Losing My Perspicacity, September 2, 2025

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! I hope everyone had a great and relaxing weekend. The weather here in Chicagoland was glorious, which made it easy to hang out in the backyard and forget all the craziness happening around us.

However, there was one thing that happened over the weekend that kept me and other law dorks glued to social media and our PACER accounts. Given the cruelty and depravity of the move, I think we should talk about it. It’s one of those moments that should have all of us asking, “Is that what we want America to be?”

Before we start, a huge shout-out to Anna Bower of the excellent site lawfaremedia.org, who appears to have given up her entire Labor Day weekend to cover this story as it happened. I’m going to do my best to keep the screenshots to a minimum, but there are a lot of “WTF?” moments in this string of events.

Early on Saturday, we got word that various advocacy groups were seeking to stop the Trump administration from removing “hundreds” of unaccompanied minors to Guatemala. Here’s the initial skeet, but if you’re interested, you can go over to Bluesky and follow the entire saga, which took nearly the whole weekend.

You can see from the minute order that federal Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan moved a hearing up to 12:30 pm from 3 pm when it appeared children were in the process of being removed before the scheduled hearing. If you’ll recall, this is the move DHS tried before with Judge Boasberg, which led to him ordering planes to turn around and land back in the United States. Judge Sooknanan had already issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) barring the removal of a class of children, but she entered a new TRO that prevented a larger group of children from being taken out of the country.

Like I said, ICE/DHS/DOJ have tried this move before

At this point, it’s worth noting that Judge Sooknanan was awakened at 2 am on a long weekend by notice that DHS was in the process of shipping the children out — at 2 am on a Saturday.

Now we come to the part that had my jaw on the floor, because in my opinion, DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign, who has been the voice of the Trump administration in a lot of these cases, either 1) straight up lied to a federal judge or 2) didn’t bother to read the TRO petition before he stepped up to argue against it. Both are bad; one is significantly worse.

“That’s what I’ve been told” is always Ensign’s fallback retort. And while I do believe that ICE/DHS/etc would have absolutely no problem misrepresenting facts to a judge, Ensign is an officer of the court and should be verifying these facts before he steps up to the bench.

Anyway, plaintiffs (the children)’s lawyers are jumping up and down and screaming at this time that what Ensign is saying is not true, and Judge Sooknanan has decided to draft a TRO that stops the DOJ/ICE/DHS from taking these kids out of the country without her permission. But she doesn’t stop there, noting, as other judges have in recent weeks, that the DOJ absolutely can not be counted on to follow court orders in good faith. There was a time when the DOJ employed the best and brightest lawyers in the US. Now… le sigh.

So Ensign comes back and tells the judge that all the kids are being removed from the planes. But knowing the DOJ, she’s like, “Okay, great. Come back and tell me when they are all off the planes.” This level of micromanaging and hand-holding is not done in most cases, but again, no one trusts the DOJ these days. She makes them put everything on the record so they can’t hedge on anything.

Then, and here’s the real pièce de résistance, she makes Ensign stand there while she reads off all the plaintiff’s claims that completely contradict everything he just represented in open court.

Over the last two days, there’s been a lot of legal arguing over whether or not the government even has the power to deport unaccompanied minors, but the notable thing from this case is that Judge Sooknanan kept making the DOJ come back with status updates pretty much all weekend. This was from Saturday afternoon:

Judge Sooknanan kept making DOJ come back with status reports until every child was back in federal custody and accounted for. It wasn’t until late afternoon on Monday that we got confirmation that everyone was safe and still in the continental United States.

Watching all of this unfold in real time was incredibly dramatic and stressful, and, like Joshua Friedman, I am also grateful for judges who remind us that every single life matters, no matter how small or unseen.

So what do we take away from this weekend’s legal shenanigans? That there is nothing ICE/DHS won’t stoop to in their campaign to terrorize immigrants, that DOJ has become a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, rather than the rule of law, and that there are still very good people out there fighting very hard against the darkness. Let’s make sure we support them.

I’m quickly running out of room due to all the screenshots, but I wanted to mention a few other things today.

• Disgraced and disbarred former lawyer Rudy Giuliani was injured in a car accident over the weekend, so Trump is giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Of course he is. Also, he might give one to Big Balls.

• Uh, I know a lot is going on right now, but maybe we should be concerned about what’s happening around Venezuela? TL;DR - we have sent a shit ton of warships to the Caribbean.

• As if things weren’t bad enough, now the Orgy Dome at Burning Man has blown away.

• First Nations Canadian actor Graham Greene has passed away at the age of 73. While Greene is rightly being remembered for his dramatic and Oscar-nominated roles, he also had some serious comedic chops. Here he is in 1994’s Maverick, a seriously underrated comedic gem that had the misfortune of casting Mel Gibson in the lead role before we knew he was a raging antisemite and domestic abuser.

Greene, apparently, never stopped working. He has 180 acting credits to his name on IMDb, and eight projects still in production that haven’t been released yet. RIP Graham. He will be missed.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

If you are concerned that Americans didn’t take to the streets over Labor Day, let me put your mind at rest.

Here’s the march in Chicago:

And here are more actions in SoCal:

In fact, “Workers Over Billionaires” actions took place all across the country yesterday.

You guys know that I’m a proud union member and an advocate for unions in every industry across the land. I’m going to leave you on this Labor Day with some words of wisdom from Billy Bragg.

“There's power in a factory, power in the land; Power in the hand of the worker; But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand…”

Survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.