blog

May 12, 2025

Stephen Miller’s Argument for Suspending Habeas Corpus Is Legal Garbage

Suspending the right to challenge the legality of one’s detention in court would shred a core tenet of the Constitution.

If White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is to be believed, Team Trump is poised to drive another stake through the heart of the Constitution. On May 9, Miller told reporters that the administration is considering whether to suspend the right to habeas corpus – known as “The Great Writ” – in immigration cases. Suspending habeas corpus, which allows individuals to challenge the legality of their detention in court, would be unconstitutional.

The Suspension Clause, located in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution, says: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

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May 6, 2025

US and Hungary Stand Alone at ICJ in Favor of Israel’s Blockade on Gaza

Thirty-seven states, the UN and international NGOs all condemned Israel’s blockade at the International Court of Justice.

Since March 2, Israel has blocked all food, medicine, fuel, and other relief from entering the besieged Gaza Strip, home to 2.1 million Palestinian people. “Israel is starving, killing and displacing Palestinians while also targeting and blocking humanitarian organizations trying to save their lives,” Ammar Hijazi, Palestine’s ambassador to the Netherlands, told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) during last week’s five-day hearing. “Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war.”

The ICJ convened the hearing at the request of the UN General Assembly to address the following question:

What are the obligations of Israel, as an occupying Power and as a member of the United Nations, in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, including its agencies and bodies, other international organizations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including to ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population as well as of basic services and humanitarian and development assistance, for the benefit of the Palestinian civilian population, and in support of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination?

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April 30, 2025

Vietnamese Agent Orange Victims Remain Uncompensated. Tlaib Aims to Change That.

Vietnamese and US descendants of those exposed to Agent Orange continue to face diseases and congenital anomalies.

Today marks 50 years since the end of the American War in Vietnam, which killed an estimated 3.3 million Vietnamese people, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, tens of thousands of Laotians and more than 58,000 U.S. service members. But for many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people; Vietnamese Americans; and U.S. Vietnam veterans and their descendants, the impacts of the war never ended. They continue to suffer the devastating consequences of Agent Orange, an herbicide mixture used by the U.S. military that contained dioxin, the deadliest chemical known to humankind.

The United States used Agent Orange as a weapon of war. From 1961-1971, the U.S. military sprayed toxins that contained large quantities of dioxin in order to destroy food supplies and improve visibility for the U.S. military by killing broad swathes of vegetation throughout southern Vietnam. As a result, many people have been born with congenital anomalies — disabling changes in the formation of the spinal cord, limbs, heart, palate, and more. This remains the largest deployment of herbicidal warfare in history.

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April 22, 2025

Orbán Faces ICC Investigation After Refusing to Arrest Netanyahu in Hungary

As a party to the ICC’s Rome Statute, Hungary is obliged to arrest suspected war criminals and send them to The Hague.

In a shameless attempt to undermine international accountability for accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán graciously hosted the architect of Israel’s 18-month genocide in Gaza on April 3.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is now formally investigating Hungary’s blatant refusal to fulfill its legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu and send him to The Hague. States parties to the Rome Statute have a duty to cooperate with the court and facilitate the arrest of any ICC suspect who enters their territory. Although Orbán announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the statute on April 3, it does not take effect for one year.

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April 15, 2025

Appalled at Funding Genocide, Over 2,000 US Taxpayers Turn to the UN for Redress

With no recourse in U.S. courts or Congress, the Taxpayers Against Genocide movement pivots to the UN Human Rights Council.

Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG), a nongovernmental grassroots mass movement comprised of more than 2,000 taxpayers who have been protesting their congressional representatives’ votes to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, filed an unprecedented report with the UN Human Rights Council on April 7.

“We have gone through all the channels open to us in our effort to stop U.S. officials from using our tax dollars to fund genocide. We have called and met with these officials, we have peacefully protested, and we have taken them to federal court. To date, none of this has stopped them,” Seth Donnelly, lead taxpayer plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, told Truthout. “The genocide in Gaza rages on, fueled by our tax dollars. We have now elevated our struggle to the international arena, starting with our report to the UN Human Rights Council, as one necessary step towards countering the impunity of the U.S. government.”

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April 2, 2025

Mahmoud Khalil’s Attorney: “This Is the McCarthy Era All Over Again”

The US government is weaponizing antisemitism as an excuse to kidnap and deport even lawful permanent residents.

A federal judge in New Jersey will soon issue a ruling on where the deportation case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who led the student encampment at Columbia University last year, can be litigated. On March 8, Khalil was abducted in New York by agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who told him his lawful permanent residency status had been “revoked.” He is now languishing in a notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles from his U.S. citizen wife who is over eight months pregnant, while U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz decides where his case will be heard. Khalil has been charged with no crime.

On March 9, Khalil was sent to New Jersey and then transported to Louisiana late that night into the next morning. On March 10, a New York federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation while his legal challenge is pending.

On March 28, a hearing took place in New Jersey before Judge Farbiarz. Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and one of Khalil’s attorneys, told the judge that his client’s detention was “Kafkaesque.”

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March 14, 2025

Duterte’s ICC Arrest for Crime Against Humanity Strikes a Blow Against Impunity

Under the guise of his “war on drugs,” the former president of the Philippines murdered political opponents.

Activists in the Philippines say the stunning arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for a crime against humanity marks a major step toward accountability for the thousands of Filipinos targeted and killed under the pretext of his infamous “war on drugs.”

“The arrest of Duterte is highly significant for the cause of international justice because it sends a clear signal that tyrants who brazenly trample on basic human rights can eventually be held to account by alternative international accountability mechanisms,” Edre U. Olalia, chairperson of the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) in the Philippines and co-president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, told Truthout.

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February 13, 2025

By Refusing to Obey Court Orders, Trump Is Provoking a Constitutional Crisis

Trump is making real the words of OMB director Russell Vought, who said “we are living in a post-Constitutional time.”

No sooner did Donald Trump take the oath of office than he immediately took a wrecking ball to government agencies and programs that protect nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives.

States, public interest organizations, schools, doctors, unions, immigrants, federal workers and individuals have filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging Trump’s legal authority to take these actions. At least nine judges throughout the country have temporarily halted several of them.

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February 9, 2025

Trump Plan for Gaza “Worse Than Ethnic Cleansing,” Says UN Human Rights Expert

Unlawful deportation or transfer of a population constitutes both a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Donald Trump’s outrageous plan to remove the Palestinian people from Gaza, assume U.S. ownership of the Gaza Strip and make it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” reveals his intent to commit a war crime and a crime against humanity.

What Trump proposed during a February 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House is “unlawful, immoral and irresponsible,” Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said at a February 5 press conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. “This is worse than ethnic cleansing. It’s forced displacement … which is an international crime.”

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January 24, 2025

Trump’s Blitz on Immigration Aimed to Overwhelm. Here’s What You Need to Know.

Executive orders Trump issued in his first days in office violate both the Constitution and several US laws.

Pandering to his nativist base, Donald Trump made the central pledge of his 2024 presidential campaign a threat to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” On January 20, 2025, he began to fulfill that promise.

On Inauguration Day, repeating the words spoken by Chief Justice John Roberts, Trump swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Setting aside the issue of whether he purposely refrained from placing his hand on the Bible his wife was holding, the oath Trump swore triggered the “Take Care Clause” of the Constitution. Article II imposes on the president the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

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