System for Migrant Families - The New York Times

Ankle Monitors and Curfews: Inside Biden’s New Tracking System for Migrant Families

"The goal of the program is to keep people from skipping out on their asylum hearings, joining the millions of undocumented people who stay in the country indefinitely.

A portrait of a mother and son.
“We know that we didn’t come here legally, but we didn’t have a way to do it legally,” said Sandra, an asylum-seeker who crossed the border with her son, Justin, and her husband.Loren Elliott for The New York Times

On a recent evening in California, a woman named Sandra was at a birthday party with her 15-year-old son when she glanced at the clock.

She started to panic: It was after 10 p.m.

She had less than an hour to get home in time for an 11 p.m. curfew set by U.S. immigration authorities, part of a nearly year-old tracking system for migrant families who hope to be granted asylum in the United States.

She motioned to her son that they had to leave, and hustled him out the door and into the car.

They made it home at 10:58 p.m., the bulky GPS monitor on her right ankle pinging out her location to the authorities keeping track. Her heart, which had been slamming in her chest the whole ride home, finally slowed.

Sandra, 45, and her son Justin, who crossed the border in December after fleeing Colombia, are part of a nearly year-old Biden administration program that seeks to quickly process — and potentially deport — many of the migrant families who have arrived in the United States in record-breaking numbers.

The goal of the program is to keep families from skipping out on their asylum hearings and melting away into American society, joining the millions of undocumented people who stay in the country indefinitely under the radar of U.S. authorities.

If the families fail their asylum screenings, they can be deported within weeks. The asylum process usually takes years, with most claims ultimately rejected.

So far, the Family Expedited Removal Management program has tracked more than 19,000 people since May, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was obtained by The New York Times. More than 1,500 of them have been deported and around 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors, the ICE data show. The rest either passed their initial screenings or still have cases underway.

Although the program has been used in only a fraction of claims, some U.S. officials see it as a test case for a faster way to deal with families seeking refuge in America, where laws require the government to consider asylum claims from anyone who makes it onto U.S. soil.

They hope the program can provide an alternative to the usual options for handling migrant families: detaining them in costly ICE facilities, which President Biden has criticized, or releasing them with court dates years in the future and no consistent way of tracking them.

Thomas Giles, an ICE official who runs the program, said it was showing signs of promise.

“It’s definitely increased our family unit removals over the last nine months compared to before, so it’s been successful with that,” he said. But he cautioned that the program requires an enormous amount of resources and is still in the early days.

“This is basically what we’ve needed to do for 10 years, but on a massive scale,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

The Biden administration should expand the program, he said, because it is difficult to deport people — especially families — once they have been in the United States for years, building lives in America while their cases wend their way through the system.

What to do with families?

The U.S. immigration system, chronically underfunded and understaffed, cannot keep pace with the number of people who want asylum in America. Mr. Biden, in an election year with immigration as a dominant issue, is even said to be considering restricting asylum altogether.

There were more than 2.5 million migrant encounters at the southwest land border in fiscal year 2023, a record-breaking number that has strained resources in American cities.

The questions of how, where and how long to detain migrants have confounded successive administrations. But the issue of what to do with families, in particular, has been among the most fraught, with ethical and political implications at every turn.

Years of scientific consensus show that detaining minors, even with their parents, can cause developmental damage. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump all detained families in ICE facilities, hoping that the prospect of being locked up would deter migrant families from making the trip.

Mr. Trump tried to expand the practice and detain families indefinitely, but a federal judge said it violated a court settlement that required that families only be detained for 20 days.

The Biden administration made a point of ending family detention, instead releasing families with ankle bracelets and traceable cellphones. That model was a precursor to the new program, which uses strict curfews and expedited asylum screenings in addition to the electronic monitoring.

The program is being used in more than 40 locations with the resources to keep track of thousands of migrants and make swift rulings in a make-or-break step of the asylum process: the credible-fear interview.

In a functioning system, most people seeking asylum would be interviewed at the border to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution back home. But only about 500 such interviews are conducted every day — for a sliver of the thousands of people who cross.

The rest are often released into the country with a court date far in the future.

The new program aims to screen families and quickly deport those who don’t meet the bar for credible fear. Mr. Giles, the ICE official who runs the program, said that ICE gives migrants a list of free legal service providers when they are processed into the program.

If families fail their initial screenings, case managers who track their movements make sure their travel documents are in order and coordinate the trips home, usually on chartered government planes. If they abscond, ICE begins to search for them for immediate arrest.

If they pass, they can stay in the United States at least until their cases are concluded.

‘I didn’t want to come’

Sandra said she came to the United States as a last resort.

For years in Colombia, she ran a Christian organization aimed at helping the children of people addicted to drugs. It was, she said, her “dream job.”

But last year, she said, gang members threatened to kill her because she refused to help them sell drugs. She knew she had to leave.

“I didn’t want to come,” she said through a Spanish interpreter, asking that only her first name be used because of fears for her safety. “Many people come here because they are after the famous American dream — but that was not my case.”

In Colombia, she said, she was “up here,” motioning above her head. In America she is “down here,” pointing to her ankle monitor.

She began organizing the journey to the United States in the winter, with a vague plan for what to do once she arrived with Justin: Her older son, who had come to the United States a few years ago, would buy them plane tickets to Oakland, Calif.

But first she had to get across the border. In Mexico, they were robbed and threatened with kidnapping and torture. Cartel members threatened to hold them until their families paid money. There was only one option, she said. Cross the border.

In early December, they walked into Arizona and told Border Patrol they were afraid to return to Colombia, kick-starting the asylum process.

The government saw them as candidates for the new expedited process because they were headed to the Bay Area, where the program has an office. Sandra was given an ankle monitor and told to check in at a government office in San Francisco.

The case manager there told Sandra that she was not a criminal but that this was part of Mr. Biden’s program to get things “under control,” she recalled.

“This is kind of humiliating in a way,” she said. “We know that we didn’t come here legally, but we didn’t have a way to do it legally.”

‘Completely untenable’

Many advocates for immigrants say the expedited removal program actually works too fast, making it difficult for people to find legal representation. They also criticize the use of GPS trackers, which are more often used in criminal courts.

The National Immigrant Justice Center said building an asylum case requires “complex legal research, fact gathering, and numerous in-person meetings with the client for trauma-informed interviews and case preparation.”

“The speed of the program is completely untenable,” said Cindy Woods, national policy counsel at Americans for Immigrant Justice, an organization that represents families whose cases are processed through the expedited removal program, including Sandra’s.

Ms. Woods said that over the summer, a mother of two from Ecuador reached out to her two days before her family’s credible-fear screening. But the woman became distraught when talking about “past harm and threats,” Ms. Woods said.

There was no time to prepare her for the asylum screening, which she ultimately failed, Ms. Woods said. The woman is now in hiding with her family in Ecuador.

Ms. Woods said the expedited removal program was preferable to family detention. But she said “it is happening way too fast.”

For the Biden administration, speed is the whole point.

The backlog in the immigration courts surpassed three million cases last year, and there are not nearly enough judges and interpreters to tackle it effectively. The new expedited program is an attempt to keep that backlog from swelling even more with families.

The future

On a Friday in late December, Sandra arrived at her initial asylum screening in San Francisco.

She explained to the officers why she had come to the United States and what she risked back home. One week later, there was a decision: She had passed the credible fear screening, the first administrative step on the road to asylum.

She had been in America for four weeks.

Now, she waits along with the rest of the asylum seekers for her case to come up in immigration court. There are often multiple hearings, including one where both the migrant and the government present evidence. That can take years.

Now that she’s passed the initial screening, government officials took off her ankle bracelet — a relief, she said. She will apply for a work permit so she can earn money.

But the country still feels deeply unfamiliar to her.

“We trust in God and I think everything is going to turn out well,” she said. “But of course we are afraid of what is going to happen.”

Ankle Monitors and Curfews: Inside Biden’s New Tracking System for Migrant Families - The New York Times

Fani Willis Hangs Onto Trump Case, but More Turbulence Lies Ahead - The New York Times

Fani Willis Hangs Onto Trump Case, but More Turbulence Lies Ahead

"A fresh array of problems are in store for Ms. Willis and her prosecution of Donald Trump, one of the most significant state criminal cases in American history.

Fani Willis stands at a podium next to Nathan Wade.
Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, and the prosecutor Nathan Wade at a news conference in August.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

After revelations of Fani T. Willis’s romance with a subordinate sent the Georgia criminal case against Donald J. Trump down a two-month detour worthy of a soap opera, a judge’s ruling on Friday resolved a major cliffhanger. Ms. Willis could continue prosecuting the case, so long as her ex-boyfriend withdrew from it.

But the resignation hours later of the former boyfriend, Nathan J. Wade, whom Ms. Willis hired as a special prosector, only settled so much. A fresh and complicated array of problems lies ahead for Ms. Willis, and for one of the most significant state criminal cases in American history.

“Her troubles are far from over,” Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor and ethics specialist at Georgia State University, said in an email on Friday.

The defense effort to disqualify Ms. Willis began in early January, upending the case and making it unlikely to reach trial before the November rematch between Mr. Trump and President Biden. Any attempts to appeal Friday’s ruling by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court could delay matters even further.

Republicans have smelled blood. The G.O.P. lawmakers who dominate Georgia politics have created new ways to investigate Ms. Willis, which could potentially lead to her removal from office. And last week, a young lawyer named Courtney Kramer, a former intern in the Trump White House, announced that she would run against Ms. Willis in this year’s race for district attorney.

Ms. Kramer’s campaign, while unlikely to succeed in heavily Democratic Fulton County, could amplify criticism of Ms. Willis and the case, which charges Mr. Trump and some of his allies with conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

A young lawyer named Courtney Kramer, a former intern in the Trump White House, announced that she would run against Ms. Willis in this year’s race for district attorney. Natrice Miller/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press

Mr. Trump has made Ms. Willis’s troubles a recurring talking point at rallies. One of his staunchest allies in Congress, Representative Jim Jordan, is chair of the House Judiciary committee, which has been investigating Ms. Willis and her prosecution of the former president. On Thursday, Mr. Jordan sent a letter to Ms. Willis threatening to invoke contempt of Congress proceedings against her if she did not turn over certain documents related to her office’s use of federal funds.

All of these attacks could help to sow doubts about the district attorney and her case in the minds of future jurors.

As the pressure has mounted, Ms. Willis has responded with fierce defiance. Soon after news of the relationship broke, she gave a speech at a Black church in Atlanta, calling herself “flawed, hardheaded and imperfect” but also suggesting that her critics were motivated by racism.

Just last week, at an International Women’s Day event, she lashed out against “idiots” who criticized her and mispronounced her name as “Fanny” — it’s FAH-nee — and recounted how a friend had recently asked if she regretted becoming district attorney.

“Are you kidding?” Ms. Willis recalled responding. “I’m the best D.A. this county’s ever had.”

Mr. Cunningham said that even after Friday’s ruling, Ms. Willis and her entire office could still be removed from the case if an appeal were to succeed, which would send it skidding into new realms of uncertainty and potential chaos. The judge, he noted, pointed to lingering questions about whether Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade “testified untruthfully,” even saying in his ruling that “an odor of mendacity remains.”

“Trump and his co-defendants will surely appeal,” Mr. Cunningham said in his email, “and Judge McAfee’s order gives plenty of basis for them to argue to the court of appeals that just removing Wade is an inadequate remedy.”

It is not clear how much Mr. Wade’s resignation sets back the case. Ms. Willis has described him as a longtime trusted ally. And as the manager of the Trump prosecution team since November 2021, he possesses a wealth of institutional knowledge that would have been particularly helpful if the case stretches out for months, or even years.

At the same time, there is no evidence that Mr. Wade, a lawyer and former municipal court judge from the Atlanta suburbs, ever handled a major political corruption case before Ms. Willis hired him. Indeed, his scant experience was a key argument in the original motion to disqualify Ms. Willis.

Ashleigh Merchant, the defense lawyer who filed the motion, claimed that Ms. Willis had hired an underqualified boyfriend, paid him handsomely from public coffers, and then benefited from vacations that she and Mr. Wade took together.

Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer who filed the motion to disqualify Ms. Willis, claimed that Ms. Willis had hired an underqualified boyfriend, paid him handsomely from public coffers, and then benefited from vacations that she took with him.Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

A more serious problem for Ms. Willis and the case may lie in the new state commission that has the power to investigate and remove elected prosecutors.

The commission, made up of Republican appointees, was created last year but was stymied by legal problems that the legislature addressed in a recent measure. It is likely to face a court challenge before it can begin its work.

A second group made up of mostly Republican state senators and dedicated to investigating Ms. Willis has already begun holding hearings. Its leader, Senator Bill Cowsert, has said that the group does not want to conduct a “witch hunt.” But it has the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, and it called Ms. Merchant as its first witness last week.

Before Ms. Merchant’s motion to disqualify Ms. Willis, the prosecution had secured pleas from four of the original 19 defendants in the sprawling racketeering case. Presumably, any talk of additional deals shut down as defendants waited to see whether Ms. Willis and her office would be thrown off the case. It is unclear whether the events of the last two months will make further plea talks less likely.

The best news for Ms. Willis on Friday was that Judge McAfee declined to force her off the Trump case. But she also scored smaller victories, as the judge declined to punish her for other actions. Among them was the speech she gave at the church.

Steven H. Sadow, the main lawyer for Mr. Trump in Georgia, had described the speech as “provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments” meant to “publicly denounce and rebuke the defendants.” He argued that they were troubling enough to disqualify Ms. Willis and her office and dismiss the indictment.

Judge McAfee declined to go that far, although he did call Ms. Willis’s statements “legally improper.” And he suggested that he was open to issuing a gag order that would block Ms. Willis from mentioning the case in public from now on.

But does keeping Ms. Willis quiet help or hurt the case as it drags on? Much like Mr. Trump, she does not shy away from the spotlight. And like Mr. Trump, her talkative, combative nature has won her enthusiastic fans.

In December, a few weeks before the relationship was brought to light, Ms. Willis drew applause and cheers as she spoke at an event in New York honoring her.

“A lot of folks mad,” she said, “But I’m still here.”

Danny Hakim is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about Danny Hakim"

Fani Willis Hangs Onto Trump Case, but More Turbulence Lies Ahead - The New York Times

Friday, March 15, 2024

Missouri law bars divorce during pregnancy – even in cases of violence | Missouri | The Guardian

(The United States is quickly moving back to it's primitive, 19th Century past)

Missouri law bars divorce during pregnancy – even in cases of violence

"The statute, which can lead to reproductive coercion in a state that has banned abortion, has recently gained nationwide attention

A close up image of a pregnant woman holding her stomach
Under a Missouri statute, those who are pregnant are barred from legally dissolving their marriage. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

At six months pregnant, H decided enough was enough. She had endured years of abuse from her husband and had recently discovered he was also physically violent towards her child. She contacted an attorney to help her get a divorce.

But she was stopped short. Her lawyer told her that she could not finalize a divorce in Missouri because she was pregnant. “I just absolutely felt defeated,” she said. H returned to the house she shared with her abuser, sleeping in her child’s room on the floor and continuing to face violence. On the night before she gave birth, she slept in the most secure room in the house: on the tile floor in the basement, with the family’s dogs.

Under a Missouri statute that has recently gained nationwide attention, every petitioner for divorce is required to disclose their pregnancy status. In practice, experts say, those who are pregnant are barred from legally dissolving their marriage. “The application [of the law] is an outright ban,” said Danielle Drake, attorney at Parks & Drake. When Drake learned her then husband was having an affair, her own divorce stalled because she was pregnant. Two other states have similar laws: Texas and Arkansas.

It took H three months after the birth of her second child to muster the finances and courage to file for divorce again. She believes that had she been able to obtain a divorce when she first tried, she would have been able to leave an abusive environment many months earlier.

The original intent of the statute in Missouri, which originated in 1973, was “noble”, Ashley Aune, a Democratic representative, said, as it tried to ensure that a mother and her child were provided for by settling custody arrangements and child support after the child’s birth.

But in practice, it has created barriers for pregnant people seeking divorce. The precise number of women the current statute affects is unknown – no entity collects this information. But the problem, Synergy Services, a non-profit that provides supportive services to people experiencing violence in Greater Kansas City, said they regularly receive requests for support from pregnant women unable to divorce abusive husbands because of the law.

Advocates warn the law can enable reproductive coercion, a term referring to behaviors that aim to control the course of another person’s reproductive autonomy. Common examples include forcing a person to continue or terminate a pregnancy, sabotaging their birth control or tracking their ovulation cycle.

When the abuse was ongoing, H says she would not have used the term to describe her experience. She does now. Her first child was six months old when she was raped by her former husband and became pregnant again. “I think he knew, in his mind, that it would keep me as his property,” H told the Guardian.

Aune recently introduced House bill 2402, which would give a family court judge more discretion to grant an expedited divorce in cases of pregnancy. “I want a judge to be able to look at that and say, ‘OK, you’re right. This is a situation where we need to close this divorce out,’” Aune said. The bill has yet to be brought to a vote.

Missouri is particularly restrictive when it comes to reproductive health and autonomy. It was one of the first to ban abortion after Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, including in cases of rape and incest. Research shows that abortion restrictions can effectively give cover to reproductive coercion and sexual violence: the National Hotline for Domestic Violence said it saw a 99% increase in calls during the first year after the loss of the constitutional right to abortion.

Advocates are currently trying to gather enough signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would make abortion legal until fetal viability, or around 24 weeks.

In Missouri, homicide was the third leading cause of deaths in connection with pregnancy between 2018–2022, the majority (75%) of which occurred among Black women, according to a 2023 report by the Missouri department of health and senior services, which examines maternal mortality data. In every case, the perpetrator was a current or former partner. And in 2022, 23,252 individuals in the state received services after reporting domestic violence, according to the latest reporting from Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, which compiles data from direct service providers in the state.

“I don’t believe it is hyperbole when I say this legislation could literally save lives,” said Matthew Huffman, chief public affairs officer at Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, a state-wide membership association of domestic and sexual violence service providers.

Having “the agency and ability to have a divorce finalized puts you in a place where you can begin to regain control of your life”.

Missouri law bars divorce during pregnancy – even in cases of violence | Missouri | The Guardian