A federal judge offered a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump’s massive deportation scheme, while blocking the government’s attempts to remove immigrants who entered the country on parole.

U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb blocked three recent Department of Homeland Security actions that expanded the expedited removal of parolees, arguing that new policy changes were arbitrary and capricious and had exceeded its statutory authority.

In her 87-page ruling, Cobb slammed the Trump administration’s extrajudicial removals of immigrants who had been temporarily granted entry to the United States while awaiting admission application results, calling the case “a question of fair play.”

Plaintiffs who had followed the rules of their parole had suddenly been detained by immigration authorities. In some instances, their asylum cases had been abruptly dismissed, but in others they had not. Immigrants who had entered the country on parole were made subject to expedited removal, which provides minimal opportunities for immigrants to challenge their deportation.

“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” Cobb wrote. “Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here, restricting their ability to seek immigration relief and subjecting them to summary removal despite statutory law prohibiting the Executive Branch from doing so.”

“This case’s underlying question, then, asks whether parolees who escaped oppression will have the chance to plead their case within a system of rules. Or, alternatively, will they be summarily removed from a country that—as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges—may look to them more and more like the countries from which they tried to escape?”

Cobb determined that the parolees represented by the plaintiff nonprofit organizations, and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like them who’d been paroled at a port of entry, faced “imminent, irreparable injury” that “outweighs any harm to the Government or the public from pressing pause.”

The government actions, including the termination of the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program in March, would be stayed until a final verdict is reached.

The FBI went through the Epstein files and redacted Donald Trump’s name, according to the “FOIA Files” newsletter by reporter Jason Leopold, published in Bloomberg Friday.

It was previously reported (in a July letter to the Justice Department from Dick Durbin, the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member) that, under Attorney General Pam Bondi’s direction, FBI Director Kash Patel ordered around 1,000 FBI personnel to sift through more than 100,000 Epstein-related documents throughout two weeks in March. Working on 24-hour shifts, the staff were reportedly instructed to “flag” records mentioning Trump, prompting Durbin to ask the DOJ: “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

Leopold reveals that Trump’s name was blacked out—as were the names of dozens of other public figures. The files then went before a unit of FOIA officers, and “Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.”

The FOIA team reportedly cited an exemption protecting individuals from “clearly unwarranted invasions[s] of personal privacy” and another protecting “personal information in law enforcement records.” As Leopold notes, it’s not very rare that even prominent public figures’ names are redacted from records on privacy grounds.

The rest is history: Bondi reportedly notifying Trump that he appears in the files; the DOJ and FBI releasing the case-closed memo; the ensuing (and ongoing) public outcry; the congressional attempts to force the files’ release; and, now, speculations that Trump might corruptly wield the pardon power to pressure Ghislaine Maxwell, the currently imprisoned Epstein co-conspirator, to clear his name.

The bottom line here, Leopold writes, is that the chances of Trump’s name being unredacted anytime soon are slim to none. We can wait for all the people mentioned in the files to die. Or Trump could decide to voluntarily waive his privacy rights, allowing his name to be unredacted, which at present seems very unlikely.

One of Trump’s economic advisers grasped at excuses for Trump’s pitiful job growth numbers on CNN Friday morning, citing “seasonal adjustment quirks around teachers,” among other reasons.

July’s job numbers came in far lower than anticipated, and the administration issued revisions for stated job growth in May and June—reducing nearly 260,000 jobs off its last two reports. Stephen Miran, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, attempted to explain the chasm between prediction and reality.

CNN reporter Kate Bolduan pointed out that this marks the weakest month of jobs growth since December 2020, during the pandemic. Bolduan asked Miran what he attributed those numbers to, if not “the uncertainty created, in part, by the president’s trade war.” Miran rattled off reasons.

“About 40 percent of that is due to seasonal adjustment quirks around teachers, some of it is due to declining foreign-born employment, even as we created more American-born employment, and that is going to net out in a way that you see ultimately reflected in the data like that,” Miran said.

CNN points out that June turned out to be the weakest month of jobs growth since December 2020 -- the last full month of Trump's first term pic.twitter.com/mkxbGYzTOM

“Seasonal quirks” could hardly be responsible for........

© New Republic