Appeals Court rules on the detention of illegal aliens without bond

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump administration has scored this legal victory:

:A decision on Friday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, if sustained by the Supreme Court, will allow the Trump Administration to detain pending removal as many illegal aliens arrested by DHS as it has the physical capacity to hold. Currently that capacity is only around 65,000. But DHS is building more detention facilities, and the expectation is to increase that number to 200,000 by the end of 2026.

Until Friday evening, the effort by the Trump administration to engage in “mass removals” of illegal aliens — a Trump campaign promise — has suffered from two primary hampering factors: 1 ) limited bed space in detention facilities that created a bottleneck; and 2) a practice in place for nearly 30 years that illegal aliens arrested in the interior of the country were almost always released back to their lives while being given a Notice to Appear to initiate removal proceedings against them at some time in the future.

A General Accounting Office Report in December 2024 — at the end of the Biden Administration and based on data from the Biden DOJ’s “Executive Office for Immigration Review” (EOIR) — disclosed that 34% of all removal proceedings ended with an “in absentia” removal orders from 2016 to 2023, meaning the illegal alien failed to appear. This meant to carry out the removal, the illegal alien had to be located and arrested a second time.

Further, as of July 2024, there was a backlog of 3.5 million removal cases pending before immigration judges — almost entirely as a result of more than three years of “Open Border” policies during the Biden Administration.

Now the Fifth Circuit has said it’s not a requirement to send them back to the community while waiting deportation. The decision was 2-1.

If you’re interested in the court’s reasoning, please see the opinion.

Basically, the idea is that the government has the authority to do this under statute, even if many previous governments declined to do it. The dissenting judge noted that, “some of the people detained are ‘the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.'” For a substantial portion of that group, that would almost certainly be because their American-citizen children and grandchildren were born here after the parents or grandparents had entered illegally. If Congress wants to exempt the older generations and grandfather (literally) them in to citizenship or amnesty, all Congress has to do is pass a law to that effect.

I assume this ruling will ultimately be appealed to SCOTUS.

The traffic counter …

The New Neo Posted on by

… seems to be back to normal, now that I’ve installed the updated code.

For those of you who didn’t see the original post on the subject and don’t know what I’m talking about, please go here.

And once again I want to thank everyone who posted a comment in that thread. It’s heartwarming, comforting, and inspiring to hear from you.

The not-so-Super-bowl

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m no football fan, but even I could tell that last night’s Superbowl game was more boring than usual. And for Patriots’ fans, it was more painful and even embarrassing.

I also watched some of the halftime “entertainment,” curious about Bad Bunny. I didn’t expect to like it, and I didn’t – it’s very rare for me to like current popular (?) music. But the degree of tuneless awfulness of this particular selection was nevertheless surprising.

As for the Spanish – I can understand a fair amount of Spanish, but this sounded garbled. Turns out that was a plus, because apparently the lyrics often went like this (a sample) when translated:

Hell, what safaera
You have a f**king amazing a*s
Anything that gets you breaking the highway
Move it, move it, move it, move it

More translations can be found here, if you care to see them. Let’s just say that the one I offered above is the mildest by far. I didn’t check to see if they’re authentic – but if they are, ugh.

Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico and his other theme is that “America” means not the US but the two continents, north and south. Apparently the NFL is trying to reach out to Latin American audiences, and Bad Bunny is very popular in that neck of the woods, whereas football (American style) is not. Thus, the Bad Bunny halftime.

The incomparable Baryshnikov

The New Neo Posted on by

He had it all – perfect technique combined with utter ease and freedom of movement, musicality, “attack,” charm, sex appeal, and acting ability:

I was fortunate enough to see him dance many many times in person.

I also once stood next to him for about ten seconds. We were both in flat ballet slippers, and I have to say that although his height has been variously reported as 5’5″ or 5’6″, I suspect he might actually be more like 5’4″ because he seemed to be exactly my height.

No matter. The man is a giant.

Another temporary injunction is removed

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

The Trump administration has been racking up some solid wins before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals of late. Another was added to the list on Friday as the appellate court vacated a District Court preliminary injunction regarding the administration’s ban on DEIA initiatives. …

… [T]he matter is remanded back to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with the 4th Circuit’s opinion. As with so many of these rulings, this is not the end of the road. The plaintiffs may decide to seek rehearing en banc and/or appeal today’s decision. And even if they do not, the case may still proceed on the merits in the District Court (at least as to the latter two provisions). Still, as they say, a win’s a win. And this is a solid win for the administration.

To me, the most interesting thing about this ruling is that two of the three judges who made the decision were appointed by Obama.

Revisiting Georgia, November 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The left has tried to bury the controversy, but it’s reared up again.

For example:

The Fulton County Report of Investigation into the 2020 General Election outlines numerous allegations of election irregularities, including the unauthorized ordering of over one million absentee ballots, failure to perform mandatory signature verification, and discrepancies in ballot counts. It details how Fulton County’s election processes violated Georgia law, leading to potential fraud and manipulation of election results. The report raises serious concerns about the integrity of the election, citing missing records, unauthorized access to election systems, and the counting of ballots without proper verification.

It’s long; I haven’t read it. But that summary is disturbing. And here’s a tweet that claims to show a Grok summary of the document’s ten main points:

1. Systems reprogrammed before election, causing failures.
2. Untested systems used for advance voting.
3. Over 1M extra absentee ballots ordered without stubs.
4. Absentee signature verification neglected.
5. 35 tabulator memory cards unlawfully swapped.
6. Security seals cut, fraudulent returns printed.
7. 20,713 unaccounted ballots from advance tabulators.
8. Election records destroyed or not preserved.
9. Absentee ballot image files removed.
10. Qualified write-in votes discarded.

Are these allegations verified, and by whom? It’s hard to get the facts, and the MSM is concerned mainly with the FBI seizure of related documents.

From Roger Kimball:

The FBI has a lot of sifting and sorting to accomplish in the weeks and months ahead. An ongoing court case claims that 150,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County were suspicious (my cautious word for “fake”) because they weren’t creased and didn’t look like they were marked by hand. Officially, Sleepy Joe was the first Democrat to gain more than 70 percent of the vote in Fulton since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. The FBI analysis of mail-in ballots might show him to be as popular in Fulton as Castro was in Cuba or Stalin was in the Soviet Union.

There are also hard drives to be inspected and electronic voting machines to be vetted. Remember the allegations that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked? Dominion (now “Liberty Vote”) collected some $787 million in damages from Fox News over the story. It will be interesting to see what sort of follow-up there is to those allegations.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have not been idle. New York Representative Dan Goldman has filed an amendment to prevent the Trump administration from investigating election records, ballot boxes, and voting machines across the country. Yes, really.

I don’t know whether anything will come of this. I do know that without election security that people can trust, there will always be significant doubt. And I also know that the legal system is inadequate to address allegations of election fraud after the fact, which gives extra motivation to those who would commit such fraud.

Benghazi: “Find them and bring them to justice” said Hillary many years ago

The New Neo Posted on by

You may remember Hillary as saying, about the Benghazi killings of four Americans, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” It was infuriating. The context was that she was shrugging off (and misrepresenting) the details, including the motives of the perps, as though it didn’t matter, and supposedly focusing on future prevention. But of course it mattered. If you want to prevent something you have to know who did it and why.

Hillary followed it with the statement that the perps needed to be found and brought to justice. Here’s her testimony;

The Trump administration decided to do just that: find them and bring them to justice, all these years later. That is, at least one of them has been apprehended:

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday that Zubayr Al-Bakoush was flown to the United States overnight and will face federal charges tied to arson, murder, and terrorism for his alleged role in the assault that killed four Americans. …

“We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law,” she said, adding that the message is simple: time does not erase accountability.

Pirro echoed that warning, stressing that the case is not over simply because years have passed. “The Benghazi saga was a painful one for Americans. It has stayed with all of us,” she said. “And let me be very clear, there are more of them out there.” Pirro said she and Patel have remained in contact with the families of the four Americans killed and vowed that investigators will continue hunting down those still at large. “Time will not stop us from going after these predators, no matter how long it takes,” she said. “We owe that to the families who suffered horrific pain at the hands of these violent terrorists.”

Traffic counter shenanigans

The New Neo Posted on by

Tech stuff is not my strong suit. But as the owner of a blog, I’m forced to tackle it.

Years ago I had a kindly web developer helping me now and then, a relative of a relative. Most web developers of any skill will only take on large projects, and mine never was large. Now he’s unavailable, and so when something goes wrong I break out into a cold sweat and start pacing around and yelling at no one. And then I have to fix it myself.

The latest involved my site meter. My traffic used to be higher years ago. But natural attrition among older readers, fewer links to me, and perhaps better bot detection have reduced the traffic count.

But it’s still decent, although far from huge, and it’s been stable for several years. It goes up when there’s a big link and down a bit on weekends, but otherwise it’s quite predictable unless the blog goes down for a while. I don’t check it every day, but it shows traffic for a month.

Yesterday I checked it and was shocked to see that my traffic for the day was about 30% of the usual. That’s quite a dropoff. I couldn’t figure it out, and right up until yesterday the traffic was at the normal level.

Then I noticed that the people who administer the tracking site said that they had just installed a newer and even better bot blocker. So apparently, fewer bots were being counted, although they had supposedly been effectively blocked before.

Was it possible that over two-thirds of my traffic has been bots all this time? This was profoundly disturbing. Had I been living in a dream world till now?

I contacted the site and they suggested re-installing the code. It took me hours to figure out how to do that, but I did it. Unfortunately, there was no change. I also noticed that all the traffic that was being reported was said to be coming from “Icloud Private Relay,” which turns out to be a sort of VPN connected with Safari on Apple. So it seems the counter was filtering out all visitors but those.

I finally figured out something I think fixed it; I’ll skip the boring details. Now other visitors are being recorded as coming in from other sources. But I’ve lost faith in the counter.

I could install a different counter, and have many times. But every single one gets a wildly different count, and I’ve come to distrust all of them. Or, I could ignore traffic entirely and be grateful that you’re all here, however many of you there are.

The Virginia playbook: run as a moderate, govern as a radical

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s how it works:

Spanberger’s very first order of business was reversing Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 47, which had allowed for coordination between the Virginia State Police and the Department of Corrections and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That coordination was important because it allowed the federal and state governments to cooperate to remove people in the country illegally who had committed additional crimes. That it was necessary for Spanberger to make it harder to deport criminals is a tell that her moderate campaign commercials will instead translate into a much further left administration.

Spanberger isn’t alone in moving Virginia sharply leftward. Both branches of the state legislature are now also controlled by Democrats, and they’re introducing policies that no one campaigned on. House Bill 863 would reduce minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter and child pornography. If Spanberger ran on “let’s let rapists off easy,” the Virginia electorate somehow missed it. In fact, Spanberger’s campaign ads highlighted her law enforcement experience and that she’s a moderate who works with both sides of the political aisle.

More at the link.

Spanberger is in for four years.

Her approach makes Mamdani’s look good – at least, he campaigned on a radical platform. Maybe not as radical as the way he’ll govern, but close enough. Spanberger was more duplicitous. But voters don’t seem to learn; then again, maybe this is what the majority of Virginians really want. I doubt it, but maybe.

This author certainly perceived in advance what Spanberger was going to be doing; the following was written shortly before the election:

… [F]ew politicians, including Democrats, have been as partisan and divisive as Spanberger. The Heritage Action for America scorecard has given Spanberger half the rating of the average House Democrat, marking her as one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress and noting she has reached across the aisle far less than her Democrat colleagues. …

Under Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia has empowered parents, restored sanity to schools, and bolstered safety. Spanberger wants to reverse it all, returning to an extremist agenda for the state. Virginians deserve better than a governor who endangers girls and women while defending illegal gangsters and scandal-plagued allies. Her moderate mask is off—voters can see the truth.

Apparently they couldn’t see the truth. Or perhaps they did see it, and that’s what they chose.

What’s up with Trump and Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

I admit I haven’t been pleased with what’s going on lately from Trump on Iran. My main beef has been that he appeared to encourage the demonstrators with promises of help and then, when many were massacred, did nothing. I don’t think he caused the killings, which would have happened anyway. And he may have had good reasons for pulling back. But the whole process has left a distinctly bad impression and sends a weak, blustery message.

Trump is often blustery. But he’s not often weak.

And then, after the empty threats, it seemed (and still seems) odd to me that he appeared (and appears) to be willing to negotiate. Hadn’t he learned how fruitless that is with Iran? Does he think he can work some sort of magic with the mullahs? Or is he playing for time with another goal in mind?

Reports are pretty much useless, IMHO, because each party is posing and putting a spin on it that could be false. But if you read this sort of article, based partly on NY Times reporting, you get a gloomy feeling. Here’s a sample:

he U.S. delegation, led by Steve Witkoff, on Friday, conducted two rounds of inconclusive talks with the Iranian regime negotiators in the Gulf Arab state of Oman amid alarming reports that Tehran is relocating its weapons-grade nuclear material and rebuilding its ballistic missile stockpile. …

Iran appears to be dragging the negotiations, gaining time to crush the popular uprising and secure its nuclear and missile stockpile. The Guardian (UK) quoted Iranian negotiators, saying that “[f]urther talks are on the cards at a time and date yet to be determined.”

The regime seems pleased with how the talks are going. “It was a good start to the negotiations. And there is an understanding on continuing the talks,” Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, said following the talks on Friday.

From the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage ordeal to the Obama-Kerry nuclear deal, the Mullah regime has always played for time while counting on the other side to make concessions or lose focus.

This isn’t esoteric information. Trump and his negotiators surely know it, unless they’ve lost their minds. Those who hate Trump and think he’s stupid probably don’t find these developments odd, but since I neither hate him nor think he’s stupid, at least so far, I am both surprised and puzzled.

The most benign explanation I can come up with is that it’s Trump himself who is playing for time, perhaps based on some Israeli information. Another less-good possibility is that he is so taken with the role of peacemaker that he’s making some poor calculations.