Let me tell you a story. When I was a child, I suffered from night terrors. It was always the same dream: I could hear my family and neighbors wailing in the street outside as they were pursued and then destroyed by a nameless malevolent force, something neither I nor anyone else could control, a great darkness that was, somehow, all my fault.
Today, that childhood dream is finally coming true. Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars.com.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about InfoWars in the last year and a half. As the seasons have changed, my ambitions for the project have grown grander, crueler, better aligned with market data. Come, friends, and imagine with me…
Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you’ll die if you don’t buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.
Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.
With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.
The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry. This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.
All of this is to say that I believe in us. I believe that with the new InfoWars, we can alchemize the pioneering spirit of amateur inquiry, the profit-maximizing drive of corporations, and the cold mental clarity that comes only with disciplined daily ingestion of mind- and body-altering chemicals. Ifwe can do that, what other great things can we do together? (snip-MORE)
I subscribe for free to this one, so please do click to read the whole thing. He does great work, and deserves the reads. You do not have to sign in to read.
Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.
Welcome back to “One First,” a newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks.
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Back in February, I wrote about the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unsigned, unexplained February 2016 rulings blocking President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” and how they ushered in what might be called “the modern emergency docket.” In my earlier post, I raised a series of questions about what had led the Court to do something that, in 2016, was completely unprecedented (blocking an executive branch program then under review in the lower courts), and whether the justices had any idea of the Pandora’s Box they were opening. As I wrote, “because the Court didn’t write then, and hasn’t explained itself since, we’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period).”
It turns out, thanks to some truly remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak for the New York Times, that we didn’t have to wait quite that long. On Saturday, Kantor and Liptak published 16 pages of (leaked) internal memoranda from six of the justices providing a window into how and why the Court did what it did on February 9, 2016. And the memos are, at least to me, a remarkable combination of eye-opening and sadly unsurprising. As I explain below, I think there are at least five significant takeaways from these materials—none of which paint the Court in an especially flattering light. And at the heart of most of them is Chief Justice Roberts.
Behind the scenes, Roberts led the charge for the Court to blaze a new trail—relying on statements outside the record; invoking the wrong standard for the kind of relief the applicants sought; failing to even acknowledge the irreparable harm the government (and the environment) would suffer from the Court intervening; and pushing back aggressively when Justices Breyer and Kagan both urged a compromise that should have accounted for his ostensible concerns. I’ve suggested before that the real acceleration of the Court’s modern emergency docket behavior can be traced to 2018, right around when Justice Kavanaugh succeeded Justice Kennedy. But in the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes. (snip-the rest is on the page)
Republicans are upset because tomorrow, they could lose at their own game.
After Texas redistricted in the middle of the decade to give Republicans more congressional seats, which Donald Trump demanded, Virginia decided to add more blue seats. This upset Republicans because, dammit, they invented this game.
Now, the same groups that want to add more red seats in Texas are spending big money to argue against adding more blue seats in Virginia. The commercials have been wild, with some of them warning that Richmond Democrats are engaged in a “power grab.” Some of the ads warn that this disenfranchises Black voters. Others state that if you vote, yes, that means more “illegals” will invade the state to commit crimes. It’s getting nasty, but Republicans don’t know how to win any other way. They use this information, and they cheat. (snip-MORE)
Last week in Cameroon (in case you are a Republican, that is a nation on the continent of Africa), Pope Leo quoted a Bible verse, which was, “Jesus told us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.’” And then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while claiming that God is on his side to wage war, quoted a fake Bible verse at a prayer breakfast.
The verse was inspired by Ezekiel 25:17 and comes from one of my favorite movies, Pulp Fiction. It was delivered brilliantly and forcefully by one of my favorite actors, Samuel L. Jackson. (snip-MORE, also deliberate and forceful!)
It’s a little late in the day, but I’ve been away. I’d set this up for the morning, but it is pretty important for those of us in the USA. The FISA 702 bill reauthorization regarding warrants for surveillance of US citizens was defeated after being brought forward nefariously.
(Note: I’m not on Bluesky. I love that anyone can click onto a post, and go look at it without having to sign in. So, please click below, and go read each little post, because again, this is important.)
In a dramatic scene that unfolded in the wee hours this morning, members of the House defeated a ploy by the administration and Speaker Johnson to ram through a 5-year reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Here’s what happened, and what will/should happen next. 1/20— Liza Goitein (@lizagoitein.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM
Charles Don Flores has sat on Texas’s death row for 27 years for the murder of Elizabeth “Betty” Black in 1998, during the commission of a robbery. The problem is, he did not kill Elizabeth “Betty” Black. That’s not just conjecture or me believing in someone’s innocence; even the state of Texas does not claim that he killed her. The man who actually did kill her was also sent to prison for the crime and was released over a decade ago, but Flores was sentenced to the death penalty for supposedly participating in the crime. Texas, you see, has a law called the “law of parties” that holds every participant in a crime responsible for everything that happened during its commission. So, for instance, if you drive the getaway car and your accomplice kills someone during the commission of a robbery, you are held equally responsible, even if you didn’t even know it happened.
There was no physical evidence, no DNA connecting Flores to Black’s murder. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever beyond his identification by a single neighbor who didn’t pick him out of two photo line-ups and initially said both men she saw where white with an average build and long hair, while Flores, clearly Latino, was a bigger guy with short hair.
So why is he there again? Because that neighbor, Jill Barganier, was later “hypnotized” by a cop who had never hypnotized anyone before. A cop who hinted, repeatedly, at the suspect having short or shaved hair, who told her she would continue to remember even more things about the robbery after the hypnosis. By the time she made it to court — after she had seen Flores’s picture on TV and in the news on many occasions — she was able to point to him in court as the accomplice of the the man who killed Betty Black.
There’s a lot that’s wrong with this case, obviously, but the hypnosis part is what caught the attention of magicians Penn & Teller, who recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to consider Flores’s case. Why? Because, they say, what the officer did is no different than what they do in their Vegas show every night.
“I am bringing this to you with the utmost humility,” Penn Gilette told The New York Times. “I am carny trash. I am uneducated. If you want to say I have a position of expertise, it is that I have lied to people onstage and gotten them to believe it. And I think I could do what that police officer did.”
The brief reads:
Despite the fact that Mrs. Barganier described the passenger in the car she saw at the scene of the crime as a white man with long hair, she was fed repeated suggestions by law enforcement that the passenger had “neatly trimmed” or “short, shaved” hair; she was told by the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more after the hypnosis session; and months later— after photos of Mr. Flores appeared in the press and she saw him seated at the defense table at trial— suddenly she identified him as the passenger. It is of little surprise that she was confident in her in-court identification when she saw this now-familiar face and believed she had produced it from her memory: That is exactly what the officer told her would happen. But it was not real. Some of the same cognitive techniques Penn & Teller use on stage to trick audience members’ memory and alter their perception explain how the investigative hypnosis session induced Mrs. Barganier to abandon all previous descriptions of the suspect and instead point to Mr. Flores.
On the tape, the officer keeps telling her that her memory is like a videotape that she can rewind and fast-forward at will. And it’s very tempting to believe that. It’s very tempting and comforting to believe that our brains are always recording whether we are aware of it or not and that, with the help of something like hypnosis, we can access those recordings. Certainly no one wants to believe that someone can more or less just jump into your brain and make you believe you saw things you didn’t see.
Our minds have a tendency to fill in the gaps if we don’t remember everything that happened in a particular situation, they explain, and memory retrieval process distorts memories — things they take advantage of as magicians.
By manipulating an audience’s memory—both in its formation and its recall—Penn & Teller get the audience to convince themselves that things have happened when, in reality, those things never occurred. That is all well and good for purposes of entertainment. But the same suggestion-based memory manipulation was also on display in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier. And the officer-hypnotist left her believing that new things that came to mind later were true “memories” she could testify about, not merely things her brain subsequently filled in.
They can tell you exactly how he did it, as well.
The suggestion inherent in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier is obvious: The officer/hypnotist asked her multiple questions about whether either suspect had short, shaved, neatly cut, or trimmed hair—even as Mrs. Barganier reiterated that both had long, wavy hair. The officer then showed Mrs. Barganier a photo lineup in which every photo was of a Hispanic male with short hair. Mrs. Barganier again did not identify Mr. Flores from that photo lineup. But she then also saw his photo in news coverage of the case prior to trial. Combined with the assurances of the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more as time went on, she was primed to “remember” Mr. Flores at trial. And she was particularly primed to do so because she was understandably motivated to assist police in finding the person who had committed a violent murder next door to her home. Pet. 6. Moreover, Mrs. Barganier’s certainty that her belated, in-court identification of Mr. Flores was correct (“over 100%” positive, as she testified), is not surprising. As Penn & Teller have observed, it is “very difficult for the audience to contradict the ideas that they themselves have constructed.”
The truly appalling thing about all of this is that the state of Texas actually knows that they are right about hypnosis being junk science. Just a few years ago, the state banned investigative hypnosis from being submitted as evidence in court. Of course, that was well after Flores was convicted and it had been used in over 1,800 trials over the course of four decades. In 2013, the state also enacted a “junk science” law, allowing for individuals to appeal for a new trial if the forensic science used to convict them has been found, upon further study, to be bullshit. This includes “evidence” like bite mark analysis, fiber analysis, bloodstain pattern analysis and 911 call analysis (one of the scariest ones, in my opinion, given that people have such wildly varying reactions in any kind of emergency).
Yet, Texas is fighting against Flores’s appeal and still hopes it will get to execute him. Because it’s Texas, and they really, really like executing people there.
There is a lot that is frustrating about our criminal justice system, but somewhere near the top is definitely the stubborn refusal of many involved with it to correct things when they’ve made a mistake. We see it over and over again, and it’s bad enough when it happens with someone serving any kind of sentence, especially a long one, but it’s unconscionable when we’re talking about the death penalty. There are no take-backs with the death penalty, and nothing anyone, even a magician, can fix once someone is dead.
We seem doomed to another week of war news. On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the U.S. military seized an Iranian-flagged ship that he said tried to run the U.S. blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Marines boarded the cargo ship Touska after it was disabled. Trump posted that the USS Spruance “gave them fair warning to stop,” but that “The Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”
But what’s happening with the president as he conducts his war is now completely out of bounds. This morning, just after 8 a.m., he had a long rambling post on Truth Social that concluded, “if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”
Notice how Trump speaks in the language of an all-powerful businessman, a CEO without a board to tell him what to do. He is sending “My Representatives” to Pakistan and “if they (Iran) don’t take the DEAL,” he’ll do “what has to be done.” It’s crazy on steroids, and well past the point where even his own party should be giving him a pass. The president of the United States is threatening to bomb civilian targets and devastate a civilian population. War crimes, plain and simple.
All of this from the candidate who, in November of 2024, in the closing days of his campaign for the White House, said that “If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace.”
Every accusation is a confession. And the Truth Social posts happened after Trump called NATO and our allies “absolutely useless” at a Turning Point USA event Friday night. If you’re exhausted, and honestly, at this point, who isn’t, take a deep breath, plan for a little extra fellowship with friends (more on my plans at the end), and remind yourself that we cannot afford to put our heads in the sand and that the effort to overwhelm us in intentional—that’s how authoritarians do it. It’s a good week to talk with people about what’s going on, to encourage them to stop and think, and then to make sure they’re registered to vote.
The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, was on ABC’s “This Week,” Sunday morning, and he chimed right in with the president. Host John Karl asked if Trump was prepared to go back to “full-on war” and Waltz responded, “all options are on the table. We could take that infrastructure out relatively easily. The Iranian air defenses have been absolutely decimated.”
He continued, without being prompted, “And just to get ahead of a lot of the critics and hand-wringing, throwing out irresponsible terms like ‘war crimes’, attacking, destroying infrastructure that has clearly and historically been used for dual military purposes is not a war crime.”
Then Waltz did it again on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where volunteering to Kristen Welker, who hadn’t asked about it, that the U.S. could still target civilian infrastructure in Iran if a ceasefire deal wasn’t reached, again claiming that wouldn’t amount to war crimes. “We have a long history of taking down bridges, power plants and other infrastructure that is powering Iran’s military,” Waltz said, as though that somehow made it acceptable. “In the laws of land warfare and the rules of engagement, any type of infrastructure that is co-mingled is absolutely a legitimate target.” He reiterated on CBS, appearing on “Face the Nation,” that because the IRGC is running bridges and power plants, they are “legitimate military targets,” again rejecting the notions that bombing them would be “some type of war crime.”
So bombing civilian targets seems to be top of mind for the president and one of his key spokespeople on these issues, which should concern all of us.
Waltz is a former Army Special Forces Officer, decorated for his bravery. He graduated from Virginia Military Academy, according to his bio from his time in Congress, but he is not a lawyer. Apparently, concerns about launching attacks against civilian populations didn’t stick. Waltz was Trump’s first National Security Advisor this term, but he resigned following Signalgate after serving for just 101 days. (Tonight’s trivia: That’s the second shortest tenure of any NSA. Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first NSA in 2017, resigned after just 24 days, two Scaramuccis, and was ultimately convicted of lying to the FBI before Trump pardoned him.) Trump nominated Waltz to serve as the U.N. Ambassador the same day he stepped down.
Today, the United States struck yet another vessel in the Caribbean. Three people were killed. The U.S. Southern Command account on Twitter said they were narco-terrorists. These attacks used to be shocking. Now, they barely garner notice. As of the last strike, four days ago, Reuters reported the death toll was “over 170.” Three people were killed in that strike last Wednesday, as well.
Also appearing on the Sunday shows, FBI Director Kash Patel said he would file a defamation case on Monday against The Atlantic, which reported last week, in a story headlined, “The FBI Director Is MIA,” that Patel’s colleagues are “alarmed” by “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Two dozen people interviewed for the story “described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.”
Nominees for important government positions, and Director of the FBI is among the highest because of access to national security information, are heavily vetted before they take office. But as with so many other norms in the time of Trump, Patel’s questionable personal choices have continued to come to light since he took office. The report says that Patel is “drinking so heavily that meetings need to be rescheduled and his security detail has trouble waking him up. Among the report’s most chilling revelations, “Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. ‘That’s what keeps me up at night,’ one official said.”
Screen grab of Patel “celebrating” with the U.S. Men’s Hockey team after their Olympic victory.
This morning, Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked Patel, “So you’re gonna sue them?” “Absolutely,” he responded. “It’s coming tomorrow.” He added that it would be for defamation.
I’m looking forward to discovery. Especially the part where Patel is deposed, under oath. Expect the lawsuit, which he probably has to file to look tough for the audience of one, to be dismissed before it gets that far. Patel would face questioning about his drinking and other misconduct while in office. And he would be exposed to penalties of perjury.
The Atlantic’s report concludes with this story: “Patel has publicly proclaimed that the FBI needs to demonstrate that it is ‘fierce,’ and officials I spoke with said that he is fixated on that image in private as well.” So what is he doing about that? Apparently, Patel “recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough.” The Atlantic explains that “Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens. ‘Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,’ one official told me, ‘but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.’”
It’s likely that Patel has little support inside of the building, and that could mean this is just one of many stories that get launched in an effort to ease him out before it’s too late. When the “that” in “That’s what keeps me up at night,” is the Director of the FBI, not a foreign terrorist or criminal threat, then it’s highly likely the career folks, and maybe even some of the politicos, want a “real functioning FBI director” in place.
I started out by saying we’re entering this week already exhausted and it’s important to keep taking care of ourselves. My plan this week involves spending time in person with my #SistersInLaw cohosts Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Barb McQuade, and Jill Will-Banks, when we do the podcast live in Denver on April 23rd. If you’re in Denver, I hope I’ll see you there! If you’re in Atlanta, we’ll be live there on May 3. There is nothing as important as being with the people that we love right now.
On Monday, the Montana Supreme Court issued a landmark 5-2 ruling declaring that “transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination,” and that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state’s equal protection clause. The ruling in Kalarchik v. State of Montana blocks a definition-of-sex law and related state policies that stripped all legal recognition from transgender people and barred them from obtaining accurate birth certificates and driver’s licenses. The decision rests on Montana’s constitution, whose Equal Protection and Individual Dignity clause has been repeatedly interpreted to protect transgender people—and which the court made clear provides far greater protection than the federal constitution. Justices have now issued the clearest declaration ever that transgender people in the state will have enhanced protections of their rights, grounding the ruling in equal protection, sex discrimination, and privacy—principles with broad applicability in a state that has become a major battleground for anti-trans legislation and resistance to it. (snip-MORE)
Several justices seemed to support the families of trans youth on the question of whether to force Colorado Children’s Hospital to discontinue capitulating to the Trump administration.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether Children’s Hospital Colorado can be forced to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The hospital was one of roughly 40 across the country that capitulated to Trump administration threats and shuttered their trans youth care programs. However, the hospital’s position has grown increasingly untenable, as hospitals in states like Minnesota and California have begun reversing course and as the Trump administration has suffered mounting losses in federal courts—including an Oregon ruling that vacated the very declaration the hospital cited as justification for halting care. Hearing arguments on Tuesday, several justices appeared skeptical of the hospital’s rationale, questioning whether Colorado’s civil rights protections for transgender people—among the strongest in the nation—can simply be overridden by federal threats that do not constitute law. (snip-MORE)
They served their prison time. Then came deportation.
After being released from prison in 2022, he completed an 18-month job training program with the Los Angeles-based organization Homeboy Industries and began working as a cook for the group’s onsite cafe. He enrolled in two different community college programs to study business administration and culinary arts. He volunteered with groups to help other trans Latinx and formerly incarcerated people get back on their feet. By the time he reached the five-year anniversary of his release date, JJ hoped he would have saved enough to buy a house with his sister.
He also wanted to travel more, and last April, JJ went to Thailand with his mom, sister and a friend. It was his first time outside the United States since he and his parents entered the country without legal documentation when he was a toddler. They later obtained permanent resident status, and his sister was born in the United States.
“I always told myself, the moment I was able to come home, and if God permitted me to get my life together, that I would like to travel with my family,” JJ told The 19th. “Being able to give that to both my sister and my mom — even if I knew that this would be the end result, for me to get deported — I would do it all over again, just to see them happy.”
JJ, who asked for The 19th to withhold his last name for privacy, was not particularly concerned when returning to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and going through the standard post-flight motions. He waited in line for customs, showed his passport and green card, and got his fingerprints taken. But then, the customs officer made a phone call and escorted JJ away from his loved ones.
The weeks that followed felt like a different kind of prison: five days in LAX sleeping on the floor and living off of vending machine food, he said. Then it was five months in Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, where it came down to two options: JJ could do a “voluntary” departure to Mexico, or he could challenge his case in court and risk staying in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indefinitely. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment by the time of publication.
The choice was clear for JJ, he said, even if that meant returning to a country he hasn’t known since age 2. “I’ve been here since September, and I’m barely learning how to maneuver around. My Spanish is horrible,” he said recently from Mexico. “People notice that I’m not from here because of the way I speak.”
In the second Trump administration, people with JJ’s background — a formerly incarcerated trans immigrant — have three targets on their backs, and the power of the federal government aimed at them. Trump has repeatedly stated that ICE, under his administration, will detain and deport “the worst of the worst,” particularly people who have committed crimes. A combination of anti-trans, anti-immigrant and tough-on-crime messaging by the White House depicts a country under siege.
To carry out its mass deportation mission, the administration has ramped up partnerships with local law enforcement and correctional facilities that allow the federal government to take custody of people held in prisons who have already served their sentences. Even in states like California, which limit local law enforcement partnerships with ICE, federal law defines a broad list of criminal offenses that can make a noncitizen deportable, even if that person secured legal status like JJ.
The result is a system of “double punishment,” a prison-to-ICE pipeline that advocates told The 19th can be particularly detrimental for trans people.
We just see trauma compounded on trauma compounded on trauma.”Lynly Egyes
Trans migrants often face rejection from family, abuse, job insecurity or homelessness as a result of their identity, which increases their risk of criminalization, advocates say. In ICE custody, they may be denied health care access, face sexual violence and be deported to countries that are hostile to their identity. Even for those who attempt to rebuild their lives after serving prison terms, “ICE could use that years later to target them, pull them into immigration detention and have them deported,” said Lynly Egyes, the legal director at the Transgender Law Center.
“We just see trauma compounded on trauma compounded on trauma,” Egyes said. “When trans people are shuffled between systems such as prison into ICE custody, it completely strips them of any opportunity for freedom and connection with their loved ones and community.”
It took three attempts for Nataly Marinero to secure parole from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It ultimately happened in 2023, and he was released after nearly 18 years of incarceration. The state’s parole approval rate was about 34 percent at the time.
During this process, the parole board assesses an incarcerated person’s behavior and activities while in custody and considers whether they will be a threat to the general public. The board considers a range of factors, including signs of remorse, past criminal history, age and plans for the future, according to the California department of corrections website. While in prison, Marinero took substance abuse courses, worked on getting his high school diploma, had a job as a clerk in the prison kitchen. He had not received a write up, an infraction in prison, in years, he said. Each of these factors help to build a stronger case for release.
Immediately after leaving prison, Marinero joined a reentry program in Los Angeles called A New Way of Life, where he received housing, a job and connections to other opportunities to help him transition to life outside.
Life felt good.
“Freedom — just to think about it makes me want to cry,” the 40-year-old told The 19th. “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Marinero, who came to the United States without authorization at 17, was aware that ICE had put a “hold” on him at the beginning of his incarceration more than a decade ago. ICE “holds” are requests asking jails or prisons to hold someone after incarceration so that they can be transferred to immigration custody.
“When you get to prison, your counselor would tell you when you have an ICE hold,” said Laura Hernandez, executive director of the California-based advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
“If you have an inkling that you may have an ICE hold, you tend to check every so often,” she added. “But sometimes ICE holds aren’t placed on anyone until right before they’re getting ready to be released. So people have to check like the entire time they’re inside.”
Whether the agency follows through on picking up immigrants with ICE holds on their accounts is largely a toss up. In Marinero’s case, he was allowed to be released from prison; he was allowed to join a reentry program and to live his life for two years without being arrested by ICE.
In January 2025, he received a call from a woman who said she was his parole officer. This struck Marinero as odd, because this was a different officer from the man he had previously spoken with. The woman demanded Marinero come to the front of his reentry home, he said. When he obeyed, ICE agents were waiting outside and took Marinero into custody.
His legal advocates at the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, who also serve trans people, moved quickly to assess whether Marinero could make an asylum claim as he was moved from an ICE holding facility to detention centers in California and Louisiana over the course of two months. Ultimately, his legal team was unable to file an asylum claim before his deportation. In April 2025, Marinero was placed in handcuffs and loaded onto a plane. He was back in El Salvador, a place he fled as a teenager and one of the most dangerous countries for trans people in Latin America.
Partnerships between federal immigration authorities, local law enforcement and state prisons have existed for three decades.
In 1996, fears about crime led to a wave of laws — including the 1994 crime bill — with more severe punishments and a historic expansion of law enforcement. President Bill Clinton signed into law two bills that created pathways to speed up the deportation of noncitizens with criminal records and broadened the list of crimes considered aggravated felonies. These crimes could range from murder and sexual assault to shoplifting and forgery. As a result, any noncitizens, including green card holders, with an aggravated felony record became eligible for deportation.
“It especially hit lawful permanent residents,” said Juliet Stumpf, the Edmund O. Belsheim professor of law chair at Lewis & Clark Law School, whose research centers on what’s referred to as “crimmigration.”
“We used to see lawful permanent residents as being able to remain in the country if they committed a crime,” she added. “But now, we’ve added a whole other level of penalty, for lawful permanent residents especially, because they’re the ones that are going to be most vulnerable to deportation based on those grounds.”
One of the 1996 laws also laid the groundwork for the 287(g) program, which can essentially turn local and state law enforcement into an arm of immigration enforcement. These 287(g) agreements fall into one of three categories, one being the “Jail Enforcement Model,” designed to identify noncitizens held in local jails or state prisons who can be transferred to immigration custody.
At the time of Trump’s first term, his administration ushered in a high — at that time — of about 150 active 287(g) agreements of all types. In the last 15 months, that figure has increased tenfold. As of April 10, ICE has signed 1,645 agreements across 39 states and two U.S. territories, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. That dataset indicates that 10 percent of these agreements, 171 total, fall under the Jail Enforcement Model.
One contributor to this growth is likely financial incentives built into Trump’s expansive 2025 so-called One Big Beautiful tax bill, said Karen Pita Loor, director of the criminal law clinical program at Boston University.
“Historically, 287(g) agreements were not financially profitable for these counties, localities, whatever jurisdictions. They weren’t making them money,” Loor said. “The bill created really attractive financial incentives that make 287(g) agreements much more profitable.” These benefits to local law enforcement agencies can include salary reimbursements, $7,500 for equipment and $100,000 for new vehicles.
Some states, like California, where JJ and Marinero lived, have laws limiting collaborations between local and federal law enforcement. But even in those jurisdictions, the more forgiving immigration policies often do not extend to migrants with criminal records.
Prior to Trump’s return to office, JJ and Marinero, who served their prison time and were on a path to rehabilitation, might have gone unnoticed by ICE, advocates said.
Now, for Marinero, “I feel like going back to the same time when I was younger,” he said. “I can’t dress the way I want to dress. I can’t be who I want to be. It’s kind of killing my self-esteem.”
I just want to be free.”Nataly Marinero
Growing up in El Salvador, Marinero did not have a specific word to describe how he felt about his gender. He just knew that people called him a girl, but he felt like a boy and preferred loose fitting shirts and pants rather than dresses. Marinero’s religious family treated his self-expression like a curse that needed to be healed, he said. They told him he would go to hell if he didn’t change. People called him a “marimacha,” a slur for a lesbian or masculine girl. He was also repeatedly targeted for sexual violence.
“It was so bad that I wanted to try to kill myself so many times,” Marinero said. “I just want to be free.” When his uncle offered to connect him with a group who could get him into the United States, Marinero jumped at the chance.
Being back in El Salvador 23 years later, Marinero mostly works and stays at home. He doesn’t have friends, he said, though he recently found a boxing gym that is helping to relieve stress. In Mexico, JJ said he also keeps to himself and isn’t open with people about his trans identity. He said it helps that he “blends in” as a man and doesn’t get many questions or weird looks.
Next March will mark five years since JJ left prison. The five-year plan he mapped out for himself has changed quite a bit, but he hasn’t lost all hope.
“I feel like I just came out of being in prison all over again, and I have to start all over again,” he said. “Just getting back on my feet; that’s really my fifth-year goal now.”
You know about RFK Jr. hiding the body of a dead bear cub in Central Park. You heard about him cutting off a whale’s head and tying it to the roof of his car. Now, get ready to hear about RFK Junior and the raccoon penis.
What?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the worst US health secretary in our nation’s history, once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon on the side of I-684 while his children waited in his car. I don’t know if this was during his cocaine addiction. (snip-MORE)
On Monday, Virginia’s Governor, Abigail Spanberger, signed into law a bill that eliminates tax exemptions for organizations connected to the Confederacy. Most people were not aware that these organizations were exempt from paying taxes, or that they were even still around.
The bill, passed by the House and Senate in the General Assembly, specifically removes the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, along with other groups, from the state’s list of organizations that are exempt from state property taxes. (snip-MORE)
The Commission of Fine Arts is scheduled on Thursday to consider Donald Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot arch on the other side of the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. This huge sculpture will be at the foot of Arlington National Cemetery. Unfortunately, the Commission of Fine Arts is stacked with Trump appointees.
The original plans for this monument were for it to be 76 feet tall to symbolize the year of America’s founding, which, in case you were educated in a red state, was in 1776. Soon after, Trump insisted that it be taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (he must’ve been standing next to Emmanuel Macron at the urinals), which stands roughly 164 feet tall. Eventually, Trump decided that the arch should rise to 250 feet, to celebrate America’s 250 years, making it what is believed to be the tallest triumphal arch in any of the world’s capital cities. (snip-MORE)
Whether you are watching the Super Bowl on TV, scrolling make-up tutorials on Instagram or listening to a technology podcast, you are being fed advertising for artificial intelligence.
The commercials are everywhere. And they promise the world.
Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the companies that build AI have deployed advertising to recruit us as loyal users of their astronomically expensive software. Persuade us now, and perhaps we will be loyal customers later.
Meanwhile, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach — with some help from a nebulous technology group — has sounded an alarm about AI this week, releasing a PSA.
“The reports are very troubling,” he says about threats posed by artificial intelligence.
Over the next few years, our culture will decide whether we are AI skeptics or fanatics. For that reason, the language that is used to sell AI — or steer us away from it — matters. Let’s listen to what is being said about the technology that could define the 21st century.
From Silicon Valley
In their ads, technology companies describe AI as a wonderland: productivity at work, inspired hobbies at home and wellness nirvana at the gym. The word choices would make a spiritual guru proud.
In marketing AI app-building software, Base 44 urges us: “Consider yourself limitless.” It’s also described as “the next thing you can’t live without.” The company uses the language of religious cults swirled with rampant consumerism. “Elite” plans start at $160 per month.
Besides AI, what product from the past 50 years could have generated all of these promises in one commercial? In 78 seconds of advertising, Perplexity offers:
“Get your time back.”
“Access to knowledge is easier than ever.”
“Discover something new every day.”
“Knowledge on-demand anytime anywhere. For anything you wanna know.”
There’s no modesty — just hyperbole.
Judging by their advertising, tech companies agree on AI’s greatest virtue: efficiency.
The YouTube description for a Copilot AI ad claims that “Microsoft 365 Copilot isn’t just a better way of doing the same things. It’s an entirely new way of working.” Press play on the video and watch a layered flurry of chatbot prompts, all written simultaneously and feverishly, including: “Want to get a jump start on your day?” The message envisions AI as hyperactive multichannel problem solving.
Other AI advertising promises are more direct. ChatGPT’s advertisement, “What Codex unlocks,” features a technology CEO who boasts about what AI made possible. You don’t need to understand his jargon to understand the promised efficiency.
“We were able to create a JavaScript runtime in just two weeks,” says Syrus Akbary Nieto. “Without Codex, it would have taken us easily one year.”
For people outside Silicon Valley, ChatGPT’s advertising shows tangible AI efficiencies, such as opening a new restaurant.
“I found the perfect spot,” someone types into the chatbot. “Help me write the business plan.”
In another ad, ChatGPT is the elixir for fixing the family car: “Dad said the truck is ours if we fix it. Help us get it running.”
The pitches implicitly promise success when you combine your ambition with AI’s wisdom — never mind the skills required to cook spaghetti bolognese or handle a wrench.
The ad’s answer: Open the Gemini chatbot and ask it to visualize his new bedroom, complete with the family dog’s bed. The commercial closes with words carrying a double meaning: “It will be whatever we want it to be,” the boy’s mom says. Both the house and the Gemini chatbot, the script suggests, can be family dreams. (snip-MORE, including the ad transcript, and info about the organization behind the ads. It’s good, and not much more to read. I just don’t like lifting other people’s work.)
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