Free Republic

An Iowa judge on Wednesday threw out President Trump’s lawsuit over the Des Moines Register’s final 2024 poll and declared that even a wildly off election-eve survey is the kind of “erroneous statement” the First Amendment must protect. RedState readers will surely remember the poll in question. The Register published a wild outlier three days before the presidential election, suggesting Kamala Harris held a lead over her Republican opponent in Iowa. The Hawkeye State was not considered competitive. And it wasn't. Trump went on to win the state by 13 points. It was a 16-point miss that Trump described as...

...Judge James Boasberg, who confronted the Trump administration over its 2025 deportation flights, was a nine-time host for a Chinese law exchange funded by a Chinese Communist Party-linked spy front. Six of those annual host credits came while Boasberg served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. One came in 2020, when he was its presiding judge. The court reviews some of the government’s most sensitive applications for foreign-intelligence surveillance and searches.... ...CUSEF, is part of Beijing’s United Front system, which combines political influence with intelligence operations. ...

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Texas to install air conditioning in all of its prisons, saying that inmates in lockups without it are being given punishments that violate their constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said in the 150-page order that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice must come up with a plan to install air conditioning by the end of 2029 in every prison in the state where summer heat routinely soars above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). He ruled that a lack of air conditioning violates the constitutional right not to be given “cruel and...

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., questioned Wednesday whether the Trump administration provided due process when it barred three major media outlets from access to the White House. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said the administration's process did not appear to comply with two earlier D.C. Circuit rulings, Sherrill v. Knight and Karem v. Trump, requiring due process before reporters' hard passes can be revoked, the Washington Examiner reported. "The government said those cases were wrongly decided," Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said at the hearing. "Maybe they were wrongly decided, maybe they weren't. But as a district...

A federal judge has ordered the White House to immediately restore access for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. NBC News’ Nikki Battiste and Gary Grumbach report on the judge’s ruling.

A federal judge with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued a preliminary injunction to block the U.S. government from conducting warrantless civil immigration arrests in the district unless the arrestee is deemed likely to escape before a warrant can be procured. "Defendants are enjoined from enforcing their policy and practice of making warrantless civil immigration arrests in this District without a prearrest individualized determination by the arresting agent or officer of probable cause that the person being arrested is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, as required by 8 U.S.C. 1357(a)(2) and...

Key Points * A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the board of the Kennedy Center from inscribing the name of President Donald Trump on the performing arts center’s main building to honor him and from renaming the center’s campus after Trump. * “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. ======================================================================= A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts from inscribing President Donald...

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major loss in his quest to restrict the use of mail-in ballots just weeks before the midterm elections. Lawyers for Trump had asked the Supreme Court to allow his executive order allowing US Postal Service rules allowing the government to 'check' mail-in ballots against a central repository of registered voters in each state - and reject ballots from voters not listed in the database. The appeal was the third time the Trump administration asked the high court to intervene - in a sign of its outsize interest in the matter. Critics have...

The Supreme Court told the Trump administration on Monday that the midterms will be run on the same mail-ballot machinery that has been driving half the country crazy since 2020. Standardized envelopes, unique barcodes, and a list of who is actually supposed to receive a ballot? Not this year. Maybe later. That is the practical meaning of the unsigned emergency order. The justices left standing the nationwide blocks on the Postal Service’s Ballot Mail for Federal Elections rule. Fox News and The Gateway Pundit both reported the denial of the stay. Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin have already started stuffing...

Emergency appeal turns up heat on Supreme Court, which is also considering the administration’s bid to change the rules for mail-in ballotsThe Trump administration filed an emergency appeal Tuesday that seeks the Supreme Court’s blessing to deploy a federal immigration database that it says could be used to root out people improperly registered to vote.The effort stems from an executive order President Trump issued last year that directed the Department of Homeland Security to share information with state officials about voter eligibility and to compare states’ voter rolls with federal data. The administration has built a verification system over the...

The contested rules require states to rapidly overhaul mail voting with new voter lists and bar-coded envelopes. The Supreme Court is expected to rule relatively quickly, given the emergency nature of the appeal. California and nearly two dozen other states warned the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday that allowing the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots in the November election would cause “chaos” and could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. “In some States ... compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable...

The Supreme Court Thursday rejected a bid to implement a new congressional map in Missouri that would have likely given Republicans an extra seat in the House of Representatives.In an order with no noted dissents the high court imposed a stay on the map while a lawsuit brought by opponents of the redistricting gambit makes its way through the legal system.For now, Missouri must use the map implemented following the 2020 census, which has returned a House delegation of six Republicans and two Democrats. The new map would have carved up parts of Kansas City to weaken the Democrats’ grip...

The U.S. Supreme Court again rejected Missouri congressional maps backed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, a loss for Republicans trying to maintain control of the House in the pivotal midterm elections. The decision appears to clear the way for the state to use a map passed in 2022, as the state's highest court ordered. It's part of a pitched legal battle that has created confusion for voters and others shortly before ballots begin going out for the November elections. The Trump administration had urged the court to keep the president's preferred maps, which were aimed at gaining one additional...

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump ’s mail ballot restrictions for now, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting in the midterm elections already underway. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the brief order. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the restrictions should not go into effect for the midterms but indicated he might rule in favor of the Trump administration later. The Trump administration had asked the court, once again at the center of a...

New York and 21 other states are suing the Trump administration to block a new Department of Homeland Security rule that would give immigration officials wider discretion to deny green cards, visas or entry into the United States when determining whether applicants could become dependent on government aid. The rule change, set to take effect Friday, likely would make it tougher for many immigrants to obtain green cards if they use or are deemed likely to need public benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid or housing vouchers. New York State Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Mayor Zohran...

Efforts to build an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Gilroy have hit a snag after a federal judge ordered construction on the building to be paused owing to the 24-acre site being in possible violation of multiple laws concerning immigration and the environment. As ABC7 reports, the Friday ruling was issued after both sides delivered arguments in US District Court. Back in June, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County both announced their intent to challenge the construction of a new ICE facility at a site east of the Gilroy Premium Outlets. In a statement, Bonta reiterated...

The order pdf: https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2026cv1114-192

The highest court in Massachusetts on Thursday issued a public reprimand against a district court judge who was accused of allowing an immigrant to escape US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. The case dates back to 2018 when Judge Shelley Joseph was accused of colluding with the immigrant’s attorney and a court officer to allow him to escape out a back door of the courthouse after a hearing on charges that included drug possession. The decision by the Supreme Judicial Court follows a recommendation for the reprimand by a hearing officer for the Commission on Judicial Conduct. It concluded that...

A machete-wielding MS-13 executioner known as “the witch” has been cut loose by an “activist” federal judge in California despite facing an aggravated murder warrant in El Salvador. David Antonio Aviles Perez, 35, was captured by ICE agents in San Diego in April on an international warrant accusing him of aggravated murder. He had been held in federal custody pending his removal from the US. But before authorities could arrange for his extradition, Aviles Perez was released last Wednesday by federal Judge Jinsook Ohta, who ordered his release from a southern California ICE detention facility by 5 p.m. the following...

ICE spent months tracking down an MS-13 gang member known as “The Witch,” a convicted killer wanted in El Salvador for an execution-style murder. Now, ICE has been forced to set him free. U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden appointee in California, ordered David Antonio Aviles Perez released from ICE custody after concluding that immigration authorities violated his due-process rights.Judge Ohta ruled that ICE erred by holding him for five months without an individualized determination of whether he posed a danger to the public or was likely to flee.A machete-wielding MS-13 executioner known as “the witch” has been cut...