@chancerydaily.bsky.social
RE
Kids at civil, #Immigrationhearing no right to an attorney

(#Bluesky COMMENT)
‪Navin Pokala ‪@navinpokala.bsky.social‬
Context: These are not actual Article III judges ... these are #AdministrativeLawJudges within #DOJ ... so they are under #Bondi and #Trump. Something that needs to happen next time there is a Dem trifecta is to move deportation tribunals into the Judicial branch, independent of POTUS.
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@Lazarou Thx 4 orig boost

The #DOJ on Tues canceled hundreds of grants to community orgs & local govts, including funding for #GunViolence prevention programs, #crime-#victim #advocacy & efforts to combat #opioid #addiction, acc/to an email obtained by WaPo.

Maureen Henneberg, acting head of the Office of #Justice Programs, which oversees the DOJ grant program, told staff in the email that the canceled awards were identified through a weeks-long review process & did not align w/the #Trump admin’s priorities.

This is an older article from February 2025, but I thought it might be worth sharing here in the wake of Trump's attempts to transform the civil rights section at the Department of Justice into a fascist attack dog that works only to further his authoritarian ideological goals. Within three weeks of Downmarket Mussolini's inauguration, the regime had already repurposed the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights towards prosecuting Trump's Christian Nationalist agenda, while actively sidelining investigations into racial abuse, disability access, and even sexual assault.

https://www.propublica.org/article/department-of-education-civil-rights-office-investigations

“We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump

"In the three-and-a-half weeks since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, investigations by the agency that handles allegations of civil rights violations in the nation’s schools and colleges have ground to a halt.

At the same time, there’s been a dramatic drop in the number of new cases opened by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — and the few that attorneys have been directed to investigate reflect some of Trump’s priorities: getting rid of gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports and alleged antisemitism or discrimination against white students."

I don't really think it's a coincidence that Trump and his Education Secretary Linda McMahon (a woman extremely active in the cause to privatize education and promote religious voucher schools) immediately prioritized the same winger bullshit at the DOE as the regime is now trying to force the DoJ's civil rights division to pursue; namely discrimination against white people, alleged antisemitism, and women's rights - but only in the extremely narrow context of keeping trans women out of women's sports and bathrooms. This is a Christian Nationalist government, actively working to install a Christian Nationalist political and social order on the United States by whatever means legal, or extralegal, it requires to do so.

The push to access the #DOJ system is the latest attempt by the #Trump admin to claw deeper into vast troves of federal data to advance #Trump’s aggressive #deportation efforts.

Last week, officials w/ #ICE who are working with DOGE asked to use a sensitive #Medicare database, including personal #health information & addresses, to help ICE locate people the admin does not THINK are in the country legally.

#DOJ staff were instructed to begin preparing #ECAS accounts for the #DOGE team, the documents show, including fmr hedge fund staffer Adam Hoffman as well as Payton Rehling & Jon Koval, both of whom work at a private equity firm tied to #ElonMusk. The team also includes Marko Elez, who resigned from the govt in Feb after WSJ linked him to a social media account that made #racist posts. He was rehired after #Musk dismissed the significance of the posts.

A team of roughly a half-dozen #DOGE “advisors” placed at the #DOJ won approval from senior officials at the agency on Friday to access the #ECAS system, according to the documents reviewed by The Post.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment Monday, and The Post could not confirm whether the access has been granted or why it was sought.

The system—the Exec Office for #Immigration Review’s Courts & Appeals System, or #ECAS —is used to store records of immigrants who have interacted w/US immigration system, detailing their name, any addresses, previous immigration-court testimony & history of engagement w/ #law enforcement, among other things. #DOJ’s website states that “ECAS supports the full life cycle of an immigration case” by maintaining “all records & case-related documents in electronic format.”

Representatives for #Musk’s #DOGE have received permission to access a highly sensitive #DOJ system that contains information including the addresses & case history for millions of legal & undocumented immigrants, acc/to documents obtained by WaPo.

"The secretary can remove them at will, & the threat of removal is the ultimate tool for control over final decisions on recommendations," #Trump #DOJ lawyers wrote.

For this & other reasons, DOJ lawyers argued, the #USPSTF's members should be seen as so-called "inferior officers," meaning they can be lawfully appointed by an executive branch dept head - like #HHS secy #RFKJr - & do not require #Senate confirmation under the #Constitution.