Judge Torches Trump For Turning Into Henry II With His Wild Rants

A federal judge compared Donald Trump to Henry II for his blatant efforts to punish his administration’s critics.

While overseeing a lawsuit Monday concerning the Trump administration’s crackdown on noncitizens’ pro-Palestinian speech, U.S. District Judge Willliam Young referred to the twelfth-century English king while mulling whether the president’s penchant for publicizing his every personal problem ever inspired his underlings to take action.

Young cited Henry II’s famous line, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The offhand remark led errant knights to murder Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’d sought to increase the power of the Catholic Church.

Trump “doesn’t have errant knights, but he’s got Stephen Miller,” Young quipped, according to Politico’s senior legal correspondent Kyle Cheney.

Young pointed out that whenever the president had a problem with someone, especially in government, that person tended to find themselves facing a spate of problems they hadn’t had before. For example, after Trump had his explosive feud with Elon Musk, the government began to review its contracts with SpaceX. After beefing for months with Senator Adam Schiff, last week, the president accused him of “mortgage fraud” and said he should “pay the price of prison.”

Young also questioned Trump’s motor-mouthed attitude, while his administration appeared intent on violating the First Amendment.

“The president is a master of speech and certainly brilliantly uses his right to free speech,” said Young. “Whether he recognizes or not whether other people have any right to free speech is questionable.”

Last week, Young heard testimony from four veteran officers from the Department of Homeland Security who recounted their superiors’ unusual requests to arrest green card holders and noncitizen academics who had committed no crime.

Republicans are still doing everything they can to help Trump avoid answering any more questions about Jeffrey Epstein.

The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents. The resolution would do nothing to actually force the DOJ to follow through on this request, but even that is apparently too much for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has delayed the vote to give his party more time to control the narrative and weather the blowback it’s received from Democrats and MAGA loyalists alike.

Johnson will not bring the bill to a vote before August recess, if at all, according to Politico’s sources.

If Johnson and House Republican leadership really cared about transparency and truth on Epstein, they’d simply bring the bipartisan resolution led by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to a vote. But they won’t, because they care more about protecting Trump than keeping promises. And the backlash continues.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People. If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-line MAGA conspiracy theorist, wrote on X Monday in reference to the GOP’s dawdling pace on the Epstein files. “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Federal immigration officials are looking for their own path away from the Trump administration.

Veronica Cardenas, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor, told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale.

“I have been contacted by people on the inside, stating, ‘How did you leave?’ and ‘What process did that take?’” Cardenas said.

“Even at the time that I left, people were, number one, surprised—because when you join the government, people believe that there’s this sort of trajectory to it. When you leave, it does catch people off guard,” she continued. “I think people are going through that struggle, and what I would say to them is that your voice has so much power. You don’t have to do things that are unjust or wrong. Believe in yourself, step out of that.”

Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota of 3,000 arrests per day, in line with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s demands.

Speaking to her own experience exiting the agency, Cardenas said that taking the jump to leave boils down to a “moral conflict.”

“We all take oaths, right? When we step into that job, we are taking an oath to protect the Constitution and to follow the rule of law,” Cardenas told MSNBC. “And then when you get into that space, and you’re looking at these decisions that are being made, and the way that they’re being made: People are being harmed, people are dying in ICE detention, in custody.

“You have this conflict with yourself: ‘These laws cannot be right, and I don’t want to enforce it anymore,’” Cardenas told the network. The former assistant chief counsel then underscored that institutional change against America’s immigration is “not coming from the inside” but the outside.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday urged President Donald Trump to release more Epstein files, lest his base turn against him.

The Georgia lawmaker wrote on X that Trump, having entertained a number of conspiracy theories (to which she, of course, also subscribes), must now either deliver on them or face his supporters’ wrath.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Greene wrote. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back.”

“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” she continued. “They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Greene’s threat comes as Trump is still attempting to pacify supporters who are disillusioned with his handling of the case of deceased financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Justice Department and FBI displeased his base with a memo deflating Epstein-related conspiracy theories previously elevated by the president’s team (despite Trump’s own storied past with the disgraced financier). Trump has since disowned his supporters who remain interested in Epstein, calling them “weaklings” and claiming that this MAGA cause célèbre was actually a Democratic “scam” all along.

On Saturday, the president, evidently realizing the controversy isn’t going anywhere, announced that he’d requested the release of grand jury testimony related to the case of United States v. Epstein (which, if granted, would only occur after lengthy legal processes—and, even then, would fall short of many’s hopes for the release of all Epstein-related DOJ files.)

In announcing his request, Trump complained on Truth Social that “nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more.” The president appended the post with the exclamation “MAGA!”—but for swathes of his supporters, including Greene, making America great again will require more transparency than he now seems willing to provide.

Immigrants detained as part of Donald Trump’s deportation scheme are being treated like animals, according to a horrifying report published by Human Rights Watch Monday. 

The report found that detainees had been subjected to “conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards,” as the number of detainees ballooned under the Trump administration’s direction to ramp up the rate of arrests. 

The report, which focused on three immigrant detention centers in Florida—Krome North Service Processing Center, the Broward Transitional Center, and the Federal Detention Center—was based on interviews with 11 detainees, 14 immigration attorneys, and the family and friends of seven detainees who were held in detention between January and June 2025. They alleged that in these facilities, detainees suffer medical neglect and physical abuse, and are deprived of access to legal representation and safe living conditions. 

Human Rights Watch found that officers at these facilities were often abusive to the detainees. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,” one man said, according to the report.  

In another instance, detainees in a crowded cell became agitated when officers ignored a man who was coughing up blood for hours. Eventually, officers stormed the cell and forced everyone to the ground, binding their hands with zip ties. One detainee said he heard an officer demand that the cell’s CCTV be turned off, and another said one of the officers slapped him.

In multiple cases, facility staff were dismissive and neglectful toward detainees experiencing medical emergencies, and punished those experiencing mental health crises. Authorities at Broward Transitional Center created a chilling effect by placing detainees experiencing emotional distress in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. “If you ask for help, they isolate you. If you cry, they might take you away for two weeks,” said one woman. “So, people stay silent.”

One man said that what detainees were subjected to was akin to “psychological abuse.”

“The guards treat you like garbage. Even if they speak Spanish, they pretend not to understand,” he said, adding, “You feel like your life is over.”

Detainees were forced into overcrowded cells where they would eat substandard food and sleep on cold concrete floors, with one man even convinced that he would get hypothermia because of the temperatures. Another woman, who was confined for days in an intake cell at Krome, an all-male facility, said staff refused to allow detainees to clean the single toilet, which was covered in human feces. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came,” she said. 

Another woman who was kept in the same intake room said the toilet was visible from visitation rooms, where men were being held. “If the men stood on a chair or on the desk, they could see right into our room and the toilet. And sometimes they got up to look at us,” she said. 

Human Rights Watch reached out multiple times to the all three facilities, but only heard back from the company that manages Krome. That company, Akima Global Services, LLC, stated,  “We cannot comment publicly on the specifics of our engagement.”

This latest report comes at the heels of stories out of Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration’s premier wetland-themed concentration camp, where detainees say they are kept “in cages like chickens.”