Deportation nation: a roundup

As masked ICE enforcers rampage through American streets and workplaces, non-citizens aren't their only targets.

So many stories today on immigration, deportation and citizenship today I'm just going to do a roundup:

* Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark: "Let's get this out of the way: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. You know that. I know that. But it is wholly unclear if Trump’s masked forces in tactical gear do." Why'd they mass in force outside Chicago's National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture ahead of its annual Barrio Arts Fest?

* From the Santa Barbara Independent: Meet some children left alone after their moms were seized who are now left to figure out how to care for each other, such as 15-year-old Juan Martinez, who is now in charge of his brothers, ages 8 and 9 ("I just hope I get my Mom back"), or Alexa, 16, left to care for her 6-year-old and 10-month-old sisters by herself (“They became my responsibility.”) I dislike appeals to sentiment, and it's perfectly true that Juan, who I assume is a citizen along with his brothers, could have landed in the same fix had his mother been apprehended for some crime like setting off a bomb in a public place, as opposed to her actual situation of having lived in the U.S. for 16 years with no criminal record. (Both cases arose from this week's Glass House Farms raids in Ventura County, in which one migrant worker was killed.)

* What happens when ICE agents detain and abduct persons who loudly assert that they are U.S.-born citizens, and then turn out to be exactly that? It seems they often find other charges to throw at them, such as assaulting or interfering with police. Check out a case from Montebello, Calif. where charges were just quietly dropped. [L.A. Taco]

* A church worship leader mom and her four U.S. citizen kids were held at a detention facility for nearly two weeks incommunicado and without access to legal advice. It took a member of Congress to locate her and look at though not speak with her, and there’s still no sign she’s aware of what happened to her detained husband or that she could speak with legal representation. [Bellingham, Wash. Herald; corrected an erroneous earlier description]

* Donald Trump on Truth Social said he’s giving "serious consideration" to revoking the U.S. citizenship of perennial critic Rosie O'Donnell, pretending that presidents can do that. O'Donnell was born on Long Island. She is exploring acquiring Irish citizenship by way of Ireland's family heritage track, but dual Irish-U.S. citizenship is common and a lot of people have it. Assuming that dual citizens do not renounce their U.S. citizenship voluntarily, it can be taken away from them against their will on a theory of implicit renunciation on only a limited list of grounds, one of which is not "needling Donald Trump too much."

* In one of two significant federal court rulings from California Friday, a federal judge ordered police in Los Angeles to stop shooting at journalists for the next two weeks. The case arose after widespread reports that police were gassing, roughing up and shooting projectiles and flash-bangs at journalists trying to cover protests and riots in Los Angeles, including a widely circulated citizen video of Australian broadcaster Lauren Tomasi being shot from behind as she spoke before a camera from her network. (About those “less lethal” munitions.)

The TRO lasts 14 days while the judge considers a preliminary injunction, and also extends to such measures as putting journalists under curfew or interfering with their legitimate gathering of information. Aside from general constitutional protections of the right to report from the scene on disruptions, California has its own laws meant to protect reporters' rights.

* In the second of the two Friday rulings, another California federal judge "temporarily blocked the Trump administration from conducting indiscriminate immigration stops in the Los Angeles area and denying detainees access to lawyers."

Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California observed that the Fourth Amendment requires "reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity to detain a person and said that detaining officers “may not rely solely” on "apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence at a particular location, such as a day laborer pickup site; or the type of work a person" does, absent some additional evidence. She also said that under the Fifth Amendment, detained persons could not be held without access to lawyers.

Like many other federal judges, Judge Frimpong also questioned the accuracy of the Trump administration's factual representations in court: what "the federal government would have this Court believe — in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case — is that none of this is actually happening.”

HHS Secretary Kristi Noem threw a press conference at which she called the judge an "idiot" and repeatedly referred to her as "he." You can look the judge up on Wikipedia and find that Maame Abena Famanyame Ewusi-Mensah was born in Los Angeles, attended Harvard as an undergrad followed by Yale Law School, and before her appointment to the bench worked as "an associate at Morrison & Foerster from 2002 to 2007. From 2007 to 2015, she served in various positions in the United States Department of Justice, including in the Civil Division." It is not recorded that she shot any dogs.

* While I haven’t had time to research the issues much, there is reason to think both of these temporary restraining orders could be held overbroad by higher courts. To begin with, in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983) the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a man injured by a police chokehold had no standing to obtain an injunction against the LAPD's policy allowing chokeholds because there was not a compelling likelihood that he himself would face another one in the future. "Justice Marshall's dissent argued that the majority's test would immunize from review any widespread policy that deprives constitutional rights when individuals cannot show with certainty that they would be subject to a repeat violation." Defendants will argue that these two injunctions are overbroad because they protect persons at risk of future injury, many not in court, who cannot prove both 1) that they were injured by the past practice and 2) that they are likely to be injured again if it does not stop.

That's on top of the Supreme Court's recent Trump v. CASA ruling that injunctions cannot ordinarily grant "universal" relief to persons not in court except under particular circumstances (e.g. certification as a class action).

* Terrific Kevin Williamson piece on immigration in L.A. May be paywalled, but Williamson is really a good reason to subscribe to The Dispatch.

Illustration: Aïda Amer for Axios.