I want to protest the fact that Kash Patel, this Trump sycophant, totally unqualified for his position as FBI director, ordered the arrest of a judge in her own courtroom, a first in American history. Federal agents came in and arrested her. She had an illegal alien in her court for other reasons having nothing to do with ICE or immigration law—there for other reasons. And she was presiding over a case. She told the ICE agents to wait. They came in anyway. She told them to get out of her court, that this was no place to arrest anybody who was before an American judge in a courtroom as part of our justice system, part of the way we do things, respecting the law. And they disobeyed her, came in anyway and tried to grab him.
She escorted this gentleman along with his lawyer into a hallway, and they then accused her of hiding him, which is a lie, and then arrested her and dragged her off.
I just want to say, a line has been crossed. And of course, Kash Patel did this on purpose to test something. And what is he and Trump trying to test? Well, of course, Trump doesn’t want to obey anything the courts say, even up to the Supreme Court, that run counter to his grab for power, his egomaniacal drive for revenge against his enemies.
This is a test case. The director of the FBI has a judge arrested who he doesn’t like because she was following due process of law with a defendant in her own court—someone there for a wholly different reason. She said, no, this is my court. Courts are sacred. I don’t know what words she used, but that is certainly the implication. You don’t invade a court and disobey a judge and grab someone who is in that court in a legal procedure.
And then she was hauled off and now she will have to be appearing herself in court, charged with who knows what—fabricated, trumped-up charge. But really what this is about is a test case. Kash Patel wants to test the legal system—not just disobey court rulings, ordering Trump to return people who were falsely arrested and sent off to foreign jails, mistaken identity cases that he refuses to do anything about—but actually, can we just arrest a judge, haul him or her off the street, maybe out of their bed at night with a knock on the door, with jackbooted forces, the Trump MAGA people coming in in ICE costumes, throwing their weight around, arresting judges?
Trump has already made war on law firms that have the temerity to defend people in our system, in our legal system, who he doesn’t like. He’s told them not to do that. He says if they want to do business with the federal government, they can’t defend people or have anything to do or associate with people he doesn’t like, and he is going to persecute them. And they have knuckled under just like our tech bros have knuckled under, just like the entire leadership of the Republican Party has knuckled under. And now we see the arrest of a judge in her own courtroom. Are we also going to knuckle under to this or has another line been crossed?
You know, people throw around the word fascism, but when judges are arrested—as they were in the 1930s—threatened in Germany in the rise of fascism, persecuted and killed in Italy… I’m reminded of a young woman I know in Italy whose father was murdered in the 1990s by the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. A young woman who grew up without a father because he was murdered in the street by mobsters. He was a prosecutor. He was a lawyer. And the mob in Italy started killing prosecutors, and that’s when the Italian government put up the heat and got serious about prosecuting the mob and began to roll them back, even in places like Sicily.
It’s a short step between killing a judge and having her murdered and arresting her on a trumped-up charge. It’s a short step when we see a government making war on the judiciary, our court system, already disobeying them when they rule against them, singling out lawyers who dare to stand up to them, singling out universities who dare to stand up to them. And now a judge is arrested.
This is a dark day for American history. Let your voice be heard.
Share this post