First the judges started questioning the truth of government officials and attorneys. Then the judges accused the DOJ / ICE of ignoring court rulings and orders. Now in this case Bondi’s posts clearly violate a judges orders and the constant posting on social media is designed to color or bias the public and potential jurors. The coruptin of this administration if beyoung anything we have ever seen in the US. I just read that Kash Patel has ordered the elete tatical teams around the country to rotate providing complete security and transportation. Not the regular FBI but the strategic elite teams. Hugs
“The government failed to respect Ms. Flores’s dignity and privacy, exposed her to a risk of doxxing, and generally thumbed its nose at the notion that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The post also directly violated a court order sealing the case,” the judge wrote. “Notwithstanding, the government now seeks an accommodation from the Court that it blatantly failed to give Ms. Flores and her codefendants.”
The attorney general’s posts included names and photographs of the defendants.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s posts made the government’s request for court-ordered discretion for its agents “eyebrow-raising, to say the least,” one judge wrote. | Allison Robbert/AP
Two federal judges have raised concerns about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s use of social media to publicize a wave of arrests last month of people charged with interfering with federal officers during an immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.
In an order earlier this week, Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster said Bondi’s posts on X including the names and, in many instances, photographs of the defendants shortly after their arrests “violated a court order” placing those cases under seal.
Foster leveled the criticism in connection with the prosecution of Nitzana Flores, a South Haven, Minnesota, resident accused of assaulting two Border Patrol officers during a scuffle last month in Minneapolis surrounding the arrest of another person for allegedly ramming a government vehicle.
The judge said Bondi’s posting of the names and arrest photos undercut prosecutors’ request for an order to prohibit defense attorneys from publicly disclosing personal information about immigration agents involved in the case against Flores. The requested order would also prohibit any defense counsel from sharing that information with their client.
Foster said Bondi’s social media posts made the government’s request for court-ordered discretion for its agents “eyebrow-raising, to say the least.”
“The government failed to respect Ms. Flores’s dignity and privacy, exposed her to a risk of doxxing, and generally thumbed its nose at the notion that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The post also directly violated a court order sealing the case,” the judge wrote. “Notwithstanding, the government now seeks an accommodation from the Court that it blatantly failed to give Ms. Flores and her codefendants.”
Foster modified the government’s proposal by broadening it to cover any party, victim or witness, while narrowing it to details such as phone numbers, residential addresses, email addresses and dates of birth. The judge also declined to restrict what evidence Flores can see and declined to prohibit disclosure of identities, which would include names and photographs.
At a hearing in a separate Minneapolis case last week, another magistrate judge, Shannon Elkins, directed prosecutors to “address whether the public posting of photographs violated the Court’s sealing order.” The government missed a deadline Tuesday to respond. Elkins later agreed to extend the deadline until Monday.
Justice Department spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment, but there are signs that Bondi got the magistrates’ messages.
On Friday, Bondi was careful not to jump the gun when announcing a new, massive wave of arrests in connection with a disruptive immigration-related protest at a St. Paul church last month. The new indictment Bondi announced added 30 defendants to the nine people already charged, who include former CNN anchor Don Lemon.
“YOU CANNOT ATTACK A HOUSE OF WORSHIP,” Bondi wrote in an X post that went up within a minute of the indictment being unsealed in the court’s online docket. “If you do so, you cannot hide from us — we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you. This Department of Justice STANDS for Christians and all Americans of faith.”
While booking photos or mugshots are public in many states, the federal government has traditionally cited privacy concerns to resist making them public in federal criminal cases. In 2012, the Obama administration instituted a nationwide Justice Department policy to refuse release of such photos, except where necessary to track down a fugitive or for investigative reasons.
That policy appears to have been abandoned after President Donald Trump returned to office last year. The Justice Department has for decades routinely publicized the names, ages and hometowns of people arrested by including that information in press releases.
Reddit, Meta, and Google voluntarily “complied with some of the requests” for identifying details of users critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent as part of a recent wave of administrative subpoenas the Department of Homeland Security has been distributing to Big Tech the past few months, according to an anonymously sourced New York Times report.
Those three companies, plus Discord, have received “hundreds” of such requests that have come from DHS recently. Meta, it should be noted, is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
Administrative subpoenas used for this purpose represent an escalation. This tool, which comes not from a judge but from DHS itself, was formerly reserved for situations like child abductions, according to the Times.
The users were targeted because their posts “criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents,” the Times says.
A Google spokesperson replied to the Times with a statement, saying “When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” and “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
Gizmodo requested comment from Meta, Discord, and Reddit. We will update if we hear back.
According to the Times, one or multiple of the relevant companies have stated that they notify users of these requests from DHS, and give them a 14-day window to “fight the subpoena in court” before complying.
Amazon has also been accused of at least some degree of participation with ICE’s ongoing mass deportation efforts. In October, Amazon-owned Ring announced a partnership with Flock that would loop the AI-powered network into the content coming from users’ doorbell cameras. According to a 404 Media investigation, that network feeds information to law enforcement agencies at the local and federal levels, allowing for reasonable concern that ICE has access to all that footage.
Protesters have launched an effort called “Resist and Unsubscribe” targeting ten tech companies they perceive as exceptionally supportive of ICE. That list includes Meta, Google, and Amazon, but not Reddit.
Donald Trump’s ICE is doing exactly what he wants. And now they are holding a political prisoner for nearly a year in an ICE detention camp simply because 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia dared to champion views the Trump regime opposes. This should concern all Americans especially given the recent warning from concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer—who explained on my SiriusXM show that history tells the Trump regime building massive ICE detention camps will ultimately be used to imprison political prisoners.
That should not be a surprise to anyone who follows the history of fascist and other right wing regimes. Trump is following the fascist playbook, complete with his own secret police that has terrorized and even killed Americans who defy him. The most glaring example being the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—who were then smeared by Trump officials as “domestic terrorists.”
Shockingly, we just learned that Trump’s ICE shot and killed another US citizen, 23 year old Ruben Ray Martinez, almost a year ago in March of 2025. However, Trump’s secret police covered up their involvement until recent media reports broke the story open. The details surrounding the murder of Martinez–who worked at Amazon–are simply unbelievable with ICE claiming that for some unknown reason this young man with no criminal record suddenly used his car to attack ICE officers.
Beyond that ICE has terrorized American citizens who dared film them—which they are legally entitled to—assaulted protesters and engaged in conduct consistent with an occupying army, not federal agents.
But it’s not ICE acting as a rogue agency—Trump wants them to do this. Trump—like Putin– wants to silence dissent as we’ve seen with his regime targeting all who oppose him from comedians like Jimmy Kimmel to seeking to criminally charge and imprison six Democratic members of Congress for warning members of the military to not follow illegal orders. A grand jury blocked that–at least for now.
That is why the case Leqaa Kordia demands far more attention given it’s a sneak preview of what we can expect from Trump for not just immigrants–but also U.S. citizens. Leqaa is a 33-year-old Palestinian woman with family in Gaza and the United States. Her mother is a US citizen living in Paterson, New Jersey—which is where Leqaa was staying and working as a waitress until she taken by ICE.
Leqaa Kordia
Kordia—who came to the US in 2016 on a student visa and was in the process of seeking permanent residence status via her mother –has no criminal record. The diminutive woman poses no threat to anyone. But to the Trump regime she is dangerous because she participated in peaceful protests advocating for Palestinian humanity. In the case, of Leqaa this issue is very personal in that she has lost nearly 200 relatives in Gaza.
But Leqaa’s case is not about Palestine—nor it is about Israel. Rather, it’s about freedom of speech—and the Trump’s regime targeting those who dare defy them.
How this case began was that in March of 2025, ICE informed Leqaa they wanted to speak to her. In response, she voluntarily appeared at the ICE office in Newark, New Jersey–where she was quickly arrested, thrown into an unmarked van and sent 1,500 miles away to the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas far from her lawyer and family.
Since then, she has been detained in horrific conditions. As Leqaa detailed in a recent op-ed, the ICE facility she has been held in for nearly a year “is filthy, overcrowded and inhumane.” She slept in a plastic shell “surrounded by cockroaches and only a thin blanket.” And the food quality is so atrocious, it has caused her to vomit resulting in significant weight loss.
Worse, just a few weeks ago she experienced the first seizure of her life, collapsing to the floor. From there, ICE transported her to a hospital where her wrists and legs shackled to her bed for the three days. As she put it, “The entire time I was chained…I felt like an animal.” And simply to be cruel, ICE refused to tell her lawyers or family where she was or her medical condition.
None of this should be happening. As her lawyer Amal Thabateh explained to me, two different immigration judges ruled that Leqaa should be released on bond. But the Trump regime instead invoked a little used procedure to keep her in detention open ended.
To do that, serial liar DHS Secretary Kristi Noem smeared Leqaa as being a “terrorist” sympathizer for expressing concern for Palestinians in Gaza. They even claimed that releasing Leqaa—who again has no criminal record and was living with her US citizen mother in New Jersey–was somehow a threat to our nation. Of course, this is the same Noem who smeared with lies Renee Good and Alex Pretti as “terrorists” to justify their murders so we know she will say anything to defend the Trump regime’s crimes against humanity.
The idea Leqaa is a political prisoner is not just my view. Amnesty International lists her on their website demanding that the US government “release detained protester.” Her case is in the same section on the Amnesty website where they are calling for the release of dissidents in Russia, Belarus and other authoritarian regimes. This is where our nation is now viewed by human rights organizations.
Deeply alarming is that these ICE dentition centers are increasingly become death camps. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in two decades. And in the past six weeks, six people have died in ICE custody including one man killed by ICE agents as they were restraining him. Will anyone be held accountable for this man’s death? That is like asking will anyone be held accountable for the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed in a Russian prison two years ago. We know that no one will be prosecuted because Russia is an authoritarian nation. As disturbing as it sounds, so is the United States under Trump.
But for those who refuse to submit to Trump and want to stand up for freedom of speech, I hope you will sign the Amnesty International petition calling for the US government to release Leqaa. Other ways to help this young woman include calling on your members of Congress to demand her release. You can also consider making a donation to her online fundraising page to help her and her family. Finally, you can follow Leqaa’s campaign for freedom on Instagram and amplify the updates.
As Andrea Pitzer repeatedly warned in our conversation on concentration camps, it does not end with people like Leqaa. It begins with people like Leqaa being held with in a camp for as long as the regime wants to keep her–in horrific conditions–simply because they want to silence her political views. They then continue until they reach people like us. But as the famous poem goes, by then it’s too late because when “they came for me…there was no one left to speak out.”
——
Below is my recent interview about Leqaa’s wrongful detention with her lawyer Amal Thabateh, who is with Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project and Laila El-Haddad, an award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist.
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