This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosseo from Bloomberg Radio.
I don't think it's a pullback. It's a little bit of a change.
Everybody in this room that has a business, you know, you make little changes. You know.
Bavino is very good, but he's a pretty.
Out there kind of a guy.
And in some cases that's good.
Maybe it wasn't good here.
That was President Trump on Fox saying they're de escalating in Minnesota rather than enforcing a pullback. Trump is shuffling the lieutenants in charge of his immigration crackdown in Minneapolis after a second person was killed by a federal officer in a matter of weeks. He's dispatched Borderzar Tom Homan to the state to replace Border Patrol Chief Greg Bavino, who'd been the face of the aggressive, almost militarized operation. My guest is Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law.
She served as the Deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department and led the pattern or practice investigations of police departments. I want to get your general impression of what's been happening in Minnesota. The tactics that have been used by immigration agents. You have the shooting deaths of two people
by ICE officers within weeks of each other. And we've seen all these videos showing aggressive tactics by officers ice agents, throwing chemical agents at not even a crowd, at a few people, shoving people who are trying to film them. I saw one video where a man was already on the ground, subdued and an ICE officer still sprayed a yellow chemical into his face.
This is a law enforcement agency that is completely out of control. I don't say that lightly. I have just seen this happen in other places. You know, when I was at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, we would invest gate law enforcement agencies. There were local agencies that were sometimes out of control, and they acted just like this one for all the same reasons. It's just
that what's so disturbing about this. I mean, part of what is disturbing about this to many peoples, and it's the federal government. Part of what's disturbing about it is that this is a nationwide you know, they have nationwide enforcement of authority, and so it's been most pronounced in Minneapolis. That's certainly not the only place where they had been shooting people and using excessive force, lying about what they're doing.
And so when you have a law enforcement agency that's out of control, that's frightening on a couple of levels. One is just people our right to be concerned about their personal safety, but it's also a real threat to democracy. So I think it's hard to overstate how problematic this is. Problematic is two weak a word, right, It's really hard to overstate how dangerous what is happening is.
Along those lines, Alex Pretty was the fifth person to be shot and killed by federal immigration officers since Trump launched his immigration crackdown in Los Angeles last June, and at least nineteen times federal immigration agents have opened fire on civilians. Most of those incidents involve agents firing at drivers during enforcement stops. None of the officers has faced criminal charges, and the administration hasn't announced any internal disciplinary
measures against them. Is this very unusual? What would normally happen?
So I'm hesitating about usual and normal for two reasons. One is, with eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, it's hard to say what's normal or usual in any given agency because there's a wide spectrum of what happens. And even when you talk about the federal law enforcement agencies, even when you focus on immigration enforcement, CBPHSI, ICE, it's hard
to know how abnormal this is. I will say it is completely unacceptable, and it is the reason that we see this law enforcement agency being out of control is because there is not any accountability either external right, There's no investigation that's being done so that there can be
criminal prosecutions. There's very little accountability through civil litigation because of how difficult the Supreme Court has made the law in this area and the internal accountability mechanisms, which are the most effective, generally speaking, in the most real time, you just say that people don't do this, You give them a day off if they start to do something wrong, and you fire them if they keep doing it. That
sort of accountability is not happening. Now. That's long been a problem with immigration enforcement, in part because of the line, and we've been drawing it and discussing these cases between what implicitly what people think is okay for law enforcement to do to non citizens versus citizens, and a lot of what immigration enforcement has been doing in this country has been done to non citizens, oftentimes at the border and they've essentially been given a pass, and so it's
really important for a number of reasons to stop making a distinction between how between non citizens and citizens. And one of the reasons is that that distinction is why they've been allowed to grow into an agency that uses excessive force with impunity and lies about it with impunity. So I think it's important for people to recognize that the way that these federal immigration enforcement agencies are working
now did not come out of nowhere. It has a long history and being allowed to behave this way in places that were not as open to the public and against people that did not have as much sympathy as protesters do now.
As far as investigations, it seems as if the federal government is doing an investigation on the latest killing of Alex Pretty. I'm not sure about the Renee Good shooting. Whether they're actually doing an investigation on the federal level, it's.
A little unclear, and I think it's probably changing. It's robe fairly fluid, given that they're getting much more pushback than they expected. But from what I have read, it appears that they're doing what is called the use of force review, which is what you should do anytime there's a serious use of force, and what historically DHS law enforcement agencies have done, right any use of force, not just shootings, but you know, strikes to the head for example,
anything that's a serious use of force. You would do a review to determine whether there are any policy violations or whether there were any maybe training problems or even equipment problems that were revealed by the incident. And that's something that should happen regardless of whether there's a complaint, regardless of whether there's you know, any media about it. It's an internal often called an administrative investigation. It sounds
like they're maybe doing that now. I think people would be correct to be concerned about the robustness of that investigation and the credibility of that investigation, given the demonstrably false prejudicial statements that leaders of that organization have already made. And so what often happens when law enforcement agencies have those problems with credibility or just competency, is you will
have an outside agency conduct that administrative investigation. So that's what I think we should all be asking for as an independent agency for the federal la enforcement agencies to open up provide all the evidence to an independent entity to be able to conduct that administrative investigation. In the past, the Offices of Inspector General, Federal Offices of Inspector General
would have been a good candidate for that. They're rather compromised because of the way that their independence has been threatened by President Trump, and so I'm not sure that's an adequate stand in here. In addition to that administrative investigation, there should be a federal criminal investigation, and specifically, there should be an investigation to determine whether there were criminal
violations of these individuals' federal civil rights. We know from the Good killing they decided not to do that, and my understanding is that attorneys left the Civil Rights Division because of that decision. I don't know whether they're rethinking that they could. People should be pushing them to rethink that.
And the same here with Predi's killing. They could be doing a criminal investigation to see whether his civil rights were violated, and there's been no indications that I know of that they are, but that could change.
So let me ask you this, because there's been a lot of talk about, you know, immunity with the Vice President coming out last week about Renee goods shooting and saying absolute immunity, then backing off a little bit, what kind of criminal charges could be brought against a federal officer.
So there's not a large body of federal criminal law actually, so oftentimes the charge, the only charges that are available at the federal level are charges for violating individuals civil rights. So that is definitely something that the federal government could do. There are also oftentimes when law enforcement agents behave in
this way, they are violating state criminal law. So for example, in the Derek Chauvin case where Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, he was found under state law to have murdered George Floyd, the state crime of murder. That is much more complicated when the state is trying to prosecute not a state or local law enforcement officer, but a federal law enforcement officer. There is a large body of law that makes it more complicated and more difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement
officers criminally. For state prosecutors to prosecute federal law enforcement officers criminally, that said, it's not impossible, and it is something that the state appears to be pursuing here, and they have legal grounds to do so.
The state is sort of in an uphill battle here because, you know, the federal government has the initial evidence from the both scenes and apparently the local officials have said that federal officials are refusing to honor a search warrant that they had to get signed by a judge. So the federal government is withholding the information here.
Yes, the federal government is essentially obstructing a criminal investigation, and that is highly unusual. Normally, federal and state governments will work together and try to gather evidence, even in deciding, like you know, quote unquot who will go first in terms of prosecuting the individual. But that's not happening here. And that's why people are right to be concerned that what the federal government is doing here is trying to cover up what actually happened. This is not, you know,
sort of normal protocol. This is them behaving very differently for reasons that appear to be they don't want anybody else looking at what actually happened. The good news is that there is a lot of evidence you can gather outside of what the federal government is refusing to turn over. We should be so grateful to the individuals who are out there filming and providing that ragging the evidence. Who are willing to testify and talk about what they saw
before and after the cameras were on. That is really important information that can become evidence right once it's properly you know, vetted and confirmed. And with these facts, it seems like you could make a prosecution on that information alone.
Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, you this conversation with Georgetown law professor Christy Lopez. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was persuaded to freeze a judge's ruling that barred retaliation against the public in Minnesota. I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg. I've been talking to Georgetown law professor Christy Lopez. She was the Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice and led the pattern or
practice investigations of police departments. Christy, let's turn to the courts for a moment, because not just in this case, but in many cases across the country, there have been complaints by federal judges that the Trump administration is ignoring orders, or skirting orders, or you obeying them around the edges, however you want to describe it. And so the Chief Federal Judge has demanded the acting head of Ice personally appear in court on Friday to explain repeated failures to
comply with court orders. This might be a situation where the federal government might try to fight this.
They could. The federal government has been very disrespectful to and defining of the federal courts. They're really relying on the federal courts a sort of deference and a sense of propriety and hoping that that will keep the federal courts from really pushing All courts, but especially federal courts have long given great difference to federal officials and you know, given them chance after chance after chance before actually coming
down them holding it in contempt. They could hold people in criminal contempt, but they generally don't do this, and I think that's largely what the administration is relying on. I think they also see it as part of their brand to be sort of, you know, to be bullying the courts and to be you know, to show the powers is more effective than the rule of law. So there's that as well. But I think that what will
make the difference here. I think we are all beginning to understand this, and if we didn't already, but what is going to make the difference here as public pressure. That is what's going to determine whether tod Lions shows up in court, whether the administration backs off in this area of really egregious immigration enforcement as in many other areas.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was persuaded by the government to freeze a judge's ruling that barred immigration officers from retaliating against the public in Minneapolis, including detaining people who follow agents in cars. I thought it was surprising that the Eighth Circuit froze that judge's order that was intended to maintain the peace.
Basically, I agree. I want to be clear, I haven't read that opinion yet, so I'm happy to check back in once I have. I agree there doesn't appear to be a strong basis, or really any basis to not allow the district Court's order to take effect. It was a very mild order. It was not anywhere near what the plaintiffs had asked for, and it does little more than say, no, you really do have to abide by the Constitution when you are policing these protests and when
you are enforcing the immigration law. It's really hard to see why the eight Circuit wouldn't have allowed that order to stand.
Is there another event in our history that resembles what's happening here in Minnesota?
Yes, I think we've gone through a number of eras of our history that resemble what's happening here. I think in some respects. The one that comes to mind for a lot of people, and I think is an accurate comparison, is the Civil rights movement. The difference there was that in that context, in many ways, the federal government worthy
protectors rather than the primary instigance of violence. It's broadly understood that the federal government could have done more to protect civil rights protesters and activists than it did, but certainly they weren't seen generally speaking, as the primary antagonists and violators of right, and here that's oddly flipped. You
see the Minnesota governor sending out the National Guard. You see the local police, you know, trying to protect individuals and trying to investigate federal law enforcement who's violating people's rights. That I think is fairly unprecedented. So you've seen this dynamic before of just you know, people trying to speak out against injustice, some of the labor strikes from the
late nineteenth century, early twentieth century. You've seen things like that, but I don't think we've ever seen anything like this where you have the federal government, historically the better protectors of individuals constitutional rights, being the primary violator of those rights, and state in local governments having to step in and find a way to try to protect people's rights.
Yeah, I'm just wondering what the federal government is thinking when apparently the officers involved in the latest shooting were allowed to continue working, but now they've been placed on administrative life.
It is common practice to put officers who are involved in shootings, you know, formally on administratively out of any public interaction during the course of the investigation, especially where there's some indication that force might have been unlawful or
a violation of policy. I think the thing to understand here, and this is really important for people to understand this administration doesn't actually have a problem with how much their immigration law enforcement officers are violating people's rights, how much violence they're using the way that they are, you know, violing people's rights, you know, taking splitting apart families and sending them far away and leaving them to find their
own way home, knowingly taking people who are here lawfully, sometimes who are even citizens, and just you know, we don't care. Will sometimes say the cruelty is the point, and I think that holds here as well. I think the cruelty and the violence is the point of how this enforcement is happening. A year ago, if I'd heard someone say that, I might have thought that it was hyperbolic and overly dramatic. But I think that's exactly what
we're seeing. And the only reason that they are starting to hesitate a bit after this most recent killing is not because they've had a change of heart. It's because the country is demonstrating more broadly that they don't like what's going on. That is the only thing that's going to change the way they're acting, because they do not
think that there's anything wrong with how they're behaving. In fact, they are intentionally allowing their agents to behave in this way because they want to instill here in people, because they want to demonstrate how powerful they are, because they want to demonstrate how they can violate the law and get away with it.
Another surprising thing to me was the statements by Christinome, the DHS secretary, and Baveno that word contradicted by the video that everyone was seeing. Why say something that's demonstrably false?
Yes, I think there's two schools of thought on that, and I think they could both be true in different ways and perhaps with different people. One school of thought is that they're saying things that are false about things that are on video in the hopes that the people who support them or won't ever go watch those videos, right,
and so they'll never find out what actually happened. The other school of thought is that they are saying things that are false knowing that they will be shown to be false, and then able to demonstrate that they're allowed to say things that aren't true, that are demonstrably not true and get away with it anyway. It's part of
their trying to make people lose hope. Right. Wow, they can do something so awful and then lie about it completely, even though we all can see that's not what happened, and nothing happens to them, nothing happens to this officer, They keep going forward and so if they're able to get away with that, then they will in fact have
become more powerful. And so that's why it's so important that people are now actually pushing back, and why the only thing that's going to change this is more people pushing back.
More they are demoting, or however you want to call it. They're taking Bavino off the scene and sending him back to the border, and Tom Holman is coming in. Homan supposedly has a more targeted approach than Bavino, So might we expect that we'll see less of these aggressive tactics.
I wouldn't rely on that. I think Homan has if he just based on the things that he's said and done in the past, he has the exact same violent and authoritarian tendencies that Bobino did, and so they're just switching people around. Bobino is a target right now. You know, maybe that means something for the long term. It could just be a short term, you know, until things quiet down. I don't think people should feel good at all about
Homan coming in. I think they should feel good that they've had some they've moved the need a little bit on making the administration do something. But the administration is going to be waiting to see whether sort of moving people around will quiet people down. And what again, People need to keep the pressure on until the actual behavior changes.
And there's nothing about home and the way he thinks about these issues, the what he has done about these issues, what he has said about these issues, that said that he has a demonstrably different approach to immigration enforcement.
Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Christy. That's Professor Christy Lopez of Georgetown Law. The Trump administration and the California Republican Party are asking the Supreme Court to block the state from using its new congressional map that favors Democrats during this year's midterm elections. A lower court said the new map is lawful and can be used in twenty twenty six, rejecting a bid by the administration and the California GOP to block the map on the
grounds that it was racially gerrymandered. The request seeks an emergency order to block the map while the court considers a full appeal of the decision. The state of californ Ffornia has until January twenty ninth to respond. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter Madelen Mecklberg Madline tell us about the California map and what happened in the lower court.
So California decided to redraw its congressional maps after Texas undertook a similar effort at the request of President Trump. And the idea behind California's maps is that they are creating five new districts that will favor Democrats in an attempt to counteract the five new districts that have been added in Texas as a result of their redistricting effort. Now, the maps in California were challenged by the state's Republican
Party and also by the Department of Justice. The Trump administration and a lower court said that the maps were allowed to stand for the election. They said that there's no evidence that they were racially gerrymandered, and that the effort was a purely political one and therefore the maps are valid and should be used this year.
It sort of makes me laugh that the Department of Justice is challenging this when it was President Trump and the Trump administration that's been urging Republican states to redraw their maps.
I think a lot of spectators who've been following this feel Similarly, it's certainly we wouldn't be here in the California case if Texas hadn't decided to redraw its maps at Trump's request. And a lot of the same issues have been presented in these cases. There's really not a lot of daylight between them, and so the arguments are really similar, and it's yes, definitely interesting to see the administration on different sides of each of these cases.
What are the California Republicans saying, because I mean, I can remember California Governor Gavin Newsom having press conferences where he was urging them to, you know, we have to do this in California because they did it in Texas. What are they pointing to as evidence that it was not done for political purposes?
Right? I think one of the main arguments that we've seen from them in filings is that race has a proxy here and that they're using this political argument in order to actually do racial gerrymandering. They cited testimony from one of the consultant map makers that the state used when they were redrawing this redrawing these congressional districts, and that individual said made reference to ensuring that there were certain Latino districts that were bolstered in order to make
them more effective. And so what the GOP party in California and the DOJ are arguing is that they are using this guise of political retribution to redraw the maps in order to actually racially gerrymander.
The Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas to use those Republican drawn maps, and actually there was some mention of California in that decision.
Right, So the way that redistricting came work is that they're decided by a three judge panel at the lower court level, and then there's no the appellate process just skips over the circuit court and goes right to the Supreme Court. And so unlike traditional cases that come before the High Court, there's no cert petition here. The Supreme Court really has to answer to request for emergency action. And so that's what we saw in the Texas case.
They said in their ruling, as you mentioned, they said that it's clear that the Texas maps were drawn, they were politically motivated, there was no evidence that there was racial gerrymandering, and they made mention to California as a comparable effort. They said, just like in California, where the districts have been redrawn with politics in mind, and so we've heard the Supreme Court weigh in on this before. I think I don't think that we're expecting a lot
of surprise when we get a ruling from them. Of course, you never know. I don't want to be in the business of predicting what the Supreme Court is going to do, but basically the case is are very similar. They have acknowledged in this separate ruling that California is like Texas in that they were drawn with politics as the motivating factor.
Redistricting efforts were being done with the mid term election in mind. Let's start with Texas. I've been reading that it's not a guarantee that Republican candidates would win all five of the new Texas districts, right.
I think it's very early to try to say how any of these races are going to shake out in the midterms. But you're correct that the Texas maps, the idea is that they've created five congressional districts in Texas that are likely to go for Republicans. But I think kind of given the current state of play, it's very difficult to make any kind of predictions, and Texas is
a very unique place. I know it's easy to put it in this red state bucket, but there's a ton of diversity, and especially when we're talking about counties that are around the border, it's not a garantee how they're
going to go in the race. And so I think the bid there was that we're going to create five additional safe Republican seats in the House, which is incredibly important because at this point, Democrats need to gain just three seats in order to have control of the House, and so by having these five new Republican districts, they would really be a roadblock to Democrats' efforts to take
control of the House. And that's where California comes into play, where they drafted their maps as an attempt to neutralize this effort in Texas, and they've created five Democratic seats that they expect to go safely to their party. I think it's a little more clear in California that those
seats will be safely Democratic. So this could have been a miscalculation on the Republican's parts because California is set to give five more Democrats seats in Congress if the Supreme Court upholds these districts, but the same is not necessarily a guarantee in Texas for the five seats that they're seeking to create.
But there are other Republican states in play now or trying to be in play. Tell us what other states are doing.
That's right. There was just news earlier this month in New York, a state court judge said that the state's only Republican held congressional district needed to be redrawn because it diluted black and Latino voters, and so Democrats are now expected to pick up an additional House seat in
New York. And there's also the potential for Republicans to pick up seats in Missouri and North Carolina and potentially in Ohio in Florida as well as a result of redistricting, but some of those are still up in the air. That's an issue that we're going to get to a
little later this year. And then the Supreme Court is also weighing this Voting Rights Act case relating to Louisiana's congressional map, and a ruling that we get there could potentially eliminate one of the state's majority black, heavily Democratic
congressional districts and could also prompt other states to take action. So, although we're in the year of the midterm election and it feels close but also very far, a lot is still on the table and in play as we're talking about how these races are going to shake out.
Yeah, I'm wondering if suppose the Supreme Court doesn't come down with a decision in that case until June, if there would be enough time for the legislatures to ramp up and do more redistricting. The time seems really tight, but it is.
It's tight, and it's hard to say with any certainty because this is a redistricting is the responsibility of state legislatures, and while they tend to follow similar procedures for doing that, every state is different and has slightly different rules and slightly different approaches to how they do this, and so those local rules and regulations could also factor into whether there's enough time to make anything happen by the election.
Let's turn to another topic, and that's the social media addiction trial that's starting in Los Angeles, and TikTok on the eve of trial is settling.
The last number we got is that there's roughly twenty five hundred people individuals, family members that are part of this bucket of personal injury cases. And so that's either individuals suing or family members of individuals suing saying they personally suffered harms because of the design of these social media platforms. And so this is a settlement with one
individual plaintiff. But this plaintiff is the very first to go to trial of these thousands of cases, and she's part of this bell Weather category of cases where the outcome of these trials, whether it's through settlements or verdicts from the jury, is going to inform how the rest of these thousands of cases get resolved.
But to be clear, the social media case is starting this week.
That's correct. Today was jury selection in that very first trial. The plaintiff there has reached settlement agreements with snap snap first Snapchat, and with TikTok, but her claims against Meta's Facebook and Instagram and Google's YouTube are still alive and still will go before the jury unless there's some kind of a chord reached with those individual defendants as well.
And of course we don't know how much was paid in the settlement.
I take it no, don't the terms of the specific agreements that have not been made public at this point, but there's been a lot of analysis done. This personal injury bucket of cases is just one. There's also been lawsuits filed by school districts and by state attorneys general.
And I know that a Bloomberg intelligence analyst who's been following these cases, he's estimated that there's a multi billion dollar liability here for the social media companies in terms of the potential for or settlements or payouts in trials as all of these cases move forward. But you know, that's very far down the road. We're at the very beginning of a long process here that could see that out.
And this is the first time these kinds of claims are going to go before a jury. I mean, we've heard them in congressional investigations. But tell us why that makes a difference.
Because so far they've been able to use Section two thirty to argue that they shouldn't be held liable for content on their platforms. But that's what's unique about these cases is the argument is about the fact that these plaintiffs believe that the social media platforms intentionally designed their products to be addictive. So it's about design features and not about content that's being produced on the website. So it's kind of a unique pathway to get them to court.
And we are expecting Mark Zuckerberg to testify at some point during the trial.
After all the times he's testified, he might qualify as an expert witness soon. Thanks so much, Mad. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Madelein Mecklberg, and that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law podcasts. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot bloomberg dot com, slash podcast Slash Law, and remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at
ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg