8 deportees land in South Sudan after Supreme Court ruling
July 5 (UPI) -- Eight deported "migrants" who had been held at a U.S. military base in Djibouti are bound for South Sudan aboard a military aircraft that took off on Friday night.
The flight carrying the eight deportees had been delayed for six weeks until the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled a lower court erred when it issued a preliminary injunction halting the deportations in April.
"These sickos were finally deported to South Sudan on Independence day," said Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, in a press release on Saturday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement "deported these eight barbaric criminal illegal aliens who are so heinous even their own countries will not accept them," McLaughlin added.
She accused federal "activist judges" of delaying the deportation flight.
"We will continue to fight for the freedoms of Americans while these far-left activists continue to try and force us to bring murderers, pedophiles and rapists back to the U.S.," McLaughlin said.
The federal lawsuit forced the flight to land at the Djibouti base while the matter made its way through the federal court system.
The eight deportees include two from Cuba, two from Burma, and one each from Laos, Vietnam, Mexico and South Sudan.
All have been convicted of crimes, including homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault and sexual offenses involving a minor younger than age 12.
The military aircraft left the Djibouti base at 8:30 p.m. EDT with each deportee secured by handcuffs and ankle shackles while surrounded by uniformed personnel, The New York Times reported.
The aircraft landed in South Sudan just before midnight EDT on Friday.
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Puerto Ricans hope for change as Bad Bunny sings about the island's turmoil and identity
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — In a small bookstore in the Caribbean's largest mall, dozens of people gathered on a recent evening for the launch of a slim dictionary. Its title is 'The ABC of DtMF,' which is short for 'DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,' the newest album from Puerto Rico's latest prodigious son, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny. The mostly older crowd flipped through the pages, seeking to understand more about Puerto Rico's culture, the places, phrases and references in Bad Bunny's music. The singer has elevated the global profile of the island, a U.S. territory, to new heights, promoting its traditional music, denouncing its gentrification and challenging its political status. It was an unexpected opportunity for an island that for years has cried out about its territorial status, dwindling affordable housing, high cost of living, chronic power outages, medical exodus and fragile economy. Pleas for change have been largely pushed aside, but Puerto Ricans are optimistic that Bad Bunny's new album and his series of 30 concerts that began Friday means they'll finally be heard. 'He's going to bring change, and there's a young generation who's going to back him,' said Luis Rosado, 57, who this week attended the dictionary launch at the urging of his son, who lives abroad. 'They want my neighborhood' Ten minutes before the first concert on Friday, a giant billboard on stage lit up with the words, 'Puerto Rico is a colony since Christopher Columbus 'discovered' the island during his second trip to the New World in 1493.' The crowd that filled the 18,000-capacity coliseum whooped. 'This album has sparked a conversation around the world about our situation as a colony,' said Andrea Figueroa, a 24-year-old professional athlete who said foreigners have started to ask her about Puerto Rico and its issues, something she hopes might lead to change. Those born on the island of 3.2 million inhabitants are U.S. citizens but cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, and they have one representative in Congress with limited voting powers. Figueroa said the album resonated with her because her father is one of thousands forced to leave the island in search of work as the economy crumbled. It's a sentiment Bad Bunny sings about in 'What happened to Hawaii,' with the lyric, 'He didn't want to go to Orlando, but the corrupt ones kicked him out.' The song taps into concern that the Puerto Rican identity is eroding amid an influx of people from the U.S. mainland, many of them attracted by a 2012 law that allows Americans to move to the island and pay no taxes on capital gains if they meet certain conditions. Hundreds of Americans also snapped up properties in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck the island as a powerful Category 4 storm in 2017, forcing more than 100,000 people to leave. 'They want to take the river away from me and also the beach; they want my neighborhood and the grandma to leave,' Bad Bunny sang on Friday as the crowd drowned out his voice. The artist spent half of Friday's concert singing from the porch and roof of a traditional Puerto Rican home that served as a second stage, where he wonders about its fate aloud because it's been rented: 'Do good people live there? Is it an Airbnb?' The mostly young crowd booed loudly, flinching at their reality on an island where the housing price index increased by almost 60% from 2018 to 2024 and where short-term rentals have surged from some 1,000 in 2014 to more than 25,000 in 2023. The song hit Carmen Lourdes López Rivera especially hard. She is the vice president of the Community Board Association of La Perla, an impoverished community once known for being Puerto Rico's biggest heroin distribution point. Investors with deep pockets have long sought to buy up the area, which is perched on a hill with deep turquoise waters lapping below a massive 16th-century fort popular with tourists. 'They have always said they want to kick us out of here,' she said. 'We're going to fight for what belongs to us.' Bomba, plena and a crested toad The effect of Bad Bunny's album and concerts is already being felt. More than 35,000 hotel nights have been booked during the normally slow summer season, with the concerts expected to attract more than 600,000 visitors, generate more than $186 million and create more than 3,600 jobs, according to government officials. Beyond that, Bad Bunny's use of folkloric music like bomba and plena has revived interest in those musical traditions. Dozens of newcomers have requested classes and are seeking out teachers, said Jorge Gabriel López Olán, 28, an experienced drummer. 'And it's very necessary, isn't it? To understand where we come from and where our music and culture come from,' he said. On Friday, Bad Bunny fans sported long ruffled skirts traditionally worn to dance bomba, while others donned straw hats known as a 'pava,' worn by 'jíbaros,' Puerto Rican peasants. Musicians and dancers wore the same outfits on the main stage, which at one point even featured live chickens. Interest has surged to the point where universities including Princeton and Yale have launched courses on Bad Bunny. Albert Laguna, a Yale professor, described Bad Bunny's residence as a powerful move: 'Instead of me going to the world, right, I'm going to start here.' There is even renewed interest in the Puerto Rican crested toad, the island's sole indigenous toad species that is under threat and was featured in a video as part of Bad Bunny's newest album. Not even two weeks had passed since the album's launch and people already were sending in pictures to confirm if they had spotted the crested toad, said Abel Vale Nieves with Citizens of the Karst, an environmental nonprofit. 'It's something we had not seen before,' he said, adding that the album presented Puerto Rico's reality to the world: 'A situation of complete disadvantage where we don't have the right to a lot of things.' 'It creates interest in Puerto Rico's historical situation, and I think it did so in a wonderful way,' he said, adding that the concerts will only boost visibility of the island's issues. 'It's a beautiful opportunity.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
This Group's Record in Front of the Roberts Court Is Mind-Boggling
In a provocative dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently called out her colleagues on the Supreme Court for appearing 'overly sympathetic to corporate interests.' Objecting to a decision allowing fuel companies to sue over clean-air rules that don't regulate those companies, Jackson described how 'moneyed interests' seem to 'enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.' Justice Sonia Sotomayor later echoed that sentiment in a different case, highlighting the court's reluctance to constrain 'regulated businesses' while imposing 'Kafkaesque' rules on other litigants, such as 'politically disfavored noncitizens.' Jackson and Sotomayor are right to be concerned about the court's bias toward industry. As the Constitutional Accountability Center has documented, the court has adopted the position advocated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in nearly 70 percent of its cases since John Roberts became chief justice 20 years ago. Some terms, the Roberts court has sided with the Chamber 80 percent, 90 percent, and even 100 percent of the time. That is a sharp increase from prior decades, when the Chamber's success rate hovered around 50 percent. Even this remarkable success rate does not fully capture the advances big business has made under the Roberts court. The court's pro-corporate decisions routinely yield landmark rulings that bulldoze settled doctrine in favor of industry. Take, for instance, the recent trio of cases imposing limits on judicial deference to agency legal views, cutting back on agencies' ability to adjudicate certain matters in-house, and brushing away time limits on challenging agency regulations. Each decision undermined long-standing precedent, making it more difficult to enforce laws meant to ensure safe workplaces and products, a clean environment, and fair financial dealings. Industry's 'losses' at the Supreme Court, by contrast, are often simply failures to reshape the law even more aggressively in its favor. In these cases, the court maintains the status quo, but it almost never moves the ball significantly in favor of consumers, workers, or the environment. This term, for instance, the court declined to expand the 'nondelegation' doctrine, which addresses when Congress can give policymaking authority to agencies, something corporations have long urged to make it more difficult for agencies to regulate them. But the court's rejection of that effort simply reaffirmed precedent going back a century—and the Chamber has claimed that even the court's opinion in this case implicitly signals a more restrictive approach to agency authority. This lopsided pattern means that efforts to promote corporate accountability at best tread water, while industry victories regularly reshape the legal landscape. That dynamic is exacerbated by how the court selects cases to hear. Overwhelmingly, the justices choose to review lower-court decisions that go against corporate interests—rarely the opposite. In some recent terms, over 90 percent of the business cases the court chose to hear were corporate challenges to lower-court rulings that favored individuals or the government over industry. By stacking the deck this way, the court gives big business plenty of opportunities to overturn unfavorable decisions, while avoiding putting corporate victories in jeopardy. To illustrate just how skewed the court's practice has been, during one five-year period the court reversed only two lower-court victories for industry, while reversing nearly 50 lower-court victories for plaintiffs and the government. Big business's newfound success is partly driven by another trend that has emerged under Chief Justice Roberts: a deep rift between the Democrat- and Republican-appointed justices in business cases. Based on the numbers, the court's more liberal wing—not its conservative bloc—appears to be following Roberts' professed model of a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes. The more liberal justices have typically voted for the Chamber of Commerce's position roughly 50 percent of the time, while the conservative justices have sometimes done so more than 75 percent of the time. Some years, the conservatives have sided with industry nearly twice as often as their colleagues. And tellingly, when business interests prevail, conservative justices almost never dissent. With the recent comments by Jackson and Sotomayor, the court's own members are now calling attention to this apparent bias. And the conservative supermajority has been unable to muster a response. Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to refute Jackson's accusation that the court acts inconsistently when deciding who to let through the courthouse doors. His response was to cite a list of cases that he claimed showed otherwise. But this list, strikingly, does not include a single case in which the court allowed individuals to sue corporations, or prevented corporations from suing the government. What the record actually shows is that the court invariably sweeps aside procedural roadblocks when industries sue to evade oversight and accountability. But the court does not offer the same solicitude to individual plaintiffs attempting to redress corporate abuse. In the 2010 case Free Enterprise Fund v. PCOAB, for example, the court permitted industries to challenge oversight by agencies they claim are unconstitutional, despite lacking any statutory right to do so. In the 2019 case Seila Law v. CFPB, it held that companies can pursue these sorts of challenges to agency authority without showing that the alleged constitutional flaw made a difference in their case. Both decisions led to major rulings cutting back on agency independence. In West Virginia v. EPA in 2021, the court allowed fossil-fuel interests to sue over an environmental policy that would never have gone into effect regardless, giving the conservative majority the opportunity to endorse the so-called major questions doctrine, which makes it more difficult for Congress to give agencies the authority they need to regulate business. More recently, in Axon Enterprise v. FTC, the justices allowed litigants to go directly to court with objections to agency procedures, instead of waiting for the agency to first complete its proceedings. And in Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, which prompted Jackson's remarks this term, the court let fuel companies challenge an emissions standard based on supposedly 'commonsense' speculation about its effects—precisely what the court has long prevented individuals and nonprofits from doing. Compare this indulgent approach with how the court treats other litigants. In sharply divided decisions, it has blocked consumers and employees from leveling the playing field by joining together in class actions. It has repeatedly shut plaintiffs out of court entirely by shunting them into forced arbitration. The court has made itself, not Congress, the arbiter of what counts as an 'injury' that can justify a lawsuit—and in the court's view, being erroneously designated as a terrorist by credit bureaus does not qualify. The court has prevented unhoused people from using the Eighth Amendment to challenge laws that punish them for sleeping outdoors. It has prohibited victims of human rights abuses from suing companies that aided those abuses, pronouncing corporations uniquely immune under a 200-year-old law. It has contorted statutory language to stop immigrants from obtaining effective relief against wrongful detention and deportation. And it has barred individuals from challenging government surveillance because the harms they complained about were too speculative—a lesson the court forgot when industry plaintiffs came before it. As Justice Jackson noted, 'the Constitution does not distinguish between plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce and those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegrated schools, or privacy.' But if anyone doubts the reality of that statement in practice, the court's one-sided record 'will do little to dissuade them.'
UPI
2 hours ago
- UPI
Judge blocks random immigration raids in LA
July 12 (UPI) -- A federal judge in California issued two restraining orders blocking federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from conducting random detentions of people in Los Angeles and denying access to legal advice. The ruling this week by U.S. District Court for the Central District of California Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong was in response to a lawsuit filed by a collection of plaintiffs, including two individual American citizens. "The individuals and organizations who have brought this lawsuit argue that this organization had two key features, both of which were unconstitutional: 'roving patrols' indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion and, having done so, denying these individuals access to lawyers who could help them navigate the legal process they found themselves in," Frimpong wrote in the 52-page ruling. "On this, the federal government agrees: Roving patrols without reasonable suspicion violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and denying access to lawyers violates the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution." "What the federal government would have this Court believe -- in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case -- is that none of this is actually happening." The lawsuit was filed earlier in the month and names Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel and several other federal officials as defendants. The suit comes as ICE officers and agents from other federal agencies, including the FBI and DEA, continue immigration raids in the Los Angeles area at the direction of President Donald Trump. The raids have entered their second month as Trump continues his promised crack down on immigration. Demonstrators this week clashed with federal agents in Ventura County outside a cannabis growing operation. Earlier in the week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass indicated the city would join the lawsuit to block the Trump administration's immigration raids, but the municipality is not named as a plaintiff in the suit filed in District Court. In her ruling, Frimpong pointed to several instances where people were questioned indiscriminately by federal agents and in some cases detained without lawyers for lengthy periods of time. The two restraining orders remain in place for 10 days. The plaintiffs are seeking a more permanent preliminary injunction.
