Category: Legal, Laws, and Regs

Lawyers, next time, talk to the techs

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 6, 2025

I’m following several lawsuits related to recent Trump/DOGE antics. Among them is a lawsuit by the Alliance for Retired Americans related to DOGE access to Treasury fiscal systems.

First of all, none of the DOGE techies who have been mentioned at Wired have the expertise to even understand the Treasury systems, much less modify them without hopelessly breaking them. Most of the DOGE people are script kiddies, not folks who have worked with large enterprise systems—especially systems likely to have been written in Java.

Secondly, most of these people have no training in working with larger enterprise systems. Working with Teslas and space ships does not equip you to create the massive systems in place at Treasury and likely many other government systems. Heck, there’s no indication any of them even know how to use project management systems such as Git, if this screenshot of a X-witter post is any indication.

Rookie Mistake 1: no backups

To stop the costly destruction that could be catastrophic for so many people in this country, lawyers for several groups filed a lawsuit against Treasury, demanding that DOGE be stopped from potentially damaging these essential systems. They also asked for a Temporary Restraining order to take effect while the case is litigated.

During a hearing yesterday, the judge and both sides agreed to a proposed order to ‘maintain the status quo’ of the systems by only allowing limited read-only access to DOGE ‘special employees’. However, they agreed to let Treasury employees unfettered access to the systems.

Any person who is an employee (but not a Special Government Employee) of the Department of the Treasury and who has a need for the record or system of recordsin the performance of their duties;

Employees like Thomas Shedd, who was brought in by DOGE. Employees like Shedd who is an employee solely because of DOGE coercion.

Employees like Shedd who can now rummage about these systems without any hindrance, doing whatever he wants to these systems.

Legal folk: you don’t like techies like me to write about or dabble with the law because we’re not experts. At the same time, you don’t bring in tech experts likebe me to ensure you’re not making a terrible mistake with the legal agreements you make. And this was a hell of a bad agreement.

You should have phrased the order to only include employees who were employed in the Treasury before January 1, 2025. Now, DOGE could tell Bessant to ‘hire’ any number of DOGE people who will have free reign over these system, and they won’t violate this court order.

In fact, Bessant can go to Congress or write letters to Congressional members stating that the DOGE special employees have read-only access, while DOGE-affiliated techs have unrestricted access to everything.

Bad call. Really bad call. Lawyers, next time, talk to the techs.

Also published at Substack

Tags DOGE

Constitution Immigration

Subject to the jurisdiction…Trump just stated no one can enforce migration law against migrant mothers

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 21, 2025

Trump

Among the appalling, thoughtless, reckless, and inane executive orders trump issued on Day One, the one considered the most *bonkers is the one to end birthright citizenship.

Yes, is it is true that for over a 130 years, courts have deemed that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment, which states:

All people born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

According to Trump’s executive order:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

A lawsuit has already been filed on this order, and I expect others—many others, and not filed in Texas—to follow.

But let’s take a moment to look at Trump’s action another way.

What Trump is saying is that the parents of the child are not subject to jurisdiction, and therefore the the child isn’t a citizen. Technically, the ‘not subject to jurisdiction’ has meant that children of certain foreign diplomats who have immunity from our legal jurisdiction aren’t automatically made citizens when born in the US. According to USCIS:

A person born in the United States to a foreign diplomatic officer accredited to the United States is not subject to the jurisdiction of United States law. Therefore, that person cannot be considered a U.S. citizen at birth under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This person may, however, be considered a permanent resident at birth and able to receive a Green Card through creation of record.

The person born to a foreign diplomat is not a US citizen by birth because the child’s parent or parents are not subject to jurisdiction. So, what does that subject to jurisdiction mean, exactly?

What it means is the parent or parents can’t be arrested, handcuffed, detained, or charged with a crime—no matter how serious their actions—unless the country that sent the diplomat waives immunity.

Though the immigrant parent or parents are not diplomats, the concept of not subject to jurisdiction doesn’t mysteriously attain a new meaning in our legal system. It is a plainly understood concept that disdains wiggle room.

So, Trump is saying. is that the parents are not subject to jurisdiction. This means the parent or parents can’t be handcuffed, arrested, detained, charged with any crime, or taken to court. Our immigration laws would have no impact on these individuals, because they’re not subject to jurisdiction.

Ipso facto if Trump’s administration wants to continue removing birthright citizenship from the children of these immigrants, then his administration must agree not to handcuff, arrest, detain, charge, or take any other legal action against the child’s parent or parents. Since deportation is a legal action, the **US could not deport the parent.

Could the administration deport the children, instead? I don’t see how, according to our laws. If the administration wants to arrest, detain, and/or deport the child, they’d have to demonstrate the child was here in violation of immigration law, but how could they do so?

According to Cornell Law:

Infancy is an affirmative defense offered by a defendant in a criminal proceeding that the defendant did not have the mens rea necessary to be charged with the crime on account of their age. In other words, the defendant was too young to possess the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of their actions.

In other words, the child did not have the criminal intent to violate the law, and therefore hasn’t broken any law. Even without the infant defense, the baby did not enter the country illegally, they did not cross the border to our country illegally, they did not overstay their visa illegally…they’re just here. As if by magic. And we have no laws on magic.

Still, if Trump wishes to up his deportation numbers, he could deport the children…to the country of their birth. We can live with this.

*Most bonkers, if you ignore that whole Gulf of America thing.

**The executive branch can declare an individual as persona non grata and ask them to leave the country, but this concept is based on the fact that they were originally welcomed to the country, and it gets more twisty from there.

Substack link for commenting

Tags Executive Order, Trump

Immigration Political

Doing the Math on Trump’s Deportation plans

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date October 28, 2024

Buoys placed by Texas in the Rio Grande

I had planned on writing about Project 2025 and its emphasis on deportation—particularly its unstated but understood emphasis on deporting people Who Are Not White. But I got caught up in the sheer impossibility of Project 2025 and Trump’s grand ideas of mass deportation. What they want, is insane.

Thankfully, in the last few weeks, other media companies, profit or otherwise, took up the challenge. And they did a good job of it. I could have wished they had done so before people starting voting, but better late than never.

ProPublica has done a series of stories on immigration under the main title of The New Immigration. Not only did the nonprofit cover the data that overwhelmed me, it also put a human face on the story of immigration in our country.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

This week, both the Vegas Sun and the Texas Observer noted how chaotic Trump’s deportation plans would be for their states of Nevada and Texas. Yet, in Texas at least, state legislators embrace Trump’s plans.

Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—second in the United States only to California—and another roughly 1.4 million U.S. citizens in the state live with at least one undocumented family member, per studies in recent years. Unauthorized workers form the backbone of crucial sectors; in the construction industry, up to 50 percent of laborers building the state are undocumented, according to a 2013 survey by the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project. All this means Texas would be uniquely disrupted by Trump’s plans, with the tearing apart of mixed-status families placing a possibly massive burden on the state’s meager social services systems, and the exiling of a chunk of its workforce imperiling the economic development and affordability known as the so-called Texas Miracle.

Yet Texas’ statewide Republican leaders are full-throated backers of a Trump return to the White House, leaving dissenters within the immigrant and business community and Democratic Party to advocate for millions of Texas families, workers, and consumers.

Vox called into question the polls that seemingly show most people in the US favor mass deportation. As it found, though, the polls don’t capture the complexity of the issue. (Polls rarely do.)

CBS News noted the impossibly high price tag associated with mass deportation. Business Insider noted how mass deportation would gut the construction industry. And economists warn that Trump’s mass deportation in addition to his plans on tariffs on all international goods will tank the economy.

What is rarely mentioned in any of these news stories, however, is how truly unAmerican mass deportation is. We are a land of immigrants. Immigration and the diversity that has come from immigration are our greatest strengths. In addition, the people most targeted for deportation are not the enemy; migration is not an invasion. People from south and central America are our neighbors. Folks from the islands just off the main land are our neighbors.

To cherry pick out a few bad actors and ignore the vast numbers of hard-working people just trying to build a better life for their families is to ignore what drove our own ancestors to this land. And to target people of color—and make no mistake, Trump and his minions are targeting people of color—is to enshrine racism and bigotry. We the People becomes We the White People, or even We the White People Who Think the Same.

I’d like to think we’re better than that. Even with the ugliness that all too often forms the basis of a Trump rally, I still want to hold on to the belief that we’re better than that.

Tags Immigration, Trump

Government Legal, Laws, and Regs The Democratic Difference

It is none of our damn business

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 9, 2024

My Dad shortly before he died

My Dad, who was a Republican, would have liked Tim Walz. He would have liked Walz’s plain speaking. He would have admired his bluntness, especially when Walz says that a woman’s right to choose is none of our damn business. He would have liked it because that’s exactly what my Dad used to say.

When Dad and I talked about things like abortion, his philosophy was, “It’s none of my business what happens between a woman and a doctor. This is no one’s business but the woman and her doctor.”

He felt the same thing about same-sex marriage: it was none of his business. I know he would feel the same thing about trans treatment: it was none of his business.

He took that same belief to what he expected from his elected representatives: interfering in a woman’s right to healthcare isn’t the government’s business. Whether a woman has an abortion or not isn’t the business of the state legislature. Or Congress. They have work to do that is their business, and abortion, same-sex marriage, pronoun use, trans healthcare, what books people read … none of these are their damn business.

My Dad was born in 1910. He didn’t always understand why a woman would want an abortion, but her having one, was none of his business. He didn’t fully understand the LGBTQ+ community, but he never expressed disapproval of any member of the community because it wasn’t his business to approve or disapprove. He felt he didn’t have the right to make judgements on how other people lived as long as how they lived didn’t hurt anyone else.

It was none of his damn business. And he fought in World War II as part of the 82nd Airborne to ensure that others didn’t interfere where they had no right to be.

Now, please take some time to watch Lawrence O’Donnell rip apart today’s media in one of his most eloquent and important video appearances, ever. Because he’s telling the media what is their business, and that they are failing.

PS I’ll tell you something else about my Dad: he never would have voted for Donald Trump.