Supreme court refuses to allow Trump's national guard deployment in Chicago area
The supreme court has refused to allow Donald Trump to deploy national guard troops to the Chicago area, in a rare departure from recent cases where the court’s conservative majority has largely sided with the president.
While the justices’ order is preliminary, it marks an important reining-in of Trump’s efforts to expand the use of the military for domestic purposes in historic moves against a growing number of Democratic-led jurisdictions.
The nation’s highest court denied the US justice department’s request to lift a judge’s order in October that has blocked the deployment of hundreds of national guard personnel in a legal challenge brought by Illinois state officials and local leaders, who had opposed any federalization of those troops to offer back up to immigration enforcement.
The department had asked to allow the deployment while the litigation plays out. There have been sustained protests outside an ICE facility in Broadview, on the outskirts of Chicago, with aggressive tactics used against the resistance by the authorities.
The justices decided on a 6-3 vote on Tuesday to back a lower court and rule that the Trump administration had not met the legal burden needed to show that it was not able to execute the laws of the land without federal military intervention.
The three justices leaning furthest to the right on the bench, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, dissented.
'Not justice or accountability': Maria Farmer says DOJ still 'evading truth' on Epstein
Maria Farmer, who reported the abuse of her sister Annie Farmer by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to law enforcement in 1996, has released this statement today, following congressman Robert Garcia’s request to the Office of the Inspector General to conduct an independent investigation into the failure of the FBI to properly investigate her reports of child pornography and abuse:
The release of the Epstein files has been many things - initial victory and optimism for a long-fought push for truth, crushing disappointment and frustration at the Department of Justice’s continued evasion of the truth with the heavily yet irresponsibly redacted release of the files, and the surrealism of finally being vindicated after the truth was revealed.
We now all know that the FBI ignored my 1996 reports of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell’s sexual abuse of minors and possession of CSAM which I made - not for myself - but for vulnerable girls like my younger sisters and Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Since then, they have engaged in a systematic cover-up to protect him and his circle of powerful abusers.
This revelation brings some validation - but not justice or accountability. It must lead to real answers about who knew what and when, and why our government’s justice system failed so badly. I am grateful to Congressman Garcia’s leadership in continuing to demand answers and join him in insisting that the Office of the Inspector General stop protecting institutions and start providing the truth that survivors and the public have been denied for far too long.
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