Revealed: Trump’s War on ICE Protesters Is Collapsing in Court

Judge torches Trump’s bid to rewrite January 6, Mamdani says he may still order Netanyahu’s arrest, and Utah’s Republican leadership tells Trump to back off

Good morning. I’m John Byrne.

A blockbuster investigation reveals the Trump administration has lost or abandoned nearly half of its criminal cases accusing protesters and immigrants of assaulting federal agents. A federal judge just used a January 6 rioter’s own petition to permanently cement the true history of the Capitol attack in the federal record. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he’s still exploring whether he can order Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest when the Israeli PM comes to town in September. And in deep-red Utah, the Republican lieutenant governor is telling the Trump administration to stop threatening the states over elections.

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Trump’s Cases Against Protesters and Immigrants Are Falling Apart

The New York Times just published the most comprehensive review yet of the Trump administration’s signature legal weapon against people who get in ICE’s way, and the results are devastating. The administration has charged more than 550 people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have collapsed. Juries acquitted defendants, judges tossed charges, or prosecutors quietly withdrew them.

To understand how abnormal that is, consider that the Justice Department typically wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases. Of the 26 people who insisted on jury trials, 22 were acquitted.

The details are worse than the numbers. In dozens of cases, video and court records showed federal agents were the ones who got physical first, shoving, tackling, and pepper-spraying the people they later accused of assault. In more than 100 cases, prosecutors never even claimed an agent was injured. Officers charged more than two dozen people whose only offense was filming agents or shouting warnings. Judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including forcing a 19-year-old American woman to permanently delete photos from her phone. Then they charged her with assault.

Two young mothers in Charlotte were surrounded by armed, masked agents on a dead-end street while screaming to a 911 operator for help. An agent smashed their car window with the barrel of his rifle. Their charges were so weak the U.S. attorney’s office eventually dropped them.

And Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who championed these tactics, told the Times his only regret is that they didn’t charge more people.

There’s a precedent for this moment. During the Palmer Raids of 1920, the Justice Department rounded up thousands of immigrants on flimsy charges, until a career official named Louis Post canceled deportations and federal judges condemned the raids as lawless. The courts eventually broke the fever then. They’re doing it again now, one dismissed case at a time.

Judge Uses Rioter’s Case to Destroy Trump’s January 6 Rewrite

A January 6 rioter named Jennifer Ryan, the Dallas realtor who joined the mob at the Capitol, asked a federal judge to go beyond her Trump pardon and erase her conviction from the record entirely. Judge Christopher Cooper didn’t just say no. According to Raw Story, he used the ruling to permanently enshrine the truth of that day in the federal record.

“Given the historical significance of the events of January 6 and ongoing efforts to rewrite them, the Court will take the opportunity to set the record straight,” Cooper wrote. He then walked through the facts: a mob breaking windows, assaulting police officers, and forcing its way into the Capitol. Ryan watched the violence unfold on television from her hotel room, he said, and chose to join it. She chanted “Fight for Trump!” inside the building while fire alarms blared, and afterward threatened news studios from beside a broken Capitol window.

The consequences of her participation, Cooper wrote, “will not be scrubbed from public memory, even if her conviction is vacated.” And in a line aimed squarely at the man who pardoned her, he observed that “there are some who wish to rewrite the history of that day, and that desire resulted in her pardon.”

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Mamdani Says He May Still Order Netanyahu’s Arrest in New York

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told The New York Times that his administration is considering whether he has the legal authority to arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said, pointing to the International Criminal Court’s warrant over the war in Gaza. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.”

Netanyahu, locked in his own reelection fight, responded by accusing the mayor of championing Hamas and claiming Mamdani “secretly hates America.”

Mamdani has condemned the October 7 attacks and doesn’t praise Hamas. What he does do is say out loud what a growing share of his party believes: nearly half of House Democrats just voted to end U.S. aid to Israel. That vote failed, but the shift is unmistakable.

In 1998, a Spanish judge’s warrant got Augusto Pinochet arrested in a London hospital bed, and the British courts ruled that a former head of state has no immunity for torture. The dictator’s untouchability ended not with an army, but with a piece of paper and officials willing to honor it. Mamdani understands that principle; international law only means something when someone is willing to enforce it.

Republican Civil War Erupts as Utah’s Lt. Governor Blisters Trump

Trump spent his Thursday address claiming America’s elections are worse than those of “third-world” nations and hacked by China, offering no evidence for either. On Friday, the pushback came from his own party. Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, demanded Trump “stop threatening states and filing frivolous lawsuits.”

Trump’s DOJ has sued Utah and other states for refusing to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers. They’ve also sent state election officials letters threatening criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. Trump claims 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote. That’s false. Henderson’s own audit found that out of more than two million registered Utah voters, just 27 people shouldn’t have been on the rolls.

“We call on the federal government to restore the election security resources that have been cut over the past several years,” Henderson said, adding that Utah will keep delivering “secure, free, and fair elections” with or without Washington’s cooperation.

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I’m John Byrne. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.