They keep telling you nothing works anymore.
I spend my days in filings nobody reads, and I’m telling you Wednesday was one of the better days this country has had in a year. You’d never know it from watching the news.
Hit the ❤️ like button and restack this one. Massachusetts just passed the strongest anti-ICE law in the country, and a like and a re-stack is how it reaches people who need to see it.
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Kelly Garcia chaired the Chelsea, Massachusetts, school committee and now sits on the city council. She told Boston’s WBUR radio that so many kids stopped showing up to class—deported, or too scared to come—that the district cut 70 staff positions.
Gov. Maura Healey signed the PROTECT Act Wednesday morning at La Colaborativa in Chelsea, a city where about 46 percent of people were born outside the US. Lawmakers attached an emergency preamble, making it law the moment the pen lifted.
ICE now needs a judicial warrant to arrest anyone on civil immigration charges inside a Massachusetts courthouse, public school, child care center, hospital, or nursing home. A federal officer who violates your constitutional rights can be sued for it, and police can no longer ask about your status unless it’s tied to an actual crime.
The Black and Latino Legislative Caucus filed the bill. More than 75 grassroots groups called the House version too weak and pushed a harder one through Senators Jamie Eldridge and Lydia Edwards. The House enacted it 137 to 21.
Garcia didn’t call it symbolic. She called it action.
Federal agents in Jackson, Mississippi, wanted the phone records of everybody near six locations in town—including major highways that carry thousands of drivers a day. Thousands of records. Possibly tens of thousands.
Magistrate Judge Andrew Harris turned them down in February of last year. The government came back in June with a scaled down request—only devices that hit two or more of those towers—and he turned that down too.
On Wednesday, federal Judge Carlton Reeves reviewed it himself and went further. He held that so-called tower dump warrants—where police demand data on every cellular device connected to a tower—are unconstitutional general warrants in every case, and that trimming a request after the fact can’t save one.
Reeves spelled out what a tower dump can expose. Who stood at a voting site. A place of worship. A doctor’s office. A domestic violence shelter. A rehab facility. An immigration clinic.
He wrote that he can’t imagine any tower dump warrant application that could ever be specific enough to pass.
The Trump regime tried to grab back $20 billion Congress set aside for clean energy projects in people’s homes and neighborhoods. On Tuesday a federal appeals court told them no.
Six of the ten judges said taking money because you don’t like what it pays for probably breaks the law. The money stays where Congress sent it.
Career prosecutors told the Justice Department there was no case. In February of last year it ordered Denise Cheung, a 24-year veteran who ran the criminal division of the US Attorney’s office in Washington, to open a criminal investigation.
The evidence they handed her was a video from the right-wing group Project Veritas. She and the other prosecutors in her office said there was nothing there, and when they told her to have the bank freeze the money anyway, she said no to that too. They asked for her resignation and she wrote it that morning.
Nobody has been charged with anything since.
Twenty billion dollars. They came for it with a Project Veritas video and a woman’s career, and they still lost.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is going after the people who helped Jeffrey Epstein commit crimes at his ranch outside Santa Fe. He needs the federal files to name them, and the Justice Department won’t hand them over.
In 2019 federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to stand down and promised to cooperate when the state’s turn came. It never came. Torrez reopened the case in February. His office asked ten times for the files. Ignored or denied.
So on Wednesday he sued. Forty pages against the Justice Department and acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who Torrez says could hand it over with a stroke of a pen and instead chose to stonewall and conceal. Justice says it’s protecting survivors’ privacy. A group of Epstein survivors called that laughable, since their names are already out.
That same day a state commission reported dozens were likely abused at the ranch, most still unnamed because the federal files are blacked out. Rachel Benavidez, brought there as a young massage therapist, told them Epstein’s powerful friends let him “roam free here in New Mexico unchecked” long after he was a convicted sex offender.
New Mexico is one of the last places that can still charge anybody for this. Torrez knows it. That’s why he’s suing.
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Then hit the ❤️ like button and restack this one. Massachusetts just passed the strongest anti-ICE protections in the country, and somebody in your feed has gone a month without hearing one good thing. Substack won’t hand it to them. You will.
Onward!
Scott
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