Trump Shuts Down DHS Civil Rights Office as Deportations Spark Outrage

The Department of Homeland Security shut down its office in charge of investigating civil rights complaints on Friday.

DHS closed its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which was created along with the department in 2002 to advise leadership on civil rights and liberties and to investigate agency complaints on everything from disaster response to immigration enforcement. Its 90 employees were told they will be paid through May 23.

There’s no word on whether the functions of the office will be transferred elsewhere, or what will happen to its $22 million in funding. But it comes as no surprise, considering the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate oversight and civil rights offices in other departments. The civil rights division in the Justice Department, for example, has been directed to serve conservative culture-war aims, and much of its other work has been frozen.

The fact that the DHS’s office handles complaints against Immigration and Customs Enforcement was almost certainly a strike against it under this administration, which seeks to fast-track mass deportations regardless of complaints. To hard-line anti-immigration people on the right, civil rights and liberties are just further obstacles to getting rid of as many legal and undocumented immigrants as they can.

At the start of Trump’s second term, his campaign promise of fast-tracking mass deportations raised concerns that legal protections would be disregarded and civil rights violations would skyrocket as more immigrants were detained. Now that appears to be coming true, and getting rid of an office that would investigate those violations is certainly by design.

A federal judge tore into Justice Department lawyers Friday as they struggled to defend Donald Trump’s order banning transgender people from serving in the military. 

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said that she would not be “gaslit” by the lawyers’ attempts to convince her that the policy did not constitute a transgender ban, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney.

“You’re saying one thing in public. You’re saying a different thing in court,” Reyes said, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s post on social media that referred to the policy as a ban. 

Earlier this week, Reyes had ruled that the Pentagon could not enforce the policy and had mischaracterized research and ignored evidence to support its conclusion to disallow transgender service members. Last week, Reyes stopped a hearing cold in its tracks so that the lawyers could actually read the studies mentioned, after she found that “virtually every” study cited in the ban contradicted support for Hegseth’s policy.

The judge noted in her ruling that the defense agreed that transgender people “can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence,” and that the government’s claims about their suitability for service were “pure conjecture.”

She delayed the order from going into effect until March 21, to give the Trump administration enough time to pursue an emergency appeal. 

In a new filing Friday, the Department of Justice asked Reyes to dissolve her preliminary injunction. Lawyers argued against her interpretation of Hegseth’s policy disqualifying service members who “have a current diagnosis or history of, or Exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria.” The lawyers claimed this rule did not “discriminate against trans-identifying persons as a class.”

Reyes hit back at the lawyers during Friday’s hearing, pushing them to explain how Hegseth’s policy was addressing an actual problem in the U.S. military and not simply creating a “pretext” for discriminating against transgender people, according to Cheney.  

The judge noted there were already policies in place that required military officials to identify people with debilitating medical conditions—which would include those with gender dysphoria that rendered them unable to serve.

“Everything in the record is that it’s a pretext. There is nothing in the record that this was a deliberative process,” Reyes said. 

Will U.S. marching bands be replacing “God Bless America” with “God Save the King”?

Donald Trump had a bizarrely warm reaction to news that Britain’s King Charles would extend a “secret offer” for the United States to join the British Commonwealth, something that the Founding Fathers fought and died to exit nearly 250 years ago.

“I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday, recirculating the story.

It was not clear if Trump was serious or making an odd joke, but several U.K. outlets have reported that the unprecedented offer of “associate membership” is very much real. The Commonwealth is a volunteer association of 56 nations. The majority of them share history as former British colonies, including Canada, India, and Australia.

Charles is the head of the Commonwealth, as well as king of 15 of its member states. Five other members have different monarchs ruling over them, and 36 other members are republics.

The Daily Mail reported that the first extension of the hand-written offer was delivered to Trump by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a visit to the White House last month.

A member of the Royal Commonwealth Society spoke with the Mail on the condition of anonymity about the matter, claiming that America’s potential entry into the Commonwealth was being discussed “at the highest levels.” They believed it would be “a wonderful move that would symbolize Britain’s close relationship with the U.S.”

“Donald Trump loves Britain and has great respect for the Royal Family, so we believe he would see the benefits of this. Associate membership could, hopefully, be followed by full membership, making the Commonwealth even more important as a global organization,” the person added.

As strange as the offer is, it could be an attempt by Charles to quell Trump’s hostility toward long-standing Western alliances as Europe braces for potential war with Russia.

Trump has continually agitated and aggravated America’s allies, positioning the nation as more of a global bully than a policeman, forcing some of America’s friends to reconsider the value of its military protection. Some of those injuries include Trump’s shocking hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during critical peace negotiations, his nonsensical trade war, his threats to annex Greenland, his whiplash decisions to suspend and un-suspend military resources and intelligence with Kyiv, his venom toward NATO, and his insistence on making Canada the nation’s fifty-first state.

The Trump administration is moving to deport another international student for speaking out against the U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine.

One day after Cornell Ph.D. student Momodou Taal, who has dual U.K. and Gambian citizenship, reported unidentified law enforcement agents outside his home, the Justice Department emailed him and his lawyers asking the graduate student to come to ICE headquarters for his detainment.

Taal was suspended for participating in anti-Zionist protests on campus last year. On Sunday, he sued the Trump administration on the grounds that two executive orders used to detain innocent student-activists like Mahmoud Khalil violate the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution.

Days later, Taal said unidentified agents were outside of his house trying to intimidate him into turning himself in.

“This morning, shortly after a federal judge scheduled a hearing in my lawsuit demanding the courts strike down Trump’s executive orders attacking free speech, law enforcement from an unidentified agency came to my home in Ithaca, New York. I believe they planned to detain me,” Taal wrote on X. “Trump is attempting to detain me to prevent me from having my day in court.… This is part of a continued pattern in the Trump administration’s flagrant disregard for the judiciary.”

Taal’s lawyers then submitted a motion to stop the government from “attempting to detain, remove, or otherwise enforce the two executive orders against Mr. Taal.”

The Justice Department’s email to Taal on Thursday seems to be a way to get around his motion for a temporary restraining order.

“My guess is that someone in ICE told DOJ they were going to do this and DOJ said ‘hey if you grab this guy at his house with no warning while he has a pending TRO, that is going to piss off the judge, so let’s let him surrender instead,’” American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X.

The Trump administration is still working to detain Taal.

“I will not be intimidated,” Taal said in a statement Thursday. “Am I worried at times? Of course. Am I stressed beyond anything I’ve experienced before? Most definitely. But I cannot, in good conscience, remain silent.”

The Trump administration is so worried about judicial scrutiny over its deportation flights to El Salvador that officials are thinking about misusing the “state secrets privilege.”

Notus reports that Todd Blanche, the number two person at the Justice Department and Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, revealed as much in a court filing Friday. Specifically, he said that he had “direct involvement in ongoing Cabinet-level discussions regarding invocation of the state-secrets privilege.”

The fact that invoking the privilege is under consideration in the White House suggests that what actually happened is damning for the administration, and a negative ruling could seriously blunt Trump’s immigration powers. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is trying to find out exactly when the flights from the United States to the Central American country took off and whether officials were aware of a court order blocking the deportations at the time.

Since Boasberg’s court order on Saturday, he has been vilified by Trump, Elon Musk, and several other right-wing personalities, all of whom have made threats against him and called for his impeachment. New reports have also revealed that many of the immigrants rounded up and placed on the flight were not violent criminals or gang members, as administration officials claim. Many deportees simply had distinctive tattoos.

In addition to attacks on Boasberg’s credibility, the administration has also made the bizarre argument that the judge’s oral order carries less weight than a written one, and begun attempts to get the judge removed from the case by an appellate court. The threats to Boasberg even prompted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare statement of condemnation.

Trump has pulled out the rarely cited Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the flights, which were only possible thanks to Secretary of State Marco Rubio cutting a deal with the country’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele, to send them to facilities accused of engaging in torture. If the administration tries the state secrets privilege next, it will only deepen the ongoing constitutional crisis.