Seymour Hersh. ICE: WHEN AN HONORABLE JUDGE MEETS A CORRUPT GOVERNMENT

WHEN AN HONORABLE JUDGE MEETS A CORRUPT GOVERNMENT

The ICE raids in Minnesota have brought about a conflict not envisioned by the Constitution

SEYMOUR HERSH FEB 11 ∙ PAID

A federal immigration agent tackles a protester to the ground for arrest after a different protester broke windows on two of the agents’ vehicles with a hammer as they tried to leave the intersection of E. 27th St. and 14th Ave. S. in Minneapolis on February 3. / Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images.

Jerry Blackwell was a winner. A Minneapolis kid, he went to a first-rate college on a scholarship, whizzed his way through law school, and went into private practice in his home town. At one point, the singer Prince was among his clients. He served as a pro bono prosecutor after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and delivered the opening statement and closing argument in the successful prosecution of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Blackwell was nominated in June 2022 by President Joe Biden to be a US District Court judge for Minneapolis. He was approved by the Senate and assumed office that December. He’s run a tight ship at a time of chaos in Minneapolis as ICE, supported by other federal agencies and President Donald Trump, began an all-out assault on suspected undocumented residents of the city. There have been mass arrests and violence, including two killings of protesters by federal agents. The protests are ongoing.

The issue before Judge Blackwell on February 3 was a narrow one, as the transcript makes clear. “The hearing this afternoon,” he announced, “concerns compliance with court orders; not policy, Just compliance. Nothing else.” There was no need to state the obvious—that the White House had decided to make a show of force in liberal Minnesota, with its large population of immigrants from Somalia, by doing what it has been doing elsewhere in America—bringing in ICE and other armed units to seize people of color. Since 1932, Minnesota has consistently voted Democratic in presidential elections, with the exception of 1972, when Richard Nixon won in a landslide.

Many immigrants without documentation in hand have been grabbed—literally forced at gunpoint out of a delivery car or van—and immediately deported, in Blackwell’s view, without any attempt to meet the legal and constitutional due process requirements.

There were two federal attorneys in Blackwell’s courtroom: Ana H. Voss, the experienced assistant US attorney in Minneapolis who would resign a few days after the hearing; and Julie T. Le, a young lawyer working for ICE in Washington who had been detailed to the Justice Department offices in Minneapolis, which were swamped with questions about illegal detainments. It was Le to whom Judge Blackwell complained about the failure of the Washington offices of the Attorney General and Homeland Security to release a detainee in Minneapolis whose age did not meet the minimum legal requirement.

The judge was pissed off by ICE’s failure to release detainees whose seizure did not meet constitutional requirements in the first place. He said: “I hope everyone here agrees and acknowledges that a court order is not advisory and it is not conditional. It is not something that any agency can treat as advisory as it decides how or whether to comply with the court order.”

After noting that the authority he cited is vested from Article III of the Constitution, Blackwell made a clear reference to the Trump-induced madness taking place on Minneapolis streets: “Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. . . . When a release order is not followed, the result is not just delay. In some instances, it is the continued detention of a person the Constitution does not permit the government to hold and who should have been left alone, that is, not arrested in the first place.”

Blackwell turned to the lawyers’ explanation that there were just too many contested arrests for the federal government’s legal system to deal with. “If the government undertakes an enforcement action of this scale, one that results in the detention of large numbers of people, including individuals who are lawfully present in the United States, then the government assumes a corresponding obligation that each detention complies with the Constitution and court orders governing release. . . . But what you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.

“In many instances,” the judge said, “I have had to not just issue an order, but another order, another order, another order . . . about seven or eight different touches sent to the government simply asking for the date, time, and location of someone who was ordered released, in many instances, a week or more in the past. . . . The requirements that the court has in place exist because individuals were being detained without lawful authority, they were being transferred contrary to orders, or released in ways that undermine the relief that was granted by the court.”

It took Le, the newcomer, to give the judge an inside view of what can only be seen as the Trump administration’s utter lack of regard for those seized illegally and later ordered released by a federal judge. She explained that she arrived from Washington to Minneapolis with no idea of what she was supposed to do on issues of due process. The judge, with what I hope was a smile, interjected. “Are you telling the court,” he asked, “that you were brought in brand new, a shiny brand new penny into this role, and you received no proper orientation or training on what you were supposed to do?” The answer was yes.

Le offered to share the documents she had been provided by the government regarding the case at hand with the court and was told that any information provided would need to be shared with counsel for the illegally seized person, known during the proceedings as “Oscar,” whose whereabouts were not being provided by the government, despite repeated efforts by the court to get him released. The judge said once again that the alleged illegal immigrant had no criminal record and had been ordered by the court to be released immediately more than a week earlier.

The judge said that for days there were inaccurate reports that the detainee was being scheduled for release and a flight back to Minnesota from El Paso, according to one message. A counsel for ICE later said that the detainee was in Albuquerque and was scheduled to fly to Minnesota two days later. During all of this back and forth chatter, the detainee remained in ICE custody, in direct disregard of the judge’s January 15 order that he be freed immediately. The detainee was returned to Minnesota and released on the afternoon of January 28. The official reason for the delay, Judge Blackwell said, was safety of the detainee amid never explained security concerns.

Where Oscar slept, if he did, and who fed him, if he was fed, is not in the court record.

It was during this period, Le told the judge, that she put in her resignation but remained on the job because no replacement could be found. And now, she told the judge: “I am here with you, Your Honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. The job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”

Blackwell’s response was empathetic and to the point. He told Le: “I want you to understand my goal in any of this is not to threaten you or anyone. What we really want is simply compliance, because on the other side of this is someone who should not have been arrested in some instances in the first place who is being held in jail or put in shackles for days, if not a week-plus, after they’ve been ordered released.

“And I know that the government has a concern about the growing number of requirements that the court puts in place upon release of individuals. That happens because of the things we learn. For example, if we say, ‘Release the person immediately,’ then we learn—having transported him back to El Paso or New Mexico, you don’t bring him back. We learn that somebody is put on the street with just the clothes on their back and have to figure out how to get back here when they never should have been arrested here in the first place, let alone flown halfway across the continent of North America.

“And then we say, ‘Alright. So you brought them back. We can’t have them released when it’s minus-fourteen outside. And now we have to address that. Don’t release them in the circumstances that might endanger their health or safety.’

“And so once that’s addressed, then we learn that they’ve been released, but now conditions have been imposed. That someone who should never have been arrested in the first place is now being told, ‘You’re going to be released if you wear an ankle monitor,’ which the court didn’t order because the person was unlawfully detained in the first place.”

The judge asked Le, “Do you understand that?”

She said she did and added: “And I share the same concerns as you, Your Honor. I am not white, as you can see. And my family is at risk as any other people that might get picked up. . . . But again, fixing a system, a broken system . . . I don’t have a magic button to do it.”

Somehow, amid all the suffering and fear that an irrational and ignorant president can create, here in the US and abroad, it is reassuring to hear an informed and honorable federal judge share his anxieties with a young federal worker in the wrong job in the wrong place, and try to reach a meeting point.

Julie Le, according to a report in the New York Times on Sunday, was fired from her temporary job in Minneapolis with the Justice Department. There was no immediate word about her permanent job as an attorney with ICE in Washington.

At the end of a long day for Judge Blackwell and the others in the courtroom, Kira Kelley, one of the public interest lawyers for Oscar, whose full name was not in the transcript, asked for a moment.

She had a lot to say about Oscar’s experience.

“Most of my clients,” she said, “are pulled over for how they look or where they are or for any number of things that don’t amount to probable cause. . . . His affidavit really just shows us what it’s like. . . . That he was without food. He was without clean clothes. . . . People are being treated like less than human. . . . I can’t tell you how many clients [once released] . . . who I had to go find who were left on the side of the road with no coat, no phone, no wallet, no hat . . . and it’s zero outside. We shouldn’t need a court order saying, ‘Don’t put someone’s life in danger.’ But here we are.”

Here we all are. 

Michael Roberts: Tariffs and the US economy

by Michael Roberts

Last week, the mega tech companies – the so-called Magnificent Seven – presented their latest earnings results.  They appeared to be ‘blockbuster’. They painted a picture of a booming economy, supporting President Trump’s assertion that America “is the hottest country anywhere in the world”. (He was not referring to global warming).  At the same time, Trump announced his latest round of tariff measures on goods exports from other countries into the US.  The US stock market continued to stay near a record high.

The financial media lauded the tech results and even went along with the Trump administration’s claims that all the fears about the hit to US economic growth and inflation from Trump’s tariff measures had been proved wrong.  

But the more you look at the data below the stock market hype and Trump’s claims, the reality is much less rosy. Below the surface, large parts of corporate America are grappling with slowing profits and the uncertainty generated by Trump’s aggressive trade war. With almost two-thirds of S&P 500 companies having reported second-quarter results, earnings for consumer staples and materials companies are down 0.1 per cent and 5 per cent year on year, according to FactSet data. Indeed, 52 per cent of those S&P 500 companies to have posted results, have reported declining profit margins, according to Société Générale.

The 10 biggest stocks on the S&P 500 account for one-third of overall profits across the index, with tech and financials reporting year-on-year quarterly earnings growth of 41 per cent and 12.8 per cent, respectively.

And when we delve into the earnings results of the Magnificent Seven, we find, contrary to the views of the financial media, that their earnings rises are not due to revenues and profits accrued from the huge investments in AI made by these companies, but from existing services created from the previous tech boom in the internet and social media. Meta’s (Facebook) shares jumped more than 11 per cent on their results adding more than $150bn to its market value. But the rise in earnings came from increased advertising revenues in existing services, not AI.

Meta’s Zuckerberg  proclaimed that he is investing ever more in AI data centers and energy sources. “We are making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do from a business perspective,” Zuckerberg said on a call with investors. However, Meta’s finance officer Susan Li said Meta was not anticipating “meaningful” revenue from its generative AI push this year or in 2026. And the company cautioned that the costs of building the infrastructure needed to underpin its AI ambitions were growing. Meta raised the lower end of its 2025 capital expenditures forecast to between $66bn and $72bn. It said that it expected its 2026 year-over-year expense growth to be higher than its 2025 growth rate, citing higher infrastructure costs and growth in employee compensation due to its AI efforts.

Over at Microsoft, quarterly profits soared from record revenues in its cloud computing division. But it too is looking to make future money from its massive investment in artificial intelligence. Finance officer Amy Hood said Microsoft spending on data centres would rise to $120bn in 2026 up from $88.2bn in 2025 and almost quadruple the $32bn in 2023. “We are going through a generational tech shift with AI . . . We lead the AI infrastructure wave and took share every quarter this year, we continue to scale our own data centre capacity faster than any other competitor.”  But little or no revenue comes from AI so far. Copilot AI apps now had 100mn monthly users, Google’s Gemini with 450mn users and market leader ChatGPT, with more than 600mn. But only 3% actually pay for AI.

Already Microsoft and Meta capital expenditure is more than a third of their total sales. Indeed, capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the US economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending.

And there is no end yet to the AI investment boom. US data center construction hit another record high in June, exceeding $40bn annualized for the first time. That’s up 28% from this time last year and up 190% since the launch of ChatGPT nearly three years ago.

But this boom in the stock market, driven by AI hype, is increasingly out of line with the rest of the US economy. 

Take the latest US real GDP figures.  After the data showed that the Eurozone grew only 0.1% in Q2 2025, the US data showed a rise in real GDP of 0.7%, which translated into an annualised rate of 3.0%, more than forecast. Trump hailed the result. But the headline growth rate was mainly due to a sharp fall in imports of goods into the US (-30%) as the tariff rises began to bite. The fall in imports meant that net trade (that’s exports minus imports) rose sharply, adding to GDP. Excluding trade and the impact of the tariffs, real final sales to private domestic purchasers, the sum of domestic consumer spending and gross private fixed investment, slowed to a rise of just 1.2% compared to 1.9% in Q1.

Indeed, investment growth dropped back in Q2, up only 0.4% vs 7.6% in Q1. Investment in equipment grew only 4.8% compared to the huge 23.7% rise in Q1, while investment in new structures (factories, data centres and offices) fell 10.3% in Q2, having also fallen 2.4% in Q1.  Looking through all these volatile changes, the overall picture is that the US economy rose 2.0% in real terms in Q2 2025 over the same period in 2024, at the same rate as in Q1. The US economy is still doing better than the Eurozone and Japan, but at less than half the rate of China.

Source: BEA

Mainstream economist Jason Furman points out that US real GDP growth for the first half of 2025 averaged just a 1.2% annual rate, well below the pace in 2024. So the current 2% a year rate as above is likely to slip further.

Source: Jason Furman

And then there is employment.  The latest release on jobs growth in the US was ugly.  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics said there was only a tiny 73k increase in July and previous May and June data were revised down sharply, while the unemployment rate rose.  Indeed, only 106,000 jobs have been added from May to July, down sharply from the 380,000 added in the previous three months.

This is now the worst job market in the US since the end of pandemic slump. Layoffs are at their highest level with nearly 750k job cuts in H1 2025.  Even the high flying tech sector has seen a loss of jobs. Across all subsectors, jobs growth remains well below the peak tech era of 2022 or even the pre-COVID era.

Blame the messenger. On the news of July jobs figures, Trump claimed the US economy had never been stronger; the figures had been rigged and so he sacked the longstanding head of Bureau of Labor stats.  It’s true that the jobs statistics are volatile and the Bureau finds it difficult to reconcile different measures of employment growth, but the irony in Trump’s move is that the Bureau’s estimates of payroll employment have got more, not less, accurate over time.

The reality is that the US economy has been slowing down for some time and with it, employment growth. Indeed, America has lost 116k manufacturing jobs over the last year—that’s the fastest pace of job loss since the early COVID era and worse than any period from 2011-2019. Big drops in the transportation (-49k) & electronics (-32k) industries have driven most of the decline.

And then there is inflation.  Far from inflation rates heading down as the economy slows, the official rates are staying stubbornly closer to 3% a year, instead of the target rate set by the US Federal Reserve of 2% a year. 

Source: Furman

You might say, what difference does one percentage point make? But remember American consumers have suffered an average 20% rise in prices since the end of the pandemic slump and with average wage growth now slowing towards 3% a year, any real gains in living standards have disappeared. 

Source: Atlanta Fed

Average real weekly earnings for full-time employees are now at the same level as just before pandemic, some five years ago.

All this is well before Trump’s tariffs begin to hit the US economy and consumers. As Fed chair Jay Powell put it: “American businesses have been absorbing Trump’s tariffs so far, but eventually the burden will be shifted on to American consumers.” Trump’s latest tariff measures are a mess with no rhyme or reason. He has raised high tariffs on some countries and in some sectors, but not in others. Since Trump took office, the average effective US tariff rate on all goods from overseas has now soared to its highest level in almost a century: 18.2%, according to the Budget Lab at Yale.

Source: The Budget Lab

Trump says increased import tariffs are bringing in billions in extra revenue for a government that is running a huge budget deficit of about 6% of GDP a year.  But the extra billions are tiny compared to the deficit and revenue is being lost from Trump’s cuts to corporate profits taxes and above all from the slowdown in the economy.  Meanwhile, the  US trade deficit is running about 50 per cent above last year and will end up higher for 2025 as a whole, while GDP growth will be weaker.

Tariffs are typically paid by the importer of the product affected. If the tariff on that product suddenly goes from 0% to 15%, the importer will try to pass it on.  So far, many have resisted and tried to absorb the extra cost.  Some 50% say they are “absorbing cost increases internally.” But eventually, the tariff rises will feed into consumer prices. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates the short-term impact of Trump’s tariffs will be a 1.8% rise in US prices, equivalent to an average income loss of $2,400 per US household.

But the tariffs will also lead to less investment at home as US manufacturers find the costs of importing components from abroad rising significantly, and domestic substitutes (if they exist) will be pricier.  Profit margins will be squeezed even if prices are raised to compensate.  That will add to downward pressure on US economic growth.  The Yale Budget Lab reckons if they stay as they are now, Trump’s tariffs will reduce GDP growth by 0.6% pts through the rest of this year and next year (that means the current growth rate of under 2% could fall below 1% by end 2026). As I have argued before, the US economy would then enter a period of stagflation, where economic growth stutters to a near halt, while unemployment rises along with inflation. 

This puts the US Federal Reserve in a serious dilemma.  Last week, the Fed’s monetary policy committee decided not to lower its policy interest rate. The Fed’s policy rate, which sets the floor for all borrowing rates in the US and often globally, was held at 4.25% for the fifth straight meeting. This was despite threatening noises from President Donald Trump who wants a huge cut and says he will remove Fed Chair Powell if he does not get it.  But if the Fed cuts rates, that will weaken its ability (such as it is) to control inflation and meet the 2% target.  On the other hand, if it continues to hold rates up, then it will add to the borrowing costs of companies and households and so force further cuts in investment and employment. 

Now I have argued in the past that Fed monetary policy has little effect on the economy: what matters are profits and their effect on investment.  But the Fed’s dilemma between rising inflation and rising unemployment sums up the growing stagflationary environment in the US. And the impact of Trump’s trade tariffs has yet to be fully felt. So the Fed faces the prospect of a stagflationary economy.

Meanwhile the AI capacity spending boom accelerates.  The  Magnificent Seven of mega tech companies are paying for this by running down their cash reserves and borrowing more.  Of the planned investment in AI data centers of near $3trn by 2028, half will have come from using up cash flows and increasingly nearly another third from what is called ‘private credit’. 

The tech companies are borrowing less in the traditional form of corporate bond issuance or bank loans and instead opting for getting credit from private credit companies that raise money from hedge funds, pension funds and other institutions and then lend it on.  These credit vehicles are not regulated like the bond markets or the banks.  So if things go wrong in the AI bubble, there could a rapid reaction in credit markets.

The US has a record high stock market, unlimited spending on AI capacity by the tech giants, along with sharply increased borrowing to pay for it; but no sign yet of any significant revenues or profits from AI – and alongside that: a slowing rest of the economy, a widening trade deficit in goods and increasing unemployment and prices.  All this as we go into the second half of 2025.