The U.S. government just demonstrated exactly why due process matters. In what should be a shocking admission, the Trump administration revealed in court that it had made a bit of an oopsie (they call it an “administrative error”) — one that resulted in trafficking a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran prison. Their response to this horrific mistake? Not contrition or attempts to fix it, but rather an argument that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction to help bring him back.

This is what happens when you replace due process with authoritarian expediency. And it’s exactly what the MAGA movement is deliberately pushing for, as evidenced by Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, who sneered at the very concept of due process during an ABC interview last week:

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?”

In making this argument, Homan inadvertently reveals himself to be embracing the same twisted logic as those he claims to be fighting: criminals who feel that the ends justify any means, that due process is an inconvenient obstacle rather than a fundamental safeguard of justice. It’s the kind of thinking that leads directly to “administrative errors” that destroy innocent lives.

The entire point of the rule of law in a civilized society is that we’re better than that. We provide due process precisely because it’s the only way to ensure we don’t punish innocent people. If Homan and his department were actually doing their jobs properly, due process wouldn’t be an obstacle — it would be an opportunity to demonstrate the legitimacy of their actions through proper legal channels.

Instead, we have this fucking mess:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

That’s one hell of an “administrative error.”

Let’s be crystal clear: this wasn’t a “deportation” — deportation requires due process. This was human trafficking, plain and simple. A U.S. resident with legal protection was grabbed by government agents and forcibly transferred to a foreign labor camp.

What stands out in the court filing is the government’s cavalier attitude in the filing. They admit, with bureaucratic sterility, that they trafficked a man they knew had legal protection:

On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error

The normal response to discovering you’ve made a catastrophic error that has imprisoned an innocent person in another country would be to fix it immediately. Instead, the government’s response is essentially “ah well, nothing we can do!” They actually argue that because they’ve already illegally trafficked him to a slave labor camp in El Salvador, U.S. courts have no power to help:

Here, Plaintiffs seek review of the legality of the Executive’s restraint of and removal of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, leading to his present detention there…. (alleging Defendants “decided to deport Plaintiff Abrego Garcia without following the law”). Plaintiffs make it clear that the ultimate relief they seek is his return to the United States to live at liberty with his family… (alleging irreparable harm from separation from his family and asking “the Court to immediately order Defendants to take all steps reasonably available to them, proportionate to the gravity of the ongoing harm, to return Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to the United States.”) Because Plaintiffs seek Abrego Garcia’s release from allegedly unlawful detention on the grounds that it was effected illegally, they make a core habeas claim, and they must therefore bring it exclusively in habeas.

But there is no jurisdiction in habeas. Plaintiffs admit—as they must—that the United States does not have custody over Abrego Garcia. They acknowledge that there may be “difficult questions of redressability” in this case, reflecting their recognition that Defendants do not have “the power to produce” Abrego Garcia from CECOT in El Salvador. … But even more, they concede that Abrego Garcia is not in Defendants’ custody. Id. (asking the Court to order Defendants to “request that the government of El Salvador return Plaintiff to Defendants’ custody”). Despite their allegations of continued payment for Abrego Garcia’s detention, Plaintiffs do not argue that the United States can exercise its will over a foreign sovereign. The most they ask for is a court order that the United States entreat—or even cajole—a close ally in its fight against transnational cartels. This is not “custody” to which the great writ may run. This Court therefore lacks jurisdiction.

The government’s argument is essentially: “Yes, we illegally trafficked someone we knew we shouldn’t have touched, but since we’ve already done it and he’s in a foreign prison, U.S. courts are powerless to help.” While the DOJ’s jurisdictional argument may be technically correct under current law, the implications are horrifying.

This is precisely why due process exists in the first place.

It’s not just some bureaucratic inconvenience — it’s a vital safeguard against exactly this kind of nightmare scenario. Without due process protections, government agents can make “administrative errors” that result in trafficking innocent people to foreign prisons, then shrug and say “oops, nothing we can do!” when the mistake is discovered. And, before long, those “administrative errors” become convenient ways to get rid of anyone the powers that be dislike.

A few weeks ago, law professor Steve Vladeck wrote an important piece about why we have due process, noting that it is the main thing that “separates democratic legal systems from … less democratic legal systems.” In that piece, he responded to people telling him (a la Homan) that it was fine to remove gang members from the US without due process since they were so bad.

Against that backdrop, there’s just no good argument for refusing to provide comparable process to accused members of TdA before removing them from the country. I say this not because, contra some of my Twitter fans and e-mail correspondents, I support TdA and want to keep “rapists and murderers” at large in the United States. Rather, I say this because that kind of process is how any of us can have confidence that the folks being packed onto airplanes and whisked off to El Salvador are Venezuelan citizens and members of TdA—as opposed to U.S. citizens; political dissidents; or others whom the Trump administration would just as soon be rid of. Indeed, one need not believe that the government is acting maliciously to believe that errors will be made.

Vladeck wrote that warning just a week and a half ago — well before the DOJ’s admission of this “administrative error.” But this case isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of an emerging pattern that demonstrates exactly why his concerns about due process are so vital.

Consider the growing list of victims: There’s Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist. There’s Neri Alvarado, a bakery worker. Neither had any gang connections. Their “crimes”? Having tattoos. In Alvarado’s case, it was a tattoo promoting autism awareness. This is what passes for “evidence” of gang activity when you dispense with due process.

These aren’t isolated incidents. The flood of similar cases reveals a systematic dismantling of due process. Take Jerce Reyes Barrios, detailed in the New Yorker piece linked above:

Jerce Reyes Barrios, a thirty-six-year-old soccer player and youth coach, fled Venezuela last year after marching in anti-government protests. His immigration file cites two grounds for suspicion: a gesture he made while posing for a photo that was posted to social media and a tattoo of a crown on top of a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” His lawyer, Linette Tobin, worked with his family to secure documents from the police in Venezuela to show that he hadn’t committed any crimes. They also tracked down Barrios’s tattoo artist. “He wanted a tattoo related to soccer,” the artist said in a legal declaration. “We searched on the internet and the ball with a crown caught our attention to represent the king of soccer, and he liked the idea.”

The same article quotes a Tren de Aragua expert confirming that the gang “does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification” — yet tattoos remain the government’s primary “evidence” for trafficking people to foreign prisons. This is what happens when due process is replaced with prejudice and paranoia: innocent gestures become evidence of crimes, and basic fact-checking is discarded as an inconvenient obstacle.

When confronted with these facts, the response from MAGA leadership has been to double down on authoritarianism while attacking anyone who dares to question their methods. Take White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s revealing freakout of a response to reporter Andrew Feinberg when he simply asked about due process safeguards against mistaken identification:

“You can get classified by simply having certain symbols in your tattoos and wearing certain streetwear brands—that alone is enough to get someone classified as TdA and sent to El Salvador,” Feinberg said. 

“That’s not true, actually, Andrew,” Leavitt snapped. Feinberg insisted he was simply reading from court documents filed by the government. 

“No, according to Department of Homeland Security and the agents—have you talked to the agents who have been putting their lives on the line to detain these foreign terrorists who have been terrorizing our communities?” Leavitt asked. 

“I–I’m not denying that—” Feinberg said, but Leavitt continued.

“TdA is a vicious gang that has taken the lives of American women, and our agents on the front lines take up deporting these people with the utmost seriousness, and there is a litany of criteria that they use to ensure that these individuals qualify as foreign terrorists, and to ensure, to ensure that they qualify for deportation,” she said. 

“And shame on you, and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals who have—this is a vicious gang, Andrew! This is a vicious gang that has taken the lives of American women!”

“I’m not trying to cover for anyone,” Feinberg insisted, but Leavitt continued to attack Feinberg for even asking about the documents, once again unable to account for the government she purports to represent.

“And you said yourself there are eight criteria on that document! And you are questioning the credibility of these agents who are putting their life on the line to protect your life, and the life of everybody in this group and the life of everybody across the country? And their credibility should be questioned? They finally have a president who is allowing them to do their jobs, and God bless them for doing it,” Leavitt fumed.

The performative outrage is telling. If there truly is a “litany of criteria” that “ensure” proper identification of gang members, as Leavitt claims, then providing due process should be trivially easy. The government could simply present its evidence in court, where it would stand up to basic scrutiny. Their aggressive resistance to any kind of oversight suggests they know their “evidence” won’t withstand examination.

The historical parallels are impossible to ignore. In his piece, Vladeck highlights Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s prescient 1952 warning about due process:

[T]he Nazi regime in Germany installed a system of ‘protective custody’ by which the arrested could claim no judicial or other hearing process, and as a result the concentration camps were populated with victims of summary executive detention for secret reasons. . . . There are other differences, to be sure, between authoritarian procedure and common law, but differences in the process of administration make all the difference between a reign of terror and one of law. Quite unconsciously, I am sure, the Government’s theory of custody for ‘safekeeping’ without disclosure to the victim of charges, evidence, informers or reasons, even in an administrative proceeding, has unmistakable overtones of the ‘protective custody’ of the Nazis more than of any detaining procedure known to the common law. Such a practice, once established with the best of intentions, will drift into oppression of the disadvantaged in this country as surely as it has elsewhere.

Seven decades later, Jackson’s warning reads like a prophecy fulfilled. We now have a MAGA movement explicitly embracing the exact authoritarian tactics he feared: disappearing people through “administrative” mechanisms, trafficking them to offshore camps without due process, then declaring any “errors” in the process irreversible. The parallels to the “protective custody” system he described are not subtle.

The dangerous implications of this mindset are perfectly captured by MAGA Rep. Victoria Spartz, who recently declared at a town hall that:

“There is no due process if you come here illegally because you violated the law. Period! You violated the law, you are not entitled to due process.”

This statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both law and logic that would be merely laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Follow her “logic” to its inevitable conclusion: if merely being accused of breaking a law strips you of due process rights, then there is no rule of law at all. Under this framework, government agents need only accuse someone of a crime to justify trafficking them to a foreign prison camp. No evidence required. No hearing needed. Just an accusation.

This isn’t just wrong — it’s an explicit endorsement of exactly the kind of authoritarian system that Justice Jackson warned would “drift into oppression.” It creates a perfect circular logic: you lose your right to due process because you’re accused of a crime, and you have no way to challenge that accusation because you’ve lost your right to due process.

This is inhumane. It is unconscionably evil.

I tend to hate calling anyone’s actions “evil” as that’s a strong charge that feels loaded. But at some point you have to call it out for what it is. It is pure evil.

And just to confirm what kind of inhumane evil this all leads to, when confronted about the case of Abrego Garcia — who, again, the administration admits it wasn’t supposed to remove — Vice President JD Vance just flat out lied and claimed (falsely) that the court documents say he was a “convicted MS-13 gang member.”

It’s quite something for JD Vance to accuse others of not reading the court document when it becomes clear that it is he who did not read the court document. Nowhere does it say he was a convicted MS-13 gang member, and the DOJ’s own filing admits that he had a legal right to be here. Even the replies to Vance’s tweet include a number of MAGA supporters asking why Vance is just making shit up.

The mask is slipping so badly that even reliable MAGA cheerleaders are recoiling in horror. Joe Rogan has admitted that the human trafficking program is “horrific.” Even Rod Dreher — who loved authoritarianism so much he literally moved to Hungary to live under an authoritarian leader — is saying “whoa, dude, too far.”

This is the line that due process draws: between a government bound by law and one ruled by whim, between justice and terror, between civilization and barbarism. When Trump, Homan, Leavitt, and Spartz argue against due process, they aren’t just attacking a legal principle — they’re attacking the very foundation of the rule of law itself.

Their vision of America is one where government agents can disappear anyone they want based on nothing more than an accusation, where “administrative errors” are features rather than bugs, and where the mere act of questioning their actions is treated as treason. They’ve made it crystal clear that they don’t believe in due process, the rule of law, or any coherent moral philosophy beyond raw power used to inflict suffering on those they deem unworthy of basic human dignity.

This isn’t just un-American. It’s a deliberate embrace of the exact authoritarian evil that America was supposed to resist.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, was an active participant in a political movement on his campus. The political movement called for the university to divest from arms companies and from a state deemed by the International Court of Justice to plausibly be committing genocide. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. His role in the movement was that of negotiator and mediator with the school’s administration — that is, engaging in speech.

But Khalil is Palestinian, and the movement in question is for Palestinian freedom and against Israel’s eliminationist assault on Gaza. So, as of Saturday night, Khalil, a legal permanent resident, is being held without charge at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention center. His attorney and his wife — a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant — were unable to find Khalil in the sprawling ICE carceral system for over 24 hours.

On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on Khalil’s apartment, a Columbia University-owned property near the school’s Manhattan campus. Khalil called his attorney, Amy Greer, who spoke with the agents on the phone. First, they reportedly said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke the graduate’s student visa. The attorney told them that Khalil has a green card, which Khalil’s wife produced as proof. Then, according to reports, the agent told Greer that they were revoking Khalil’s green card. The agents threatened Khalil’s pregnant wife with arrest too, and then took her husband away.

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X on Sunday, linking to The Associated Press’s coverage of Khalil’s arrest.

There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

It is all the more vile that Khalil has been targeted for engaging in protected protest activity calling for an end to the U.S.-backed slaughter of his people. The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters. It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and noncitizens alike. This is settled constitutional law: The Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, for example, reaffirmed the principle that the First Amendment protects even the most controversial and provocative forms of speech. 

Some of the only activity not protected by the First Amendment in this regard is material support for a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the government. What counts as “material support” has a strict legal standard — even expressing support or sympathy for a foreign terrorist organization is not included in that standard.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Zeteo’s Prem Thakker that Khalil was arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” The claim is yet another outrageous affront to First Amendment protections, which robustly include political speech and a whole host of protest activities.

Khalil has not been charged with material support for terrorism, nor any other crime. Under law, green cards cannot be summarily revoked; grounds for removal require criminal convictions for specific crimes including assault or theft, or proof of visa fraud. Green card holders facing removal are, under law, given the chance to appeal. They are not simply removed. I repeat “under law,” because Khalil’s case threatens to make that very designation irrelevant.

Related

The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters

The Trump administration has made a series of threats to revoke the visas of students and others involved in Palestine solidarity protests, which it consistently describes as “pro-Hamas.” Following on from President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump’s regime is committed to the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as a way to demonize — and criminalize — criticism of Israel. In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order mendaciously titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Trump threatened to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

While still a senator, Rubio recommended the use of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the secretary of state the power to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat. The very same law was used to enact racist immigrant quotas, and as a red scare weapon to deport or refuse entry to leftists like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, among others. The law has been amended numerous times since, in efforts to limit its authoritarian and racist uses. With the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, Congress prohibited as grounds for excluding immigrants from the U.S. “advocacy or publication of communist or other subversive views or materials.” Stated plainly: It’s illegal under congressional statute and the Constitution to remove someone from the country due to political speech.

Rubio’s own comments show he seeks to revive the Immigration and Nationality Act’s most harmful form. Just one week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Rubio invoked the law in a Fox News interview as grounds for deporting pro-Palestine protesters, and posted on X: “Cancel the visa of every foreign national out there supporting Hamas and get them out of America.” Now Rubio is secretary of state and committing in words and deeds to his illegal deportation agenda.

There’s little use in simply pointing to the law, even the Constitution, to oppose these authoritarians. Republicans are well versed in forging new legal realities through force and violence. Legal protections cannot be assumed; they need fighting for, or they simply will not hold. Establishment Democrats and institutions like Columbia University have helped bring us to this grim watershed moment. Every institution that treated support for Palestinian lives and condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war as antisemitic and terroristic laid the ground for Trump’s wholesale attack on basic speech rights.

Palestine solidarity activists and anti-colonial thinkers have long made clear that a government willing to prosecute a genocidal war abroad, as the U.S. has, has no problem enacting exclusionary, discriminatory violence at home. This is not new; these are the inherent contradictions of a purported democracy engaged in colonial domination. It should not take the illegal detention of another Palestinian to expose this, but here we are.

“This is unacceptable. Deporting legal residents solely for expressing their political opinions is a violation of free speech rights,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “Who’s next? Citizens?”

For those of you with any investment in the protection of basic rights and legal protections — in the defense of any shred of democracy against authoritarian rule — the fight to free Khalil and maintain his legal status is your fight too.

The post If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead appeared first on The Intercept.

Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform). Those same patterns are now threatening the federal government’s basic functions.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.

The parallel to Twitter is striking and terrifying. At Twitter, Musk’s “reform” strategy transformed a platform used by hundreds of millions for vital communication into his personal megaphone, hemorrhaging somewhere between 60-85% of its revenue in the process. But Twitter was just a private company. Now he’s applying the same destructive playbook to the federal government, where the stakes involve not just user experience or advertising dollars, but the basic functioning of American democracy.

The constitutional violations here dwarf the Twitter debacle. Where Musk merely broke a social media platform through incompetence last time, he’s now breaking the actual mechanisms of governance —  and doing it with the same reckless playbook that turned Twitter into a ghost town. As Conger and Mac, who documented the Twitter disaster, point out, even the specific tactics are being recycled:

The email landed in employees’ inboxes with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” The message in the email was stark: Accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign.

That was the note that millions of federal employees received around 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It echoed a similar message that thousands of workers at Twitter got from Elon Musk in late 2022 after he bought the company.

[….]

Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, has enlisted the help of a team of loyalists to assess agencies and make cuts, the same thing he did during the Twitter takeover.

Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Company, helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE. Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.

Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.

One of Mr. Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.

Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday night and viewed by The Times.

Wired, which has also noted the obvious parallels between Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the federal government (written by Zoe Schiffer, who also wrote an insightful book about the Twitter disaster) has an even more terrifying article about just how unqualified Musk’s goons are:

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at OPM as a senior advisor to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE, and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM foodchain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior advisor to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chairman. (The former CEO of PayPal and a long-time Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protege, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online resume and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

Among the new highers-up at OPM is Noah Peters, an attorney whose LinkedIn boasts of his work in litigation representing the National Rifle Association and who has written for right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller and the Federalist; he is also now a senior advisor to the director. According to metadata associated with a file on the OPM website, Peters authored a January 27 memo that went out under acting OPM director Charles Ezell’s name describing how the department would be implementing one of Trump’s executive orders, “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” This has to do with what’s sometimes known as Schedule F—a plan to recategorize many civil service jobs as political appointees, meaning they would be tied to the specific agenda of an administration, rather than viewed as career government workers. The order would essentially allow for career certain civil servants to be removed in favor of Trump loyalists by classifying them as political appointees, a key part of the Project 2025 plan for remaking the government.

For all of Musk and fans whining about the hiring of “unqualified” people (which has been very clearly coded to mean non-white, non-male, non-cisgender), the fact that he’s hired a kid whose experience is “camp counselor” into a high-level position is fucking insane.

But this isn’t just about personnel changes. It’s about systematically dismantling government institutions from the inside out.

And it’s only getting more and more dangerous. It’s been reported (and a lawsuit has been filed over it) that the “fork in the road email” was sent via a hastily setup on-premises server that these idiots needed to do the email blast, even though that almost certainly violates federal law.

On top of that, there are multiple reports of Musk basically taking over various parts of the government. He apparently showed up at the General Services Administration on Thursday, just after his right-hand man in the Twitter shakeup, Steve Davis, told them they were ending a bunch of leases on government buildings (another thing that Twitter also did). Even worse, Wired reports that Musk’s friends are using the GSA to try to get access to a variety of systems, including remote access to laptops, and even reading emails of government employees.

There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the executive office of the president to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. While Musk’s team could be trying to obtain better laptops and equipment from GSA, sources fear that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order would grant the body broad access to GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the system and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, amongst many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.

Then, on Friday morning, there were even scarier reports of him fighting with the longest tenured non-political employee at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, leading Lebryk to resign after Musk demanded access to the US Treasury’s payment system.

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

But Musk demanded that he get to control it, apparently.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

And it’s not that Lebryk had ideological disagreements. As the WaPo story notes:

“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”

But he got pushed out because Elon’s team wants control over the money spigot.

Then, later today, Reuters reported that Musk’s aides have locked career civil servants entirely out of government computer systems.

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

[….]

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.

Again, Elon has not been nominated as an officer of the US, and the Senate has not even been given the ability to review any such nomination. Instead, he’s basically acting like he runs the government and is slashing and cutting with wild abandon.

There are all sorts of laws that have been broken in the process, forcing courts to jump in. Earlier today, for example, a judge in Rhode Island had to stop the Musk/Trump administration from carrying out their attempt to stop spending money apportioned by Congress. A judge having to use this kind of “talking to a five-year-old language” to the Presidential administration is crazy:

The Executive’s statement that the Executive Branch has a duty “to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,” (ECF No. 48-1 at 11) (emphasis added) is a constitutionally flawed statement. The Executive Branch has a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the people as expressed through congressional appropriations, not through “Presidential priorities.” U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, cl. 3 (establishing that the Executive must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed . . .”). Federal law specifies how the Executive should act if it believes that appropriations are inconsistent with the President’s priorities–it must ask Congress, not act unilaterally. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may ask that Congress rescind appropriated funds.3 Here, there is no evidence that the Executive has followed the law by notifying Congress and thereby effectuating a potentially legally permitted so-called “pause.”

While just at the district court level, this judicial smackdown echoes historic rebukes like Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, where SCOTUS reminded Truman that “the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.” Musk’s shadow administration represents a constitutional crisis orders of magnitude greater than Twitter’s blue check chaos.

When Elon took over Twitter, he certainly had the right to go in and destroy the place through ignorance and overconfidence.

But this is the US government. He doesn’t own it. He wasn’t elected. He wasn’t officially appointed. And there are laws that are being broken left and right. Even worse, the impact of all this nonsense is way more significant and way more serious than any of the shit he pulled at Twitter.

Millions of people actually depend on the US government functioning. You can’t just have some random jackass show up and rip out fences and assume shit won’t go south. They went completely south with Twitter, but that was just a random social media site people could move on from. This is the most powerful country in the world, and it’s being ripped apart by someone with no concern or care for the actual damage he’s doing.

I would be among the first to say that the federal government needs massive reform, just as I thought that Twitter needed a major overhaul (one of the reasons I wrote my Protocols not Platforms paper was to try to inspire that kind of overhaul). But there are smart ways to do it and then there’s this: which is just utter destruction while looking over his shoulder to see if the nihilistic kids who worship his every move are finding it entertaining.

There’s a crucial lesson here about thoughtful reform versus destruction: Musk’s approach to institutions resembles a toddler “fixing” a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance — but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform — it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation. And unlike Twitter, where users could move to Mastodon or Bluesky (or just log off entirely), there’s no backup government waiting in the wings when Musk’s wrecking ball finishes swinging.

Those who care about functional institutions must demand adherence to constitutional processes, not billionaire whims. Because if we don’t, we might find ourselves longing for the days when Musk was only breaking social networks instead of the basic machinery of democracy.

For all the hype and warnings about how TikTok is clearly a “national security threat” from China, the Trump administration has effectively kneecapped the investigation into one of the most serious cybersecurity breaches in US history — a genuine, proven threat to national security. In what Team Trump probably thinks is a move to “destroy the deep state,” they’ve actually disbanded the government review board tasked with getting to the bottom of this unprecedented hack of our phone system by China.

We’re still nowhere near understanding just how bad the Chinese hack of our phone system was. The incident that was only discovered last fall involved the Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon, which used the US’s CALEA phone wiretapping system as a backdoor to gain incredible, unprecedented access to much of the US’s phone system “for months or longer.”

As details come out, the extent of the hackers’ access has become increasingly alarming. It is reasonable to call it the worst hack in US history.

Soon after it was discovered, Homeland Security tasked the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) to lead an investigation into the hack to uncover what allowed it to happen and assess how bad it really was. The CSRB was established by Joe Biden to improve the government’s cybersecurity in the face of global cybersecurity attacks on our infrastructure and was made up of a mix of government and private sector cybersecurity experts.

And one of the first things Donald Trump did upon retaking the presidency was to dismantle the board, along with all other DHS Advisory Committees.

It’s one thing to say the new president should get to pick new members for these advisory boards, but it’s another thing altogether to just summarily dismiss the very board that is in the middle of investigating this hugely impactful hack of our telephone systems in a way that isn’t yet fully understood.

Just before the presidential switch, the Biden administration had announced sanctions against a Chinese front corporation that was connected to the hack. And while the details are still sparse, all indications are that this was a massive and damaging attack on critical US infrastructure.

And one of Trump’s moves is to disband the group of experts who was trying to get to the bottom of what happened.

This seems… bad?

Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont said on the social media platform Bluesky that the move would give Microsoft a “free pass,” referring to the CSRB’s critical report of the tech giant — and Beaumont’s former employer — over its handling of a prior Chinese hacker breach.

Jake Williams, faculty at IANS Research, went even further on the same website: “We should have been putting more resources into the CSRB, not dismantling it,”he wrote. “There’s zero doubt that killing the CSRB [would] hurt national security.”

While some have speculated that this move is an attempt to cover up the extent of the breach or even deliberately assist the Chinese, a more likely explanation is simple incompetence. Trump and his crew still don’t understand what the government actually does and are so obsessed with a fictional “deep state” out to get him, that this is just part of their process of firing as many people as possible, without regard to the important work they actually do.

Still, even as all the headlines remain fixated on TikTok and its supposed (and still totally unproven) national security threat, the new administration has dismantled the team of experts tasked with figuring out what happened with an actual Chinese hack on critical US infrastructure. That seems important.

But outside of specific cybersecurity news sites, the story has received basically no coverage at all. I’m at a bit of a loss as to how any of this makes America great again.

President Joe Biden, asked last week what his government planned to do to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, responded by rejecting the idea that the numbers could be trusted. “I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said on Wednesday. “I’m sure innocents have been killed and it is the price of waging war,” he added. “But I have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using.”

A new analysis by The Intercept provides evidence refuting that claim.

Biden’s effort to delegitimize the numbers coming out of Gaza as fake news has created an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis; they note Hamas governs Gaza, therefore runs the Ministry of Health and is inflating the figures. (Biden later clarified he meant to say he didn’t trust Hamas, not all Palestinians, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Biden’s claim was quickly rejected by human rights organizations that have been active in Gaza for years. The Associated Press noted that the Ministry of Health’s figures from previous conflicts have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. And the State Department itself has long considered the numbers reliable. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health, meanwhile, responded by publishing a list of names of 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children. The list included 2,665 children, but The Intercept found that one 14-year-old boy was listed twice, bringing its total down to 6,746. Otherwise the list does not contain duplicates.

Now that the Health Ministry has published a list of victims, skeptics have suggested that the list may be fabricated and that a paper with names on it proves nothing. Immediately after the publishing of these names, Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby maintained the skepticism, saying that the ministry is “a front for Hamas” and that “we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health at face value.” 

Pressed, Kirby acknowledged civilian casualties were rising. “We absolutely know that the death toll continues to rise in Gaza. Of course we know that. But what we’re saying is that we shouldn’t rely on numbers put forth by Hamas and the Ministry of Health,” he said. A reporter noted that independent reporting suggested “thousands” of civilians had been killed. “We would not dispute that,” Kirby said.

But is the list itself reliable? We interrogated it and were able to corroborate dozens of names on the ministry’s list through a single family. 

Prior to the release of the list, Maram Al-Dada, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Gaza but now lives in Orlando, Florida, had told The Intercept about the deaths of seven relatives on his father’s side of the family and 30 on his mother’s side, in and around Khan Yunis. A week later, that number had risen to 46 total. (He and his family were featured on last week’s Deconstructed podcast.)

We compared the list of his relatives that began to be compiled last week — before the release of the list by officials in Gaza — to the list subsequently made public by the Ministry of Health. Al-Dada and his parents requested that last names not be published, as there is concern in Gaza that Israel has targeted journalists and their families, and might also retaliate against civilians who speak to Western media. The family hopes to emerge from the war with as many relatives still alive as possible.

The list of those killed includes four different last names: 30 members of one branch of the family, nine from another, four from a third, and three from a fourth. 

Of those 46 members of Al-Dada’s family so far lost in the war, 43 appear on the list, from the littlest — a baby girl not yet one — to the oldest, a 71-year-old grandmother.

When a building is struck, multiple generations are wiped out. “In Palestine, the society is set up differently than it is here,” Al-Dada noted. “People never leave their place. So families are huge; they all stay close to each other. For example, if you have a son, he will get married and he will build a house right behind your house and this keeps going. That’s why you will find a lot of people are getting killed from the same family.” 

Each name on the list is the story of a profound tragedy. One family’s home had already been bombed, for instance, and so the father and two children sought refuge at his brother’s house. The wife of the family’s father was in Saudi Arabia, undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca, when she learned her husband and children had been killed in a new bombing at her brother-in-law’s house. The bombing also killed the man’s brother.

There have also been many close calls. On Monday, the neighbor of Al-Dada’s grandparents was bombed, killing the family living there. A small piece of shrapnel from the explosion tore through a steel grate, blasted through a white chair and destroyed the family’s refrigerator. His grandmother, who was unharmed, had been sitting in that chair just moments earlier. He shared the following photos with us.

A report in HuffPost also found that nearly 20 State Department reports have cited the ministry, and one also argued the ministry may have undercounted. “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation,” the U.S. State Department report read.

The Intercept presented the White House with our new reporting and asked if Kirby and Biden stand behind their claims. We also asked whether the administration has made any independent efforts to gauge the extent of the killing if the Health Ministry’s numbers aren’t reliable, and if, as the administration states publicly, it is concerned about civilian casualties. The White House referred us to public comments made by Kirby and State Department spokesperson Matt Miller that acknowledged civilian casualties.

“We don’t have any way to make an accurate assessment of our own about the number of civilians who have died in Gaza,” Miller told reporters. “There is not an independent body that’s operating in Gaza that can provide an accurate number. But we do have skepticism about everything that Hamas says, but that said, obviously a number of civilians have died, which is why we’re working to do everything we can to minimize civilian harm and get humanitarian assistance in to the civilians in Gaza.”

Far from doing everything it can to minimize civilian harm, the IDF has said its “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division of Israel’s military, said recently, “When our soldiers are manoeuvring we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 aeroplanes overhead destroying anything that moves.”

Al-Dada said his family was firmly apolitical, with zero connections to Hamas. The October 7 attack on Israel surprised them as much as it did the world. 

Since Biden muddied the waters on the extent of the carnage, Israel imposed a total communications blackout on Gaza, while ratcheting up its airstrike campaign and launching a ground invasion. U.S. officials have reportedly issued private warnings to the Israeli government but have still not threatened to withdraw any military, political, or economic support. Instead, the Biden administration is putting together a $14 billion package for Israel that includes money for the Iron Dome, replenishment of weapons, and more.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza produced updated figures: As of Tuesday, October 31, at least 8,525 Palestinians have been killed and more than 21,543 injured since October 7.

The post Biden’s Conspiracy Theory About Gaza Casualty Numbers Unravels Upon Inspection appeared first on The Intercept.